Victor Erice’s Film The Spirit of the Beehive: A Coded Warning Against Submission in the Aftermath of the Spanish Civil War

ABSTRACT

This essay discusses Victor Erice’s film The Spirit of the Beehive in terms of issues relevant to psychoanalysis today: the impact of socio-political trauma on the psyche. Through his cinematic artform, Erice captures the isolation and emotional deadness of village life in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War which we discuss in terms of the contemporary interest in intergenerational transmission of trauma as well as the expansion of the psychoanalytic paradigm to include socio-historic events impacting unconscious processes. Through a personal narrative of a young girl’s plight, the film captures her mind-numbing surrender to fantasy elaborations – which serves as an allegory for the people of Spain’s mind-numbed surrender to fascist dogma. Throughout the film, a witness is needed, so Erice turns to us, his viewers to take on this role. Beyond being a coded exposé of Franco’s regime, the film serves as a warning with disturbing relevance today.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Bion referred to “−K” as the opposite of seeking and having knowledge (“K”) to convey the avoidance or emptying out of knowledge – even “the wish to destroy the capacity for it” (Parsons, 2000).

² Ana’s refusal to turn a blind eye brings to mind Scout’s uncompromising commitment to truth when unspoken dangers lurk just below the surface in To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee, 1960). Both pre-adolescent girls serve as cultural icons of a willingness to disobey paternal authority in order to bring certain values to bear on complex situations – values which reflect an understanding of the proper/ethical way to act. Their loss of innocence due to early trauma develops into a need for truth in the case of Scout in her commitment to a just social order, but to fantasy and untruth for Ana in her quest to find “the spirit.”

³ According to Stone (2002), film censorship was a bona fide roadblock for Erice and other progressive filmmakers in Spain in the 1960s who, as political dissidents, departed from the Francoist aesthetic.

⁴ Consider the many “Why-questions” children ask in their attempts to make sense of both the regularities (Why does the sun rise?) and irregularities (Ana’s “Why did he kill her?”) in the world (Schiffrin, 1981).

⁵ Salberg (2017) notes, “if a parent has self-states that are dysregulated or even dissociative, I think we can assume that he or she will be in some way emotionally compromised, and thus at times inaccessible to the child to help with self-regulation, self-soothing, and mentalization of feelings and thoughts” (p. 87).

⁶ See J. Riley (2023) for an analysis of the role of the socially subordinate servant in the Oedipus myth.

⁷ In Beehive, on one of Ana’s forays to the farmhouse to locate the spirit, she is depicted as conversing/gesturing to an absent figure (the assumed spirit) near the well as Isabel, who remains hidden to Ana, looks on with an almost disbelieving impish grin.

⁸ Although according to Paul Smith (2006), leftist critics attacked the film’s lack of overt political commentary, Smith claims “Erice gives a much more subtle and moving take on historical trauma suffered by Spain in the twentieth century” with his allegorical style.

⁹ Indeed, Ana Ornstein notes that memories of her early life with her loving family in Hungary prior to their deportation during the Holocaust is what sustained her amidst the terror of her time in Auschwitz.

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Notes on contributors

Julie Gerhardt

Julie Gerhardt, Ph.D. is a Personal and Supervising Analyst and Faculty at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She has published in Psychoanalytic Dialogues, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, Studies in Language, Journal of Child Language and maintains a private practice in Palo Alto CA

Dan Slobin

Dan Slobin, Ph.D. is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Linguistics Society of America. He has published numerous books and papers on language and cognition across languages, with particular attention to child language development. His research sites include Spain (the setting of the film under discussion here), Mexico, Chile, Italy, Germany, The Netherlands, Croatia, Turkey, and Israel.