The Story of Ana in El espíritu de la colmena

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Notes

1. Writing about the film in Sight and Sound, XLIII (1974), 199–200, Roger Mortimore went so far as to say: ‘The film is about the parents, who have suffered the war. It is not a film about children’—a wild overstatement, in my opinion.

2. ‘Entrevista con Víctor Erice’, published with the screenplay: Víctor Erice & Ángel Fernández Santos, El espíritu de la colmena (Madrid: Elías Querejeta Ediciones, 1976), 143–44. The original filmscript of El espíritu de la colmena published here shows many differences from what was actually shot. It is very noticeable how much that was relatively facile and obvious has been pared away—maybe a little too much in places.

3. This image was basic to Erice's first conception of El espíritu de la colmena (‘Entrevista’, 141).

4. ‘En cualquier caso, sin Isabel no podría existir esa Ana última. El papel que cumple es, pues, muy importante. Lo patético de Isabel es que no cree en el alfabeto que, casi sin darse cuenta, provoca; para ella es un juego’ (‘Entrevista’, 148).

5. There is a verbal connection between the watch and Fernando's colony of bees. He writes in his journal: ‘Alguien a quien yo enseñaba últimamente en mi colmena de cristal, el movimiento de esa rueda tan visible como la rueda principal de un reloj …’ We hear his voice saying these words on two occasions, once near the beginning and once near the end of the film.

6. Erice shows the essential isolation of each individual member of the family in this sequence. There is a wordless, giggling communication between the two girls, terminated by Isabel swallowing the wrong way and having a coughing fit ( a reminder of what she did to the cat). But the really notable thing is that although this is a family meal, there is not one shot of the family as a group at the table. Instead we see each member in turn individually. Nobody says a word.

7. Narcissus is the paradigm, Garcilaso's Albanio in the Égloga segunda, 11.766 ff., an example.

8. In the opinion of one reviewer, the monster looks ‘a little like her father as well as Boris Karloff’ (John Gillett, Sight and Sound, 43 [1973–74], 56.)

9. A shorter version of this article was read as a paper at the VIII Congreso de la Asociación Internacional de Hispanistas at Providence, R.I., in August 1983. Since the original went to press, Erice's El Sur has been released, to general acclaim, and among much else confirms the director's interest in the subject of father-daughter relations. Studies of El espíritu have also been appearing. They include Peter Evans, ‘El espíritu de la colmena: The Monster, the Place of the Father and Growing up in the Dictatorship’, Vida Hispánica XXXI (Autumn, 1982), 13–17; and Luis O. Arata: ‘“I am Ana”: the Play of Imagination in The Spirit of the Beehive’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, VIII (Spring 1983), 27–33, which coincides with my reading of the film in major respects.

I want to thank a number of friends who have read and commented on this paper, which represents a critical venture, new for me, in a medium which literary scholars can no longer afford to ignore—Dr Peter Evans, Dr John Izod, Dr Francisco García Sarria, Mrs Carmen Dakin and not least my wife.