El Espíritu de la Colmena, 1973
[The Spirit of the Beehive]
A
detached, preoccupied scientist, Fernando (Fernando Fernan Gomez),
has moved to the provincial tranquility of Castille with his young
family in order to devote his time to the study of bees. He spends
countless hours at an apiary observing their daily ritual, manipulating
their environment, recording the results of his intervention. His
wife, Teresa (Teresa Gimpera), languishing from the isolation of the
remote town and her husband's alienated affection, occupies her time
by writing longing, heartfelt letters to loved ones left behind during
the war. She hand delivers the letters to the train station, where
a commuter train makes a brief stop, collects the mail, and sets out
to its final destination. The children, Isabel (Isabel Telleria) and
Ana (Ana Torrent), left alone to occupy themselves in their mother's
absence, attend the screening of Frankenstein
at a makeshift movie theater in town. Ana, unsettled by the incomprehensible
acts of the monster and the townspeople in the film, relentlessly
asks Isabel to rationalize their actions. Isabel pacifies Ana by explaining
that the monster is actually a spirit who cannot die, and takes the
gullible Ana to an abandoned barn where she claims to see the spirit
in the well. Intrigued by the prospect of finding the elusive spirit,
Ana becomes obsessed with the idea of befriending the imaginary monster.
The Spirit
of the Beehive is a visually poetic, haunting, and allegorical
film on innocence, illusion, and isolation. Victor Erice uses the
recurrent imagery of the beehive to create a pervasive sense of claustrophobia
and geographic disconnection: the honeycomb structure of the stain
glass windows through the house; the amber glow of the oil lamps and
candles; the pervasive haze of the darkness of winter. Filmed in 1973
under the Franco regime, The Spirit of the
Beehive is a deceptively lyrical tale of idyllic childhood
memories and a disturbing portrait of isolation. Like the bees in
Fernando's experiments, the children are also unwitting subjects of
an unnatural, artificial environment. In essence, Ana's misguided
actions mirror the illogical behavior of the disoriented bees attempting
to adapt to an inorganic crystal beehive. Isolated from a natural
environment, Ana, too, lacks a logical frame of reference. Her attempts
to incarnate the spirit of the monster is a naive attempt to reconcile
her own confusion. But inevitably, her quest leads further into the
darkness - to more incomprehensible revelations - to deeper questions.
© Acquarello 2000. All rights reserved.
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A
pensive adolescent named Estrella (Icíar Bollaín) awakens
at dawn to the alarming sound of barking dogs that progresses to
an increasingly audible, anxious commotion downstairs as Estrella's
panicked mother, Julia (Lola Cardona) calls in vain for her husband
Agustín (Omero Antonutti) and, upon discovering that he had
mysteriously disappeared sometime during the night, awakens the housekeeper
to help her search for him around the expansive, neighboring grounds
of their rented country home. Meanwhile, underneath her pillow, Estrella
discovers a small box containing a shiny pendant suspended on a chain
- the same divining article that, as she recounts in an adult voiceover,
he had suspended fifteen years earlier above his then-expectant wife's
distended stomach before predicting that she would give birth to
a daughter - an episode that the young lady had, admittedly, perhaps
invented in her own fanciful imagination to explain her profound
connection to her father. The implications of the early morning's
frantic activity then contextually unfolds through the eyes of a
younger Estrella (Sonsoles Aranguren) who, at the age of eight, is
traveling with her parents on a cross-country train in order to relocate
to northern Spain where her doting father has accepted - perhaps,
reluctantly - a position as a staff physician at a rural hospital.
Fueled in part by curiosity over her father's perennially unrequited,
romanticized longing to return to the southern city of Sevilla, as
well as her parents' palpable estrangement and pervasive silence
over the nebulous circumstances that have brought them to their seemingly
imposed exile in the north (in an explanation that is further muddled
by her father's gregarious and animated former governess, Milagros'
(Rafaela Aparicio) explanation of the rift between the republican
Agustín and his pro-Franco father as a simplistic, but puzzling
family feud caused by supporting opposite factions of illogically
shifting "good" and the "bad" sides during the
Spanish Civil War), Estrella attempts to piece together the intriguing
fragments of her beloved father's enigmatic past and impenetrable
emotional façade, a puzzle that begins to take a bittersweet
and disillusioning form after she encounters her father's motorcycle
near a surrogate place of dreams: the CineArcadia that is screening
a melodrama entitled 
In
the autumn of 1990, renowned Spanish artist Antonio Lopez Garcia enters
his Madrid studio and begins to assemble a large canvas for his new
painting. The subject of his still life is a fruit laden quince tree
in the courtyard. Lopez proves to be a meticulous craftsman. He drives
three long poles into the ground around the perimeter of the tree
and suspends a plumb line in order to determine the center of the
painting. He runs a tube of white paint along a brick wall in the
background to demarcate the median line. He stakes his painting stance
with ground spikes. He marks the visual center of individual leaves
and fruits to retain their compositional balance. For two brief hours
each morning, the sun reflects from the roof and casts a majestic
light against the upper portion of the quince tree, leaving the rest
of the tree in shadow, and it is this phenomenon that Lopez attempts
to capture in his painting. As Lopez struggles to preserve this wondrous
moment, the process of life continues unhindered through changing
climate, inclement weather, distracting building renovations, news
of significant international events, and interruptive visits from
friends and relatives.