Stephen Schwartz, co-author of Spanish Marxism versus Soviet Communism: A History of the P.O.U.M. in the Spanish Civil War, has linked a number of his associates to the film below (which is available on Youtube). Your editor, in turn, passed the link on to another distinguished author of a recent book on the Spanish Civil War, Adam Hochschild, who was wowed: “Amazing. I’ve seen lots of still photos from this time—which must have been in the first month or two after the beginning of Franco’s coup—but didn’t know there was film.”
Per Schwartz: “This documentary film is one of a series of well-produced news features in many languages distributed worldwide in the aftermath of the Spanish antifascist victory of 19 July 1936.
The anarchosyndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT — National Labor Confederation) and its anarchist cadre, the Federación Anarquista Ibérica (FAI — Iberian Anarchist Federation) were the most powerful forces in the defense of the Spanish Republic.
The CNT-FAI, in the antifascist front, possessed a unique international network of intellectuals capable of issuing compelling, modern propaganda.”
As Schwartz has rightly noted, “the moral and social power of the CNT-FAI” is best evoked by George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia. Passages like the following one from Homage still have the power to fire up readers:
Many of the normal motives of civilized life—snobbishness, money-grubbing, fear of the boss, etc. –had simply ceased to exist…However much one cursed at the time, one realized afterwards one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word “comrade” stood for comradeship not, as in most countries, humbug. One had breathed the air of equality…In that community where no one was on the make, where there was a shortage of everything but no privilege and no boot-licking, one got, perhaps a crude foretaste of what the opening stages of Socialism might be like. And, after all, instead of disillusioning me it deeply attracted me. The effect was to make desire to see Socialism established much more actual than it had been before.
Schwartz notes there’s a Catalan edition of Orwell’s classic (Homenatge a Catalunya) and he commends the original American edition with its lucid foreword by Lionel Trilling.
Trilling, man of the center-left, wasn’t much moved by Orwell’s “foretaste” of socialism. It was Orwell’s opposing self that made him a “figure’ for Trilling. Orwell had the great “virtue of not being a genius, of fronting the world with nothing more than one’s simple direct, undeceived intelligence, and a respect for the powers one does have, and the work one undertakes to do.”
I’m guessing most readers who do homage to Homage would be more thrilled than Trilling by a documentary film that seems in touch with Orwell’s felt sense of solidarity. Any undeceived intelligence, though, would have to allow there’s something off-putting about the film too. Its anti-Catholic fervor is a reminder “our” side of the war against fascism and Stalinism in Spain joined in a Red Terror that resulted in the murder of thousands of Catholic priests.
A day or two after I saw the report on Revolutionary Barcelona, I watched a reconstructed version of Eisenstein’s 1937 film Bezhin Meadow, which I’d hoped would be a version of the great Turgenev story by that name in A Sportman’s Sketchbook. While there are echoes of Turgenev’s tale, the film turned out to be a compelling piece of anti-Kulak, Stalinist propaganda (though Koba the Dread didn’t go for it). I’ll take Schwartz’s point that back in that day there were plenty of intellectuals with a knack for propagandizing, but there may be a little more to say here. Eisenstein’s knack for effective agit-prop isn’t all he shared with anti-fascists who documented Barcelona in 1936. A scene in Bezhin Lea, where peasants trash the Village church after evicting bad Kulaks who’d been hiding out there, underscores another conjunction. Eisenstein’s film is marked by a fervid anti-clericalism. Just like revolutionary Barcelona’s testament, which is full of rage at the Catholic Church. It’s daunting to realize Orwell’s heroic Spanish comrades had something inhumane in common with their Stalinist foes–a nasty bias against religion. B.D.