For all the critical attention (and furious critical controversy) his work occasioned over half a century, Luis Bu?uel resisted our best taxonomical efforts. To begin with, while no artist of this century strikes one as more quintessentially Spanish than Bu?uel, how can one apply the term ?Spanish filmmaker? to a man whose oeuvre is far more nearly identified with France and Mexico than with the land of his birth?
Such is the power of the press that a reviewer for an influential publication can laud a heretofore little-known film by an obscure director and thereby thrust that work into the international spotlight. Back in 1976, New York Times critic Richard Eder authored an article in praise of what was then a three-year-old film. The title of the piece was ?A Great Film We May Never See.? The film in question is The Spirit of the Beehive, directed by Victor Erice.
