The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

Wow! Such a good movie.

A bit overrated, but still an amazing film

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

The movie is made so realistic it has a lot of that WoW feeling at the right moments and never tooo over the top. the suspense is done so well and the emotion is felt. Very well put together with the music and all.

I am proud to say that I have just added a NEW TOP FILM to my favorites list. :)The Spirit of the Beehive took me through probably one of the GREATESTEXPERIENCES of my life. Honestly, judging form the plot on IMDb, I did not think it would be that good. Now, after watching it, I declare it to be the MOST BREATHTAKING movie I have scene in a verrry long time.It is SET IN 1940, and LITTLE Ana and her older kid-sister, Isabel, venture around their Spaniard country-side where they attend school, go mushroom picking with their father, discover a deserted building, and most importantly, WATCH MOVIES at their local cinema house.Ana is mesmerized after watching the new film in town, James Whale's Frankenstein (1931), where her sister tells her lies to scare her even more of the monster. I love that while the movie is playing, they show the scene where Frankenstein's Monster encounters a little girl and is shown to be harmless by playing with her, but obviously the villagers will think otherwise.CHILDHOOD, in many ways, is one of the most beautiful things to portray on the big screen. Especially, because it is an adult re-creating these moments that have some similarity to their own youth (or I would hope so in Victor Erice's case); the innocents, freedom, imagination, energy, and even purity that comes from us when everything was so simple.****The girl who plays Ana put me to tears towards the end of this story. I could not help but get a little emotional, because not many directors can really show what it is like to be a kid again.

The Spirit of the Beehive is dull and empty shell of a movie with ridiculously slow pacing. The movie in generally has nothing going on. The only reason why people seem to like it and think it is great, is the deep symbolism it has to offer. People be like "I got it, it was deep and hence it is good." Deepness is good, but this movie is easily the least solid thing created by this medium, offering nothing but shallow and irrelevant scenes and zero plot which lead to a lacking conclusion which doesn't conclude more than any of the former scenes. This movie is the prime example of a movie where there is nothing to get, but the fans will get "it" anyway. This movie is the reason why South Park made an episode about "The Poo That Took A Pee." For those who do not know, it was literally a story about poo taking a pee, written by an 8 year old, but people thought it was socially thought-provoking and deeply philosophical work about the current sate of our society and human nature. This movie's fans prove that apparently you don't have to think anything on your own while making a movie because the fans will do the thinking for you and refer to the movie with words like epic, smart and deep while the only word you need is tedious.

It's somewhere on the Castilian plateau around 1940. A traveling movie show brings the classic Frankenstein to town attracting all the eager youngsters. Ana and her older sister Isabel are fascinated by the meeting of the little girl and the monster. Ana can't understand why the girl was killed but Isabel assures her that it's all fake. In fact, she's seen the monster alive in real life as a spirit in the night and living in an abandoned farmhouse nearby. They go there and imagine the invisible giant. Then Ana finds a real wounded Republican soldier starts hiding in the farmhouse from the Franco forces. The girls' father tends to the beehives and writes while their mother daydreams about her lover who had gone to war.This is a pretty slow movie. It has some interesting shots, and a lot of long uncut scenes. The girls are amazing. The scene of them watching the movie is glorious. There's only one scene where the family is all together. It's not that loving family. Quite frankly, the parents can be just figures off screen for all I care. Ana Torrent has such a doll face. The camera can exist just by pointing at her. The problem is that this movie has no tension most of the time. It exists in its world but it takes forever to get to anywhere. If the movie wants to take the Frankenstein comparison to the fullest, it should have included a Dr Frankenstein in the movie. They could have added news footage of the war and Franco. Or maybe have a big commander as the doctor.

The Spirit Of The Beehive is an excellent and realistic portrait of childhood, with less Malickian mysticism and more realism; in that the 'realism' of a child is a different mysticism than 'adult' mysticism; or perhaps enchantment is a better term. That term also explains Ana's ideals about life, and why she stares at her father's glass beehive relentlessly, for she sees an order in it that is absent in her existence. This metaphor is far more cogent and powerful than the facile political connotations impugned. In fact, one can even argue that Ana's ordered home (replete with honeycomb shaped windows) and home life are manifestations of the beehive she loves, and, just as we view her with intent, so does she view and imbue the bees' lives. The outside world- politicized or not, by comparison, is no beehive, and things need to be ordered, by force, or by suppression- the elision of the drowning scene in Frankenstein is a good illustration of this for the diegesis of the film is her perspective, and she would likely close her eyes to that scene anyway, which is why the actual film also elides the dream sequence of Ana and the monster, as its hands seem to move to grab her.Watching films from certain periods in one's life, for the first time, is an odd experience, for often it is as if one is backfilling one's own past, altering it subtly as if one had experienced the recent past as a decades' old memory, as if it had been there all along. Throughout Erice's film, I had images and emotions of what my own existence in 1973, the year of the The Spirit Of The Beehive's release, was but, alack, in real life, I am an Isabel, not an Ana, thus I can discern the real from the irreal. On the positive side, when I state that Victor Erice's debut film is a cinema masterpiece and classic, you can rest assured that it is. Really.