"With an amazing performance by Ana Torrent-there has probably never been a more extraordinary view of a child on a movie screen-one of the great images has been created." (Richard Eder, N.Y. Times) This status as a haunting film about children needs the qualification that it is about real children and their natural preoccupations with suicide, sadism, heroic self-sacrifice. And the setting, a Castilian village at the end of the Spanish Civil War, in a film made in a time of continuing censorship, should warn us that this children's story is a way of recuperating for the cinema the very narrative materials-political and historical-that are glimpsed only peripherally and fleetingly. The center of the film is a question on the limits of Frankenstein: "Why did the monster kill the girl and why did the villagers kill the monster?" And the conclusion enters into an Expressionistic and hallucinatory fantasy as a way of lifting the narrative out of its realistic and ideological constraints. Erice does not so much demystify as bracket the mythic aspect of film that Expressionism projected. William Nestrick, "The Offspring of Expressionism," PFA 9/85. Note: Víctor Erice's The South screens July 27.