The first film Víctor Erice saw was not a masterpiece. It was the ninth entry in a Sherlock Holmes series, a B-thriller shot in 1944, and he was five years old. The place was the Gran Kursaal in San Sebastián, a casino, variety hall and cinema built right on the sea. The date was 24 January 1946. He went with his sister, who was twelve. The film was The Scarlet Claw, directed by Roy William Neill, and it is set in a village in French Canada called La Morte Rouge. Nobody can find La Morte Rouge on a map, because the village does not exist. It was invented by the screenwriters.
Erice has told this story many times, most fully in La Morte Rouge (2006), a half-hour video essay he made for an exhibition pairing him with Abbas Kiarostami. What he remembers is not the plot. He remembers the terror. He remembers the dark, the rain outside, the seats, the faces of the adults. And he remembers their silence. The adults sat through the murders without a word, and to the child this silence looked like complicity. They knew something he did not. The film was showing him a world in which people are killed, and the grown-ups around him had already agreed to it.
That is where the question of this essay begins. Who teaches us to fear?
The child as a low camera
Erice’s cinema is usually described as poetic, which is a way of not describing it. His formal decision is simpler and harder than poetry. He puts the camera at the height of a child and then refuses to tell us more than the child knows. The frame withholds. Adults talk at the edge of it, or with their backs turned, or in another room. We hear fragments. We see a hand, a door, a light in the corridor. The world is large and only partly legible.
The Spirit of the Beehive (1973), his first feature, is the clearest example. A van arrives in a village on the Castilian plain. The date, a title card tells us, is around 1940. Ana and Isabel, two sisters, live in a large house with bees in the walls and a father who keeps a notebook on the hive and a mother who writes letters to someone far away. A travelling projectionist brings Frankenstein to the village hall. Ana watches the monster and does not understand that he is a monster. She understands that he is a creature who is alone, and that the adults are afraid of him. Later she finds a fugitive hiding in an abandoned barn and brings him food. She thinks he is the spirit of the film. She is wrong, and she is right.
The film does not explain any of this. It lets Ana’s literal reading stand. That is the ethic of Erice’s camera: the child’s mistake is not corrected, because the mistake is the truth of the child’s position. She sees a monster where the adults see a criminal, and a friend where the adults see a threat. The political reading is not imposed. It is there in the arrangement of who is allowed to look and who is told to look away.
Fear as a curriculum
In Erice’s films, fear is not an emotion that arrives from nowhere. It is taught. The family teaches it, the school teaches it, the church teaches it, and the state teaches it by not saying what it has done. The adults are not villains. They are tired, secretive and defeated. They teach fear by withholding explanation. A child asks a question and receives a silence, and the silence becomes the answer.
The most famous scene in The Spirit of the Beehive is not the monster. It is Isabel telling Ana that she can talk to the spirit, and that the spirit is a friend. Isabel is lying, or playing, or repeating something she has half-understood. Ana believes her. The lie opens a door, and behind the door is the fugitive, and behind the fugitive is the war that nobody in the house will name. The child walks into the story the adults have refused to tell her.
This is how a society transmits its fears. Not through proclamations, but through the shape of what is left unsaid. In post-war Spain, the unsaid had a particular weight. The defeated were everywhere, in the villages and in the family photographs, but the official story was of a country saved and reunited. The war was over. The dead were not to be counted. The child who asks where the uncle is, or why the neighbour does not speak to them, learns quickly that the question itself is dangerous.
Erice was born in 1940, in Karrantza, in the Basque Country. He was a child of the first post-war decade, which is to say a child of the silence. The Spirit of the Beehive is not autobiographical in any simple sense, but it is a film about what that silence did to the people who grew up inside it. The house is a hive. Everyone is in their cell, producing. The father tends the bees and writes. The mother writes letters that are never sent. The daughters watch and wait. The queen is absent, or dead, or has been replaced by the state.
The South is a country of the mind
El Sur (1983) takes the same optic and moves it into adolescence. Estrella lives with her parents in the north. Her father, Agustín, is a doctor, a quiet man with a pendulum and a secret. He came from the South, and the South is where the film will not go. Estrella senses that the secret has something to do with the war, with a woman, with a life he had before her. She follows the clues the way Ana followed the spirit: with a child’s patience and a child’s literalism.
The film is based on a novella by Adelaida García Morales, and it was originally conceived as a longer work, with the second half set in the South. Erice never shot that half. What remains is a film about the refusal of the second half, about the father who never explains and the daughter who never arrives. The South becomes a country of the mind, like La Morte Rouge. It is the place where the story would be complete, and it is the place the film cannot reach.
This is not a failure of narrative. It is the narrative. Erice’s subject is the gap between what a child is told and what a child can see. The gap does not close. The daughter grows up and the father dies and the explanation never comes. The film ends with a train, a departure and a voice-over that admits the journey was never made. It is one of the saddest endings in European cinema, and it is sad because nothing dramatic happens. The secret simply remains a secret.
The return in Close Your Eyes
Close Your Eyes (2023), Erice’s first feature in three decades, turns the optic around. The child is now an old man. Julio Arenas, an actor, disappeared during the shooting of a television series in the 1990s. A friend, a director, and the actor’s daughter try to find out what happened. The film is about memory as a room that can be entered but not furnished. The actor may have chosen to disappear. The daughter may be looking for a father who does not want to be found.
The ending is a long scene in which the actor, played by Manolo Solo, looks at the camera. Erice has said he wanted the actors to look at the spectators, to open a dialogue with the audience. The question is left hanging: has the daughter failed to bring back her father’s memory, or has the memory simply refused to return? For an actor, is it more important to have one film that fills in the blanks? The child’s gaze from The Spirit of the Beehive has become the old man’s gaze in the cinema, and it is asking the same question. What did you see? What did you agree to?
Who teaches us to fear
The answer the films propose is uncomfortable. We teach each other. Fear is a social inheritance, passed down in silences and in stories, in the tone of a voice at the door, in the things a parent will not discuss. The child is not born afraid of the dark. The child learns that the dark contains something, and the something has a history.
Erice’s films are not about fear as a private feeling. They are about the transmission of fear as a form of knowledge. The child learns that the world is dangerous, and also that the adults are complicit in the danger. This is the political edge of the films, and it is sharper than any speech. In post-war Spain, the state taught its children to be afraid of the wrong things: of the defeated, of the neighbour, of the past. Erice reverses the lesson. The child sees the truth that the adults deny, and the adult viewer is placed in the position of the child: looking at a world that has not been explained.
That is why the films feel like memory rather than history. History tells you what happened. Memory tells you what it was like to be in a room where nobody would say it. Erice is not a nostalgic filmmaker. Nostalgia would soften the silence, make it picturesque. His silence is hard and continuous, and it does not resolve.
The three films I have been describing – The Spirit of the Beehive, El Sur and Close Your Eyes – are separated by fifty years, and they form a single long take on the same subject. A child looks at an adult world that is partly hidden. The child does not stop looking. The adult world does not explain. The film holds the shot.
A note on the other Spain
There is a companion piece to this essay, and it belongs to a different optic. Luis García Berlanga’s El verdugo (1963) approaches the same post-war Spain from the side of work and housing, not childhood. Its hero is not a child but a grown man who takes a job he does not want because the job comes with a flat. The film is a black comedy about institutional responsibility, and it asks how ordinary people become the instruments of a state they do not believe in. Erice asks who taught the child to be afraid. Berlanga asks what the child will do when he grows up and is offered a salary.
The two films are not opposites. They are two halves of the same question. One looks at the making of fear in childhood, the other at the price of complicity in adulthood. Together they describe a country that learned to live with what it had done by not talking about it.
Coda
La Morte Rouge ends with the demolition of the Gran Kursaal. The cinema where the five-year-old saw his first film is knocked down and replaced by modern glass blocks. Erice shows the rubble, and the voice-over does not mourn. The building is gone, the film is gone, the village on the screen was never there. What remains is the memory of a child in the dark, learning that the adults around him were silent, and that the silence was the lesson.
Who teaches us to fear? The film does not answer with a person. It answers with a room. A dark room, a screen, a row of adults who will not speak. The child learns that the world is a place where things happen and nobody explains them. Erice’s cinema is an attempt to stay in that room long enough to see what the child saw.
Read also: El verdugo: work, housing and the limits of freedom on god-kino, and After the Silence: Post-War Spain and the Cinema of Memory on ArtCulture UK.
