Criterion.com article on El Espiritu

This is quite an interesting article about El Espiritu de la Colmena.

• The artists who worked on the film have been haunted by its success - Erice has only made two features since.
• The 'Francoist aesthetic' - gaping plot holes and mysteriously motivated characters. Due to censorship. This can be seen clearly in El Espritu.
• The film has been seen as essentially Spanish. Ana Torrent's appearance has seen her compared to a Goya portrait. 'A village on the Castillian plain', the opening line, has been compared to Don Quiote's 'In a place in La Mancha'.
• Early versions of the script are overtly political. eg. the opening sequence once contained shots of abandoned cannons and army boots. Instead, the final version of the film uses coded references to the war - Teresa's letter is written to a refugee camp for exiled Spaniards in France, a photo is seen of Ana's father with Republican icon Miguel de Unamuno.
• Isolation is even within the family, as they are never all seen within one frame.
• Realism compared to contemporary film - the children record their own dialogue on location, whereas usually they would be dubbed by screechy women.

Cinehistoria article about El Espiritu

This is a pdf case study about my focus film, El Espiritu de la Colmena by Tomas Valero Martinez.

• It won the Concha de Oro at the International Film Festival in San Sebastian as well as awards in Chicago, London and Turin.
• The budget was equivalent to 60.000€.
• The political impact of Espiritu wasn't as great as might be expected, as censorship meant that all messages had to be incredibly subtle.
• The perfect and organised society inside Ana's home (metaphor for a beehive) Erice gives the idea of a lethargy overpowering a whole family who can't renounce their isolated life.
• In 1973 Luis Carrero Blanco became the new President of Spain, although remaining under the wing of Franco. In December he was assassinated by ETA, leading to a growing feeling of imminent political change (Franco died in 1977, passing all power to King Juan Carlos, who quickly created a democracy).

La Lengua de las Mariposas from uhu.es

This was quite a long article and all in Spanish :( It talks mainly about education under the Second Republic, which it the background of La Lengua de las Mariposas. I thought this would prove useful as Don Gregorio, the central character's teacher, is an enthusiastic Republican.

• The Church traditionally had the strongest presence in education. The Second Republic (1931-9ish) aimed to reform education, instead encouraging a questioning attitude and the separation of school and Catholicism, especially using nature.
• The film has an air of nostalgia for liberty and the promises of the Republic.
• There are direct mentions to the Civil War, although it does not appear violently until the final scene.
• In one scene the Machado poem 'Recuerdo Infantil' (Childhood Memory) is recited, which describes the boredom of a traditional classroom - 'shriveled and tired'.

My book

I'm using this book, Spanish Cinema (Inside Film) by Rob Stone. This has been especially helpful because there is a whole chapter on El Espiritu de la Colmena (1973, Victor Erice), my focus film.

• Erice is from Vizcaya in the Basque region, which could explain lots of the anti-Franco messages in the film (as the Basques, a people from the North of Spain, were suppressed by Franco, for example by being denied the right to speak their own language).
• Realism - all locations and characters keep their own names. Also, Torrent's reaction to watching Frankenstein was real, as it was the first time she had seen the film.
• The Life of the Bee by Maurice Maeterlinck was the source of the title. Used as a metaphor for Spain, eg that the Second Republic was 'invariably sacrificed to the abstract and immortal city of the future'.
• Subtle hints to oppression. For example, in one scene, the school recites a poem by Rosalia de Castro in Castillian, although it was originally written in Catalan.
• The train is a symbol for progress in the outside world bypassing Ana & compounding isolation.

Useful study of The Spirit of the Beehive

I found this (part 2 is here) on Youtube. It's by Linda C Ehrlich from the Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. She edited 'An Open Window: The Cinema of Victor Erice'. She talks alot about how the film relates to the Civil War, both in obvious ways and also how she interprets it.

• The village as a microcosm for Spain.
• The links between Ana's father, Franco and Frankenstein.
• How the film relates to other artistic forms, eg. Spanish Golden Age Theatre.
• An effort to understand the war through a child's eyes. Cinema as an escapist, all-absorbing tool.
• The role of Ana
• The Spirit - fantasy. The Beehive - concrete reality.

A useful site :)

Scope, part of The University of Nottingham's Film Studies department is quite a useful website with a collection of academic articles and reports. In fact, it's Nottingham's Film Journal. The department's homepage is here. Unfortunately, the website doesn't seem to have been updated in a while, so I am looking for a more recent version. So far, I have found these articles:

• This is about The Butterfly's Tongue, by Antonio Lázaro-Reboll... 'the use of both Galician and Spanish traditions in Cuerda's latest production poses a number of questions about cultural identity'... It explores the Republican importance of education (it was seen as the ideological arm of the new Republic... 'of the nearly 300 historical films produced in Spain since the 1970s, more than half are set during the Second Republic (1931-1936), the Civil War (1936-1939), and the dictatorship of Franco (1939-1975)'...it has a 'polarized, oversimplified vision' of the war... doesn't 'display the complexities of Cuerda's more masterful work'.
• This is a review of the 2000 Viva! Spanish film festival in Manchester, by Andrew Willis of the University of Salford... The film shows how 'Spain and, in particular, its impressionable young children, fell into the hands of the Franco regime because many were too afraid and too weak and selfish to speak out against it'.

Some random links...

A BFI article about the The Butterfly's Tongue - it criticises the realism of the film, particularly surrounding the region of Galicia, where the film it set. It also makes links to The Spirit of the Beehive and Spanish culture during the Civil War. It's actually quite scathing about the film, which surprised me a bit.

This is from the Socialist Review, so it gives a different angle on the cinema of the Spanish Civil War. It gives a good (although politically motivated) background to the war, as well as making brief mentions of The Butterfly's Tongue and Land And Freedom.