There is a tendency on films that portray fascism to fall into a mere derision of such and while condemning these inhuman regimes is of course something positive, this approach is not particularly new nor is it much of a game-changer as people could think it is. When a film’s sole purpose is to either mock or dehumanize a fascist regime the commentary tends to feel really shallow. I mean, fascism and its consequences are awful, what is new about it?
Taking this into account it comes as no surprise to me that the film which, in my opinion, perfectly portrays and denounces fascism is a movie that approaches the topic with subtlety and instead of dehumanizing or mocking the leaders of such regimes, their presence is presented through the haunting desolated vistas which depict a rural Spain, which is experiencing an undeniable gruesome epoch of sorrow.
In order to understand Victor Erice’s masterpiece, it is important to know the historical context of both when the film was produced and the period it is settled in. During the 70s, with Francisco Franco on his death-bed his fascist regime was coming to an end, with uncertainty invading the country. Erice sets his story on 1940 though, 1 year after the defeat of the Republicans by the Nationalists, when the White Terror (or Francoist Repression) was barely starting.
Censorship by Franco’s regime was also a great issue, other Spanish filmmakers like Luis Buñuel on his film Viridiana (1961) successfully condemned the oppressive regime of Franco through the use of subtext and symbolism (apparently, they weren’t bright enough to tell this). Victor Erice also utilizes symbolism to approach the thematic, and not only that but the whole familiar drama which the film depicts on firsthand mirrors a Spanish society forced into desolation, silently and slowly tearing itself apart.
Francoist imagery is subtle, to the point that it will not be noticed by an outsider as it blends with the landscape. This depicts how it became part of the daily lives for Spanish, the normalization of the reprehensible comes from over-exposure and the impotence of people.
The town of Hoyuelos with symbology of the Falange
There is something about portraying tragedy through the lenses of children that makes it so harrowing. Utilizing a kid as a protagonist of a story can, in some ways, limit it as a child can’t fit into much plots like an adult could (for example investigating a crime, exploring romances, etc. are unsuitable for kids to take place in). However, The Spirit of the Beehive is not concerned with a plot-driven story so the implementation of children is used in a rather brilliant way.
The film opens with these hand-drawn illustrations made by children. According to “The Encyclopedia of Child and Adolescent Development”, drawing is one of the few surviving forms of human expression from prehistoric times. It should not be a surprise that Pediatric Psychologists often use drawings not only to tell the knowledge and attitudes of children but also their mental state.
Some of these drawings gain meaning after watching the film (like the clock one), but I would like to make special notice to the first one of the sequence: a house and a beehive. With this Erice is not only showing us how this is perceived through the viewpoint of a child, but he is also directing our attention to this parallel he pictures in his film: a house and a beehive which they both mirror each other, just like they mirror the panorama of a country.
Using children to narrate this story is brilliant because we see this through the point of view of those that are the most vulnerable. Ana’s trauma at the ending (after she realized the republican soldier was murdered) represents the shattered innocence of the Spanish people. The liminal spaces combined with the desolation surrounding the small village of Hoyuelos (located in Segovia) reflects the hopelessness Spain was facing at the beginning of the regime. And the way the two sisters talk through whispers with the wind constantly hissing in the back tells us the impotence of people, of how they were forced to be silent while thousands of others were being murdered.
The title of the film will suggest that we have to draw our attention to the bees this film portrays, so to understand what Erice wanted to transmit through this, I think his words are able to give us the full picture: “The title really is not mine. It is taken from a book, in my opinion the most beautiful thing ever written about the life of bees, written by the great poet and playwright Maurice Maeterlinck. In that work, Maeterlinck uses the expression 'The Spirit of the Beehive' to name the powerful, enigmatic and paradoxical force that the bees seem to obey, and that the reason of man has never come to understand.”
The beehive represents this master-slave relationship evidenced in the political panorama of the country, of how the Spanish people were “caged” (both symbolically and literally) and were forced to obey. It is further interesting to notice how the beehive is mirrored in the manor of the family: windows shaped like honeycombs and a yellowish tonalities invade the setting.
This parallel is interesting because it extrapolates the condition of the bees to a family which is being slowly fractured, just like Spain was at the presented period of time. Teresa (the mother of the two girls) spends her time longing and writing melancholic letters to a distant lover. As she burns a letter she wrote to him near the end of the film (essentially wiping out what gave her a sense of hope and the identity of her lover), Erice also reminds us the loss of national and regional identity. During Franco’s Regime he applied language politics in which he banned the use of other languages used in Spain like Galician, Basque or Catalan, this was done in order to make Spain an homogeneous pulp and remove any sense of identity within people. Victor Erice was from Biscay (nowadays part of the Basque Country), a region whose identity was constantly demonized by Franco going as far as to declare it a “traitor province” and abolished the Basque law.
Erice’s film serves not only a criticism though, it also delivers a message of hope. In 1973, with the now feeble regime coming to an end, Erice seems to also believe that the hope lies within Spain’s new generation and that society also needed to embrace the child-like wonder Ana had. This idea is perfectly captured on the following shot, as Ana steps into the footsteps of the Republican soldier, a man that for her was the monster her sister talked her of and whose idea gave her a sense of wonder and served as an escapism.
In an epoch in which the medium of film was also used by the most vile as a means of propaganda, Erice uses it as this message of hope but also as a call for people towards awareness.
During the final montage, for the first time Erice displays the honeycombed windows not with a yellowish tonality but rather with a white one as it opens. Ana calls for the “spirit” and as she calls him, the whistle of a train can be heard, hinting towards the origin of how the Republican soldier came into the desolated home, where Ana originally found him. It is a new day for a nation, we should never forget the past but nor should it be romanticized.
