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| The Spirit of the Beehive |
"It's the most beautiful film in the world...olé!" So says a travelling movie man touting
Frankenstein to villagers in
The Spirit of the Beehive, a description many feel could be applied to Erice's film itself.
Vast, sparse landscapes, train tracks that seem to lead to infinity, claustrophobic close-ups of a family home (the symbolic 'beehive' of the film's title), and the unforgettable face of the child Ana - these images define Erice's feature film debut.
Haunted by
Frankenstein after her cinema experience, Ana believes a fugitive soldier to be his spirit. In Erice's quiet universe, all seem to live in inner exile and the film - made in the last years of Franco's dictatorship and set just after the Spanish Civil War - resonates with loss and longing.
