Intrahistoria y memoria del exilio interior español en 'El espíritu de la colmena' (Víctor Erice, 1973). Una visión desde María Zambrano

Resumen

In 1973, María Zambrano travelled to Geneva to see Víctor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive. The philosopher was captivated by the view the film offered of Spain’s recent intrahistory, marked by the hopelessness and despair that afflicted those Spanish Republicans who had been forced to remain in the country as interior exiles. Zambrano saw the film just a few years before Spain’s transition to democracy, at a time when she believed it was essential to recover the buried memory of the Republican project, whose imprint was still present in the lives of Spanish exiles, in order to build the new democratic project that would emerge in Spain in the late 1970s. The aim of this article is to analyse the images of The Spirit of the Beehive based on the notions of intrahistory and memory explored by Zambrano in her work in order to consider how cinema may be able to undo the “spectral” condition that Zambrano believed was the lot of every exile.