MY DVD Collection - 09 Feb 2007

(Der Geist des Bienenstocks [de] • The Spirit of the Beehive [en])

Spain 1973
d: Víctor Erice
Optimum Home Entertainment (Region 2 uk)

>> The Cast & Crew [click to show or hide]

>> The DVD [click to show or hide]

>> Reviews [click to show or hide]

Erice's remarkable one-off (he has made only one film since, the generally less well regarded El Sur) sees rural Spain soon after Franco's victory as a wasteland of inactivity, thrown into relief by the doomed industriousness of bees in their hives. The single, fragile spark of 'liberation' exists in the mind of little Ana, who dreams of meeting the gentle monster from James Whale's Frankenstein, and befriends a fugitive soldier just before he is caught and shot. A haunting mood-piece that dispenses with plot and works its spells through intricate patterns of sound and image.
— TR, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Slow-moving but lyrical, Victor Erice's stunning feature-film directorial debut carefully re-creates the post-Civil War period, but much more is at work here than appears at first glance. SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE is a thought-provoking, highly symbolic work about the isolation engendered by Franco's stultifying reign, made by one of a generation of Spanish filmmakers forced to cloak their political messages in allegory.
— TV MovieGuide
•••••
One of the best of all recent films dealing with childhood fantasies and family relationships. Two young sisters watch James Whale's Frankenstein in the village cinema, whereupon the youngest of the two becomes obsessed with the 'presence' of the Monster. She helps hide a fugitive from the Army who is eventually killed (the period is just before the Civil War); when the father upbraids her she runs off to retreat even deeper into her private world. Utilizing the barren Castilian landscapes and the burnished browns and yellows of the girls' shadowy village home with a painter's eye, Victor Erice (whose first full-length feature it is) combines a marvellous vision of childhood discoveries - listening for an approaching train, exploring the mysteries of the forest, playing games which suddenly turn sour - with a visualization of a dream-world where, even in the darkness outside, strangers and monsters can take on a benevolent aspect and respond with love. The film's real merit stems from this gently persuasive, poetic atmosphere and its precision of imagery and composition.
— John Gillett, PFA
•••••
"There has probably never been a more extraordinary view of a child on a movie screen." (N.Y. Times) This status as a haunting film about children needs the qualification that it is about real children and their natural preoccupations with suicide, sadism, heroic self-sacrifice. And the setting, a Castilian village at the end of the Spanish Civil War, in a film made in a time of continuing censorship, should warn us that this children's story is a way of recuperating for the cinema the very narrative materials-political and historical-that are glimpsed only peripherally and fleetingly. The center of the film is a question on the limits of Frankenstein: "Why did the monster kill the girl and why did the villagers kill the monster?" And the conclusion enters into an Expressionistic and hallucinatory fantasy as a way of lifting the narrative out of its realistic and ideological constraints. Erice does not so much demystify as bracket the mythic aspect of film that Expressionism projected.
— William Nestrick, PFA
•••••
The Spirit of the Beehive is a visually poetic, haunting, and allegorical film on innocence, illusion, and isolation. Victor Erice uses the recurrent imagery of the beehive to create a pervasive sense of claustrophobia and geographic disconnection: the honeycomb structure of the stain glass windows through the house; the amber glow of the oil lamps and candles; the pervasive haze of the darkness of winter. Filmed in 1973 under the Franco regime, The Spirit of the Beehive is a deceptively lyrical tale of idyllic childhood memories and a disturbing portrait of isolation. Like the bees in Fernando's experiments, the children are also unwitting subjects of an unnatural, artificial environment. In essence, Ana's misguided actions mirror the illogical behavior of the disoriented bees attempting to adapt to an inorganic crystal beehive. Isolated from a natural environment, Ana, too, lacks a logical frame of reference. Her attempts to incarnate the spirit of the monster is a naive attempt to reconcile her own confusion. But inevitably, her quest leads further into the darkness - to more incomprehensible revelations - to deeper questions.
— Acquarello

El Sol del membrillo

(Das Licht des Quittenbaums / Die Vergänglichkeit des Lichts [de] • The Dream of Light [en])

Spain 1992
d: Víctor Erice
INSight Films (Region 0 us)

>> The Cast & Crew [click to show or hide]

>> The DVD [click to show or hide]

>> Reviews [click to show or hide]

A truly magnificent film from the maker of Spirit of the Beehive and The South, which effortlessly transcends the term 'documentary'. Basically, it follows Madrileño painter Antonio López as he meticulously and slowly labours over a painting of a quince tree in his garden. That the task takes him months is of interest in itself, but where the film scores is in its fleshing out of its subject through conversation with friends, wife, admirers, and builders at work on his house, a strategy that simultaneously contextualises López and puts his bizarre, even limited conception of artistic endeavour into perspective. Don't worry about a lengthy, fairly banal dialogue about half-an-hour into the film; the rest is visually extraordinary, funny, touching, and quite unlike anything else.
— GA, Time Out Film Guide
•••••
Victor Erice captures a sublime and infinitely fascinating portrait of art, inspiration, and the creative process in The Quince Tree Sun. Similar to the feature films of Abbas Kiarostami, Erice interweaves reality and fiction using a cast of nonprofessional actors in order to distill the fictionalized account of the artist's life and reveal the emotional honesty of the creative spirit. Using the simple narrative style of documentary filmmaking, mundane conversations, and personal introspection, Erice presents a vision devoid of artifice or pretense. What emerges is an understated observation of the inevitable passage of time, and the irrepressible longing of the soul to capture an elusive moment of nature's fleeting beauty.
— Acquarello
•••••
For all my admiration for Victor Erice's first two features (Spirit of the Beehive and El sur), I wasn't entirely won over by this meticulous 139-minute documentary (1992) about artist Antonio Lopez Garcia painting a small quince tree in a Madrid courtyard, even though many of my smartest colleagues were bowled over by it (the Chicago International Film Festival awarded it a Gold Hugo). Like the painter, it's painstakingly serious about what it's up to.
— Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader