For Teresa Gimpera… The Spirit of the Beehive (1973)

It’s difficult to feel nostalgic after what we’ve been through these past few years but sometimes, when I look around, something tells me that our ability to live life to the full has vanished along with it.

 

I was saddened to read of the death of the Spanish actress, Teresa Gimpera, aged 87 and a wonderful screen presence in every film I have seen her in. I first saw her in Vincente Aranda’s 1969’s Las Crueles (The Exquisite Cadaver) along with Carlos Estrada, the sublime Capucine and Judy Matheson, so excellent in her first starring role, which is an existential classic from this rich period of European and Spanish cinema; part giallo but also a refined exercise in the search for meaning during the fading years of the Franco regime.

 

The Spirit of the Beehive is a similarly enigmatic film and again with every reason to be so. Director Víctor Erice’s first feature, it is the most potent mixture of the cinema of beauty with a carefully surfaced commentary on the nature of contemporary Spain; women’s role, men’s insularity and the hope we make from fantasy; so much honey as we buzz through our daily rigours fulfilling duty at work, school and home.

 

Set during the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War in 1940, when the rest of Europe was still fighting the fascists even as Franco’s victory sank in, the film commences with a truck speeding across the Castilian plain towards a village where children eagerly await the news of what the film will be. It’s James Whale’s Frankenstein (1931), one of the first great horror classics for a community that has just witnessed the unnatural recreation of their political and cultural life.

Teresa off to post a letter

The film takes its time, Erice is remarkably composed for a first timer, here and throughout as the mechanics of setting up a cinema in the local hall are followed, the screen, the chairs, the brightening eyes of the eager audience as the screen flickers to life and the children look on in awe trying to comprehend what they are now watching.

 

We cut to a man tending beehives Fernando (Fernando Fernán Gómez) and the voice over of his wife Teresa (Teresa Gimpera) as she composes a letter to a long-lost lover or friend. The colours of the beehives are matched to those of the interior of the house and the window consist of small panes of glass embedded in a criss-cross of lead inlays. The house is like a beehive and so is the territory of the film as the characters cross each other’s paths busy on their way, all interlinked. Teresa is shown on her bike heading across the plain down to post her letter at the station. The train arrives in Lumiere style and she, face clean of make-up, catches the eye of a young soldier in a window seat and the two look at each other, more reminded than attracted?

 

Fernando makes his way back to their house, a well-to-do building that has seen better days, their maid tells him where his children and wife are and, after reading and smoking his pipe, he stands at the window able to hear the dialogue from the cinema next door as Dr Frankenstein ponders the universe and the meaning of what he is about to do… Or is it just us, Erice providing an aural cut towards the interior of the film-watching ahead of the visuals?

The focus duly shifts back to the screening to young Isabel (Isabel Tellería) and her even younger sister Ana (Ana Torrent) as Frankenstein’s monster (Boris Karloff) emerges out of the rushes for is fateful encounter with Little Maria (Marilyn Harris) at the pool. We know what’s happening but Ana does not and asks her sister for reassurance about the girl and the monster – are they still alive or, like so many they have known, have they just disappeared into death?

 

I’ve seen him alive, in a place I know near the village…

 

That evening the girls discuss the film and Isabel reassures Ana that the Monster is alive and well living at a shed next to a well over the fields.

The remarkable Ana Torrent, still working at just 57.

Downstairs Fernando writes about the glass beehive he keeps in the house: “… the constant agitation of the honeycomb, the mysterious, frantic commotion of the nurse bees over the nests, the bustling bridges and stairways of wax, the invading spirals of the queen, the endlessly varied and repetitive labours of the swarm, the relentless yet futile effort, the feverish comings and goings undermining the next day’s work, the final rest of death far from a place that tolerates neither the sick nor tombs.” Someone had seen these workings and been not just saddened but frightened – a society without mercy.

 

Fernando falls asleep in his study, the darkness turns to a yellow light and as he enters the bedroom to get changed, Teresa pretends to still be asleep. So far these two have not spoken to each other and what we know is what they have written to others. The children are the only ones in direct communication at this point and they head off to join their swarm at the small village school. To say the film gives a child’s eye view of things is an understatement and the two girls – everyone used their own first names in the film to avoid confusing them – are exceptional, especially Ana through whom we experience subsequent events with the blurred unreality you’d expect from a Bunel* or a del Toro. She was just seven.

The girls go across the flat fields to the shed and inspect the well, Isabel further elaborates on the continue existence of Frankenstein’s monster, he is now a spirit, not that they are quite sure what that is exactly… Erice keeps us hanging on for more defined meaning and through the events that follow we see events intermingled between the shadowy yellows of the house and Ana’s sense of incomprehension and wonder. Thus, meaning is smuggled from beehive to village and the grown ups with their obscure motivations and their unintelligible concerns.

Fernando Fernán Gómez

Through it all the house moves closer together as the fantastical mixes with the all too real… people do indeed disappear but Ana will keep trying to connect to their spirit. It’s relatively easy to see the allusions especially if you imagine watching this as a young Spaniard at the time but the film works on its own merits on the level of Ana’s story, the quiet desperation of the family drama and the impact of American cinematic culture on a self-defeated Spain at the very beginning of Francoism, from a culture waiting for freedom near the end.

 

The cinematography of Luis Cuadrado is a wonder capturing the atmospherics, location and expression with fluid grace and precision – it’s one of the best-looking of films and, whilst I wasn’t keeping count, one that takes place mostly in silence with the only clues to meaning on screen. When Teresa slips a blanket around her husband as he sleeps exhausted at his desk – trying to put into words the almost unsayable – you know there’s a thawing between them. If Ernst Lubitsch was Spanish and filming in the early 70s…

There’s an interesting paper from Kevin Hagopian of Penn State University* in which he draws the line between Luis Buñuel’s Viridiana (1962) and the new wave of Spanish filmmakers that followed. He showed how to use magically real cinema to critique the fascist state and more were to follow including Erice and, I would say, Vincente Aranda with Las Crueles and the remarkable Teresa.

She is remarkably still and silently present in all of her scenes, bookending the real-world drama as she writes and reads her letters and hides her desperation from husband and children. There’s so much to be read into her quietness and as her husband obsesses with the bees she confronts the possibility that their lives may have been damaged for ever. Yet, in the end, she finds a way forward and there’s an optimism that is mirrored by Ana as she calls into the night. Straddling the new wave of boundary pushing cinema from the more commercial to this very epitome of art-house, Teresa Gimpera was one of the faces in the evolution of Spanish cinema and her depth and range allowed the sub-texts to flow even through the seemingly formulaic genre films.

Now I must seek out more of her work starting with her other Aranda collaboration on the madcap Left-Handed Fate (1965) which has a new Mondo Macabra Blu-ray which includes a profile of Teresa – The Muse of Pop Cinema! She had such a long and varied career and whilst she may well have been the pop-art muse she was also a very gifted actor and the spirit of the beehive lives on even as we're all caught up inside.

 

*It's here on the State University of New York website.