Each of the two films, ElEspíritu de La Colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) by Victor Erice andLa Mala Educación/Bad Education (2004) by Pedro Almodóvar, brings itsaudience back about 30 years to see “childhood”, although they address manydifferent issues.
Pedro Almodovar's Bad Education ((La Mala Educacion) is the most remarkable film I have seen in a long time. This will sound like high praise but it is, in some ways, queer cinema's closest equivalent to Hitchcock's Vertigo. People are not whom they seem to be, new identities are assumed, and memories create ideals that become more important than reality.
In The Spirit of theBeehive shows us a mysterious and dreamy image of a village “somewhere onthe Castilian plain in 1940”. The ruins remind the audience of the civil war, andthey create an atmosphere of depression. The slow pace provides with the roomfor me to absorb, digest, and question the elements in the film, anextraordinary experience which is different from being immersed in the storyand, after leaving the movie theater, feeling empathy. Its direct reference tothe horror classic Frankenstein (1931) and the dream sequence in which Anameets Frankenstein’s monster both suggest the director’s focus innocence anddeath: like Frankenstein’s monster, Ana is curious about death and confusingreality and fantasy. After reading Paul’s article on Criterion, I believe thehidden meanings in the film may be both personal (to Victor Erice) andcontextual.
In Bad Education(2004), Almodóvar skillfully designed multiple storylines, which are set in1980, 1977, and 1964 (three decades), and led them to converge at the end ofthe film, where the fiction mirrors the reality. In the layers that Almodóvarcreated, Enrique is able to visit the life of Ignacio and understand how sexualabuse affects the life of Ignacio, that of his brother Juan, and that of FatherManolo in these three decades. The camera lingers on male bodies as Enrique,Juan, and Father Manolo collaboratively discover the whole image through manyversions of Ignacio’s life story; the gaze becomes an interactive examinationof sexuality and desires within themselves.
THE REPLAYING OF HISTORY: Judith Escalona's entry
La Mala Educación/Bad Education
Almodóvar’s neo-noir film is a poetically powerful look athow we lie or generate narratives to support our specific goals or motives. False identities and narratives are established at the verybeginning of the film: The truth of the film narrative is as precarious as that of the shortstory The Visit upon which it isbased. Juan is a thief of his brother Ignacio Rodriguez’ identityand history. He sets the film narrative in motion in order to advance his actingcareer.
Enrique Goded is searching for a story to make a new film bygoing through the tabloids when The Visitfalls in his lap. He is moved by it because it is at least partlyautobiographical, written by his first love Ignacio Rodriguez. But Enrique doesnot exactly recognize him after so many years. The author himself is suspect.Juan is impersonating his brother as lover and writer. But he really wants tobe known as an actor by the name Angel Andrade.
Throughout the film, there are visits and annunciations thatare transformative. Juan visits Enrique that launches the film. Ignacio visitsFr. Manolo in order to blackmail him. Enrique visits Ignacio’s home in Galiciato uncover the truth. Berenguer, the former Fr. Manolo, visits Enrique afterthe final scene of the film is shot to reveal how Ignacio actually died.
From the written word to the screen, there is collusion, cooperation,collaboration, and, ultimately, complicity. The Church as an educationalinstitution is guilty of teaching falsehoods that glaze over the truth of its motives. Enrique will change the ending of TheVisit in the film adaptation, making the priests culpable in the killing of Ignacio. By implication, the Bible provides the most dubious of narratives amplifiedby time and the media.
Visual cues, such as changes to the aspect ratio of the filmframe that distinguish the film narrative from the short story Enrique isreading, or the textual transitions where the typewritten pages are presentedwith highlighted passages, serve as indicators of a history told and retold frommultiple perspectives.
El Espíritu de La Colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive
The beehive is a man-made construction for managing bees inorder to use them to pollinate fields and to extract honey and beeswax fromtheir hive. “Smoking” the beehive renders the bees docile, preventing the beekeeperfrom being attacked when removing the frames that contain the honey.
The film introduces Fernando masked, as a beekeeper. He “smokes”the bees. He is also the father of Ana and Isabel, and husband to Teresa. Likethe beehive, the large home and estate frame the lives of this privileged but diminishedfamily.
Teresa writes a letter to an unknown recipient, in theprocess informing viewers about the family’s situation. She delivers it to thetrain’s mailbox, walking through the smoke and steam emanating from the train in asequence that recalls the “smoking” of the bees.
The cinema and train keep the Hoyuelos village from beingcompletely cut-off from the outside world. A shortwave radio grants Fernando furtheraccess. Regardless, the family is safely eking out their lives. They aresurvivors of a repressive regime that, years after the civil war, continues topersecute and disappear dissidents.
The elliptical narrative captures the sense of uncertainty,the precarious condition the adults live with and which casts an ambivalent qualityto their character. Unlike their parents, Ana and Isabel are full of lifethough Isabel, the eldest of the two, begins to exhibit sadistic tendencies.
Limited communication extends to the family, where only thegirls share and interpret the story of the Frankenstein monster. Ana wants toknow why the monster killed the little girl and why he was also killed––questionsthat exceed human comprehension and are, given the context of Francoist Spain,dangerous.
Ana, who along with the monster embodies the spirit of thebeehive, continues to ask the wrong questions. She asks her mother aboutspirits. The conversation elicits an intensely loving embrace from Teresa, anemotional display that will remain uncharacteristic of her for the rest of the film.
Ana is compassionate towards the fugitive, going so far asto dress him with her father’s coat. He is apprehended and killed in the barn. Shesearches for him and discovers blood when her father startles her. He has beento the authorities to retrieve his coat and watch, a situation that might haveimplicated him. He reproachfully calls her to his side. She runs away.
This is a story about conformity, of giving in to a repressivequotidian life in order to survive. In his role as beekeeper, Fernando has saved himself andhis family by metaphorically “smoking” them into a docility that Ana seeks toevade.
A short response to “TheSpirit of the Beehive: Spanish Lessons”
This is an excellent review of Victor Erice's film, providing a broad sweep of background information and formalistic analysis. I will briefly look at one aspect: The “Francoist aesthetic”is worth discussing in connection with two other films of the decade, The Conformist (1970) and The Tree of Wooden Clogs (1978). The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) is aestheticallycloser to The Tree of Wooden Clogs.Both are elliptical or “laconic” and have an organic narrativity associatedwith neo-realism. The Conformist isthematically related to The Spirit of the Beehive by exploringsurvival in a radically changing political climate. In the case of The Conformist, Bertolucci traces the corruptinginfluence of fascism on an individual. Erice looks at its effect on a family.The “Francoist aesthetic” is thus problematic, given a broader, internationalframe of reference––albeit European. It might be enriching to explore this aesthetic in other non-European national histories.
The irony of Franco’s film initiative is that it wouldresult in the production of “oppositional films.” Would Carlos Saura’s Críabe one of them? What are some othertitles?
El espíritu de la colmena is a film that reflects on cinema and movie-making. Ana is a child who does not clearly differentiate between what belongs to the real world and what is part of a narrative shown on the screen. However, I think Víctor Erice makes the spectator feel in a very similar manner by presenting the story as real while continuously stating how fiction does not belong to reality. I think Erice underlines the influential consequences cinema carry by making the cinematography feel extremely tangible and present. For this reason, I consider some of the scenes in El espíritu de la colmena could be related to haptic cinema. It feels like Erice is purposely focusing on materials or phenomea which feel extremely tangible when watching the movie. I am specifically concerned about the effect water creates when Ana drops a stone in the well, how Isabel paints her lips with her own blood, the shadows created by fire when the children are jumping the bonfire, or how the window glasses reproduce the shape of a honeycomb. All these scenes are presented using close-ups which make the spectator feel the textures and material conditions of what is shown on the screen. I think this formal characteristic could be related to the exercise Erice is doing by presenting a movie inspired by pos-war Spain in the final years of the dictatorship: by making the movie feel tangible, the story gains credibility as a fictional narrative. - Dani -
En la película Elespiritu de la colmena - extrenadaen la época de la dictadura- se observa una historia de posguerra, aunque sin escenasexplicitas del conflicto bélico narra la desolación social que dejó: “Byfocusing not on national conflict but on domestic distress, what one reviewercalled 'the war behind the window,' Erice gives a much more subtleand moving take on the historical trauma suffered by Spain in the twentiethcentury.” (Smith) Sin embargo y como Smith propone, a través de loque se denomina como 'Francoist aesthetic' se realiza una crítica conuna sutileza impecable y de forma indirecta. El uso del recurso mágico y dehorror con la búsqueda del fantasma presenta una historia donde se podríaconecta ese horror imaginario con el trauma y fragmentación de la sociedadespañola inmersa en el cuerpo del Frankenstein. En el film se puede vislumbrarla figura del fugitivo sin nombre propio y despersonalizado de ningún tipo deindividualidad que representa a una colectividad de resistencia contra el régimenfascista. Ana en su búsqueda del espíritu topa con el fugitivo, el directorpresenta dos escenas donde ella va a visitarle incluyendo una música extradiegéticay melancólica. Sin embargo, este sonido melancólico se basa en una cancióninfantil, ¿una melancolización de una España anterior a la guerra? Más aún,puede tener un valor crítico ya que esta canción infantil se llama “vamos acontar mentiras” y comienza diciendo “ahora que vamos despacio/ vamos a contarmentiras tralará” como si hiciese referencia al discurso del régimen en conexióncon la resistencia y el bando republicano de la guerra, donde un discurso llenode falacias intenta controlar un pueblo a través del terror y la opresión, comosi el fugitivo-espectro fuera maniqueisticamente hablando el malo representadosin tan siquiera nombre o dialogo pero que a través del sonido extradiegéticose critica las falacias distribuidas por el régimen. Miriam
Both El Espíritu de la colmena (Erice) and La mala educación (Almodovar) allow us to think about the role of film in the (re)telling of history and the memory of trauma; in part, they achieve this reflection metadiscursively, by inserting a film within a film. In Erice’s film, we can analyze the importance of the Frankenstein screening as the experience through which the two young girls begin to interact with death and trauma. From the outset, Ana’s exposure to the horror film forces her out of her naive childhood and into considering what it might mean to die. Since we must consider this film a product of and existing within the discursive matrix of memory of Spain’s Civil War as lived by a generation that lived but might not remember, it might be interesting to analyze the genre of horror as a potential indicator of how memory is constructed in more contemporary times. That is, in the film, how does Ana and Isabel’s generation’s relationship to Frankenstein educate them, in one way or another, to narrate or deal with their country’s painful past, a past they lived through, but might not recall or understand? In Almodovar’s piece, both the viewers and the characters make sense of the plot and the character’s personal and societal histories through the making of a movie, La visita. The film uses the the film-within-a-film to cut across temporalities and space in an attempt to reconcile the history of violence towards non-binary and queer folk during late Francoism and early Transición while, at the same, reconciling a personal history between two old friends, a set of brothers, and various intertwined love-/domination-triangles. This brings up an interesting metadiscussion about using film to come to terms with violence and grief by creating an archive of history. What are the affordances of this genre of film in moving towards the reconciliation the characters are seeking? What gets erased in a multimedia archive of history? -Anthony
Color is text. The variances of light and shadow are traditionally given great significance in critical consideration of cinematography, likely an inheritance of cinema’s black and white past; yet the utility of color, newer and more beholden to technological advances in nature, offers as much if not more to aesthetic evaluation. We see this in El espíritu de la colmena and in La mala educación.
Earth tones abound in Victor Erice’s moody masterpiece. The yellowish Castilian landscape drowns everything in flattened wide-shots, suggesting the eternity of place indifferent to human action. The lone house and well where young Ana goes hunting spirits and finds a wounded soldier is almost indistinguishable from the surrounding field. Ana’s eyes haunt as a brownish-black abyss, ocean-wide against her pale skin and often more communicative than the sparse dialogue. Those eyes, referenced metaphorically in a classroom lesson, are the bottomless repository of historical witness. Throughout, of course, everything is seen through the honey-hued light of Luis Cuadrado’s fading vision. This light is softer than the sepia-tones of old photographs and sentimentalized memories. It’s not pretty; it’s substantive, almost tactile. It calls to mind the beehive motif but the truest effect goes beyond mere allegoricalization. This light is atmospheric amber, congealing around the figures onscreen and immobilizing them in stratified history. These colors suggest a worn and muffled aesthetic, implying a culture that’s been beaten down and now only exists in muted subsistence.
Almodóvar, of course, prefers a sharper palate. Reds, blues, oranges, greens and purples rip across the screen. This chromatically heightened aesthetic provides the pulpy context for this story-within-a-story of drag queens, pedephile priests and murder. The artificiality helps estrange the plot and underscores the otherness of these characters, a positioning that imports considerable tension into the brilliant flashes of empathy created by Almodóvar and the performance of Gael García Bernal. The contrasts of color against color and primary color against desaturated tone further dramatizes the gaudy vibrancy of the expressive drag world and the blander background of its surrounding sexual-social convention. Color, in its strategic manipulation, is the most coherent drama of this film.
Both films use color as a visual reference to the effects of memory. Erice's film paints its memories as fading, the indistinct palate bearing the marks of time's erosion of impressions and events from childhood. Almodóvar suggests the stubborn vibrancy of unkillable trauma and life-defining epiphanies as color links memories of youth, the past-tense remove of storytelling, and the residual mementos of the present-day frame-tale. Color is the ur-text running through Erice and Almodóvar in these paradigmatic artifacts of post-black-and-white cinema.
Doug Parker
Whereas The Spirit of the Beehive(1973) shows Ana’s discovery of the dysfunctional world of adults from the point of view of a child, Bad Education(2004) displays Ignacio’s review of his childhood accounting abuses infringed also by adults. Despite the films are set in the first or last decade of Francoism, they both depict some of its major attributes, insofar we can conceive Spain as an underage child being ruled and abused by a regime guided by its own procedures and mechanisms, impossible to understand through the eyes of a child. Thanks to the analogy with Frankenstein, in The Spirit of the Beehive,the borders of fantasy and reality seem to be unclear for the protagonist. Ana and her sister Isabel imitate their father when they pretend to shave themselves, and a similar scene takes place in Raise Ravens(1976)by Carlos Saura,where Ana (in the two films Ana Torrent’s character is also named Ana) does the same by dramatizing adult real life scenes with her two sisters. As we can see, both realities influence their fantasies as their fantasies also influence their realities.
In The Spirit of the Beehive, Ana’s house resembles the beehives that his father carefully studies, the tinted yellowish windows have, in fact, the same hexagonal shape of the honeycomb cells. Throughout the film, there is low-key lighting, an element that Smith characterizes as “reminiscent of Vermeer”. Regarding lighting, Luís Cuadrado proves his mastery of composing such luminous cinematography in what is one of the most beautiful scenes in the film: a time–lapse exterior shot in which we observe the change from artificial light to darkness to natural light. Beyond a reference to the life cycle, the following scene shot at dawn from inside the house, thanks to natural light discovers the objects of the room. It is a revealing and magical instant that exposes another mise en abyme,a hives within a hive. In Bad Education,we can find similar low key lighting in the scene where Enrique goes to Galicia to visit Ignacio’s home, and from the door and window, lighting conveys color and shape of clothes, frames, food and jars in a way that reminds us of Vermeer paintings. Both Ignacio’s past and Ana’s present are revealed through lighting
Ramón Flores Pinedo
Children are thought to be innocent, most likely because they are young and have not yet been exposed to the “sins” of the world. According to the article, “Francoism attempted to use cinema to change its negative image abroad and to create the impression that freedom of speech was permitted.” The movie, Mala Educación, takes place during Franco’s reign and viewers are shown a side of children that intentionally makes them uncomfortable. The movie tackles taboo topics such as molestation in the Catholic Church and two young boys who experience their first sexual encounter. The movie was meant to be taboo in order to create a false sense of freedom by allowing the director to purposefully distribute an “experimental and discreetly oppositional” film by pushing back on this idea that children are innocent.
In El Espiritú de La Colmena, we are introduced to Ana who is initially innocent as demonstrated when she asks her sister Isabel, “Why did [Frankenstein’s monster] kill her?” because she simply did not understand the motive. In the movie, the girl is approached by Frankenstein’s monster and she welcomes him with flowers and tries to teach him the concept of sharing. It becomes clear that Ana is traumatized by the death of the movie character and then maintains a stoic demeanor the rest of the film. In times she should show fear, such as when she finds Isabel unresponsive on the floor, Ana appears unfazed. Later at the breakfast table, her father pulls out the pocket watch to see who would react to hearing the music. Ana looks up to prove her guilt at assisting the fugitive yet she is still without emotion. We only see a real emotion from her when she is confronted by Frankenstein’s monster by the stream and her lip begins to tremble. At the end of the film she opens the glass doors to welcome the “spirit” and says, “Soy Ana” to show she is neither afraid nor innocent.
Vanessa Guzmán
Both La mala educación and El espíritu de la colmena suggest that the Catholic and Hispanic national project driven by Francisco Franco failed. On the one hand, the relationship between Padre Manolo and Ignacio affirms that the Church is a corrupt organism and that it was unable to carry out the two tasks assigned to it by the government of Francisco Franco: watch over morality and watch over the proper functioning of family as the cell of Spanish society. In the first instance, Father Manolo sexually abused Ignacio while he was a child, an act that, in the eyes of Spanish society of the time, although more common than we would like, was questionable. Secondly, this prebítero was not able to ensure the proper functioning of Spanish families because, in one of the families he was in charge of, that of Ignacio, there was no 'pater familiae' and one of the children came out as transgender woman addicted to drugs. So, this family, does not meet the ideal structure of the Spanish family in which the father was responsible for educating and disciplining the children so that, in the future they formed their own families and served their nation in the militia or in the industry. That is, the existence of a queer son and his inability to reproduce put this social and economic order based on the traditional family at risk.
On the other hand, El espíritu de la colmena affirms that the Church was not only a corrupt entity, if not absent, because in 1940, just after the Civil War and inaugurated the Franco regime, not a single priest appears in the film. On the contrary, it is emphasized that the education of the children is in charge of the civilian population and not of the clergy, since the teacher of the town and the parents of the girls are in charge of transmitting the necessary values for social coexistence.
José Acosta
Manon Hakem-Lemaire Week 2: Topic 1: The Replaying of History Cultural scholars have often claimed that post-Franco democracy is founded on amnesia: a willed oblivion to the horrors of Spanish history. Yet close examination reveals that the period film ('cine histórico') is one of the most important genres of Spanish cinema. This topic explores the contradictory representations of the past and their implications for the post- Franco present in films that treat Spanish history, with particular emphasis on those set in the |
Francoist period. El espíritu de la colmena/The Spirit of the Beehive, by Víctor Erice (1973) The meaning of the beehive in El espiritu de la colmena is not limited to the father’s profession as a beekeeper. The beehive as a motif used to depict and reflect on the period of Franquismo (1939-1959) in which the action is set, makes a powerful metaphor. Ana, Isabel and their family, just like the whole of Spanish people, are trapped in a beehive themselves, restlessly operating for a dictatorial system, without questioning it. For instance, the austere, almost military way in which breakfast is eaten illustrate the repression of Spanish people’s freedom of expression in the 1940s. The camera focuses on one actor at a time while they eat or drink. None of the family members are talking; silence is only interrupted by the sound of dishes and cutlery clattering together. The two girls maliciously smile at each other, uneasy about breaking the silence, as though doing so were a sin. In a gesture of tenderness, the father (the very experienced Fernando Fernán Gomez) deploys a little instrument which plays a lullaby. However, his face remains absolutely blank while performing this act of kindness. The camera settles on Ana’s look at her father, sinking in her melancholic and bewildered eyes, which always seem to ask: “do we really have to live in that way?”.1 Throughout the film, the ongoing metaphor of the beehive is reinforced by omnipresent yellowish lighting, as well as the recurring hexagon shape (e.g. the window panes). The gloomy village Hoyuelos also contributes to the feeling of claustrophobia by its own name: hoyo means hole, the suffix -uelo means small, and so the name Hoyuelos could easily mean a (god-forsaken) hole. Through the candid eyes of Ana (Ana Torrent) and Isabel (Isabel Tellería), El espiritu |
de la colmena raises necessary and fundamental questions for the 1970s: what just happened, in the two decades of Franquismo? What does replaying recent history mean for the future? What is the new nature of cinema, after it served as propaganda for Franco’s regime, giving a false impression of free speech? In an interview on the film, Erice insisted on the need to find new cinematic techniques, to move away from cinema itself (with a Brechtian emphasis on artificiality, perhaps) and to create a new language for the new times ahead (Miyaoka, II, 5:20). This view is supported by the instructions at the beginning of the film “not to take the story too seriously,” as well as by Isabel telling her little sister that “en el cine es todo mentira,”2 after they attend a projection of Frankenstein. Film critics of Erice’s time, such as Laura Mulvey, also emphasized the necessity to find new forms of cinematic expression, moving away from |
1 When asked to explain his choice to cast actress Ana Torrent, Erice said that the child did not yet make the difference between fiction and reality. For example, she was, like her character, verydisturbed by theFrankenstein film. (Miyaoka, I. 5:07).
the Hollywoodian paradigms of causal narratives and happy endings which dominated the first part of the twentieth century. In short, El espíritu de la colmena shows rather than tells, evolving with a slow rhythm and an overall lack of dialogue. These narrative techniques give ample space for the spectator to weigh in and take responsibility in questioning the recent history of Spain, so that they can consciously choose not to censure themselves, their cinema and their own daily lives, unlike Ana and Isabel’s father when writing in his diary at night. References: Miyaoka, Hideyuki. Interview with Victor Erice, Café Oriental, Madrid, 2000. |
URL Part I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDknOv90EqE URL Part II: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtWFG6Aq2oU Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” Screen 16.3, Autumn 1975, 6-18. URL: http://www.jahsonic.com/VPNC.html La mala educación/Bad Education, by Pedro Almodóvar (2004) In a similar effort to Víctor Erice’s film, Pedro Almodóvar draws attention to Spain’s history of Franquismo with La mala educación (2004). Set in multiple timelines (Almodóvar’s signature technique), the film focuses on queer experience and child abuse in the Spanish religious schools of the 1950s. The denunciation of repressed sexuality and its devastating effects is particularly compelling in the river scene, when Ignacio’s story (in fact, Juan’s story) is told by young Ignacio as a voiceover. As the child’s voice explains, good boys at school were allowed a day swimming at the river with Padre Manolo (acclaimed Mexican actor Daniel Gímenez Cacho). The present transitions into the past as the voiceover gives way to Ignacio’s singing a Spanish version of “Moon River” while Padre Manolo accompanies him with his guitar. The latter is ostensibly aroused by the child’s crystalline voice. With a disturbing expression on his face, he is shown struggling to focus on his guitar-playing while being irresistibly drawn to the child, whom he sexualizes,1 as his pedophilic impulses are triggered. As the singing goes on, the other boys are shown diving into the river in their swimsuit, all in slow motion. The camera then |
focuses and zooms onto their clothes left ashore. Behind the bush, as Ignacio’s singing fades away, something morally disturbing is happening, and so the spectator knows by the combination of sound and image brought to stillness, contrasting with the precedent flow of action. Ignacio’s shout “no!” breaks the previous enchantment and brief silence. He bursts from behind the bush, falling face down, in what looks like a protection mechanism. Padre Manolo runs after him, hastily wrapping his cassock around his body. Blood dripping down on Ignacio’s face precedes the division of image into two parts opening onto Padre Manolo’s face (in fact, the actor playing Padre Manolo in the present, in Enrique’s adaptation of Juan’s story). The voiceover resumes with young Ignacio acknowledging an unescapable sense of division caused by the childhood episode of abuse. Padre Manolo, channeling his repressed sexuality onto the children he is responsible for, inflicted an unrepairable wound that would last for Ignacio’s |
1 Children are repeatedly sexualized in the film. Another example is the physical education lesson. Children are filmed from above doing push-ups in their almost military training, as the priest orders “arriba – abajo,” (up, and down) and the boys execute the move innocently, resulting in a scene very evocative of sexual intercourse.
lifetime, until he and Juan kill him by giving him an overdose of heroin in the 1970s (four years before the main action is set). In one of his typical non-linear and colourful narratives, Almodóvar paints a persuasive picture of the ongoing consequences of Franquismo into the following decades. Clearly, the spectator is shown (again, shown rather than told) that the death of a junkie in the 1970s can be accounted for by the consequences of Francoist rule in the 1950s. Never assisted in their understanding the plot, spectators are given enough autonomy to slowly make the connections between the multiple timelines and the complex relationships between the characters –necessary connections to internalizing painful truths about Spain. Almodóvar’s slow, puzzle- like narratives are therefore more powerful than classic, linear ones, for spectator themselves own the agency of drawing the conclusions themselves. Of course, by definition, this |
internalization process acts against amnesia. In both Erice’s El espiritu de la colmena and Almodóvar’s La mala educación, meta-cinema - perhaps more overtly so in the latter film - plays an important role in both the recuperation of memory as well as the articulation of the films’ narratives. Specifically, the artifice of cinema within each film eventually bleeds into the ‘real world’ of the filmic action itself. El espiritu de la colmena opens with an announcement of a film to be projected at the village cinema. James Whale’s adaptation of Frankenstein becomes a vertebral component of El espiritu, providing the narrative motivation, so to speak, for Ana to befriend the republican soldier. Frankenstein’s monster haunts her thoughts. The projection of Whale’s film is woven into the plot and timeline of El espiritu’s first half. Erice uses dialogue from the horror film, spliced in non-diegetically, to launch a critique against Franco’s regime. As Fernando stands outside his balcony, shot through honeycombed windows, the narrator of Frankenstein intones, “es usted joven… lea tu libro...despierte y vea la realidad.” Though it is Fernando who is in the shot as this dialogue plays, we may intuit that the target audience is not him, but rather the young Spaniards such as his daughter. Fantasy and reality intermingle in young Ana’s mind as she struggles to come to terms with the monster’s existence as well as her own experience as she increasingly links her own life to the story of the film. In La mala educación, meta-cinema functions as a playful linking of past and present. A common trope in Almodóvar films, meta-cinema connects the imaginary world of Ángel/Juan’s film idea with that of the real life experiences of his brother. Almodóvar deliberately blurs the line between fact and fiction by using the same actors to portray characters in flashback, a sort of film within a film that draws attention to its own artifice. In particular, the scene in which Juan films Fr. Manolo with a hand-helf, amateur film camera while they have sex underscores this break with reality that is woven into the film. Indeed, the square viewfinder of the camera takes the place of the normal set camera, as a squared off, grainy frame takes over the screen. Almodovar’s characters are actors within their own nested films, movies in which they both star and direct. Meta-cinema serves to relive, reconstruct, and retell memories in La mala educación, memories whose veracity Almodóvar challenges both his real audience and his characters to discern. Luke Bowe. Luke Michael Bowe |
Learn about this topic in these articles:
discussed in biography
- In Pedro Almodóvar…directed La mala educación (2004; Bad Education), which takes on sexual abuse within the Roman Catholic Church; the family drama Volver (2006; “To Return”); and Los abrazos rotos (2009; Broken Embraces), a stylish exercise in film noir. The latter two films starred Cruz.Read More
role of García Bernal
- In Gael García Bernal…Almodóvar’s La mala educación (2004; Bad Education), and a murderous and incestuous loner in The King (2005). His turn in the eclectic comedy La Science des rêves (2006; The Science of Sleep) showed that García Bernal was also adept at exploring the lighter side of human nature.Read More