The Spirit of the Beehive

The invisible thing in The Spirit of the Beehive is a monster made out of a lie.

Her sister Isabel means no harm. She simply tells Ana, offhand, that everything in a film is fake, that the monster did not die, that he is like a spirit, and that if she closes her eyes and calls him she can talk to him. She also takes Ana to a derelict sheepfold outside the village and tells her it is where the monster lives.

Ana believes her. She starts going there alone.

And what Erice does is hand the whole thing back to the audience: no flashback, no narration, no second point of view, no signal as to whether the creature ever appeared. Every place where the film could explain itself has been left empty. The critic Tony Rayns described it as "a haunting mood piece that dispenses with plot and works its spells through intricate patterns of sound and image."

But there is a more concrete and more startling reason to recommend it today.

The film's cinematographer was going blind while it was being shot.

Luis Cuadrado (1934–1980) was one of the most important Spanish cinematographers of his generation, winning the Cinema Writers Circle award for best cinematography almost every year. During The Spirit of the Beehive he began losing his vision to an inoperable brain tumour and had to rely on his assistants to describe the image. By the time he shot Emilia, parada y fonda in 1976 he was completely blind. He died in Madrid in 1980, aged 45.

A film about a child learning how to see was photographed by a man who was losing his sight. That is not a metaphor; it is a production fact, and it is where the film's honey-coloured light — as if seen through amber — actually comes from. Many critics have attributed the film's success to his "essential contribution."

The second reason is the archive.

It now holds 20 films across 18 countries or territories. But Spain is at zero. And The Spirit of the Beehive is, as of 2022, the only film by a Spanish or Latin American director on Sight & Sound's list of the 100 greatest films of all time. Today Spain goes from 0 to 1.

The third reason is internal to the archive.

It connects to Come and See (1985). The archive already holds one film that puts a child into the empty ground left by war — that one is the battlefield in Belarus, with the war shown head-on. This one is Spain five years after: the war never appears at all, only the silence it left inside a house.

It also pairs with Spring in a Small Town (1948): a half-ruined courtyard in a small Jiangnan town, and a manor house steeped in honey-coloured light on the Castilian plateau. Neither film shows the war. Both show only the people left in a house with nothing to say.

One last reason is a date: in two days, on 8 October, the film marks 53 years since its Spanish release.

1940 年，西班牙内战刚刚结束。

故事发生在卡斯蒂利亚高原上一座与世隔绝的村庄里，一座大宅子中住着四口人。父亲年纪大了，大部分时间在照料蜂巢、在本子上写下他对蜜蜂的观察；母亲比父亲年轻得多，整天想着一个不在场的远方情人，并给他写信。姐姐 Isabel 是家里唯一和 Ana 说话的人——她爱妹妹，但也忍不住利用妹妹的轻信。

然后，一辆流动放映车开进了村子。它带来的是 1931 年的美国恐怖片《Frankenstein》。

散场之后，Ana 问姐姐一个问题：他为什么杀死那个女孩？为什么之后他们又杀死了他？

Isabel 给了她一个答案。那个答案让 Ana 从此开始一个人寻找。

（这里不再往下说。）

A film about seeing

The Spirit of the Beehive (Spanish title El espíritu de la colmena) is a Spanish film of 1973, running 99 minutes — the feature debut of Víctor Erice. He wrote it with Ángel Fernández-Santos; the producer was Elías Querejeta, the cinematographer Luis Cuadrado, the composer Luis de Pablo, the editor Pablo G. del Amo.

Camera: a man losing his sight

This is the most easily missed and most startling thing about the film.

During the shoot, Luis Cuadrado (1934–1980) began losing his vision to an inoperable brain tumour and had to rely on his assistants to describe the image. Many critics have attributed the film's success to his "essential contribution."

The light became the thing the film is remembered for: honey-coloured, late-afternoon yellow, as if seen through a layer of amber. The windows of the house are hexagonal, matching the structure of a honeycomb; the whole building sits in that light, and indoors the characters look almost sealed inside amber.

Performance: a child who did not think she was acting

Ana is played by Ana Torrent (born 12 July 1966 in Madrid), six or seven years old at the time. Erice visited many schools, photographing girls during recess, to cast the part.

She later recalled:

"It wasn't a difficult process because it wasn't acting. I never considered myself an actress. I was just playing myself, a child, and they gave me instructions. I remember my character in the film was even supposed to have a different name, but at that age, I didn't understand why they weren't calling me my name, so Victor changed it to Anna. I wasn't conscious of acting at all, and I didn't understand what I was doing. It was just like a big mysterious game."

That detail decisively changes how the film reads: the four main characters — Fernando, Teresa, Ana, Isabel — carry the names of the actors playing them. This is not a stylistic choice. It is because a six-year-old gets confused when she is called something else on set. Erice changed the script, not the child.

Script: a film that does not explain itself

The screenplay was rewritten from the ground up. Erice's earliest version was set in the 1970s and told of an aged father dying while Ana returns to the village to see him; he thought it would "tidy the story up into a soap opera," scrapped it, and moved everything back to 1940 and into a child's point of view.

The result is a film that barely advances through plot at all. That is its core method: it does not explain. The objects that recur — the father's notebook on his bees, the mother's letters to a distant lover, the hexagonal windows, the hive on the wall — are never glossed. They are simply placed, and the audience is left to draw the lines.

Context: filming 1940 in 1973

The film was shot in 1973 — which means Francisco Franco was still alive and in power (1892–1975). The story is set in 1940, the year the Civil War ended and the Francoist state was being built.

That made direct statement impossible, so the film works entirely through symbol: an isolated village, a family whose emotional life is coming apart, a father who hands everything over to order and repetition. The beehive is the most direct of these symbols — orderly, organised, and entirely without imagination. Working through symbol to evade censorship was the shared condition of Spanish cinema at the time; Erice belongs on that line alongside Luis Buñuel.

Reception and influence

• 2022: the only film by a Spanish or Latin American director on Sight & Sound's list of the 100 greatest films of all time.
• 2010: named No. 25 best arthouse film of all time by The Guardian.
• 20 November 2012: entered Roger Ebert's "Great Movies" selection.
• 1973: won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián International Film Festival.
• Rotten Tomatoes: 96% from 26 reviews, average 9.00/10; Metacritic 87/100.
• Guillermo del Toro has repeatedly cited the film as an influence on The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth.
• Ana Torrent went on to star in Carlos Saura's Cría cuervos (1976) and Alejandro Amenábar's Tesis (1996, Goya nomination for Best Actress); in 2023 she worked with Erice again on Close Your Eyes — his fourth feature in fifty years.