Last week we discussed various angles of the concept of ‘transition,’ related to ‘La Transición,’ or period following the death of dictator Francisco Franco on November 20, 1975. With Pavlovic we gathered many different aspects of this period, and its relation to disenchantment as a cultural and historical phenomenon. We then discussed how it all relates to the lyrical production by Victor Erice and Elías Querejeta, The Spirit of the Beehive.
This week was no-assignment week, so I am posting this prompter now, to give the option of submitting a reflection on the movie and/or class discussion. This will be an optional assignment, and it will carry extra credit for those of you who submit it. It will NOT carry any penalty to those of you who do not.
The film “The Sprit of the Beehive” and the Pavlovic chapter on film of the transition area converge for me in the concepts of memory and construction. In the film, the monstrous past and youthful present come together in the form of a mysterious Frankenstein’s monster and a precocious young girl. The allusions to a constructed body that is put together in parts is evocative of the process of reconstruction that happened in post-Franco Spain. I imagine people had to reimagine what life would look like, or what they wanted life to look like now that there were less restrictions and there was less emphasis on active political film making. As the film goes on, and the young girl, Ana, experiences a traumatic event that causes her to stop speaking and eating which causes her mother to worry, and the doctor says to her that eventually she will begin to forget. But the end of the film has Ana call out to the past.
The combination of quotidian life and investment in memory and forgetting creates an assemblage that evokes the feeling of malaise and confusion that comes from such a drastic change.