351 The Spirit of the Beehive

[Gordon]

there was talk on Criterion Forums that it might be released by them.

Really? Where can I find this discussion?

Ha-ha! Awesome, just awesome. =D>

[rwaits]

Man oh man. Funniest thread ever.

[atcolomb]

Very funny!......but it was mention somewhere because it was showing at some theater for a special screening. Until it comes out i will watch my region 2 version of it.

[Michael Kerpan]

Very funny!......but it was mention somewhere because it was showing at some theater for a special screening. Until it comes out i will watch my region 2 version of it.

Sometimes it really, REALLY helps to look at the first page of a thread. Not saying it would help here. Then again, I'm not saying it won't help, either.

[Cinephrenic]

Here boys... a Criterion DVD release with a commentary with Linda C. Ehrlich.

[rwaits]

Any guesses on when we might get this one?

[backstreetsbackalright]

It's scheduled to show in Seattle in the next couple months, so I'd guess we have several more months of theatrical print circulation before the DVD drops. Or not.

[Jem]

(has this been linked?)

Review by Leo Goldsmith at Not Coming.

[Wittsdream]

Any chance that El Sur makes it onto the Criterion edition of "Spirit of the Beehive?" I have been very tempted to pick up the Manga version of this film from DVDGO in Spain, but, of course, it does not come with English subtitles.

Have any of you ever transferred a film on DVD that did not have English subtitles into a video editing program such as Adobe Premiere, which has subtitling capability, then proceeded to add English subtitles to it and burn a new DVD for yourself?

I had an old VHS copy of El Sur (seem to have misplaced it) that I taped off the Bravo network a number of years ago. I would use that as my reference for adding subtitling to, let's say the Manga edition of El Sur.

I have some experience with NLE, and estimate that typing up a new English translation using my VHS copy as a reference would take me no more than a few days to do.

I'll let you all know how it turns out.

[What A Disgrace]

Every right minded person on this board hopes that Criterion will put out a box containing all three of Erice's feature films.

[backstreetsbackalright]

Would be a lovely set indeed. I'd also love to see some more of Erice's shorts tacked on. Far as subs for El Sur are concerned, I don't have any such software experience, but I do have an SRT file of the film's english subtitles. If this would be of any use to you, give a shout.

[tryavna]

FYI, TCM are scheduled to air Spirit of the Beehive during their usual 2:00 AM foreign film slot on Friday/Saturday, July 28/29.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

Have any of you ever transferred a film on DVD that did not have English subtitles into a video editing program such as Adobe Premiere, which has subtitling capability, then proceeded to add English subtitles to it and burn a new DVD for yourself?

There's really no need to do this -- all you need to do is convert the SRT subtitles to SUP format and multiplex them with the audio and video files. I've done this a few times, although I'm away from my computer right now and can't remember exactly which programs I used. There's a number of different methods depending on what you're doing (for example, you'll have to do some extra work if you're adding subtitles to an existing DVD and you want to keep the original menus) -- VideoHelp has a ton of tutorials, so start there. If you have a hard-subbed version of the film but no SRT or SUP subtitles, you can use Subtitle Workshop or SubRip to make some using the hard-subbed version as a reference. I believe both programs can automatically generate soft subs from hard subs using optical character recognition, although I suspect this method would be wildly inaccurate (particularly for older releases done before the advent of electronic subtitling).

[Wittsdream]

Thanks to all for your wonderful, and helpful, input on how to digitally scribe an English translation for "El Sur." Fanciful Norwegian, I am not really familiar with the programs which you allude to, but will do more reading about them.

If I cannot accomplish the subtitling feat using some of these programs, I will just try it in the manner that I have more experience in.

I'll definitely let y'all know how well the DVD comes out. Heck, it can't be any worse than a Facets butchering.

[ellipsis7]

Now this is strongly mooted by the CC for September:

Derek Malcolm's A Century of Cinema

Victor Erice: The Spirit of the Beehive

In the shadow of Franco

I once showed a dozen or so classic non-American films to students at the Royal College of Art. To my surprise, despite the fact that the list included the work of such world-renowned directors as Luis Bunuel, Satyajit Ray and Kenji Mizoguchi, the film they fell in love with was Victor Erice's The Spirit of the Beehive. They rightly thought it close to magic. It is one of the most beautiful and arresting films ever made in Spain, or anywhere in the past 25 years or so.

Set in the Castillian countryside around 1940, when Franco had won the civil war but was still hunting down republican sympathisers, and made in 1973 when it was necessary for Spanish film-makers to cloak their political messages in allegory, it has an eight-year-old girl called Ana, superbly played by Ana Torrent, as its central character.
She watches James Whale's Frankenstein at the local cinema and can't understand why Frankenstein kills the little girl he meets and seems to cherish by the lakeside. Her elder sister, Isabel (Isabel Telleria), explains that nobody actually dies in movies. But she adds that the monster is really a spirit who can take on human form and can be summoned up by closing your eyes and calling out: "I'm Ana". She has seen him in a deserted outhouse near the village.

Ana is detemined to invoke the spirit. Going across the deserted fields to the outhouse, she finds a republican fugitive and brings him clothes and food. For her, he is Frankenstein and even though he is shot by the civil guard, she is certain spirits don't die and dreams that she meets him, like the little girl in Whale's film. Brought back home by her distracted parents and put to bed, she goes to her bedroom window and whispers: "I'm Ana, I'm Ana."

The film can be construed in many ways but is, above all, an almost perfect summation of child hood imaginings. It is also about the pall Franco's long shadow left over Spain. Ana's father, played with understated power by Fernando Fernan Gomez, has evidently been traumatised by the civil war and is a shadowy figure writing a treatise on beekeeping while his wife writes letters to a would-be lover, exiled in France. They are a family "locked up in themselves", unable to avoid the terrible emotional consequences of the civil war and the absolute triumph of dictatorship.

The film is thus cloaked in quiet and sadness, through which its children move almost as if in a dreamworld of their own. It is brilliantly shot by the great Luis Cuadrado in atmospherically muted colours: the series of dissolves with which he denotes the passing of time outside the makeshift cinema where the children see Frankenstein provides one stunning sequence, but there are many.

Few know that Cuadrado was going blind at the time, which makes his work all the more remarkable. There is also a memorable score from Luis de Pablo, which sums up everything while underlining nothing. It is virtually impossible to get the sight and sound of the film out of one's mind after watching it.

But, of course, it is chiefly Erice's film - a perfectly controlled and imagined first feature so painstakingly made that Elias Querejeta, one of Spain's most enlightened producers, worried that it would never be completed. To date, Erice has made only two more films: South, which is merely half a story, never completed, and The Quince Tree Sun, one of the most extraordinary films about painting ever conceived. He is now working on another one, late as usual.

[backstreetsbackalright]

Am I missing something? How does this moot a September DVD release?

[Gordon]

ellipsis, what are you seeing in that piece that I am not seeing?

[rwaits]

Isn't this piece also dated 1999??

[justeleblanc]

I read the post as... "Now that this is a definite, here is a little treat."

But I'm confused at the use of moot. I think I always am.

[ellipsis7]

I'm saying the CC newsletter has clearly dropped a clue about the forthcoming release of BEEHIVE (probably in September), and here is a nice piece by Derek Malcolm on the movie... (There's no more hidden clues in the piece, which was indeed published in 1999)... Sorry if I have misled anyone!

[Gordon]

Ah, now I get it! #-o

[Cinephrenic]

Why September, not August? Do we know the August slate yet.

[justeleblanc]

I wasn't misled at all.... just for the record.

[Ashirg]

August is Six Moral Tales and Seduced and Abandoned.

[ellipsis7]

Justeleblanc - you got it in one!