Film Forum

Spain, 1973
Directed by Víctor Erice
Starring Ana Torrent, Fernando Fernán Gómez, Teresa Gimpera, Isabel Tellería
In Spanish with English subtitles
Approx. 99 min. 35mm.

In a tiny village on the desolate Castilian plain in 1940, young sisters Isabel Tellería and Ana Torrent eagerly file into the town hall for the visiting cinema truck’s screening of FRANKENSTEIN — the original Karloff version dubbed into Spanish — with the elder Isabel explaining to rapt 6-year-old Ana that the monster is really a spirit who dons his body like it was a suit of clothes. Later they explore a remote, mysterious barn, put their ears to the tracks to hear distant trains, and learn from dad to discriminate between good and deadly mushrooms. But as mom continually cycles off to the railroad station to post emotional missives to a person unknown and as dad falls asleep at his desk writing up accounts of his beekeeping, Ana conjures up her own monster/spirit. Víctor Erice’s acclaimed first film was a real labor of love (but then again, with only two successors in the next three decades, they all are), simultaneously a sensitive evocation of the poignancy of childhood (notably via the phenomenal Torrent, possessed of one of the most striking pairs of eyes in cinema history) and, by implication, an elegy for the legacy of the Civil War (unmentioned, but only a year in the past from the film’s events). Haunting, elliptical, and poetic, THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE was selected in the 2022 Sight and Sound poll of critics, programmers, curators, academics, and archivists as one of the 100 Greatest Films of All Time.

JANUS FILMS

Reviews

“Arguably the finest and most beautifully wrought first film of the European ‘70s, a mysterious crucible as elusive, concrete, and visually primal as anything by Herzog, Straub, Olmi, or Denis.”
– The Village Voice

“The story that emerges from [Erice’s] lovely, lovingly considered images is at once lucid and enigmatic, poised between adult longing and childlike eagerness, sorrowful knowledge and startled innocence.”
– A.O. Scott, The New York Times

“A modest marvel of grace and framing that unfolds with the patience of a cloud and is driven more by wonder than pure emotion.”
– Wesley Morris, Boston Globe