Víctor Erice gives children’s questions time to unsettle us. We rate his patient, carefully composed cinema highly, though The Spirit of the Beehive sometimes leaves us wishing we knew more about its adults.
Fi1m perspective
Ana’s fascination with Frankenstein in The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) is allowed to remain frightening. Erice gives her questions about creation and death time, without supplying an answer to make the grown-ups comfortable. Ana Torrent gives that curiosity its emotional force, while Isabel Tellería’s Isabel ensures that one child is not asked to stand for all childhood. We were unsettled by how little reassurance the adults could offer the sisters. Their reserve makes the girls’ tentative explorations troubling, and Erice’s patience is worth the attention he asks for.
That feature debut was followed by El Sur (1983), whose production was halted by its producer. Dream of Light (1992), a documentary portrait of painter Antonio López García at work, brought Erice’s attention to looking and waiting into the act of making a picture. Then came shorts, installations and uncompleted projects before the return to features with Close Your Eyes (2023). The latter reunited him with Torrent and returned to cinema, memory and unfinished work. We would rather discuss what he allows a scene to do than count the years between releases.
Erice’s films are composed with a painter’s care for light, with cinematographer Luis Cuadrado among his collaborators. That gives us reason to look closely, but beauty does not always make the people easier to know. In The Spirit of the Beehive, Fernando Fernán Gómez and Teresa Gimpera keep Fernando and Teresa reserved and difficult to approach. Erice is fair to them: their distance from the children does not make them unworthy of our attention. Yet we sometimes have to take their unhappiness on trust, and holding the image longer cannot supply the missing human detail.
We recommend Erice most confidently when he stays with the children. In The Spirit of the Beehive, their curiosity need not produce a lesson, and the film does not hurry them towards reassurance for our benefit. That respect matters more to us than the beauty of any individual image. Begin there, and give Torrent your attention even when the adults test your patience.
Biography
Víctor Erice is a Spanish film director and writer. He was born on 30 June 1940 in Karrantza, Biscay. He studied law, political science and economics at the University of Madrid and film direction at the Escuela Oficial de Cinematografía from 1963.
Erice wrote film criticism for the journal Nuestro Cine and directed short films before his feature debut, The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), which he also co-wrote. His subsequent films include El Sur (1983), Dream of Light (1992) and Close Your Eyes (2023).
