Victor Erice Films | Victor Erice Filmography | Victor Erice Biography | Victor Erice Career | Victor Erice Awards

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. According to Eder, it had played in Spain ("where it did not so much evade the censorship as envelop it") and on the film-festival circuit, and had been screened at the Museum of Modern Art. But it had not earned a commercial U.S. distributor. Eder discovered the film at the Telluride Festival, where his piece was filed. ?It is one of the two or three most haunting films about children ever made,? Eder wrote. ?It is perhaps one of the two dozen best pictures made anywhere in the past half-dozen years,? he added, before going on to describe it as a film "whose power to move and astonish comes in quite original and magical ways."

The Spirit of the Beehive unfolds in a Castillan village in 1940, just after the end of the Spanish Civil War. While the town has not been a battleground, its young men are nowhere to be seen as they all have gone off to fight. The focus is on two children, eight-year-old Ana and her sister, ten-year-old Isabel. They see a print of James Whale's Frankenstein, at which point little Ana becomes obsessed with the image of the Frankenstein monster?especially the sequence in which a small girl picks a flower and hands it to the creature. Ana asks her wiser older sister if the story is true. Isabel says yes. And so Ana sets out in and around her village in search of the monster's spirit. Its existence is authenticated for her when she finds and helps an escaped prisoner who has found refuge in a barn, prior to his being found and shot by the police.

Much of the film's allure derives from the poignancy and simplicity of its sequences, especially those focusing on Ana, which are graceful unions of image and sound. The Spirit of the Beehive works as a fable of childhood, an ode to the wonders of youthful imagination and the magic of the moving image, and a subtly telling portrait of life in Spain under the repressive regime of Franco. At the film's core are the constraints on Spanish society under Franco, from the time in which it is set all the way through the time in which it was made. Franco's Spain is depicted as being in a state of inertia, with the only spark of life coming from Ana's imagination. Out of necessity, so as not to incur the fury of local censors, this commentary is ever-so-subtly drawn.

Prior to making The Spirit of the Beehive, Erice directed the last segment of Los Desafios, a three-part film, each episode of which deals with the experiences of Americans in Spain. Since then, he has worked infrequently. El Sur, made a full decade after The Spirit of the Beehive, is similar to its predecessor in that it too centers around an imaginative young girl?this one growing up in the 1950s?who fantasizes about her father. The documentary El Sol del Membrillo spotlights the inner workings of the creative process as it records the elaborate manner in which Spanish artist Antonio Lopez goes about painting a quince tree. A parallel exists between Lopez's exacting artistic method and Erice's, given the filmmaker's minute output over the past quarter-century.?ROB EDELMAN