THE FIGURE OF THE FATHER IN THE CINEMA OF VICTOR ERICE, AS A

REVELATION OF THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SPAIN DURING THE POST WAR

Pablo Fernndez Santa Cecilia 100315615

Carmen- Aitana Goberna Pons 100291143

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 THE FIGURE OF THE FATHER IN THE CINEMA OF VICTOR ERICE, AS A

REVELATION OF THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT OF SPAIN DURING THE POST WAR

In this essay we will study Vctor Erices films, El Espritu de la Colmena and El sur.

We will be exploring the socio-political context of when the films were made, paying special

attention to the production process and the film industry in that period. However, we will also

tackle the historical context the films talk about, which is the Civil War, heeding that Erice

criticizes it by showing characters confined in the silence of censorship and repression of the

postwar period. Moreover, our angle of study will be the perspective of the fathers in both

films, who are the ones that suffer the most the consequences of the war. By analyzing

several scenes, we will observe how Erice expresses the hidden emotions of the characters

through the aesthetics of the film, specially through light and composition. The aim of this

paper is to analyze why Erice chooses poetic cinema in order to talk about social and political

issues such as the Civil War in his first two films, El Espritu de la Colmena and El sur.

Victor Erice is one of the most prestigious filmmakers in spanish film history, but also

one of the most internationally acclaimed directors of all time. Because of his genius and

artistry, he is a very demanding director, which has caused him many troubles over the years.

He has only directed three feature films and several short films in over forty years. He is

widely considered as one of the top geniuses of film art of the 20th Century, but he has not

had an easy life or film career. He could be compared to filmmakers as important as Ingmar

Bergman, Michelangelo Antonioni or Pier Paolo Pasolini, and most of all, to Andrei

Tarkovsky, because of his poetic universe, his cinematic precision, his complicated

relationship with film production and the few number of films both made. However, creating

a masterpiece every ten years, his work offers a beautiful insight into the most delicate visual

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poetry, defined by utter sobriety and elegance, but also a unique vision of the issues of the

postwar Spain. Thereby, his films become the perfect combination between historical

accuracy and powerful aesthetics, and Erice is therefore the ideal filmmaker to study in this

essay. Both films are beautiful but disquieting poems, with barely no plot, and that have

managed to captivate the entire world. Firstly, we are going to study the political context and

the situation of the film industry of Erices first film, El Espritu de la Colmena, which is

considered along with El verdugo by Luis Garca Berlanga, as the best film of spanish film

history. For Antxon Salvador, it is fundamental no slo del cine espaol, sino de toda la

historia del sptimo arte1.

Vctor Erice began working as a film critic during the 1960s in the magazine Nuestro

cine. If we read the critics of films he made during that period, we discover that he had a big

preference for films that were connected with their socio-political contexts. On the other

hand, he severely criticized the lack of commitment, superficiality and frivolity of many

films. According to him, spanish cinema needed to establish a fundamental connection with

its history, mainly the Civil War. Thereby, the film can be inscribed in the so-called cinema

of disidencia which, from 1973 on, will create stories that have the civil war as a

background. However, there is a radical change between the films made during francoism

and the films of this period. Until then, it had been completely impossible to make any movie

that talked about the Civil War from a perspective different from the one of the victors. Films

like Los pjaros de Baden-Baden (1975) by Mario Camus, Pim, pam... Fuego! (1975) by

Pedro Olea, La Prima Angelica by Carlos Saura and El espritu de la Colmena, gave voice to

some sectors of the spanish society that had remained muted for a really long time, this is the

losers of the Spanish Civil War.

1
Salvador, Antxon. Espaol de cine. Lo que hay que ver. BLUME. P. 106.

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 If the political situation had changed since the 1940s, Franco was still alive in 1973,

and these films were still quite risky to be made in the new political context. They were made

under the wing of Alfredo Snchez Bella, Ministro de Informacin that leaded a sort of

persecution against the Nuevo Cine Espaol. Thereby, Erice in particular made El Espritu de

la Colmena with a very ambiguous language. He managed then to show the stark reality of

the postwar context, skillfully avoiding the scissors of the censorship. The existence of a

political regime that could be put into evidence, as well as the harassment made by a limiting

censorship, obliged the filmmaker to elaborate a powerful and well-camouflaged metaphor

that could mislead the censors while showing the deficiencies of francoism.

The film was produced by Elas Querejeta, which was a very important independent

producer in that period. Querejeta also produced Erices second film, and because of the

problems that arose between them during the shooting of El sur, it is very important to study

the context of production of that film. El surs shooting began on December 1982, ten years

after Erices first film, and made in a complete different political context, the end of the

spanish transition towards democracy. The Partido Socialista Obrero Espaol had won the

elections in October 1982, and the filmmaker Pilar Mir was named head of the Direccin

General de Cinematografa. Even if El Sur is one of the most important classic films in

spanish film history, it was not entirely finished and Erice has never felt satisfied, feeling that

it has been, so to speak, abandoned. In an interview held in 2011, Erice states that the

shooting was stopped when there was still more than a month of scenes to film, because of

financing problems. In the same interview, Erice said that the film was never divided into two

different parts, as what is widely thought, but it was Querejeta who decided to stop the

shooting and to finish the film that way. Originally, they had signed an agreement where los

dos nos comprometamos a seguir trabajando para completar el proyecto original, y

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conforme a este compromiso realic el montaje de lo que hoy es El Sur2. However, the

director of the Cannes film festival saw the film and was very moved by it, and against

Erices first opposition, he decided to show the movie for the first time in Cannes. After the

critical and public success, we can say that Querejeta had his reasons to finish film before it

was completely done. Additionally, it has been said that Erice was not the easiest director to

work with, and that they had many personal problems during the shooting of the film.

The story of El Sur had initially two parts, one that happens in the North and the one

that is settled in the South. During the first part we talk constantly about the South as a Lost

Paradise, and the unfinished film becomes much more evocative and metaphorical than if we

actually saw the South. The family had to escape from the South due to the Civil War, and

the melancholy of the lost past is mainly embodied in the character of the father which was

forced to leave his previous life, his ideals and the love of his life because of the war. The

exterior exile becomes also interior, as the consequences of the war are a lack of

communication, isolation of the characters, depression and loneliness. The historical period

of the 1950s is then mainly felt through the character of the father, as it will be analysed in

several concrete scenes.

We have decided to choose several scenes in which the father is present in both El

Espritu de la Colmena and El sur. We believe that even if they are not the main characters of

the films, the social and political context is suffered more intensely by them than by the girls.

Because of their age, they are the ones that endure the consequences of the civil war and the

repression. By selecting scenes that show the inner world of the fathers through aesthetics, we

hope to deliver a thorough analysis, at the same time coherent and concrete. The fathers

belonged to the side that lost the Civil War, so they represent the ancient world: they live in

2
http://www.rtve.es/noticias/20110107/victor-erice-sur-nunca-estuvo-planteada-como-dos-peliculas/39
3001.shtml

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the past, wrapped in a deep melancholy, because of the people they miss, the things they

write. Because of the brutal repression of the regime, they barely speak or relate to the other

characters, so their feelings are not expressed through the use of words but through images,

light and composition. Erice has always been interested in light as something that reveals a

mystery, which offers visibility to the usually unknown or unseen, and that can appear in

front of our eyes through a ray of light. As Mag Crusells states, he makes a utilizacin

anmico-lrica del color3 to express all the things that reason and words cannot reach. One

of the many achievements of Vctor Erice was the painting-like light he succeeded to create

both with Luis Cuadrado and Jos Luis Alcaine. Erice has always referred to painting as the

visual key to the poetic sense of his works, which gives them a unique personality, specially

in spanish film history. The base of their light and composition are Vermeer y Rembrandt,

pero sobre todo Zurbarn, del que reescribe cinematogrficamente la aventura de la luz con

esos planos en los que las figuras y los objetos se muestran exentos sobre un fondo carente

de definicin, que afirma sin ambages, en la remisin a la tradicin mstica y el quietismo4.

What Erice took from these paintings was la noche oscura, el viaje interior, la progresiva

disolucin del lenguaje, la renuncia y la inmovilidad, which, as we will further see, are the

characteristics that define the characters of the repressed figures of the fathers. Thereby, the

historical context will be analysed along with the aesthetics, because they are indissoluble.

Victor Erice has always loved the german expressionist cinema of the early 20th

Century. Expressionism appeared first as a reaction of the totalitarian regimes that begin to

flourish everywhere in those days, or as a response to a widespread anxiety about

humanity's increasingly discordant relationship with the world and accompanying lost

3
Caparrs, Jos Mara, Crusells, Mag, de Espaa, Rafael. Las grandes pelculas del cine espaol. Ediciones JC
Clementine, 2007. Madrid, Spain. P. 73
4
Castro de Paz, Jos Luis, Prez Perucha, Julio, Zunzunegui, Santos. La nueva memoria. Historia(s) del cine
espaol (1939-2000). Va Lctea Editorial. Espaa. P. 496.

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feelings of authenticity and spirituality5. For expressionists, reality must be studied through

inwardness, introspection and emotional experience. One of the most popular aesthetic

elements of this type of cinema is the shadow, which is often created through the chiaroscuro

technique, which was also key to the painters mentioned above. Shadows are used to create a

dramatic and narrative effect, as a kind of metaphor about the sinister aspect of humanity,

their innate desire, their hidden unconscious, very influenced by Sigmund Freuds theories

that appeared during that period too. For the expressionists, the world has become very

permeable, as external events are absorbed and transformed into internal elements that

become inherent of peoples lives and act in the same way as a mental disorder. This

historical context of the 1930s Germany can be obviously related to the rise of fascism in

Spain and to the francoist period. Additionally, expressionism can be closely extrapolated to

what we have seen regarding El Espritu de la Colmena and El sur and the characters of the

fathers.

Film expert Santos Zunzunegui states beautifully about El espritu de la colmena, la

pelcula est concebida como un progresivo acceso al conocimiento, estructurado mediante

la oposicin esencial de dos luces, la ambarina y difusa que baa la colmena y la azulada y

direccional que comparten la noche y el cinematgrafo6. The more blueish light is mainly

used to illuminate Anas character, while the amber light shows the whole family, but

especially the father. We have chosen one scene of the film where the amber light is present

to analyze the poetic use of lights, and how it expresses the fathers inner feelings.

In El espritu de la colmena, the father of the family lives constantly stuck in

nostalgia, mourn and frustration. The film takes place in 1940, a year after the end of the

5
http://www.theartstory.org/movement-expressionism.htm
6
Caparrs, Jos Mara, Crusells, Mag, de Espaa, Rafael. Las grandes pelculas del cine espaol. Ediciones
JC Clementine, 2007. Madrid, Spain. P. 73.

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Civil War, and the country is still extremely disturbed by what has been going on during the

last years. War has not only destroyed the country from a material point of view, but it has

mostly shattered harmony between individuals. People have had to face the death of their

beloved ones, so it is therefore impossible to avoid questioning themselves about where

human moral values have gone, not knowing any longer where to go or how to act. Victor

Erice wanted to make a film that would show the political commitment with the situation of

Spain and make a political allegory that would deliver a Spain turned in a sort of

concentration camp, where barbed wires are censorship and the repression, and people can no

longer relate normally to each other. To do this, he uses the metaphor of the beehive. There is

a physical hive, where Fernando passes most of his time, and a metaphorical one, created

with light, flooding the characters and impregnating everything.

The only scene in the film where the four members of the family appear in the same

room together, is the traditional familiar practice of having breakfast around the table7. At

dawn, a few hours earlier, Fernando enters the police barracks to identify the corpse of the

maquis that had been killed by the police. A fade between the corpse of the fugitive and a

medium shot of Fernando in front a window that draws the same pattern as the one of a

beehive, beginning the scene of the family breakfast in which the father occupies a central

place. The fade makes us think of a mourning moment of Fernando, bowed, who feels a real

pain for the unfair death of the fugitive, with whom he shared some political ideals.

7
Directed by Victor Erice and produced by Elas Querejeta. El espritu de la colmena, 1973. Timing: 1:16:47 -
1:18:45

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 Fernando lights a cigarette while Milagros, the maid, serves him some coffee. Teresa

is sitting on his left, thoughtful and dressed with the characteristic black clothes of mourning.

In front of Fernando, dressed in a bright yellow dress, Isabel glances at Ana, who hides

behind her bowl of milk. The table is practically empty, since the postwar was hard even for a

bourgeois family who is seemingly wealthy. Fernando brings out the musical clock from his

pocket, with no intention of checking the time or listening to his melody, but in order to

observe first the reaction of Isabel (who coughs) and then the one of Ana, who fixes her big

eyes on him. During the scene, a silence reigns that is only broken by the sound of the father's

musical clock, in an attempt to interrogate his daughters without words, without

communicating directly with them: the father wants to know which of his daughters gave his

watch to the fugitive.

The family is reunited around the table, although separated through editing, as there

are never together in the same shot. We could say this is a compositional metaphor created

through the contraposition of medium shots of each isolated member of the family. This gives

the spectator a clear idea of separation of the characters, both in a physical and an emotional

way, as if they were a family composed of bees rather than human beings inside an amber

familiar hive, that reminds us of the submissive, laborious and perfectly organized society of

the bees. The outsiders are subjugated until they fit in the perfect society, producing adverse

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effects, like in Fernandos family. The characters live locked in a house where everyone

works at their own pace and have their own lives, without thinking about what others do, in a

warm amber light that makes us think about the colour of honey, and that extrapolates the

bees behaviour into the family. The disconnection between the universe of each character

makes us think of a family idea far removed from the traditional family ideal, associated with

the Francoist ideology. The idea of the family as a whole opposes the idea of the family as

the sum of several parts. The familiar beehive is only the sum of the comings and goings of

the bees that are imprisoned inside it.

The breakfast scene is important, since it is one of the few privileged moments of

family union, provoking the exchange of looks between each one of the components. The

girls have a smiling attitude, while the adults impose a deadly silence. Fernando and Teresa

cast indirect glances, which do not participate in the girls game. It is interesting to see how

there are no subjective shots during the scene. When dealing with the figure of the mother

and the girls, the shots are quite oblique, while the fathers' shots are frontal, direct and rigid.

Fernando is the main figure of the scene and the one who leads the family, as a figure of

pater familia. His abrupt attitude, fomented by an existential situation that surpasses him,

is thus translated to the framing of the scene.

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 Among the looks that construct the space, the most important or relevant is the one

that is established between Ana and Fernando when listening to the music of the clock. The

clock is the only element that puts Fernando in relation to the fugitive, which makes him

understand the relationship between his daughter and the fugitive, although there is no

dialogue between him and his daughter. Thereby, in a situation that a priori should be

defined by warmth, a family reunion around breakfast, the separation between the characters

occurs through the silence imposed by the adult characters and especially by the father, who

interrogates his family without saying a word, but also in the technical aspect, with a

composition and editing that remarks the division between them. Through the lack of

dialogue the characters accurately reflect the climate of repression of the postwar period.

Thus, El Espritu de la Colmena is a very subtle critic to the self-censorship of the Spanish

society of the postwar period, that lived in complete silence because they were not free to

express what they really felt. The characters of El Espritu de la Colmena and El Sur are like

shadows that glide around, they are isolated and absent, almost as if they no longer existed, as

if the lack of freedom had discarded them. Thus, silence will become one of the main themes

of both films, as a result of the relentless censorship, as we are going to study now in El sur.

The scenes where Agustn appears alone in El Sur, half-illuminated in an empty room,

are very recurrent throughout the film. This game of lights, often bluish, allows us to feel the

11
thoughts of the character, to approach us to his melancholic emotions. Agustn is a

Republican, defeated after the Spanish Civil War. He is not able to adapt to the failure of the

war and lives anchored in the memories of the past. He is therefore a very introspective

character, something that does not allow his daughter and wife to be able to understand him.

There is an external exile that is provoked by the socio-historical situation after the Civil

War, as Francos regime condemns the defeated. The protagonists are forced to "move from

one side to the other," revealing that getting to where they are now, in the North, takes them a

while, meaning that it has been a long and painful exile. On the other hand, we find an inner

exile, marked by the family and social rupture suffered by each of the characters. Although in

different ways, they all have a common denominator: they are defined by the sadness,

loneliness, desolation and nostalgia left by the Spanish Civil War. We know very little about

the character of Agustn: we know that he is a doctor, a very lonely and depressive person,

who seems to be in love with another woman. What we see as spectators is a character that

hides voluntarily between the shadows, looking for dark spaces to develop his own life and

introspection. For him, the light belongs to the south and to the memories he had there and,

therefore, trying to approach this light in the north is meaningless, as a metaphor of the moral

darkness that surrounds the character. As Antxon Salvador says, Agustn is a figura

fantasmagrica situada en un trnsito permanente: entre la luz y la oscuridad, como en la

iglesia, emergiendo de la sombras8. The character of the father of El Sur deals with a

constant internal fight between the North, where he lives now, and the South, where all his

good memories remain buried by the horror of the war. He also has to deal with the

confrontation of love and death, the separation with the woman he really loved in the south

and the love he feels for his daughter, the only thing that makes him stay alive.

8
Salvador, Antxon. Espaol de cine. Lo que hay que ver. Ed. BLUME. 2008. Spain. P. 120.

12
 The scene we have chosen to analyze is the communion of his daughter9. This is

obviously a Catholic festivity which is more related to the Spanish right-wing than to the

Republicans. Agustn is a left-wing man and his beliefs are against this kind of celebrations,

considering himself an atheist. That is why the day before the celebration of Estrella's

communion, Estrella does not know if her father will go to the church. Finally, the close

relationship he maintains with his daughter overcomes his principles and we find him in the

background, separated from the rest of the audience and watching his daughter. The first

scenes of the ceremony are seen from a point of view located in the back of the church, which

could correspond to Agustns point of view, who, as we will discover later, is located at the

bottom of the church, in a dark spot. This point of view may also correspond to the one of the

rest of the family, who is located behind Estrella.

9
Directed by Victor Erice and produced by Elas Querejeta. El sur, 1983. Timing: 33:30-34:20

13
 The love that Agustn feels for his daughter obliges him to attend the ceremony,

although he does not participate in it like the rest of the family, since he contemplates the

ceremony from a clandestine place, hidden in a dark side where no one can see him, like a

metaphor that indicates that this is the first step that will lead him to his own grave. Agustn

does not share the moment with the family, an especially important moment that he decides

to only share with his daughter. When Estrella approaches him to thank him for being there,

he comes out of the darkness. The presence of the chiaroscuro in this scene takes us

immediately to the characters thoughts, to the confrontation of his ideals with reality and to

the trouble this clash produces on his mental stability. It is precisely this idea of introspection

and internal suffering that makes us understand the fact that the chiaroscuro used in this

sequence gives luminous priority to the little girl and submerges the father in the shadow.

This chiaroscuro also emits a bluish color, a cold color that makes us think about sadness and

incomprehension of a world led by the winning side of the War. The light ambiance in which

he is plunged does not belong to the church environment that we have seen in previous

scenes, lighter and purer. Agustn is in a separate space that is not related to the one that

welcomes the rest of his family. Agustn and Estrella are together but separated. They are in

the same space, but they are separated by the shadows of the past, a past that has already

entered the life of the father and that is materialized in a formal filmic way by the election of

contrasts in the light. Thereby, Alcaine convierte la luz en un elemento fsico, palpable, y los

encuadres tenebrosos de raz pictrica, autnticos retablos en sombras, cuyo interior es

revelado a medida que la luz inunda el plano10.

Estrellas communion faces Agustn for the first time with his past, with his ideas and

ideals, and with the need he has to live the present. The last shot gives place, by means of a

10
Salvador, Antxon. Espaol de cine. Lo que hay que ver. Ed. BLUME. 2008. Spain. P.120.

14
dissolve with the previous scene, to the sequence of the celebration. In the church, Estrella is

aware of the love that her father experiences towards her, a special love that makes him set

aside for a moment his ideas about religion, saying "he has done it for me, he has done it for

me". Her father has sacrificed all this for her, and this is something that unites them, as we

will see later on in the dance scene of the pasodoble.

Estrella is aware that Agustns past interferes in her relationship with him, that the

separation could be immediate. The communion scene is important, since it is the first

manifestation of fear from Estrella, fearing that the divergent paths she and her father have

taken are manifested in the fact that he does not want to attend such an important moment for

her as the one of her first communion. From this moment on, Agustns escapades are a

constant when he wants to distance himself from his past. The life of Estrella begins to be

detached from the one of her father and it is the past of Agustn, that muddles the relation

between father and daughter. In this respect, the sequence of the church in which the

character suddenly appears is very significant: it is Estrella, and nobody else, the one who

allows him to continue in a life that for him does not have any meaning anymore. In the

restaurant scene at the end, he becomes aware that he has definitively lost his daughter.

Thereby, he sees there is nothing worth living for, and commits suicide.

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 Conclusion

Erice delivers two masterpieces where time goes by like in real life, where the most

important things happen when we are not doing anything. The film is far away from the

complex and grandiloquent stories of conventional cinema, passing from the epic to the

lyrical. We identify ourselves with the regular characters because they are human, like us,

incomplete, fragmentary, they do not know how to express what happens to them and life

overwhelms them. Characters become ambiguous and contradictory as we do not have much

information about them, but they also go beyond simple characters and their lives become

poetic and universal. As opposed to other films made during francoism, where dialogs had

overpowered images, words are not that important anymore in Erices cinema, and silences

become essential, they become a style, a way of life. However, even if too many words do

not let us think properly, alienating us like in commercial cinema, the deprivation of word

and of freedom of speech is also dangerous, transforming our lives into a prison. Erice prefers

to give the reflective and poetic power to images instead of words. Through the use of

lighting and composition he is able to create a chiaroscuro which portrays the need for

introspection of a society that has been irreparably hurt by the consequences of war and its

constant presence in their daily lives. The fragile and empty lives of Fernando and Agustn

are materialized through light, portraying characters that live in a world that they do not

understand anymore.

Like a real poet, we feel that he is able to accede to another level of reality, or if as he

saw through things, capable of seeing the world as it really is. Erice seems to say that poetry,

is the only true way to approach reality, to talk about emotions but also about historical

events. Something as untied to reality as poetry, becomes a necessary perspective to study

history and specially the spanish post war period. So much pain and suffering, so many lost

16
opportunities, so many broken families and broken lives can only be expressed through

something as transcendental as poetry. What makes Erices films so sincere, so honest, is that

he does not want to make a moral lesson about what happened. He looks at the events with

distance and delivers something for us to enjoy, with almost unbearable beauty, but also to

make us think. He does not indoctrinate by giving us answers, but rather raises in us

numberless questions.

17
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