The spirit of the beehive and the Spanish civil war relationship dates back to 1973. The connection is because the film got released in the dying days of General Franco’s forty-year dictatorship. The film is an atmospheric exploration of a child’s experience in a deserted village just after the civil war. Strangely, many of the gifted artists who collaborated on the film feature, have had troubled afterlives. Since Victor Erice’s film, Ana, the six-year-old star, remains haunted by the role that made her a Spanish icon. The career of Luís Cuadrado, the creator of the luminous cinematography, was tragically cut short by blindness. Erice himself has only completed The South and Quince Tree of the Sun/Dream of Light. The spirit of the beehive and Spanish civil war relationship has adversely affected the actors.
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SPANISH CINEMA DURING THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR
The spirit of the beehive and Spanish civil war relationship is similar to other films such as cousin angelica. The violent response to Angelica emphasized the political importance of cinema that deals with contested historical periods. Under Franco’s dictatorship, Spanish cinema was utilized as a myth-making machine to spin stories about the past. Few Spaniards were fortunate to view Victor Erice’s film. The viewers described Erice’s film and Saura’s film as harsh condemnations of the Spanish regime. A recurring theme in Saura’s work is the problems associated with re-capturing a long-suppressed past through recourse to memory. After Franco’s death in 1975, cinematic representations of the war changed beyond all recognition. Filmmakers turned to documentary to try to recuperate the Spanish civil war historical period.
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THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE AS A SYMBOL OF THE STAGNATION OF LIFE
The spirit of the beehive and Spanish civil war relationship started just two years before Franco’s death. The film was among the first Spanish films to be given the defeated republicans perspective without fear of reprisals. However, the film avoids the melodramatic pitfalls of political cinema and is far from a bombastic political polemic. The film opts for quiet filmic metaphor and narrative instead. Victor Erice’s film places the story firmly in a child’s perspective. The perspective is, in fact, that of our young protagonist Ana. Erice uses the six-year-old protagonist to distance the viewer from the world of the film. The opening titles have a vague quality specificity that places the village within the context of a Spanish province. Therefore, there is no specific name of the area affected by the Spanish civil war.
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