"The Spanish Republic Isn't Nothing"

A few words about Joris Ivens

I don’t know a lot about the Spanish Civil War. Some broad strokes, basically. I suppose WWII has overshadowed the conflict in our historical memory, though something of the war has slipping into modern culture, mostly thanks to Guillermo Del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth (he set his Pinocchio in Fascist Italy). The war, and its international support were also central to Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, in which Robert Oppenheimer’s funding of the Republican armed forces via communist channels became evidence of his communist commitments at his security clearance hearing. The Spanish Republic was the great cause of ‘30s leftists, standing as a bulwark against the rise of fascism in Italy and Germany, and in Spain as well. Thousands went to Spain to fight. Millions of dollars were routed to the war effort by private individuals. It was for not, of course. Franco’s victory in ‘39 brought totalitarianism to Spain, though of course even that story is complicated. Franco’s Spain looked quite different in 1975, at the end of his long rule.

On Monday night, I attended a 16mm screening of The Spanish Earth, the 1937 propaganda documentary by Joris Ivens, with narration written by Ernest Hemingway and recorded by Orson Welles. It was a film designed to win support for the Republican cause and the Abraham Lincoln Battallion internationally, particularly in America. FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt invited it to screen at the White House. The power of the film rests in its photography, which is less impressive in crap quality on YouTube than projected from a quite nice 16mm print, but which feels both artful and immiedate. Ivens, a friend of Sergei Eisenstein, uses the principles of montage to fabricate a coherent narrative from the footage, with the help of some extraordinary editing by his collaborator and wife at the time, Helen van Dongen. The structuring narratives of the film are the tilling of a field and building of an irrigation system, and the effort to stop Franco’s advance in Madrid, which was still held by the Republicans at that stage of the war. In its final sequence, the film cuts between shots of soldiers victoriously fending off an attempt by the Nationalists to take a bridge outside the city and shots of water streaming into the field. The Spanish Earth ready to fight, ready to deliver its natural bounties through the hard work of the people.

Watching The Spanish Earth was a rousing experience, a testament to its craft as propaganda, but also disconcerting. It exists now as historical document. Its purpose, to drive support for the war, a faded memory. The Republicans lost the war. Why should this be rousing? I thought, during the film, of the scene in Oppenheimer when Kitty tells Robert about her first ex-husband, the one who lost his job and started peddling The Daily Worker before heading off to Spain to end up with a bullet lodged in his skull the first time he popped his head out of a trench. He died, she says, for nothing. “The Spanish Republic isn’t nothing,” Robert responds. I think about that scene a lot, and that line specifically. In that moment, Robert and Kitty are having a disagreement about the theoretical and the practical. The idea of a republic and the reality of a bullet through the head. The film is about the marriage of the theoretical and practical into something real and therefore uncontrollable, and perhaps this would have described the Spanish Republic had it succeeded. Indeed, reality was the opposite. The forces of fascism and authoritarianism won, and the Spanish Civil War became a preview of sorts for WWII. Reading that scene in Oppenheimer as meta-text about the larger themes of the film is right and reasonable, but that line, “The Spanish Republic isn’t nothing,” it sits with me, because in its very construction it acts as a rebuke easy dismissal of the theoretical. In fact, the Republic was not theoretical. It was a very real government structure that was violently overthrown by a military elite.

“The Spanish Republic isn’t nothing.”

Last week’s disastrous election was fought by Democrats on the premise that American democracy is at stake under another Donald Trump presidency. Their actions since, retreating to the stately traditions of governmental transition, tell a different story. It’s not American democracy that’s at stake, you see, but the traditions of 20th century political decorum. That the right have spat in the face of such decorum for decades carries no weight in the minds of these liberal establishmentarians. And I admit in years past, I too paid too much attention to the theatre of democracy rather than its essence. But democracy isn’t nothing. It isn’t theatre. It’s an ideal, an aspiration, but concrete in its effects. Where was that story?

It’s interesting to contemplate a world in which the Republicans defeated the Nationalists for control of Spain. The variables are endless, but none of them certain. A very different WWII, perhaps? No economic miracle in Spain? The entrenchment of socialist govrnment in 20th century Europe? A better world? It’s nice to dream. There’s a scene in The Spanish Earth in which a man lies dead on a Madrid sidewalk, the casualty of indiscriminate bombing inside the city. In another scene, two children are killed. Another scene has several dead laid out after a round of bombing. These are civilians. Men, women and children, their lives cut short by the machinery of war. And for what? The Republic was lost. But it wasn’t nothing, and that’s why they were murdered.