The Spirit of the Spirit of the Beehive

It's Tremendous! The best I've ever shown in this town!

The Spirit of the Beehive is in many ways a film about the experience of watching film. The entire opening sequence - from the approach of the truck that carries Frankenstein into town, through the excited questions of the children, the quaintly humorous announcement of the films showing by the town (movie) crier, the gradual filling up of the theater, and finally to the introduction and disclaimer that begins Frankenstein itself - builds anticipation about the very act of watching a movie - and in a way, this anticipation is self-referential, since the 'real' film, The Spirit, in a sense, doesn't begin until after this buildup. It is not until we find the father alone at his bees that the movie begins to give us the normal cues that it is moving forward: it now begins framing solitary shots of characters we assume will henceforth be the focus of the story; narration overlays these images, and we take these not only to be the voices of the characters visually introduced, but we take this privileged access to their thoughts as instant signs of these characters centrality. What is slightly ironic is that the true central characters have already been surreptitiously introduced in the opening sequence at the theater, but then with none of the cinematographic cues of their importance. The divide between the 'false start' and the 'real story' is further marked, more obviously, by the introduction/disclaimer that precedes Frankenstein, which warns us that we may be shocked by what follows, while admonishing us from taking the film too seriously - and then instead of seeing Frankenstein or perhaps his monster, we see the somewhat strange image of the father at work in his bee keeper suit (it is notable that Isabel will later put this suit to dress up as a monster to scare Ana). This divide - between the announcement and the film proper, is further marked by the return of the (haunting?) opening credit music, the presence of the soundtrack being an easy to spot reassertion of the filmic nature of what we are experiencing. I do not wish to go further into the introduction of Frankenstein being used, in a way, to introduce The Spirit itself (for instance, it would be too easy as well as objectionable to claim that the Father is a monster, or that he has committed a similarly against-god act); I only wish to point it out. But I will also point out that it is at around 30:00 into the film that we see any of the family members (other than the inseparable two sisters) in the same frame. And tellingly enough, it is the scene where the husband is coming to bed after having spent the night in his study, while his wife pretends to sleep.

Watching the Watchers:

The Spirit of the Beehive

The 400 Blows, Truffaut

Trains and cinema have a long history - both symbols of modernity, both rolling along a track, both a spectacle, almost a miracle, of sound and vision. The scene of Isabel and Ana playing at the train tracks develops the girls individual attitudes toward that moving spectacle of sound and vision, the film: So while Isabel faces the direction from which the train is coming, Ana faces Isabel - she is still dependent on her sister for certain cues ("why did he kill the girl?" "Why did they kill him?"); likewise, at the approach of the train, Isabel runs to safety first, while Ana does so only after being prompted; this shows the crucial difference between the girls stages in development: throughout the movie, Ana does not quite grasp the boundaries between safety and danger (the train; the deserter), between good and bad (the mushrooms), between life and death (Frankenstein; her sister's playing dead), while there are all exhibited as things that her sister understands. This difference in understanding, however is what makes Ana an innocent, and Isabel a moral agent - compare the scene in which Ana 'tests' the bees, blowing on them, with the following scene of Isabel quite self-consciously trying to strangle the cat.  This difference in their understanding is perhaps most importantly exposed when Isabel answers Ana's questions about Frankenstein (I.e., Why did the girl and the monster die?) with something like, they didn't die - movies are fake. The point is not necessarily that Ana believes Frankenstein is a true story, but that she doesn't really wield the distinction between fiction and non-fiction; she is moved by the movie without worrying about it's historical reality, and the director makes us too challenge this distinction when Frankenstein crosses the boundary of the silver screen and appears before Ana in an ambiguous encounter. 

The Spirit of the Beehive

L'Arrivee D'un train de gare de la Ciotat, Les Freres Lumiere

The movie is, after all, in many ways in the tradition of realism; still, it has many moments when it's filmic nature is brought to the viewer's attention, and these moments are among the most beautiful and memorable of the film - in particular his use of dissolves to mark the passage of time. Each dissolve (the schoolhouse in the morning, the girls crossing the field) does not seamlessly match up with the preceding image, giving the transitions a rough-edged, hand-crafted quality, not only speaking of the rustic ways of the village, but also reminding us that what we are seeing, too, was stitched together. 

The Spirit of the Beehive, dissolve technique

 

And while there is much more to this movie than this self-reference, it does have its way of reminded us that it's all a trick of light and shadows.