The film about Barcelona in 1936 in the post directly below this one seems like an “amazing” find (to quote Adam Hochschild again), but its origins remain murky. The film itself says in a still at the very end that it was “reconstructed on the basis of eight distinct materials conserved in the archives of Filmoteca Espanola and the CNT/FAI,” and, in the next still, that this was done by ISKRA. But who was (or is?) ISKRA? If there’s a scholar of the Spanish Civil War out there who could help explain more about the film’s provenance, please email First of the Month at bdemott@hotmail.com.
The film is remarkable for its depiction of the libertarian revolution in Spain, illustrating what George Orwell evoked in Homage to Catalonia, but also for its chilling anti-Catholicism. Perhaps that aspect of the film shouldn’t be surprising given that most of the Church supported Franco and the extreme right (though Catholics were of course also on the anti-fascist side) and because the revolutionaries, some of them, threw themselves into massacres of Churchmen. Still it does add dark notes to the film’s thrillingly radical resonance.