The war that won't die

The Spanish Civil War in cinema

David Archibald

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780719096532
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526162663
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The war that won't die charts the changing nature of cinematic depictions of the Spanish Civil War. In 1936, a significant number of artists, filmmakers and writers – from George Orwell and Pablo Picasso to Joris Ivens and Joan Miró – rallied to support the country's democratically-elected Republican government. The arts have played an important role in shaping popular understandings of the Spanish Civil War and this book examines the specific role cinema has played in this process. The book's focus is on fictional feature films produced within Spain and beyond its borders between the 1940s and the early years of the twenty-first century – including Hollywood blockbusters, East European films, the work of the avant garde in Paris and films produced under Franco's censorial dictatorship.

The book will appeal to scholars and students of Film, Media and Hispanic Studies, but also to historians and, indeed, anyone interested in why the Spanish Civil War remains such a contested political topic.

1

Hollywood and the Spanish Civil War: For Whom the Bell Tolls

Now it is necessary that we see the democratic-fascist battle as a whole and recognize that what the Loyalists were fighting for is essentially the same thing that we are. To focus too much attention on the chinks in our allies’ armour is just what our enemies might wish. Perhaps it is realistic, but it is also going to be confusing to American audiences.

US Office of War Information For Whom the Bell Tolls script review, 14 October 1942 (quoted in Koppes and Black, 2000: 71)

At the height of the 2008 United States presidential campaign, the Democratic and Republican Party candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, both listed For Whom the Bell Tolls among their favourite novels, their literary tastes highlighting the enduring appeal of Ernest Hemingway’s Spanish Civil War epic, at least in the US. (Keller, 2008) The novel was first published in 1940, and Paramount Pictures released a cinema adaptation in 1943. An analysis of the film and its transition from page to screen forms the main part of this chapter.¹ As background to this analysis, and in order to highlight the changing nature of US cinematic depictions of the conflict during this period, I briefly examine two US films set during the civil war that were produced and released while the conflict was still underway, Blockade (Dieterle, USA, 1938), and The Spanish Earth (Ivens, USA, 1937). Guy Westwell notes that during the civil war ‘The American government’s isolationist stance, and the continued difficulty of reconciling the ethnic allegiances and political beliefs of Hollywood’s varied audiences, resulted in an avoidance of divisive war themes.’ (2006: 26–7) When the US entered the Second World War following the bombing of Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, however, Hollywood’s representation of the conflict became pro-Republican. This is evident in For Whom the Bell Tolls and in a further four films – Casablanca (Curtiz, USA, 1942), The Fallen Sparrow (Richard Wallace, USA, 1943), Watch on the Rhine (Shumlin, USA, 1943) and Confidential Agent (Shumlin, USA, 1945) – all of which represent US citizens as central agents in the anti-fascist struggle during the Spanish Civil War. The shifting manner of US cinematic representations of the conflict provides an example of what Hayden White describes as ‘willing backwards’, a process in which the past is re-narrativised in the interests of those in the present. This analysis of For Whom the Bell Tolls will indicate, then, the way in which Hollywood attempted to, metaphorically, rewind the spool of history to appropriate and represent the Spanish Civil War in a manner befitting the needs of wartime USA.² The chapter also explores the way in which For Whom the Bell Tolls fits with Rosenstone’s assertions with regard to the mainstream historical film as discussed in the introduction.

Blockade and The Spanish Earth

The Spanish Earth was commissioned by Contemporary Historians Inc., an organisation established by prominent, US-based, left-wing writers and artists, which invited the celebrated documentarian, Joris Ivens, to travel to Spain to make a film that could raise awareness of the civil war among a largely uninformed American public.³ In January 1937 the US Congress had passed the Embargo Act prohibiting the export of arms to either side; however, as Germany and Italy were supporting the Nationalists, this seemingly neutral position effectively aided Franco. In this context, The Spanish Earth was part of the campaign to build support for the Spanish government and to overturn the US government’s non-intervention policy.⁴ The film is set in and around the town of Fuentiduena, Madrid, and battlefronts along the key highway connecting Valencia and the besieged capital. The civil war’s impact on civilian life is captured in actuality footage of the after-effects of air strikes – strikingly encapsulated in a shot of two young boys lying lifeless on the floor – and is contrasted with the dramatic reconstruction of village life. While the bombing sequences represent the Spanish people as almost anonymous victims of war, the narrative reconstruction of peasant life, personified by the focus on one villager, Julian, and his family, represents the peasants as positive historical agents. Ernest Hemingway’s narration displays a clear sympathy for the villagers’ daily struggle: ‘this Spanish Earth is dry and hard and the faces of the men who work that earth are dry and hard from the sun’.⁵ Although overly dramatic in the battle sequences, for instance when Hemingway asserts that ‘men cannot act before the camera in the presence of death’, the narration adds a sincere and sympathetic, personal and poetic tone in its description of peasant life. The connection of the peasants’ struggle with the needs of the land is continued throughout and the film concludes with a sequence of water cascading over the arid earth.

Although The Spanish Earth is overtly supportive of the Republican cause, the identity of the opposition is extremely vague. There is no attempt to explain the civil war’s complex political background, with Hemingway describing the ‘enemy’ simply as ‘they’. The film, moreover, oversimplifies the political issues at stake by suggesting that the passivity of village life is under threat from alien fascist aggression, even if fascism itself is mentioned only once, and then by a speaker at a rally. There is no mention of Franco and no mention of wider social demands beyond the peasants’ desire for land. The filmmakers also minimise communist involvement: La Pasionaria, Dolores Ibárruri, a leading communist member of the Spanish parliament, is referred to as ‘the wife of a poor miner in Asturias’ and General Lister, another prominent communist who had studied at the Freunze military academy in the Soviet Union, is casually described as having risen ‘from a simple soldier to the command of a division’.⁶ It is not surprising, then, that following one screening a New York Times columnist could write ‘the Spanish people are fighting, not for broad principles of Muscovite Marxism, but for the right to the productivity of a land denied them through years of absentee landlordship’. (quoted in Waugh, 1998: 152) Despite its deliberately vague politics, The Spanish Earth remains a haunting cinematic account of the experience of those struggling against fascism, the rough nature of the black-and-white cinematography bringing an immediacy that authenticates the on-screen reality.

The desire to broaden the film’s appeal and impact results in a representation of the conflict that sidesteps any problematic political concerns; moreover, it presents the conflict as one not directly involving US citizens. A similar process is evident in Blockade. Although the opening intertitles state ‘Spain: the Spring of 1936’, there is no subsequent mention of any events of the period, leaving nothing much more than a love story set against a standard spy plot.⁷ This partly flows from the strategy adopted by the filmmakers – to select a familiar cinematic genre and use conventional Hollywood strategies to reach a wide audience – but also from its production context. Joe Breen, head of the Production Code Authority, the industry’s self-regulating body, sternly advised producer Walter Wanger:

you will of course be careful not to identify at any time the uniforms of the soldiers shown throughout the story. You will also have in mind that your picture is certain to run into considerable difficulty in Europe and South America, if there is any indication in the telling of the story that you are ‘taking sides’ in the present unfortunate Spanish Civil War. It is imperative that you do not, at any time, identify any of the warring factions. (quoted in Schindler, 1996: 197)

Most of the overt political content emerges in the closing sequence when, as the camera tracks into a close-up of one of the villagers, Marco (Henry Fonda), who has been attempting to break the blockade, he directly addresses the audience:

Where can you find peace? The whole country’s a battleground. There is no peace. There is no safety for women and children. Schools and hospitals are targets. And this isn’t war, not between soldiers. It’s not war, it’s murder. It makes no sense. The world can stop it. Where is the conscience of the world? Where is the conscience of the world?

The impassioned appeal remains surprisingly powerful, yet the attempt to win over the US government proved to be futile. When the Western powers signed the Munich Treaty in September 1938, the policy of appeasement sounded the death-knell of any faint hope of the US government breaking with non-intervention.⁸ Nevertheless, the attempt to appeal to US public opinion and the US government led the filmmakers to represent the war as an abstract Manichean conflict pitching good against evil, which all right-minded US citizens should be morally obliged to support, but one, again, which did not involve US citizens directly.⁹ The production context also encouraged filmmakers to avoid, as Breen puts it, ‘taking sides’. This changed significantly, however, when the US entered the Second World War, as an analysis of For Whom the Bell Tolls reveals.

Hemingway in Spain

Having first visited Spain in 1923, Hemingway returned in 1937 to cover the civil war as a correspondent for the North American Newspaper Alliance. An active supporter of the Republican government, in addition to narrating The Spanish Earth Hemingway collaborated with the Spanish novelist, Prudencio de Pereda, on the short propaganda film Spain in Flames (de Pereda, Spain, 1938). He began writing For Whom the Bell Tolls in Cuba in March 1939 and it was published in 1940 to a warm critical response.¹⁰ The novel is set in 1937, in the area around Segovia, and the civil war provides the historical and political backdrop for a romantic relationship between Jordan, a US International Brigade member, and Maria, a Spanish peasant. The novel presents a sympathetic portrayal of the Republican cause; however, its political content was sufficiently vague as not to impede its success. Kenneth Kinnamon, for instance, argues that it ‘transcends partisanship in its artistic integrity’ (1996: 165) and Gene D. Phillips notes that ‘The majority of critics who did not have a political axe to grind agreed that Hemingway’s book was both good and true.’ (1980: 40–1) Hemingway locates his narrative within established historical events, specifically the failed Republican offensive in La Granja and Segovia towards the end of May 1937, but he also, as Allen Josephs notes, ‘invented a great deal – the bridge, the cave, the guerrillas themselves had no historical counterparts in that sector’. (Josephs, 1996: 239)¹¹ Hemingway also modelled certain characters on real figures; the Russian Republican officer, General Golz, for instance, is based on the Polish general Karol Swierezenski. (Kinnamon, 1996: 165) The roman à clef elements, combined with the references to established historical events, led some critics to suggest that it was an accurate, if incomplete, portrayal of the period. For instance, Josephs writes that it provides ‘an accurate rendition of that part of the war that Hemingway actually experienced, in and around Madrid’. (1996: 236) If the novel was regarded as faithful to the events of the civil war, the film’s release provoked critics to question how authentic the cinematic version would be. Thus Phillips suggests that ‘The question now was how much of that truth and goodness would find its way into the projected film version of the novel.’ (1980: 40–1) These quotes highlight the fact that many critics of the time regarded fidelity to the original as important. My main concern here, however, lies not in exploring the film’s faithfulness or otherwise to the novel, but in analysing what happens to the novel’s political content and its representation of the civil war when it moves from page to screen.

For Whom the Bell Tolls on screen

The film, shot in Technicolor, opens with the dramatic orchestral sweep of Victor Young’s score. A giant bell tolls as an intertitle appears on screen with a quote from John Donne: ‘Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.’ A subsequent intertitle locates the action in Spain in 1937. The opening sequence plunges immediately into highly dramatic action as two men successfully blow up a train, but in their attempted escape, Kashkin (Feodor Chaliapin), presumably Russian, is shot and wounded.¹² He appeals to the other, Robert Jordan (Gary Cooper), to fulfil his promise and kill him before enemy soldiers arrive. Jordan, who we later learn is a Spanish-language teacher from the United States, does so. Back at Republican headquarters, General Golz (Leo Bulgakov) instructs Jordan, a munitions expert, to blow up a bridge in enemy territory to coincide with a Republican offensive. In this operation he is aided by a small band of Spanish guerrillas led by Pablo (Akim Tamiroff) and his ‘woman’ Pilar (Katina Paxinou). Also in the group is nineteen-year-old Maria (Ingrid Bergman), who is recovering from her parents’ murder and her subsequent gang rape by Nationalist soldiers. Maria falls for Jordan and the couple’s love story forms the narrative’s central focus. The film follows the group as they prepare for the attack on the bridge over the ensuing three days. Whereas the novel is narrated in flashback, the film’s narrative is predominantly linear. There is a limited use of flashback, for instance when Pilar recounts stories of violence at the outset of the civil war; however, the film begins with the end of Jordan’s penultimate mission and concludes with his final mission.

The sense of foreboding present in the opening sequence is developed throughout the film: when Pilar reads Jordan’s palm and ‘sees’ his death, when the Spanish peasant Anselmo (Vladimir Sokoloff) is disinclined to shoot a man from his own village, and when Pablo expresses reluctance to join the attack. The darkness of the wartime situation is represented by lighting a number of sequences in a way that places the characters in silhouette; for instance in the opening train-blowing sequence and in the early exchange between Jordan and Golz. The film concludes after the bridge has been successfully destroyed, but not without consequences: two group members are killed and Jordan is wounded. The Nationalists, moreover, have le...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: film, history and the Spanish Civil War
• 1. Hollywood and the Spanish Civil War: For Whom the Bell Tolls
• 2. The Spanish Civil War in East German cinema: Fünf Patronenhülsen/Five Cartridges
• 3. Surrealism and the past: Fernando Arrabal and the Spanish Civil War
• 4. Film under Franco: La caza/The Hunt and El jardín de las delicias/The Garden of Delights
• 5. Recycling Basque history: patterns of the past in Vacas/ Cows
• 6. No laughing matter? Comedy and the Spanish Civil War in cinema
• 7. Ghosts of the past: El espinazo del Diablo/The Devil’s Backbone
• 8. A story from the Spanish Revolution: Land and Freedom/ Tierra y Libertad
• 9. The search for truth in Soldados de Salamina/Soldiers of Salamina
• Conclusion
• Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index