Spirit of the Beehive

Spirit of the Beehive
by V?ctor Erice

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VHS Tape Cover Information

Actor: Ana Torrent, Fernando Fern?n G?mez, Isabel Teller?a, Ketty de la C?mara, Teresa Gimpera
Director: V?ctor Erice
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Subtitled); Spanish (Original Language), Analog
Format: Color, Letterboxed, NTSC
Running Time: 93 minutes
Release Date: 2000-06-16
Audience Rating: Unrated
Publisher: Homevision
Studio: Homevision

VHS Movie Reviews of Spirit of the Beehive

Movie Review: The Perfect Child's-eye perspective
Summary: 5 Stars

A wide-eyed little girl in Spain c. 1940 tries to make sense of adult issues, including the quietly unhappy marriage of her parents and the abstraction of death. For her everything - starting with a viewing of James Whale's Frankenstein - has magical significance, and everything connects. She has an older sister, further along the road to self-knowledge and loss of innocence; the younger one is only at the very beginning of that road.

Beehive is an absolutely accomplished portrayal of a child's perspective on the world as a numinous place. To be so young is to live inside a series of mysteries - that's why it's not always clear what's going on - and also to see everything with new eyes - that's why the most quotidian objects and gestures in Beehive possess beauty. The cinematography is accordingly outstanding, it's a film of warm honey colours and immense landscapes - it's shot on the rolling Castilian plain - that objectify the huge unknowns of a child's world.

This Spanish movie routinely turns up on European all-time great lists, but is little known here. This probably has something to do with the politics of distribution, and also perhaps with the fact that the director, Victor Erice, has only made three films in over 30 years. This was his first, and it's a phenomenal debut. It deserves to be much better known.

As this is a Criterion DVD release, the transfer is pristine, the extras informative. The one thing they don't tell you is how the director got such extraordinary performances out of the children, especially the five-year-old Ana Torrent, who plays the younger one with a quiet conviction that De Niro would envy.

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Summary of Spirit of the Beehive

Set in rural Spain in 1940, Victor Erice's (El Sur, Dream of Light) extraordinary debut film is a haunting portrait of the isolation of an introverted child within her own family. Ana Torrent is absolutely unforgettable as the lonely little girl who sees Boris Karloff's Frankenstein, and is convinced that the monster actually exists. Encouraged by her sister, she sets off into the woods to find him and becomes immersed in a mysterious and poetic imaginary world. A poignant exploration of the fragile innocence of childhood, The Spirit of the Beehive is Spanish cinema at its very best.

Victor Erice's hauntingly beautiful The Spirit of the Beehive features one of the most unforgettable child performances in the history of cinema. Hailed as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, Erice's visually elegant "poem of awakening" takes place in a small Castilian village in the early 1940s, as echoes of the Spanish Civil Wart can still be heard throughout the countryside. It is here, in this richly rural atmosphere, that six-year-old Ana (played by six-year-old Ana Torrent) is introduced to alternate world of myth and imagination when she attends a town-hall showing of James Whale's Frankenstein, an experience that forever alters young Ana's perception of the world around her... and her ability to mold reality to her own imaginative purposes. Is she using her imagination to escape what is essentially a bleak reality, or is she protecting herself with an inner world of innocence, to counter the darker worldview of her slightly older sister Isabel? While her emotionally distant parents go about their mundane daily affairs, Ana's world becomes the film's mesmerizing focus, and The Spirit of the Beehive unfolds as an enigmatic yet totally captivating study of childhood unfettered by the strictures of reason. In Erice's capable hands, young Ana Torrent really isn't performing at all; her presence on screen is so natural, and so deeply expressive, that you almost feel as if she's living in the story being told--a story that retains its mystery and beauty in equal measure, full of visual symbolism and metaphor (including the title, which yields multiple meanings), yet never self-consciously "arty" or artificial. Simply put, this is one of the timeless masterpieces of cinema, produced at a time when Franco's repressive dictatorship was finally giving way to greater freedoms of expression. No survey of international cinema is complete without at least one viewing of this uniquely moving film. --Jeff Shannon

On the DVDs
Disc 1 presents a new, restored high-definition digital transfer of The Spirit of the Beehive, with a new and improved English subtitle translation. The supplements on Disc 2 are thoroughly fascinating, beginning with "The Footprints of a Spirit," a very well-made documentary about the making of the film, combining present-day (2006) visits to the film's original locations along with interviews with director Victor Erice, producer El?as Querejeta, coscreenwriter ?ngel Fern?ndez Santos, and actress Ana Torrent (now a beautiful 40-year-old veteran of many Spanish films). "Victor Erice in Madrid" is an extensive and thought-provoking interview, conducted by Japanese filmmaker Hideyuki Miyaoka, in which Erice discusses his films, and specifically The Spirit of the Beehive, including his observation that the film's shot of young Ana Torrent watching Frankenstein for the first time (a real-life reaction filmed with documentary realism) represents "the most important moment I have ever captured on film." Two other 2006 interviews round out the supplements: One with the great Spanish actor Fernando Fern?n G?mez (who describes how he "couldn't understand a word" of the Beehive screenplay, but played the role of Ana's father because he needed the work), and another with scholar Linda C. Ehrlich, who astutely discusses the film's visual qualities (including its warm color palette and the influence of Vermeer's paintings on Erice's sunlit interiors), the significance of Frankenstein to the story, and the qualities that made The Spirit of the Beehive both timely (in terms of its sociopolitical context) and timeless. The accompanying booklet contains an informative essay on the lasting influence of Erice's film, including the startling revelation that Erice (as of 2006) had directed only two more feature-length films (El Sur and the documentary Dream of Light) since The Spirit of the Beehive was released in 1973. --Jeff Shannon

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