Out of Memory and Time: The Cinema of Victor Erice

 

The Spirit of the Beehive (Victor Erice, 1973)

As my generation trudges ever forward year by year, there is a creeping and growing sense of nostalgia that overcomes us with each passing birthday. The never-ending “90’s kid” retrospectives on the internet filled with pictures of old video game consoles, Toys R Us toys, commercials, movies, celebrities, and sports events don’t make reconciling with the fact that our childhood and innocence is gone for eternity and will never come back any easier. Is that too dark?

Nevertheless, nostalgia is arguably the strongest agent of emotion in human beings. What we’ve experienced and lived through is our deepest connection to ourselves. This is especially true for our childhood when we’re still shielded and safeguarded and it seems like life is a cool breeze of care-free afternoons, exciting summer vacations, and instant food anytime anywhere delivered by mom. The longing for the “simpler” or more innocent times is something humans do with social life as well as politics and art. How many times have you heard politicians talking about taking our discourse back “to a simpler time” before everything got all screwed up, or critics saying “they don’t make ’em [movies/tv/literature] like they used to!”. Some of these have more nefarious intentions than others, but in general, we tend to fall into line behind the idea that hindsight is twenty-twenty and the way things used to be was always in many ways ‘better’ than the way things are.

In art, particularly cinema, this emotion of nostalgia is the most potent connection formed between filmmaker and viewer. Our longing for a particular time or place or general memory of an area or event is a human trait that great filmmakers observe and pick at with an incredible precision and good intentions. It is where melodrama, fear, joy, and pain are all extracted from and used to build connections with characters and places. A recent filmmaker who’s sparse but utterly brilliant body of work I recently became acquainted with is Spanish filmmaker Victor Erice. A filmmaker adroit in his ability to evoke a very overwhelming sense of time and place, Erice’s cinema is the ultimate embodiment of nostalgia in art.

Playing along the same wavelengths as Terrence Malick in regards to textures and themes of youth and abandonment, as well as a very personal connection to his home country’s culture, politics, and daily life, Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive, regarded the world over in cinema circles as a undeniable masterpiece, centers around a small Spanish village in Francoist Spain in which a young girl name Ana becomes disturbed and entranced by her viewing of Universal’s 1931 adaptation of Frankenstein. A particular infamous scene in the 30’s horror classic features the monster and a young girl throw daisies into the river and the monster, fascinated by the idea of using his hands to “throw”, picks the young girl up and throws her into the water as well. She subsequently drowns and dies. The historical symbolism of this scene in the context of The Spirit of the Beehive‘s fascist Spain setting aside, the crux of the film’s power in Ana beholding this sequence comes from our own experience witnessing cinema for the first time. The first time we saw moving images in the form of a story, how were we emotionally altered by its presentation and what did it mean to us? I remember the first movie I ever watched was Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and it was the first time I truly became terrified and disturbed by a fictional character (the witch with the poisoned apple).

As kids, one of the lessons we always learn is to “face our fears”. It is a necessity of growing up and every adult tells you it prepares you for the horrors of the real world. Many of the fears are actually much more elaborate, real world fears which we manifest in things closer to ourselves. This theme is repeated throughout coming of age tales, many times as symbolism for the turbulent political affairs of the country at the time. In Erice’s film, Ana is haunted by the interaction of the monster and girl, and the movie’s plot, though it’s really more of a loose string of painterly movements, focuses on Ana’s obsession with finally finding and confronting the monster from the film that haunts her dreams. It’s not inconceivable that Ana’s tussle with Frankenstein was meant by Erice to represent the Spanish populace’s ultimate reality of having to confront the fascist takeover by dictator Francisco Franco. Nostalgia often places these circumstances and events in a rose-tinted light. We do it all the time now in our political spheres, framing our upbringing under the Clinton and Bush administrations as times of much less political intervention despite the fact that even they were in perpetual war with foreign nations. The difference is, back then we didn’t have reason to care. Likewise, in The Spirit of the Beehive, the notion of Franco exists only in small clues such as the rationing of food, the opening scroll, the time-period of the film, and the encounter Ana has with a rebel soldier. But Ana is still very much shielded in her village from any notion of a fascist leader wreaking havoc and despair in his own country. Her preoccupation lies within her childhood experiences of make-believe, much like the young Ofelia in Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth.

 

El Sur (Victor Erice, 1983)

While Erice’s debut was concerned with the memory of fear, his second film El Sur (English: “The South”), much greater in my estimation and much more pronounced in its ability to evoke the passage of time and its nostalgic effects, focuses on the memories of family, or in particular, father figures. Reflective of his debut, the film centers around yet another young girl, this time named Estrella, in the backdrop of yet another tumultuous time in Spanish history, the Spanish Civil War. Estrella’s father’s disappearance to fight in the war shapes her view of him as she comes of age as a young lady. Her experiences of youth with him are a constant projection in the back of her mind, and her search to finally meet him again shapes the basis of the film. Erice’s ideas of memory are deeply rooted in the characters’ own thoughts and words, but his painterly depictions of Spain play as an additional vehicle of “remembrance” as if the world his characters inhabit is a Spain of a time gone by even for them.

Perhaps the most quintessential sequences in El Sur center around Estrella going to bed and waking up. Many conversations about her father’s past, which she has with her nanny, and conversations of the Spain from before her time are recounted as relics which shapes her present life. The ideas of nostalgia can also be many times cruel, as Estrella comments on the war and the meanness of her grandfather towards her father. Perhaps then, the fondness we feel for our past is revisiting even the less than comforting events with a fresh set of eyes and confronting them with an added confidence. As Estrella’s nanny states, “even the wildest of animals tame with age”. Perhaps it is our nostalgia that does it.

Bridge of Spies – Spielberg and the American way

Bridge of Spies (Steven Spielberg, 2015)

Steven Spielberg’s resurgence as the premier and prominent dramatist of Hollywood cinema is warmly welcomed. While perhaps the greatest of Spielberg’s traits lie in his ability to encapsulate the wonder, enchantment, terror and peril that all culminate together to create the ultimate American Hollywood “story”, his second greatest attribute is his ability to create accessibility to the darkness of human nature. While some may find this glossy finish on gritty subject matter to be “hokey” or “kitsch”, there is a manner in which the greatest commercial filmmaker, and certainly the most influential, of the last 50 years of American cinema accomplishes this juggling feat that it culminates in powerful and personal cinema.

Since Speilberg’s last truly great film, A.I. Artificial Intelligence, we haven’t gotten much out of him in terms of memorable cinema. The Adventures of Tintin I can attest is definitely much lower ranking amongst the pantheon of Spielberg outputs on most people’s lists that I have to shove aside my personal unfettered and unwavering love for Herge’s graphic novels and characters which singularly defined my childhood. That movie is 100% nostalgia for me and nothing else, so I concede I am biased.

The auteur’s last two outputs however are a different story, one of them being this year’s Bridge of Spies, a collaboration between Spielberg and the Coen Brothers (who wrote the script). The film is a showcase of good ol’ American exceptionalism when it comes to negotiations and foreign politicking. We get to see Tom Hanks strut his stuff as the insurance lawyer James B. Donovan picked by the higher ups to do a “routine” defense of Rudolf Abel (Mark Rylance is an accomplished theater actor who proves his silver screen chops here), a suspected and eventually convicted Soviet spy in the U.S. The reason routine is in quotations there is because the judicial processes of giving a Soviet spy, a “communist” (gasp! That word!) a fair trial is really a dark and upsetting joke in the film. Here, the exceptionalism in the United States in standing by its principles of liberty and justice are revealed to be a smoke-screen. Behind the fog exist deep seeded anger and paranoia, a hatred for the “other side”.

It is one thing when it’s civilians; the police officer who confronts Donovan at his home about his defense of Abel, the train passengers who stare Donovan down with all the conceit and suspicion in the world, and his own son who questions his father’s loyalty to the nation after he is fed the exaggerations and fear propaganda of the Cold War in his classroom. Regular people are suspicious, they go by what they read, what they see, the influence of society and its perceptions, the uneasy fear of foreign threats and ideas, something which is rearing its ugly head in today’s American society as well. But when it is elected officials, government workers, and those in power who let that paranoia and hatred get in the way of the liberties the United States offers to foreign citizens, criminal or not, which no other country is so generous to offer, then the system collapses and we, slowly and surely, become them.

Bridge of Spies depicts an America at the crossroads of turning on itself (yet again). In an era where people were blacklisted, ostracized for their political and social beliefs, something we said would always be a freedom in this country, an era where a government official (Joseph McCarthy) went on an obsessive witch-hunt against all those he defined as “traitors”, “communists” and a list of other propagandist impact-words, an era right after World War II in which we incarcerated in concentration camps Japanese Americans because of our paranoid fear of them and their mere presence being considered an ill to society, America continued evolving into dark, troubling, and socially broken versions of itself, one decade after another.

It’s the truth many people don’t want to hear, and in Bridge of Spies, James Donovan is Spielberg’s plea to the American people that the liberty and justice we offer is only special because it applies to even those who can’t do anything for us. For it, he received bullet shots through the windows of his house. His house where his children and wife lived, bullets were sprayed by other American citizens. (cue Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II)

Is there a semblance of parallel from Coen/Spielberg’s Cold War America to our America today? Perhaps the timeliness of Bridge of Spies is not by accident, but rather, by blessing. Steven Spielberg is a filmmaker known for his accessibility and serviceability to the American audience. He brought the complexity and enormity of the Holocaust into our homes with Schindler’s List, a cinematic achievement which would have been impossible without his sensible touch. There is no condescension in the way Spielberg (or The Coens for that matter) presents the American xenophobia of the Cold War era, in this case, not a matter of race, but of ideology.

Rather, Bridge of Spies works like an old yarn your grandfather would tell after dinner. It arrives with lightly treaded footsteps and grows ever so dark as it goes, the suspense (meeting the Russians), the chills (interrogations of prisoners), the horrors (climbing the Berlin Wall) but it prevails with an All-American pride, one in which Donovan’s compassion towards a Soviet spy, at the time the worst of worst criminals (why aren’t we HANGING HIM? the court disturbingly erupts after a lenient sentence), is the true symbol of America because it can be empathetic and understanding where no one else can.

This doesn’t mean Spielberg equates the nations and their ideologies, oh no. This is the greatest juggling feat of all, and probably one which most people in American need to hear today. Spielberg puts the worlds of Eastern Germany and the Soviet bloc in perspective. As Donovan rides on a train through Berlin he witnesses a helpless couple try to climb their way over the wall only to be shot and killed in cold blood only inches away from freedom. But this is not a viciousness that resides in the hearts of individuals, but in the hearts of national leaders.

Throughout Bridge of Spies we get a brilliant contrast between Donovan and Abel’s American-Soviet friendship, juxtaposed with the cruel and unrelenting distrust between national figures. As Donovan first goes into the negotiating room, after having his jacket haggled from him by some East German hoodlums, and meets the “secretary” Ivan Schischkin to the Soviet base… and he later realizes the man he’s meeting is a top ranking official… and the jacket that was stolen from him was correctly identified by Schischkin as a Sacks 5^th Avenue. No words or actions can be taken at face value here, and Donovan’s combination of both whimsy and serious business, perfectly captured by Tom Hanks’ performance, is a microcosm of what we consider an idealistic vision of America’s foreign policy, but one which, in reality, is hardly carried out in such a diplomatic manner.

This difference of dealing with Soviets and dealing with Rudolf Abel is a nation vs person conundrum that most people still can’t seem to grasp. In today’s America where people, especially immigrants, are consistently labeled on a collective basis rather than an individual one, ironic considering recognition of individualism is this nation’s claim to success, there needs to be a restructuring of the social connection between us that remembers a story like Spielberg’s Bridge of Spies. As Donovan rides on the train once again at the end of the film, this time a hero and with other passengers looking at him with admiration rather than (as previous) contempt, he looks out the window and sees a country of people freely walking amongst the streets, with cars, clothes on their back, kids climbing over the fence joyous and care-free (a signature melodramatic touch by Spielberg to the earlier heartbreaking scene at the Berlin Wall), and a nation comparatively prosperous and well put together to its nemesis East Germany’s crumbling, decaying infrastructure. It’s a moment to be proud to be American, but it’s also a somber moment because the individuals in the East Bloc suffer from the actions of their leaders, something outside their control.

Countries and governments fight, they engage in backstabbing, and they negotiate on hardline terms, but we as individuals share a direct connection of experience that doesn’t define us by the actions of those in power. We can see each other as Donovan saw Rudolf Abel. It is not a traitorous notion, nor is it un-patriotic to befriend despite polarized ideologies, but rather, as Spielberg declares in Bridge of Spies, part of what is truly American.