Cinema and the Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was not just a Spanish affair. Around the
world film-makers of the time, and many others since then, found it impossible
not to engage with this terrible period. In their many different ways, artists
like Ernest Hemingway, John Dos Passos, Luis Buñuel, Alain Resnais, André
Malraux, Picasso, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paul Éluard or George Orwell all
reacted to what was happening in Spain, drawing attention to it through their
work.
With the triumph of Franco's troops, Spain entered a dark period of repression
and censorship. There was no space for cinema to engage with the recent war
and the tyranny of the new system - though some film-makers did manage to
get around the censors and present visions of a Spain rather different from the
regime's. Following the death of the Generalísimo in 1975, Spain began to
explore the Civil War and its legacy in earnest. For some film-makers, artistic
liberty meant freedom to look back and re-examine a distorted historical
period. Others began to offer celluloid visions of a new bright future with
infinite possibilities.
Seventy years after the end of the war, this season offers different views of
the period and its consequences. There are documentaries and films that look
directly at the war itself, as well as films that use the period as a backdrop to
other stories. These have been produced in film cultures as diverse as
Hollywood, the USSR, Spain, France, the UK and East Germany. The
programme also includes a selection of NO-DOs - Noticiarios Documentales, or
News and Documentaries - cinema propaganda newsreels that Franco used
from 1939 until 1981 to update the population about the latest official truths.
The very first film in this survey having been made in 1936 and the most
recent dating from 2008, this programme represents more than seven decades
of cinema trying to do justice to these historic events.
More info at:
http://www.bfi.org.uk/whatson/bfi_southbank/film_programme/june_seasons/ci
nema_and_the_spanish_civil_war?
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