Cinema is the art of telling stories through images. You would think that is obvious, but not all films are like cinema. For many films dialogue is as, or more, important than images. Some films are more like plays. or are plays (Glenbary ross for example, or)
The Spirit of the Beehive1 is a Spanish film from 1973, and I would have understood the story without any subtitles. In one scene, the mother is lying in bed. The camera is not moving, and we only see her back. Then we hear the sound of her husband ascending the stairs. She turns, and for two minutes straight, we look at her face while we hear the sounds of him getting into bed, his shadows on the wall behind her. Nothing much is happening on her face. She only opens her eyes once and closes them again. Without any dialogue, their relationship is clear to us.
The images produce feelings that are hard to put into words. The barren and windswept plains stir up forgotten emotions in me. Buried memories of long-ago hitchhiking trips through the endless barren fields of desolate Northern France resurface. Both landscapes evoke desolation and loneliness. A loneliness that is repeated inside the family’s manor. The children, the father, and the mother all live in their own worlds. They rarely appear in the same frame. Again: relationships are expressed in images.
The father tends to his bees and, at night in his study writes poems, only going to bed with the first light of morning. The mother is disillusioned in her marriage and in life in general. Now and then she disappears into the distance on her bicycle, on her way to the train station (nothing more than a wooden shed with a small wooden platform in an empty plain) to send letters to a faraway lover. This while the children live in a rich world: theirs is full of wonder, of spirits and monsters, and they have each other
The interior images are like paintings by Vermeer or Velazquez: intimate depictions of simple things in a limited palette of subdued colors, rich in textures: the textures of bedsheets, of woolen socks, of the unblemished skin of the children. Faces are shown for a long time: the disillusioned face of the mother, the face of the father, full of regrets, trying to give meaning to the emptiness inside; the faces of the children with their unkempt hair and dark eyes full of wonder, looking up to the screen showing the silent movie Frankenstein with Boris Karloff.
The exterior scenes of dilapidated buildings and vast and barren windswept plains are shot in monochrome colors.
There are a few crowd scenes: the mobile cinema arriving in town, a string of excited children in tow; the teacher teaching anatomy with a cardboard doll to a classroom full of children, all wearing the same gown. Although they are discontinuous, especially the last one, somehow they fit.
The film is set in 1940. Although never mentioned directly, in the background lingers the Spanish Civil War, which had ended just one year earlier with the victory of the right-wing dictator General Franco.
The music is plaintive, strange and minimalistic and adds an extra layer of desolation.
The last image shows almost an almost imperceptible, wordless gesture of a person we do not see that shows how the events in the movie have changed the relationship between the parents.
This is a movie I wouldn't have liked when I was 25. Nothing much is happening on the surface, and it would have been too slow, the dialogue too sparse for my earlier me.
I am going to watch the films of Tarkovski again, famously slow and abstract. When I saw them thirty years ago, I only made it to the end because they were supposed to be masterpieces. Now finally, I might appreciate them.
You can watch the movie for free on Youtube: