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 loc...
