In 1996 she received numerous awards and nominations, including a Goya Award nomination for her lead actress role in Alejandro Amenábar’s film Tesis (Thesis). From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.Ana Torrent Bertrán de Lis (born 12 July 1966) is a Spanish film actress.Torrent’s debut came in 1973 with the starring role as “Ana” in the film El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) directed by Víctor Erice, when she was seven years old. This was followed by another memorable role in which she played the lead character’s younger self in Cría cuervos (Raise Ravens) (1976) by director Carlos Saura. Where a child-adult such as “Ana”/”Ángela” experiences participation envy as well as scopophilia impotence in the face of the “overwhelming unknown” (Otto Fenichel), the artist Ana Torrent emerges as a singular adept of what makes a young actor appear creepy on screen. What does not respect borders, positions, rules”–– what approaches the human, while appearing all altogether separate and other-worldly to the rest of us, this is the nature of abjection, of creepiness, of horror. Having begun with Ana’s film debut at the age of seven, it is only fitting to conclude by coming full circle, with 2014’s La Ropavejera by Nacho Ruipérez, where Ana, now credited pointedly as “Mother” assumes the role of an early twentieth-century killer of infants and young girls at a house of pleasure.
Filmografía
Filled with peepholes and whispered secrets, the film plays up familiar Torrent territory by emphasizing the role of seeing/watching in childhood development, sexuality, and often, the death drive. In the short, which echoes feature-length explorations such as Psycho (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960), voyeurism and sex appear inextricably linked with the filmmaking process itself, not to mention its exhibition, where consumption cannot be divorced from participation. If you were to look up film stills from 1973’s The Spirit of the Beehive, the majority of the images you would first encounter would be of the seven-year-old lead Ana Torrent, making her screen debut as the sensitive and precocious character Ana in Victor Erice’s Spanish drama masterpiece, set in the 1940s. Torrent’s debut came in 1973 with the starring role as “Ana” in the film El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) directed by Víctor Erice, when she was seven years old. She channels this urge into her work, befriending fellow cinephile and gore enthusiast “Chema” to help her source snuff films (actual depictions of death on screen).
What follows is a fascinating dive into the realms of extreme imagery and underground cinema, sprinkled with an engaging whodunit narrative involving a murdered professor and missing women. What at first can be seen as a fairly performative, pearl-clutching attempt at repulsion and the preservation of her middle-class values, gradually blossoms into a palpable pull towards what is happening on screen. This girl has seen too much, and before she has the language to discuss and confront what she has seen, she has decided to act. Instead, Ana and her sisters reenact troubling family dramas, donning their parents’ clothing and embodying their most painful moments. In the dramatization, Ana, though not the oldest sibling, portrays her father, implying a deeper connection than inter-family dynamics of power.
GROWING UP CREEPY, The Films of Ana Torrent
In 1996, Torrent received numerous awards and nominations, including a Goya Award nomination for her lead actress role in Alejandro Amenábar’s film Tesis (Thesis). By the end of the 1990s, she received critical acclaim when she played a Basque nationalist murdered for quitting ETA, in the film Yoyes (2000) directed by Helena Taberna. In 2008, Torrent portrayed Catherine of Aragon in the film The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), starring alongside Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson. In 1989 Torrent performed with Sharon Stone in the film Blood and Sand directed by Javier Elorrieta.In 1996 she received numerous awards and nominations, including a Goya Award nomination for her lead actress role in Alejandro Amenábar’s film Tesis (Thesis). By the end of the 1990s, Torrent received critical acclaim when she played a Basque nationalist murdered for quitting ETA, in the film Yoyes (1999) directed by Helena Taberna.
- If you were to look up film stills from 1973’s The Spirit of the Beehive, the majority of the images you would first encounter would be of the seven-year-old lead Ana Torrent, making her screen debut as the sensitive and precocious character Ana in Victor Erice’s Spanish drama masterpiece, set in the 1940s.
- Torrent’s debut came in 1973 with the starring role as “Ana” in the film El espíritu de la colmena (The Spirit of the Beehive) directed by Víctor Erice, when she was seven years old.
- Ana, with her dark, wide open, and dewy eyes recalls Daniel Kaluuya’s paralyzed character Chris falling into “the sunken place” of Get Out (2017).
- In the short, which echoes feature-length explorations such as Psycho (1960) and Peeping Tom (1960), voyeurism and sex appear inextricably linked with the filmmaking process itself, not to mention its exhibition, where consumption cannot be divorced from participation.
- Instead, Ana and her sisters reenact troubling family dramas, donning their parents’ clothing and embodying their most painful moments.
The Spanish title refers to the first part of an old proverb, “raise ravens… and they’ll pluck your eyes out”. This brings to light a few of the primary concerns of the film, namely the themes of seeing/witnessing, and revenge.Ana in Cuervos may as well be a spiritual cousin to the character Ana of Beehive. Entranced by the images of Frankenstein’s monster fatally interacting with the little girl by the lake, Ana fittingly recreates this sub-narrative when she discovers a wounded Republican soldier hiding out in a desolate sheepfold which her sister Isabel had said was the home of a monster. In Tesis (1996), a now thirty-year-old Ana plays Ángela, a university student struggling to articulate the parameters of her graduate thesis on the impact of audiovisual violence on the nuclear family.
Her research is given a burst of life when, on the subway, Ana’s train is stopped after an unknown person commits suicide along the tracks. As an audience, we never see the grisly aftermath, and neither does Ángela, but that is precisely what she longs to do. In 2008 Torrent portrayed Catherine of Aragon in the film The Other Boleyn Girl (2008), starring Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson. NightTide Magazine is dedicated to elevating voices in the horror ana torrentz genre, as well as to expanding the definitions of what horror means in our world today.
THE POWER OF CHRIST: THE VATICAN VS….SATANIC HORROR
While we highlight horror in all its forms, we always strive to advocate for and to shine a light on historically marginalized creatives working within the genre, in as many incarnations as possible. We celebrate Creators of Color, the LGBTQIA+, Disabled and Neurodivergent communities in horror, and those breaking the barriers of ageism in the genre, giving them a platform to emerge from the shadows, visible and seen.
Ana, with her dark, wide open, and dewy eyes recalls Daniel Kaluuya’s paralyzed character Chris falling into “the sunken place” of Get Out (2017). Ana likewise sinks into her characters, deploying a style of acting so naturalistic that filmmakers themselves have capitalized on these congruities to form an almost thematic continuum amongst some of her biggest films. His work is informed by the warmth of a multicultural upbringing in the tropics and the icy demeanor of a lifetime steeped in the surreal and grotesque. His first major narrative work, Velvet Cry was screened nationally and received numerous commendations for its excellence in production design and montage. Ian was recently awarded a Master’s Degree in Screenwriting + Film Studies from Hollins University, where his thesis project focused on the Hollywood life of early-talkies Mexican starlet Lupita Tovar. A few years later and now ten-year-old Ana Torrent is once again playing a young girl, simply called Ana in 1976’s Cría Cuervos by Carlos Saura.