Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6517 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-10-27
• Rating: Parental Guidance
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Number of discs: 1
• Format: PAL
• Original language: Spanish
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 93 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Victor Erice's hauntingly beautiful The Spirit of the Beehive features one of the most unforgettable child performances in the history of cinema. Hailed as the greatest Spanish film of the 1970s, Erice's visually elegant "poem of awakening" takes place in a small Castilian village in the early 1940s, as echoes of the Spanish Civil Wart can still be heard throughout the countryside. It is here, in this richly rural atmosphere, that six-year-old Ana (played by six-year-old Ana Torrent) is introduced to alternate world of myth and imagination when she attends a town-hall showing of James Whale's Frankenstein, an experience that forever alters young Ana's perception of the world around her... and her ability to mold reality to her own imaginative purposes. Is she using her imagination to escape what is essentially a bleak reality, or is she protecting herself with an inner world of innocence, to counter the darker worldview of her slightly older sister Isabel?

While her emotionally distant parents go about their mundane daily affairs, Ana's world becomes the film's mesmerizing focus, and The Spirit of the Beehive unfolds as an enigmatic yet totally captivating study of childhood unfettered by the strictures of reason. In Erice's capable hands, young Ana Torrent really isn't performing at all; her presence on screen is so natural, and so deeply expressive, that you almost feel as if she's living in the story being told--a story that retains its mystery and beauty in equal measure, full of visual symbolism and metaphor (including the title, which yields multiple meanings), yet never self-consciously "arty" or artificial. Simply put, this is one of the timeless masterpieces of cinema, produced at a time when Franco's repressive dictatorship was finally giving way to greater freedoms of expression. No survey of international cinema is complete without at least one viewing of this uniquely moving film.--Jeff Shannon

DVD Description
Made under the Franco regime, Victor Erice’s astonishing 1973 feature debut is quite simply one of the most remarkable, influential and purely poignant films to emerge from the 1970s. A bona fide classic of European cinema, the film brought Erice instant and widespread acclaim. An audacious critique of the disastrous legacy of the Spanish Civil War, The Spirit of the Beehive is set in a rural 1940s Spanish village haunted by betrayal and regret. Following a travelling cinema’s screening of James Whale’s Frankenstein, seven year old Ana (a mesmerizing Ana Torrent, later to grow into an international star of some standing) becomes fascinated with Boris Karloff’s monster. Obsessed with meeting the initially gentle creation, she transfers her entracement to a wounded army deserter.

Atmospherically rendered by legendary Director of Photography Luis Cuadrado, it’s impeccably performed by both Torrent and veteran actor Fernando Fernan Gomez in the role of her emotionally scarred, bee-keeping father. Existing in a highly evocative dreamlike state, it’s a powerfully symbolic, richly allegorical tale that is as unique as it is beautiful.

Special Features

• Trailer
  
• Stills Gallery
  
• Trailer reel

DVD Technical Information:

• Running Time: 97 minutes
  
• Colour
  
• PAL
  
• Language: Spanish
  
• Subtitles: English
  
• Region Code: 2

Customer Reviews

A supremely clever film
To fully understand 'The Spirit of the Beehive' (El Espiritu de la Colmena), one has to understand the context in which it was made. Although the film is set in 1940 it was produced in 1973, two years before the death of Franco, the end of his dictatorship, and the political and cultural repression which characterised it.

Erice manages to brilliantly depict the traumas of a family of republican sympathisers, struggling to come to terms with life under the fascist regime. What is special, is that he creates a powerful critique of the regime, and a call to arms to all those who believe in democratic values to prepare for the dictators then-imminent death, without saying anything that could actually be censored.

As a result, much of the imagery used in the film can be hard to grasp, and indeed is open to multiple interpretations - what is the significance of the beehives, of Frankenstein's monster (many say Franco but I disagree), the railway etc.? -I will leave it for you to theorise and debate on these and other aspects.

The performances are masterful, particularly young Ana Torrent and the great Fernando Fernan-Gomez, whose much later film 'The Butterfly's Tongue' has echoes of 'The Spirit of the Beehive' in it. What is more, the mood and atmosphere of repression are extraordinarily well recreated.

This work is not the easiest film I have ever watched, but it is without doubt one of the most rewarding

Classic of Spanish Cinema
"Spirit of the Beehive" begins with 'once upon a time', an epithet which, while it translates us into a world of children, simultaneously opens our eyes to the contrasting vision of fairytale and the reality of the adult world.

Set in a Castilian village in 1940, the Second World War has already engulfed Europe. Spain has just emerged from its Civil War, Franco is hunting down Republican sympathisers, and there is still a prospect that he will enter the war on the side of Hitler. This seems a bleak, unwelcoming place, but down the road comes a lorry ... a lorry bringing an evening of cinema to the villagers. Tonight it will be 'Frankenstein', projected onto a whitewashed wall while the audience bring their own chairs and cushions and settle in hushed expectation.

Director Victor Erice captures the wonder of cinema and its electrification of the imagination. His tale follows the lives of two sisters - Ana and Isabel - who become engrossed in the film. Young Ana, in particular, becomes obsessed with the notion that she can communicate with the monster and goes in search of him. She will, instead, find an escaped Republican prisoner hiding in a barn - she brings him food and clothing (echoes, here, of 'Whistle Down the Wind', or even 'Great Expectations').

It's a tale of growth, discovery and wonderment as Ana recognises her identity and the power of her own mind to shape her own world. Erice's characters make sense of the world around them, and are often highly introspective in character. Ana talks with her sister, but rarely communicates with anyone else. Her father studies bees, shutting himself off from the political world - he seems unable to communicate with people. And her mother writes letters to a former lover, banished to France after the Civil War.

The characters are all, in their own way, self-contained, seeking their own definitions of their world and of themselves, but expressive of the loss of identity and role which Franco's triumph created, and the isolation Spain would experience after the defeat of Hitler - shunned by much of Europe. Erice's film is not overtly political - Franco was still in power when it was made - but it nevertheless offers a commentary on the experience of dictatorship.

It's a visually stunning piece of filmmaking. Though the setting is bleak and lacking in any sort of glamour, Erice captures the dreamlike, fantasy quality of childhood. Ana Torrent delivers a mesmerising performance as the young Ana, beautifully portraying the essence of childhood innocence and imagination.

Regarded as a masterpiece of the Spanish cinema, "The Spirit of the Beehive" is a visual poem which seduces and holds your attention. It is a delight to watch.

Magic and loss
Many filmmakers use children, but few understand them; even fewer can remember what it was like to be a child themselves; virtually none can communicate that feeling. Erice's feature hums with the magic and awe of childhood. Every adult should see it at least once; whether you can bear to experience more than once the sense of loss that comes when it ends is another matter.