The Frame

Director: Victor Erice
Story & Screenplay: Victor Erice and Ángel Fernández Santos
Producers: Elías Querejeta
Starring: Ana Torrent, Isabel Tellería, Fernando Fernán Gómez
Year: 1973
Country: Spain
MPAA Rating: Not rated
Running time: 97min.

The film quickly transcends cinema and becomes about something far more primal – imagination itself.

Originally posted on Row Three on 31 August 2009.

[xrr rating=4.5/5]

A gaggle of excited children chase a van into the center of a tiny Spanish village – a movie has come to town, a rare occasion that brings nearly everyone in town to check it out. It’s 1940, World War II is going on elsewhere in Europe, the country is in recovery from their own civil war, but the movie is 1931’s Frankenstein, and the village’s attention is riveted. Based on this opening, it seems as if The Spirit of the Beehive is going to be a movie about the movies and the effect of movies on small-town populations – like a Cinema Paradiso or Shadow Magic. And though the rest of the film unfolds based on the catalyst of two little girls, sisters Isabel and Ana, seeing Frankenstein, it quickly transcends cinema and becomes about something far more primal – imagination itself.

Young Ana has two questions for her older sister Isabel: Why did the monster kill the little girl, and why did the villagers kill the monster? The fact that she doesn’t wholly connect the two events together perhaps makes it less surprising that she soon identifies much more with the monster than the villagers (the lack of perceived causal connection between the two also indicates to the audience that we shouldn’t look for exact 1:1 correlations between Frankenstein and the events of The Spirit of the Beehive). Isabel’s answer is that neither the girl nor the monster died, firstly because it’s a movie and the movies aren’t real, but also because the monster is still alive – she’s seen him at night in an abandoned house nearby. This response is very telling. Isabel’s imagination is good at creating stories, especially ones with a cruel edge that mislead others for her amusement, but she herself knows what’s real and what’s made up. She doesn’t get lost in her own imaginings the way that Ana soon will.

Isabel effectively replaces the mythology of the movie with mythology of her own, fundamentally affecting Ana’s imagination and actions through the rest of the film. Ana becomes obsessed with finding Frankenstein, returning to the abandoned house time after time. She feels that he would be a friend to her – though it isn’t clear in the film, her quiet shyness seems to make her something of an anomaly among the village children. A few events involving a deserter soldier eventually occur near the house that drive Ana even further into her imagination, and perhaps into madness. The thing that makes all of this so fascinating is writer/director Victor Erice’s understanding of imagination – everything Ana does and sees is filtered through her imagination and her imaginative perception of the film, and as such, everything makes perfect sense, even though trying to make direct connections with Frankenstein is usually pointless.

The title refers to the girls’ father’s occupation as a beekeeper; various vignettes of his life and their mother’s appear interspersed with the main story of Ana’s odyssey. These parts are far less clear – the mother writes a letter to an unknown person who seems to be involved in the war (brother? lover?); the father tends his bees and writes about them in his journal. Similarly, the overarching metaphor involving the beehives is incredibly obscure. The father journals about the endlessly varied and yet totally repetitive nature of a beehive, and the fact that looking at a beehive’s activity at first yields fascination but soon sadness and horror. This voice-overed statement is obliquely applied to Ana’s indomitable need to seek out Frankenstein (who Isabel refers to as a spirit), and is eventually repeated at the end, when Ana’s fascination may in fact have turned to sadness and horror, but like most everything in the film, the metaphor is not spelled out and is more of a mood or feeling than an explicit reference.

In fact, perhaps the greatest thing about the film as a whole is Erice’s extremely subtle approach. In one violent scene that is a turning point in the film, he shows nothing but distant gunfire, then cuts to the aftermath. When Ana first visits the abandoned house, the forbidding darkness inside contrasts so strongly with the bright outdoors that it looks like an impenetrable barrier to entrance, creating through a basic visual an intense sense of mystery and dread. Whatever the mother is doing with her letter-writing is never made clear – we retain the children’s in-the-dark viewpoint on adult matters. This subtlety yields a moody, mesmerizing quality, with the sense that everything is happening just under the surface – reinforcing that the driving force in the film is not anything that actually happens, but what happens in the imagination.