Friday, November 11, 2022

El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive)

There was once what was known as censorship, so that impressionable youths could avoid narrative trauma, accompanied by bad dreams and apprehension, throughout the course of the traditionally peaceful day.

Thus, categories such as General Audience, Parental Guidance, PG-13, Adult Accompaniment, and Restricted, kept psychological maturity in check, and prevented the development of madness and paranoia within the investigative general public.

But with the advent of online movie watching these stalwart categories have become less applicable, and younger generations have been unsuspectingly bombarded with material ill-suited to their corresponding age-level.

Not that it didn't happen in the past, in El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) local enthusiasts bring the cinema to a small town, a wide variety of pictures featured, one week none other than Boris Karloff's Frankenstein.

Two young sisters (Ana Torrent as Ana and Isabel Tellería as Isabel) eagerly take in the age old tale of artificial authenticity, with its accompanying inherent lugubrity, its ill-fated misunderstandings.

The older soon swiftly realizes that the younger has been affected, and takes to morbidly teasing her with sadistic sordid sorority. 

The younger isn't ready for the antics since she can't make sense of the haunting tale, her vivid imagination set to haywire through the horrific happenstance.

They live on a vast estate sedately situated in the Spanish countryside, their father (Fernando Fernán Gómez as Fernando) dreaming of becoming a writer, their mother (Teresa Gimpera as Teresa) keenly focused on the past.

General guidance periodically emerges but ample free time encourages imagination. 

But is Frankenstein coming to get them?

Ill-conjured consumed contingencies.

The film brilliantly depicts thoughtful youth with jocose harrowing perplexed curiosity, a patient heartfelt delicate examination of distressing ill-computed dissonance. 

Why would someone create that?, they've found a niche through gross indecency, the dissemination of random ideas as incredibly eclectic as a national library.

I never watched much horror in my youth but later watched many of the films I'd ignored in my early twenties, occasionally encountering an impressive force but still often wondering why so grotesque?

But lives aren't only orchestrated through the coherent mechanics of the master narrative.

Ill-fated wayward comprehension.

Experimental novelty. 

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