The war that won't die

Sixty years after it ended, film-makers are still fighting the Spanish civil war. David Archibald on the evolution of a national obsession - and the battle for truth

The Guardian
Friday July 28, 2000

When a fire bomb ripped through the Balmes cinema in Barcelona on July 11 1974, the screening of Carlos Saura's La Prima Angelica (Cousin Angelica) was brought abruptly to a halt. The violent response to Angelica, one of the first films to represent the country's bitter civil war from a republican perspective, emphasised the political importance of cinema that deals with contested historical periods. The civil war may have ended officially in 1939, but fascist fire bombs suggested that the battle for Spain's fractured past was set to continue.

The release of Jose Luis Cuerda's La Lengua de las Mariposas (Butterfly's Tongue) once again brings the Spanish civil war into the cinema. Set in Galicia in the months preceding Franco's fascist uprising in July 1936, it traces the relationship between a seven-year-old boy and his anarchist-leaning teacher.

The film is indicative of Spanish cinema's concern with the country's recent past; of the nearly 300 historical films produced in Spain since the 1970s, more than half are set during the second republic, the civil war and under Franco. A period of 40-odd years, from 1931 to 1975, has become a rich historical seam for Spanish film-makers to mine as Spain struggles to come to terms with a past that had previously been refracted through a right-wing lens.

Under the dictatorship of General Francisco Franco, Spanish cinema was utilised as a myth-making machine to spin stories about the past. Cinema became a propaganda tool as the government turned out cine cruzada, or civil-war films, which venerated the Church, the family and the fascist state. The only cinematic version of history permitted, cine cruzada is best exemplified by the 1941 film Raza (Race), a triumphalist account of the war based on a script by the victorious dictator himself. It encapsulates the attitude of those in power: they had won the war, now they needed to win the history.

Even foreign films favourable to a republican viewpoint, such as the 1943 version of Ernest Hemingway's novel For Whom the Bell Tolls, were refused distribution. Facing the sharp scissors of the censor, oppositional film-makers who remained in the country utilised allusion, metaphor and symbolism in an attempt to raise alternative historical accounts of the past.

But from within these artistic strictures emerged two of the most acclaimed films to touch on the conflict: Saura's 1965 film La Caza (The Hunt) and Victor Erice's classic expressionist work from 1973, El Espiritu de la Colmena (Spirit of the Beehive). Set in the period following the conflict, both films deny easy interpretation, but many of those Spaniards fortunate enough to have seen them in cinemas at the time viewed them as harsh condemnations of the regime.

A recurring theme in Saura's work is the problems associated with re-capturing a long-suppressed past through recourse to memory. This is evident in Cousin Angelica which recalls the war from the perspective of a child of republican parents. Similarly, Saura's 1970 film, El Jardin de las Delicias (The Garden of Delights), relates the story of an amnesiac businessman whose peseta-chasing family attempt to force him to recollect his financial transactions. After years of cinematic distortion of history, Saura's films raise crucial questions about the vital necessity of remembering the past; yet, simultaneously, they point to the inherent fallibility of human memory itself.

After Franco's death in 1975 and the subsequent relaxation of censorship laws, cinematic representations of the war changed beyond all recognition. Over the following two and a half decades, events that were previously referred to obliquely took centre-stage in Spanish cinema.

In the years immediately following the dictator's demise, some film-makers turned towards documentary in a direct attempt to recuperate this repressed historical period. In 1977 La vieja memoria (The Old Memory) was released - an experimental documentary directed by Jaime Camino that utilises eyewitness testimonies from a wide range of veterans of the conflict. It seeks the "truth" of the past, but a different type of "truth" from the monolithic accounts characteristic of Francoist cinema. By presenting conflicting, subjective versions of the same period, The Old Memory moves from a documentary style to a more open-ended narrative that invites a plurality of response.

The same year saw another landmark documentary, Por Que Perdimos la Guerra? (Why Did We Lose the War?), directed by Diego Santillan, the son of a wartime anarchist leader, which presents a series of interviews with sympathisers of the anarchist trade union, the CNT. Fiercely critical of the British and French governments' refusal to sell arms to the beleaguered republic, the film also takes a bitter swipe at Stalin and the Spanish Communist Party (PCE).

With more than a little justification, Santillan suggests that Stalin was keener to establish a pact with fascism than to further the revolutionary uprising that had prevented Franco's immediate seizure of power. Both these documentaries marked a new stage in representations of the conflict, but the appeal of documentary cinema was relatively short-lived and Spanish film-makers mainly utilised fictional cinema to deal with the past.

In 1985, Luis Garcia Berlanga's La Vaquilla (The Little Cow) was released. Set on the Aragon front during the war, the significance of the film stems from its status as one of the first comedies set during that period. In that sense it foreshadows two of the films best known to foreign audiences: Fernando Trueba's Oscar-winning Belle Epoque (1993) and Saura's Ay, Carmela! (1990).

Set on the cusp of the establishment of the second republic and the abdication of the monarchy in April 1931, the world created in Belle Epoque is a million miles removed from the lived experience of rural life in 1930s Spain. The film creates an imaginary world where no one worries about work or money, where there is an abundance of good food and wine, and where personal freedom is closely identified with sexual liberation - a world that is in the process of shaking off the repressive force of the Catholic church and where people can begin to live their lives free from patriarchal restrictions.

As with Butterfly's Tongue, this is sugar-coated history. Republican Spain seen through rose-tinted glasses; a harsh and bitter world, magically transformed into an idyllic pre-modern utopia about to be cruelly crushed by fascism. There is a refusal to engage with a concrete historical past, and what is presented in both films is a nostalgic recreation of a republican Spain that never was. These two films highlight the fact that right-wing myths of the past are slowly being undone but they are being replaced with myths of a different kind.

If both Belle Epoque and Butterfly's Tongue recreate romanticised worlds, Ay Carmela! presents a different image of Spain altogether. Set in 1938, when the republic looked defeated, Carmela and her compatriots are performers in a republican theatre company who are captured by Franco's troops and faced with the dilemma of whether to perform before a group of fascist soldiers.

Saura uses the situation to present a meditation on questions dealing with artistic and cultural freedom: how much is it possible to compromise in the face of censorship and dictatorial control? What do you do in the face of inevitable doom? These are undoubtedly questions of specific relevance to those who struggled to make films under the dictatorship, but they also raise questions about the here and now, and indicate how the civil war is visited to comment on the concerns of the present.

It was not only Spanish films that entered the battle over Spain's past. Ken Loach's Land and Freedom was released in 1995 amidst a flurry of critical praise and political debate. Using as its starting point George Orwell's classic autobiographical account, Homage to Catalonia, Land and Freedom focuses on the bitter internal struggles within the republican movement that assisted the fascists' victory.

Like Why Did We Lose the War?, by re-examining the debates over the need for a revolutionary war to defeat Franco, Loach attempts to rehabilitate the war's revolutionary dimensions, suggesting that the conflict was more than a simple struggle between fascism and democracy. The closing slow-motion shooting of Blanca, a metaphorical representation of the betrayal of the revolution by the Spanish communists, caused bitter controversy and kick-started a reappraisal of the conflict inside Spain.

The furore provoked by Land and Freedom confirms the importance of cinematic images to contemporary audiences' understanding of the past. Like it or not, as the importance of the written word is steadily replaced by the immediacy of the visual image, cinema will increasingly become an arena for the contestation of differing versions of history.

Currently in pre-production, Antonio Banderas is preparing to direct Malaga Burning!, an adaptation of a 1937 novel set in his hometown in 1936. We wait with bated breath to see what myths will be created - or exploded - when Hollywood gets its hands on the Spanish civil war.