Venecei, pero no convencereis
(“You will win but not convince.”)
Miguel de Unamuno at the University of Salamanca October 12, 1936
Vive le Muerte!
(“Long live Death!)
The slogan of Spanish Falangists
The case of Spanish director, Victor Erice, is peculiar. Erice is a great film maker who has made almost no films. His career seems to be a tragedy of thwarted potential. Perhaps, the word “tragedy” is too melodramatic. Erice is the author of one uniquely beautiful film, The Spirit of the Beehive, released in 1973. He has made several other pictures that no one seems to have seen. It is not clear whether Erice’s career has been blighted or whether his disposition is so peculiarly lyrical and poetic, so delicate and brittle (and so perfectionist in ambition) that he has not mustered the practical resources required to bring another film project to fruition. Making movies is a tough business that requires a steely mixture of determination and grandiosity yoked to the sensibilities of vaudevillian con-man. My guess is that Erice simply doesn’t have the ambition and self-aggrandizing personality necessary for success in the film industry. Perhaps, he is too quixotic, too much of a dreamer.
It is also possible that the providential confluence between The Spirit of the Beehive’s great child actor, Ana Torrent, and Erice’s obsessional subject, the secret and perverse heart of Franco’s fascism, could be realized in ideal form only once. We see this ideal realization on the screen in The Spirit of the Beehive. And that film, probably, makes superfluous Erice’s other pictures, or attempted pictures, all of which seem to be, in some sense, variants on that movie.
Shanghai Gesture
Erice’s essays on film, mostly brief and lapidary pronouncements, begin with a memory: it is 1950 and Erice is ten years old. In the provincial, Castilian village where he lives, Carranza, the American film The Shanghai Gesture is being screened. The film is an ornate, lush, and baroque pictorial representation of sordid activities in Chinese opium brothel. (The film was directed by Josef von Sternberg in Hollywood in 1942, but it has taken eight years for the picture to reach the boondocks on the barren plateaus near Madrid.) Children are not allowed in the picture. Franco is in power and the Catholic Church is powerful and there is a whiff of scandal about the movie.
With another ten-year old boy, Victor Erice sneaks into the movie theater. The film fills him with strange, nameless sensation. The movie is like being confined within the glittering crystals of a great and labyrinthine chandelier. The kind of sacred, flickering light that Erice knows from the dark interior of medieval Castilian churches quivers on the screen. The women are depraved and beautiful. Erice doesn’t understand most of what he sees. Everything is taking place far away, in an exotic China where nameless perversions are practiced.
Erice recalled that the movie changed him forever. When he came out of the theater, and staggered across the main street in the little town where he lived, his life had assumed a new form.
Education
As often happens with young people, Erice’s epiphany in the movie theater was quickly forgotten. He grew up and left Carrranza to attend the University in Madrid. It was his intention to become a economist or lawyer and work in the Spanish banking or accounting industries. But, then, another film intervened. Erice saw Truffaut’s The 400 Blows sometime in 1959. Again, his life was changed. He abandoned his studies in business and enrolled in the Government (Official) Film School in Madrid. Between 1961 and 1963, he made three short films, all of which showed promise, and, on the strength of that work, was awarded a diploma.
Erice spent much of his time during college studying the paintings in the Prado Museum. He recalls being astounded by Velasquez Las Meninas. Later, he would spend 17 years trying to make a film about that painting.
Making movies
Victor Erice’s first commercial film was a thirty-four minute picture called The Challenge released as part of an omnibus picture with two other short movies. I can find no reliable information about that movie. In 1973, Erice directed The Spirit of the Beehive. Ten years lapsed before he made another picture, a film called El Sur (The South). This 1983 picture is 93 minutes long. The film was shown in the mid-eighties and has sometimes surfaced in Europe – but Erice was not satisfied with the picture and regards it as incomplete, unfinished. The project ran out of funds when the picture was only two-thirds shot. Another nine years passed. In 1992, Erice’s documentary film El Sol Membrillo (literally The Quince Tree Sun but released in English-speaking countries as The Dream of Light, also sometimes called The Quince Tree) was released. The picture was highly abstract, apparently primarily a study of natural light on the fruit of a quince tree as observed by a painter, although some critics have surmised a vestigial plot in several of film’s sequences. The picture is said to be baffling, irritating, incomprehensible, as well as incredibly beautiful – it is 138 minutes long.
In 1997, Erice completed a script called El Embrujo de Shanghai, (The Shanghai Spell – embrujo means enchantment or, literally, “bewitchment”) a picture about a boy’s reaction to the exile of his father, apparently to Shanghai. (The scenario seems to have something to do with The Shanghai Gesture but is based upon a novel). The movie was never made although the script was published in Madrid. Another Spanish director adapted the novel from another script and a picture, with which Erice had nothing to do, was released in 2002. Erice spent several years writing a book about Nicholas Ray and regards We Can’t Go Home (various cuts - 1976 to 2011), the experimental picture Ray made with a commune of his students at SUNY Binghamton as his favorite film. (He is also an admirer of Monte Hellman and American Westerns). In 2006, Erice collaborated with Abbas Kiastorami (Erice’s favorite contemporary film maker) on a series of short pictures called Correspondence – these films represent an exchange for filmed letters between the Iranian and Spanish directors. The pictures were exhibited in Barcelona along with still photographs that both men had made – there are a total of five short films, three by Erice and two by Kiastorami, ranging from seven to 30 minutes in length. Although a catalog of the Barcelona exhibition exists, it is unclear to me what these movies are about or, even, if they are narrative in any way.
Between 2000 and 2012, Erice has made three or four short films, none of them longer than 15 minutes. Most notable is his contribution to the 2002 anthology film Ten Minutes Older, one of a number of ten minute long films in a group including work by Werner Herzog, Jim Jarmusch, Aki Kaurismaki, Spike Lee, Wim Wenders, and Chen Kaige. Erice’s short is said to be tremendous and the best of the group – it is called The Lifeline and returns to many of the subjects central to The Spirit of the Beehive. The film concerns an infant bleeding to death in a small village in 1940.
For the last seventeen years, Erice has worked on a script about Velazquez’ Las Meninas.
Erice writes that he feels close to the Italian film maker Pier Paolo Pasolini, an advocate of the cinema di poesia –that is, the cinema of lyrical inspiration. Erice writes that film shown in the darkened embrace of a movie theater is one of the last refuges of “pure contemplation.” When asked by interviewers from Cahiers du Cinema why he makes movies, Erice said: “Cinema is made to create a bridge.” Ever modest, Erice hastened to attribute the quotation to one of his heroes, Jean Renoir.
Surmises
In filmed interviews, Erice declines to explicate The Spirit of the Beehive. Instead, he points to still photograph of a scene in James Whales’s 1931 Frankenstein. The image shows a little girl with Frankenstein’s monster on the edge of a lake, placid water stretching out to a picture postcard castle and a range of mountains. The little girl smiles at the Monster who looks at her with a shy and lonely grimace. Between them, there is a garland of white flowers. Erice says that this single image is the source of his movie and its meaning. “Everything that I wanted to put in The Spirit of the Beehive is in this picture,” he says.
So what does The Spirit of the Beehive mean? Critics have reached differing conclusions on this question. Indeed, there is significant dispute even about what happens in the film. Some writers, for instance, think that the wounded Republican soldier is also an apparition, not a real person but someone imagined by Ana. Considerable controversy exists about all aspects of the film.
Early reviewers imputed political qualities to the film – the picture was thought to be about the monstrosity of Franco’s fascism. Erice made the picture in 1973, that is two years before the end of Franco’s governance of Spain. It was thought that the picture’s muted opacity was a result of tyranny. The film’s esoteric meaning, an attack on Franco and his government, had to be veiled in the child’s poetic reveries. In 1977, film censorship in Spain ended. It was thought that Erice’s next film would be hardhitting and overtly political – but El Sur (1983) was, if anything, even more elliptical and difficult to interpret. (That picture is also about a little girl growing up in a remote and isolated village in Northern Spain. The child finds traces of a mythical “south” in her father and, ultimately, discovers that he is still in love with someone from that place – a woman played by Aurore Clement.) Consideration of Erice’s ouevre as a whole has led most critics to disclaim any overtly political motivation to his works.
The Spanish writer, Luis O. Arata, a novelist who has collaborated with Erice, suggests that the film is about Ana’s question: “Who am I?” The little girl wonders whether she is a functioning member in the family’s beehive or whether she is not, like the Monster, a spirit outcast from the drone-like physicality of hive. These speculations occur in the context of images that suggest a confrontation with death – the locomotive, the monster patched together from cadavers, the abysmally deep well, and the poisonous mushroom growing in the woods. Arata thinks that the photograph that shows Ana’s father standing next to the Spanish philosopher Unamuno is decisive in support of this reading of the film. Arata, accordingly, identifies Ana with the apparition of the monster.
By contrast, another Spanish writer, Miguel Angel Lomillos, identifies the monster with Franco. Lomillos thinks that the “film’s stylistic paradigm is absence.” He points out that the absence of the father seems to trigger the reveries that are central to the picture. In only one scene, Lomillos argues, are all the inhabitants of the hive, all of the characters present – this is the breakfast sequence. The movie’s texture is “composed of voids, silences, concealment, absences, empty forms or negative space.” In Lomillos’ view, the people are searching for a father-figure, someone who can replace the defective patriarch, Francisco Franco. Thus, the Monster appears as substitute father, a sublimated Franco. Lomillos thought that the film reflected in a highly specific way the political dilemma facing Spain in 1973 – Franco was elderly, weakened, perhaps, dying, but no one had appeared to replace him as the patriarch, the “father of his people.”
Certainly, the film poses certain narrative questions that can’t be answered: Who is the mother writing to? What is the relationship between the parents? Who is the fugitive and why is he killed? These are ambiguities that the film leaves unresolved.
Crucially, Erice initially planned that the picture’s riddles be resolved in a frame story. In his original scenario, set in present-day (1970's) Spain, Ana returns to her village, Hoyuelos, to attend the funeral of her father. During the funeral, Ana’s memories of her childhood are triggered and the film proceeds as a flashback. The frame-story was designed to measure the distance between the 1970 and 1940, when the film’s events occur. After a month of shooting, Erice abandoned this structure. Later, he revived this structure – the grown daughter’s confrontation with her past at the burial of her father – for his film El Sur (The South).
Ana Torrent
Everyone who has seen The Spirit of the Beehive is captivated by the performance of the child actress, Ana Torrent. (David Thomson judiciously notes that the acting of the slightly older sister is equally compelling.) Ana Torrent was seven when she appeared in Erice’s film. When Erice met the little girl, he asked her: “Do you know who Frankenstein is?” The child answered: “Oh yes, but we haven’t been introduced yet.” Ana Torrent was struggling with sibling rivalry when the movie was made – her little brother was born just before the film was shot and this caused her to be very motivated to “assert her personality” on the set. Erice recalls that she learned by heart not only her lines but the lines of everyone else in every scene in which they appeared with her. Erice says that he didn’t direct her – “she guided me.”
Erice, writing about the picture, observes that part of the film is “documentary.” The scene in which the child first sees Frankenstein’s monster on the screen records Ana Torrent’s first encounter with James Whale’s movie – she was not prepared in any way for the images shown in the film. Erice simply photographed her as she watched the movie for the first time. Erice says that images of Ana in the darkness watching the film, the only handheld camera shots in the movie, are the “crack in the narrative” through which “the film reveals the truth”. These images “could no be directed” – they are the “record of an unrepeatable experience.”
Ana Torrent also stars in Carlos Saura’s Cria Cuevos, a film made the next year, with a somewhat similar story – the picture involves a young girl’s reactions to deaths in her family in the context of the Spanish Civil War.
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