351 The Spirit of the Beehive

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hangthadj
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#176 Post by hangthadj » Sat Jun 23, 2007 11:13 am

GringoTex wrote:I was finally able to watch the film the whole way through. The first two times I tried to watch it, I was so taken with grief at Isabel's death that I couldn't finish it.

Now that I finished it, I'm amazed that no critic (please correct me if I'm wrong) has come to the conclusion that Isabel really did die. While Ana sees her after the "death," it's in my mind obviously a dream state. Every appearance of Anna after her tumble from the chair is a subjective one. The one long shot of her and Ana's room reveals a bedspring with a missing mattress.
I just watched this last night. It's about the fifth time I have seen this film, and I am really beginning to come to the same conclusions about Isabel dying.

Aside from the scenes gringo mentioned above, there are a few that stuck out. I am just gonna refer to the one scene as her "death" in teh next paragraphs, for easier typing.

There is the scene with the family eating dinner together. The first and only time in the film this happens happens after Isabel's death. It seems as solemn affair for the parents, even for them, and you never see a shot of teh four of them at once. Just the kids on one side and the parents on the other. And then the father opens the watch while looking at Ana. I think those were very deliberate shots.

There is the very brief freeze frame of Isabel jumping through the flames almost immediately after her death.

When the search party is out for Ana the mother throws a letter into the flames. Is it from her lover? Has she started feeling guilty that she lost one child already and now Ana is missing while she was in her own isolated world. After the father brings Ana back we see for the first time the wife show affection as she drapes a blanket over him as he is sleeping, as if she is ready to be more loyal to the family after the recent trauma.

They are all very subtle moments, just like the rest of the film. And for me the film works magnificently whether or not Isabel did actually die. But, to me, it just makes more sense that she may have died.

Rich Malloy
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#177 Post by Rich Malloy » Sun Jun 24, 2007 11:40 am

hangthadj wrote:There is the scene with the family eating dinner together. The first and only time in the film this happens happens after Isabel's death. It seems as solemn affair for the parents, even for them, and you never see a shot of teh four of them at once. Just the kids on one side and the parents on the other. And then the father opens the watch while looking at Ana. I think those were very deliberate shots.
I'm intrigued by this reading of Isabella's fate, but I think this sequence might tend the other way. I recall a POV shot after the father winds and opens the watch where he looks first to Isabella for a reaction. Seeing none, he turns to Ana, who of course reacts.

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#178 Post by hangthadj » Sun Jun 24, 2007 1:12 pm

Rich Malloy wrote:I'm intrigued by this reading of Isabella's fate, but I think this sequence might tend the other way. I recall a POV shot after the father winds and opens the watch where he looks first to Isabella for a reaction. Seeing none, he turns to Ana, who of course reacts.
If I remember correctly, he doesn't open the watch till he looks at Ana. He sorta looks oddly in the direction of Isabel's chair. And then, just maybe looking for some sort of human interaction then opens the watch while looking at Ana, who as you said before reacts.

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Hoosier
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Cat Scene

#179 Post by Hoosier » Mon Jul 14, 2014 4:42 pm

I'm curious to hear what everyone's theory is for the cat scene. Is it a mere representation of the way in which the current dictatorship (Franco) has a literal "choke hold" on Spain's inhabitants, or is it just a child acting out common adolescent behavior?

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Mr Sausage
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The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973).

#180 Post by Mr Sausage » Mon Jan 18, 2016 6:32 am

DISCUSSION ENDS MONDAY, FEBRUARY 1st

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mizo
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Re: The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973).

#181 Post by mizo » Mon Jan 18, 2016 3:36 pm

As I said in the Films of Youth list project thread, I'm far from sold on this. While I don't want to kick this thread off with a lot of negativity, I would like to say that, for me, the only thing this film has going for it is the uniformly perfect casting (an Erice trademark, if the casting of his two fiction features can be considered indicative of a trend). Obviously Ana Torrent is mesmerizing, but really the performances from every individual are spot-on and, in many cases, more memorable than they have any right to be (just writing this, I was reminded of the whiny-voiced old woman who announces the movie at the beginning and the hoarse, overweight man who presents it). Beyond that, I'm afraid all I can see is a lot of narrative obfuscation circling around a matrix of symbols - mostly evoking the precariousness of life and one's closeness to death even as a child, along with the generally mystical aura surrounding the creation of life - that are neither particularly interesting nor creatively deployed. It's the sort of film that feels like it would have been much more effective as a short; as it goes on, the constant reiteration of the themes I mentioned through increasingly obvious metaphors (those slow motion shots of the girl jumping over the fire are the worst) really betray a loss of direction on the part of the filmmaker. On top of which, I can't help but feel it goes out on a really wrong note. The ominousness of that final moment where Ana is at the window strikes me as incongruous when compared to her characterization up to that point as a sort of benign (or, at the very worst, unknowingly troublesome) enigma.

Anyway, bring on the defenses!

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bottled spider
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Re: The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973).

#182 Post by bottled spider » Mon Jan 18, 2016 8:17 pm

In the immortal words of Zoolander, "words can't hurt you if you don't read them. Don't play their game". In the same way, what other people call heavy handed symbolism rarely bothers me because I'm usually blissfully oblivious to it. I'll have to take your word for it that, for example, the girl jumping over the fire is metaphorical: I'm metaphor blind.

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mizo
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Re: The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973).

#183 Post by mizo » Mon Jan 18, 2016 8:35 pm

Looking back at your response to me in the other thread, I'm intrigued by your description of the film as "funny" (certainly not a word I'd have thought of to describe it). Care to expand on that?

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bottled spider
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Re: The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973).

#184 Post by bottled spider » Mon Jan 18, 2016 9:48 pm

I didn't mean to imply the film was any sort of comedy, and some of the things I find amusing didn't strike me that way until I watched it again. But there are moments, for example, like the two girls running down a hill, away from the camera, and they keep receding... and receding... and receding. And even a serious moment, such as when the father is called in to the police station to identify his belongings, seems on second viewing as though it can be taken comically, in its sheer awkwardness. Is the film excessively earnest, or is it (at least in places) mock serious?

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Trees
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Re: The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973).

#185 Post by Trees » Tue Jan 19, 2016 8:07 am

Maybe this will finally motivate me to get off my ass and watch this movie.

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Trees
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Re: The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973).

#186 Post by Trees » Wed Jan 20, 2016 3:28 pm

I thought it was a beautiful little film. Very few spoken words. Parts of the movie almost felt like a live-action Ghibli film. It manages to capture something of the odd magic of childhood. The score and sound design were lovely. I enjoyed the film a lot and will probably watch it again.

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swo17
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Re: The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973).

#187 Post by swo17 » Wed Jan 20, 2016 3:35 pm

Trees wrote:Very few spoken words.
I showed this film to my sister once when she was trying to learn Spanish. It wasn't very helpful in that regard, but on the plus side, she was terribly disturbed by all the cat torture!

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Drucker
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Re: The Spirit of the Beehive (Víctor Erice, 1973).

#188 Post by Drucker » Sun Jan 24, 2016 5:50 pm

Mizoguchi, I don't think your sentiments were too far off from my own. I have to admit, I cheated and checked Wikipedia, and any supposed political undercurrents to this film about Franco's Spain, were totally lost on me (in a way they weren't in Cria Cuervos). The way Anna's parents were framed, my interpretation of their relationship was there was distance between them, but not necessarily that the family had broken down. And the beehive as a metaphor, which according to Wikipedia is about the mindless organization of life under Franco, wasn't my reading. I read the bee's activity as something constant and ongoing, but hidden and tucked away.

That is all to say, I wouldn't say I really "got" the movie, but I do have to say that visually I loved the movie. To me, it seemed to be deliberately told through a child's perspective, and I think the visuals reflected that. When one thinks of their childhood, details can be hard to come by, but images can definitely stand out. If the film feels like some barely connected series of events, well I would say that's sort of what childhood feels like in hindsight. Visually, the story almost felt like a children's book: the large empty field where they approach their would-be Frankenstein, the images of the parents isolated and distant from one another, and the meeting of a stranger are all presented beautifully. Lastly, the simplicity of the characters, while lacking for a story that might have tried to illustrate emotional growth, seemed accurate for this story. Frankenstein as a monster, parents that are sort of single-note, and the sister as a sidekick. All in all, I liked the way the story was told visually, I guess I never really connected with the story itself though.

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All the Best People
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Re: 351 The Spirit of the Beehive

#189 Post by All the Best People » Sat Apr 01, 2017 7:10 pm

I watched this film for the first time this morning, and found it thoroughly engrossing, magical, and ineffable, one of the very greatest films about childhood I've seen. Thematically, there's a lot to unpack, and that certainly includes for what many of us are obscure (or buried) references to Franco's regime.

One notion of interest is that of the spirit made flesh; after their evening prayers ("free us from our enemies"), and under a painting of an angel guiding a child by the hand, Isabel "tells" Ana that spirits don't have bodies, but put on bodies as disguises. Ana's belief that the spirit does indeed inhabit the abandoned house by the well is solidified by the footprint she finds outside of it. Isabel's and Ana's follow-up conversation about the well and the fact that the spirit doesn't yet know Ana takes places over shots of the angel/child painting.

Ana's eventual meeting of the wounded deserter must be seen in the context of her believing this body to be the "disguise" of the spirit of Frankenstein's monster. The Monster clearly both frightens her (due to his killing of the girl) but also seems to elicit her sympathy ("Why did they kill him?"), and she extends that mercy to the body she believes to be his disguise, bringing him clothing and food. While this doesn't seem a religious (or anti-religious) film, certainly the spirit of Catholicism casts a shadow over Spanish culture (seen here by both the aforementioned painting and the one of St. Jerome over the desk where both the father and mother write, as well as a bedside icon of the Virgin Mary in the children's room, as well as the Frankenstein prologue warning viewers to not to try to act as God), and one thinks of Christ's comment that any charity done for "the least of these" are done also unto Him; Ana's mercy to "the spirit of The Monster" is tender and innocent, and contrasts with Isabel's childish pranks (and her mercy to an apparent opponent of Franco's regime carries weight in regards to the political allegories on hand).

This all makes her "encounter" with The Monster even more enigmatic. The Monster is both a spirit of death and of life, of killing and of being reborn, and it may be no accident that the death of the girl in Frankenstein happens by the water, a traditional location of baptism, in the Christian tradition a rite of death of the old and birth of the new. The Monster thus becomes both a memento mori (which occur heavily in the film, from the skull on the desk in the painting of Jerome [a typical accessory in paintings of Jerome] to the danger of the trains to the blood-soaked bread Ana finds after the soldier has been killed) and symbol of life after death (life after death also seen in Isabel's story, no matter if we read her "death" as real or feigned). Thus perhaps the encounter is Ana's symbolic encounter with (and conquering of?) the notion of death, which has been introduced to her in the death of the soldier/spirit, and, perhaps, with Isabel as well. (I don't know that I agree with the contributors above who conclude Isabel did in fact die, but the sequence represents an encounter with death for Ana regardless, and note that Isabel's "incarnation" of the spirit concentrates on its frightening characteristics, much like The Monster has frightening aspects after being brought to life.)

With Franco himself two years from death when the film was released ("free us from our enemies," indeed), the notion of life after death also has political import for the Spanish people of the time. So these concepts play out on multiple levels of both character psychology and thematic meaning.

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