Essay Questions

What is the movie that the whole village turns out to watch which impacts young Ana so profoundly?

The opening scenes of the film show a truck arriving with film canisters for a village-encompassing screening. The film is the original 1931 version of the Universal Studios classic original version of Frankenstein. Since the film is set in 1940, this time gap helps to convey the sense of isolation that is so essential to the story. A few clips from Frankenstein are interspersed with shots of the villagers’ faces in a big dark gathering hall and it becomes quickly apparent that no face is more profoundly effected than that of little Ana, her huge eyes taking in every flickering image as though she was watching some sort of magic taking place. She will be most intensely moved emotionally by the scene in which the Creature accidentally throws a little girl into the water and mistakenly assumes that he has intentionally drowned her. This will lead to her persistent inquiries of her sister for an explanation of why the Creature killed the little girl and they the villagers in turn killed the Creature.

To whom is Teresa writing her letters?

Teresa is the mother of Ana and Isabel and the younger wife of Fernando. She is even more disconnected from her children than her husband and both parents are strangely alienated from the two girls. For the most part, the focus of Teresa is limited to the letters she writes to an unknown person. Most commonly interpreted as love letters recalling with a wistful sense of nostalgia an earlier and more pleasing time for herself, the subject and recipient of the letters is never identified and thus has led to a number of theories, all equally plausible. None of these possibilities can be either confirmed or rejected based solely on the evidence available within the film, but each is robust with potential for a deeper analysis and greater understanding of the ambiguities and mysteries of this visual fable.

One very common opinion is that the letters are pure imagination directed toward a lover who never actually existed. This interpretation is very much in line with the film’s overall focus upon the necessity of a lively imagination in order to survive oppression. The sudden and very brief appearance of a revolutionary soldier targeted for overkilled by the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s police/army naturally leads to speculation that the object of Teresa’s affections very much does exist and has attempted to return to her only to meet with a tragic end. A more narratively allusive, but perhaps emotionally more satisfying reading suggests that Teresa is writing love letters to the younger version of her husband with whom she originally fell in love with as a remembrance of when their marriage was not quite so loveless.

What is a proper analytical response to the common criticism that the film’s pace is too slow?

Although The Spirit the Beehive can be categorized in a number of different ways, it most assuredly is not an action film. A very common complaint about its detractors—and even some of its fans—is that it moves along at a pace that is just a little too leisurely. And, indeed, it can be surprising to discover that the running time is only a little over ninety minutes when the perception that it runs a full two hours is not uncommon. There is very definitely a purpose in this manipulation of the viewer’s perception of the passage of time, however. The leisurely pace of the film as a whole is by no mean accidental nor is the excruciating quality of the prolonged sequence in which Ana believes she has stumbled across the dead body of her sister.

Both the film as a whole and that particularly sequence in particular purposely mess with the viewer’s perception of time passing as a visual metaphor for what is at the center of the film’s very existence. It is set at the dawn of the Franco dictatorial regime in Spain and was released in expectation that this oppressive stage in the country’s history was on the verge of ending with the dictator’s death. The intensity of the slowed down pace of the narrative is intended to replicate the excruciating quality of the Spanish people waiting for decades for their tyrannical nightmare to finally come to a conclusion.