Europe Endless - The Mediterranean: Spirit of the Beehive (Dir Víctor Erice, 1h39m, 1973)

So we come to the end of our European journey, in a small village on the plains of Castile and with the exquisite coming of age tale that is Spirit of the Beehive, a landmark of Spanish cinema. Like its neighbours, Spain enters cinema in the late 19th century, its - Barcelona, and then Madrid-centric - industry growing in stature by the 1910s, but by the 1930s and the dawn of the sound era, damaged by competition from foreign imports, not aided by the Civil War, in which many of the films of the prior silent age were destroyed, and the subsequent censorship of the Franco era. 

Despite this, by the 1950s a surprising number of socially conscious neo-realist films, including Death of a Cyclist (Dir. Juan Antonio Bardem, 1955) and Welcome Mr. Marshall! (Luis García Berlanga, 1953) critiqued the social fabric of Spain at a time where Franco's Fascists regime controlled freedom of speech including in cinemas. Like Italy, in the 1960s Spain quickly becomes a filming location, many of the productions being historical epics, like El Cid (Dir. Anthony Mann, 1961) and Lawrence of Arabia (Dir. David Lean, 1962). 

In the 1960s would also come the government sanctioned "The Official Cinema School", whose students, in the years after the death of Franco, would come to attempt to document the Civil War and life under the dead dictator.. This would produce directors such as Mario Camus and Miguel Picazo, though later students would also attempt to reconcile Spanish identity with its recent history. Such a director is Víctor Erice; Spirit of the Beehive is his first feature, preceded only by his scripts for romantic dramas, El próximo otoño (Dir Antonio Eceiza 1967) and Oscuros sueños de agosto (Miguel Picazo, 1967). Spirit of the Beehive focuses on a single family, and in particular on their youngest daughter, Ana (Ana Torrent), in 1940, as he depicts both her coming of age and the fear and control of Francoist Spain, the latter manifesting as much through the figure of Boris Karloff as Frankenstein (José Villasante) as it does through the soldiers searching for Republicans in the Castile countryside.

This is a film about childhood; much of it is shot from Ana's perspective, and through it we see her relationship with her sister, with her classmates, and with the world around her. Her family is caught up in her father's nigh obsession with beehives - a shorthand for the ordered Spain that Francoism purports to create, and by extension, through the hexagonal windowglass that tints many of the film's most beautiful shots a deep yellow, the entrapment her father, Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez, himself a director and a titan of Spanish cinema) fears - whilst her mother Teresa (Teresa Gimpera), largely shown in these solitary sequences of travel to and from the railway station, is writing to a distant lover. Even her relationship with her older sister, Isabel (Isabel Tellería) is complex, occasionally tricking her, or leading her out into the hills around the family's house. 

Yet, it is the arrival of cinema that gives the film its focus, its concept of Franco-as-Frankenstein, or, at the very least a small girl's imagination running away with her after experiencing a vivid horror movie. This sequence, featuring James Whale's Frankenstein (1933), takes up the first ten or so minutes, its atmosphere electric, its impact on the two girls undeniable. With Ana distressed by the film's sequences in which the monster accidentality kills a small girl, a sequence the film visually recreates towards its dénouement, and is hunted itself, her sister simply explains that films aren't real. Yet, the spirit, the spell, of cinema has clearly awoken something in the young girl. Is the film mere escapism, a beautifully artistic thing in a house otherwise full only of her father's poetry, itself depicting the order of the bees, an allegory for art under Franco? The cut of Frankenstein the village view is itself censored, something that Spirit of the Beehive itself narrowly avoided, with the restrictions of Francoist Spain not repealed till 1976, but saved the editor's knife by the fact the Fascists couldn't understand it.

Only adding to the film's themes is the searingly beautiful cinematography of Luis Cuadrado. Shots are bathed in gold,, the beehive, and its symbolism here repeated through several shots - we are as much entranced as entrapped by the hexagonal frames and their cinematic quality. Elsewhere, the landscape of Castile stretches away, or leads to the train tracks that slice through shots and give the two girls both thrills and a sense of mortality, many of the outdoor sequences shot from a child's perspective, such that the train, the landscape, and the house seem to tower above us. At base, perhaps everything is either a manifestation of the beehive, the rigid control, of Francoist Spain, or the Monster that at once rejects and resembles it - at its centre, the film considers the struggle between the individual and the collective. 

It is easy to consider Spirit of the Beehive as an attempt by a small girl, unused to death and hatred before encountering the bowdlerised film, to consider Francoist Spain: later in the film Ana stumbles across a wounded Republican soldier, and like the girl in Frankenstein, takes pity on him, feeding him, and bringing her father's coat to him, but like the Monster, he is hunted down by the authorities - the Nationalists, who the film barely depicts, but for the distant crack of rifles around the abandoned sheepfold she finds him in. Maybe this is simplistic. Yet, we are dealing with the world through the eyes of a child, the performance by Torrent at once naturalistic and beautifully observed. 

The Monster represents fear, something not only seen in the small girl as she grapples with the film's concepts and tone, with the arrival of mortality in her small part of the world, but also in her father, his sequences of insomniac introspection haunted by the unity of the bees, and what may have been - though deeply codified -had the Republicans shown a united front. At points, through the editing of Pablo González del Amo, we have Francesco's ruminations over the film, or dialogue from Frankenstein over him pacing his study. Whether this be as allegory for Franco himself, the monster that terrorised Spain, who would step down as Prime Minister months before Spirit of the Beehive's release and die two years after its release, or something more intangible, Erice and co-writer Ángel Fernández-Santos leaves this up to us.

It would be remiss to ignore its influence on the similarly escapist fantasy, Pan's Labyrinth (Dir. Guillermo Del Toro, 2006), also set during the Spanish Civil War, but whilst Del Toro heads into high fantasy, Erice's picture is historically grounded, and more unnerving for it, a depiction of childhood under fascism. Since 1973, Erice has directed five films, the most recent being 2023's Close Your Eyes (Cerrar los ojos); Spirit of the Beehive remains his greatest, a coming of age film that considers our relationship with art, with individuality, and with the spectre of Fascism across Spain. Over half a century later, it remains one of the great films of Spanish cinema, and, in a quiet consideration of our relationship with the medium, the perfect ending to our travels. 

Rating: Must See 

Spirit of the Beehive is available for streaming from AppleTV and available on BluRay from Criterion

Next week, and next month, we consider four horror movies from across Europe, beginning with the iconic Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror

Epilogue: A few thoughts from the Journey

What have we learned; what could we ever learn about a nation's cinema from a single glimpse into its cinema? Some films are more revelatory than others: Ucho depicted a nation paranoid at its own surveillance, The Lives of Others used that same surveillance as a stepping-off point to consider how little things have changed since and as a vehicle to consider what makes a man do good. In multiple places, the verité, the manifestation of multiple national cinemas return to truth before the camera, many manifesting from influence by Italio Neo-Realism or British Kitchen sink realism, whilst in others the shadow cast by the French New Wave stretches onward. European Cinema certainly exists, but as a collective, the idea of one or more facets of the sixteen films we have discussed, a commonality that we can label as the European cinematic style...that is more illusory.

Europe, like its cinema, is more complex than that. We have, after all, only visited 16 of the 44 (or 51, on some counts) nations of Europe. We have not considered, for example, the cinemas of Austria, Switzerland, Iceland, much of the former Eastern Bloc, the Balkans, and the five nations of the British Isles, all of which have had their own impact, great or small, on European filmmaking. If one trend has been a common thread through this journey it is in the malleability of what we would consider a nation's cinema. It is, like Europe itself, a sphere of collaboration, many of the films we've considered being cross-national co-productions, or, like Europa and Insomnia, films whose cast and crew and focus crosses back and forth, like the railways of the former, the idea of Europe, and its continental concept of cinema.  

At base, whilst some of these films have been mirrors by which a nation considers itself cinematically, many others have been windows, a brief peek through the lens by which this or that nation view the world.  If nothing else, it has introduced cinemas I was previously unaware of to me, and to you, my readers. Thank you for joining me.