"Men Cannot Act in Front of the Camera in the Presence of Death": JORIS IVENS' "THE SPANISH EARTH" Author(s): Thomas Waugh Source: Cinéaste , 1983, Vol. 12, No. 3 (1983), pp. 21-29 Published by: Cineaste Publishers, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/41686180 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms Cineaste Publishers, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinéaste This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Sun, 19 Jul 2020 08:17:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms "Men Cannot Act in Front of the Camera in the Presence of Death" JORIS IVENS' THE SPANISH EARTH by Thomas Waugh The first installment of this article burning , churches and the like - as which Jocussed on the political and well as expensive and difficult to piy artistic background to the production out of the notoriously reactionary oj Joris Ivens' Spanish Earth, newsreel companies. The group then appeared in our Vol. XII , No. 2 issue.decided to finish the project as quickly and cheaply as possible, which Van Dongen did using a Dos Passos com- mentary and relying on Soviet footage that the Franco rebellion posed of the front. This feature-length work, As a that soon serious a theserious as Franco threat, threat, it became rebellion Ivens Ivens apparent assem- assem- posed called Spain in Flames, was hurriedly bled the group of leftist artists and in-released in February 1937. Mean- tellectuals who were to become the while, the producers decided to put producing body for a Spanish mostfilm. of their hopes on a film of greater Their idea was to bolster American scope to be shot from scratch on Span- support for the Republican cause ish soil,by personally underwriting a means of a short, quickly made budget com- of $ 18,000. Ivens would direct. pilation of news reel material. This As the autumn progressed, the need would explain the issues to the Amer-for the film became more and more ican public and counter the already urgent: the left press began denounc- skillful Franquist propaganda. ing They the German and Italian interven- called themselves Contemporary tions and the Western democracies be- Historians, Inc., and had as their gan nervously discussing neutrality. spokespeople the Pulitzer Prize- By the time Ivens arrived in Paris in winning poet Archibald MacLeish the and first bitter January of the war, a the novelist John Dos Passos, both tentative scenario in his pocket, he well-known fellow-travelers. Lillian Hell- had already been preceded by the first man and Dorothy Parker were the other of the International Brigades, and by a pillars of the group, with Hellman's growing stream of Western artists, in- Broadway producer, Herman Shumlin, tellectuals, and activists, including recruited to act as the film's producer. filmmakers from the Soviet Union and Helen Van Dongen was to put together England. the film. It soon became clear, howev- In Valencia, suddenly the new Re- er, that not enough good footage was publican capital because of the pre- available and that even the shots at sumed imminence of the fall of Ma- hand were of limited use since they drid, Ivens and John Ferno, his cine- were taken from the Franco side - matographer from the Dutch days, This content downloaded from 95.183.180.42 on Sun, 19 Jul 2020 08:17:33 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms joined up with Dos Passos and got years. The village would be a di- and his collaborators attempted to right to work. They soon concluded, agrammatic cross-section of Spanish telescope it into a simple narrative however, that their script was un- society as a whole, and various melo- idea involving Julian, a peasant who workable in the worsening situation. dramatic or allegorical touches would has joined the Republican army. Even Drafted by Ivens together with Hell- highlight the various social forces in this scaled-down role was only partly man and MacLeish, it emphasized the play - there were to be representative realized since Julian disappeared in background to the war and a step by fascists, militarists, landowners, cler- the frontline confusion after his vil- step chronology of the Spanish revolu- gy, intelligentsia, even German inter- lage sequences had been filmed. tion, calling for considerable drama- ventionists and the ex-king! Ivens was Julian, an undistinctive-looking tization. The Republicans they con- clearly intending to expand his first young peasant, appeared in only four sulted urged them instead to head experiments along these lines in scenes of the final film, stretched out straight for Madrid to find their sub- Komsomol and Borinage (where strik- by the editor to a maximum: a brief ject in the action on the front line. As ing miners had reenacted their moment on the Madrid front where he the film's commentary would later clashes with police and bailiffs, the lat- is seen writing a letter home, the text make clear, "Men cannot act in front of ter impersonated by strikers in theat- provided in an insert and read by the the camera in the presence of death." rical costumes). The script called for commentator; a scene where he is • some elements of newsreel reportage seen hitching a ride back home on to be worked in as well. leave to Fuenteduena, with a flash- The abandoned script merits a The brief final version of Spanish Earth back reminder of the letter; next, his look, however, as an indicator of turned out to be much more complex reunion first with his mother and where American radical documentar- formally than the original outline then with his whole family; and final- ists saw themselves heading in called 1936. for, an improvised hybrid of ly, a sequence where he drills the vil- Based largely on dramatized narrative many filmic modes, but certain ele- lage boys in an open space. The foot- and semi-fictional characterization, ments of the outline remained. The age was insufficient even for these its only American precursors would most important of these was the scenes, no- so that the commentator must have been the films of Flaherty, some tion of a village as a microcosm ofensure the our recognition of Julian by scattered Film and Photo League Spanish revolution. The chosen vil- repeating his name and fleshing out shorts, and Paul Strand's anomalous lage, Fuenteduena, was ideal in this the details of the narrative. The reun- Mexican Redes , completed but not and yet every other respect. Its location on ion scene would be the biggest chal- released at this point. The more likely the Madrid- Valencia lifeline was sym- lenge to editor Van Dongen. She was to model was the Soviet Socialist Realist bolically apt, a link between village re- improvise, using closeups of villagers semi-documentary epic, of which volution and war effort. It was also apparently shot for other uses, and Ivens' own Komsomol (1932) was an visually stunning, set near the ingeniously Tagus fabricate a fictional mini- important prototype. River amid a rolling landscape, scene and from unrelated material, where The Spanish Earth script followed accessible to Madrid. Politically, too, Julian's small brother runs to fetch the chronology of a village's political the village was ideal: the community their father from the fields upon his growth over a period of six or seven had reclaimed a former hunting pre- arrival. The family thus shown in this years,, from the fall of the monarchy serve of aristocrats, now fled, and had sentimental but effective scene would until the fictional retaking of the vil- begun irrigating their new land. The be largely synthetic. After Julian's dis- lage from Franquist forces during the filmmakers could thus keep their ori- appearance, a symbolic close-up of an present conflict. A single peasant ginal theme of agrarian reform and anonymous soldier was taken for the family was to be featured, particularly hints of the original dramatic conflict defiant finale of the film. their young son whose evolution between landowners and peasantry. But this forced postponement of would be emblematic of the Spanish As for the originell cloak-and-dagger Ivens' dream of "personalization" did peasantry's maturation during those plot about the young villager, Ivens not stand in the way of other efforts to heighten the personal quality of the film. At every point in Spanish Earth, the filmmakers would intervene in the post-production to make individual fi- gures come alive dramatically: through the commentary, as when a briefly seen Republican officer is iden- tified by name and then laconically eulogized when it is disclosed that he was killed after the filming; or through complex editing procedures, as when a miniature story of two boys killed in the bombing of Madrid is chillingly wrought out of noncontinuous shots and a synthetic flash-frame detona- tion; or through lingering close-ups of anonymous bystanders and onlook- ers, some of whom are even drama- tized through first-person commen- tary. Several years later, Ivens would conclude that such vignettes, "hasty and attempted identities now and then walking through a documen- tary," had fallen short of his goal of continuous "personalization" and that his next project on the Sino- [ Gunners targeting a fascist holdout on the outskirts of Madrid in Spanish Earth.