Reviews

Goya (Spain’s Academy Award)—people began to stop Chato on the street, recognizing his white hair immediately, to share stories of suffering or resistance, or simply to give him a hug. In these moments he would savor that the impunity of torturers and other perpetrators was now widely known, and that people were starting to see it not just as “the victims’ problem” but as something affecting society as a whole. But his hard work of activism never ceased. Chato travelled internationally with the film, with boundless energy, to seize the opportunity of bringing the discussion to other societies – and he never, ever forgot the International Brigades. At Sheffield Doc/Fest he visited the Plaque remembering the International Brigades and deposited flowers. At Toronto’s Hot Docs (North America’s biggest documentary festival) he said, deeply moved, “the Brigades represented the best of humankind”. After the screening an older lady approached him. Crying, she told him her name was Mora. “My father named me Mora because that was where he was stationed in Spain as a brigadista”. They embraced with tenderness.

Once we asked him how long we would fight. He responded: “Until we win. With the spoon in hand.”

Hasta siempre, white-haired warrior. We will carry on your spoon.

Almudena Carracedo and Robert Bahar are the directors/producers of The Silence of Others, which won the 2019 Goya for Best Documentary Feature (Spain’s Academy Award) and was shortlisted for Best Documentary Feature for the 91st Academy Awards. Their previous film, Made in L.A., won an Emmy. This article originally appeared in March 2020 in the online platform for Documentary magazine, published by the International Documentary Association, a nonprofit media arts organization based in Los Angeles.”

Judith Montell (1930-2020)

Judith Montell, prize-winning documentary filmmaker and long-time member of the ALBA Board of Governors, passed away on May 23 after a long illness.

Her best-known film was surely Forever Activists: Stories of the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was nominated for an Academy Award in 1991. She also directed shorter films dealing with the Lincoln veterans, including The Return of the Brigade, which focused on the 1996 reunions in Spain, as well as documentary footage of the dedication of the national monument to the Lincoln Brigade in San Francisco in 2008.

Her other work includes A Home on the Range, about the Jewish Petaluma community of chicken farmers in northern California, and a favorite at the SF Jewish Film Festival. Her last film, In the Image: Palestinian Women Capture the Occupation (2014) was made when Judy was 83. It was inspired by the work of B’Tselem, the human rights organization in Israel/Palestine, of which her daughter Jessica was the director at the time.

Besides her important films, Judy was active in the Bay Area post of the Veterans of the Lincoln Brigade for many years. It was her friendship with the vets that made her work accessible to a large public. She was a member of ALBA’s Honorary Board at the time of her death.

Film Review: What Can’t Be Seen

Mientras dure la guerra / While at War, dir. Alejandro Amenábar, 2019; La trinchera infinita / The Endless Trench, dir. Jon Garaño, Aitor Arregi, and Jose Mari Goenaga, 2019. Reviewed by Jo Labanyi

Spain’s memory boom of the last few decades has produced a flood of new films on the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath that invite the public to identify with the defeated Republicans. Unfortunately, many adopt a glossy, heritagemovie-like aesthetic while they simplify history into a fairy-tale plot of good guys vs. bad. The two films under review here both manage to avoid these traps. While at War, by blockbusting director Alejandro Amenábar, charts philosopher Miguel de Unamuno’s political and emotional roller-coaster ride during the final months of his life, as his initial support of Franco’s July 1936 military coup turned to a sharp condemnation. The Endless Trench, by Aitor Arregi, Jon Garaño, and Jose Mari Goenaga, tells the story of a modest town councilor in an Andalusian village who escapes persecution from the Francoists by holing up behind a false wall in his home for 33 years, from the beginning of the war in 1936 until a 1969 amnesty.

Both movies have won many awards in Spain and both boast wonderful cinematography and impeccable period sets and costumes. Yet they are anything but glossy. Both films make a smart use of darkness to show what cannot be seen. In The Endless Trench, it cloaks the restricted vision of the holed-up protagonist. In While at War, which attempts the difficult task of representing ideas through a visual medium, darkness has engulfed Unamuno’s anxiety-ridden home and the institutions that cramp freedom of expression.

For Amenábar, this isn’t the first time he’s risked making a film with a philosopher protagonist. His English-language Agora (2009) focused on the fourth-century Alexandrian woman philosopher Hypatia. Unamuno—known for his austerity—is an even less sexy subject for a movie. (In Agora, Amenábar could at least cast Rachel Weisz as Hypatia.) Still, Karra Elejalde’s Unamuno is brilliantly convincing. Much of the film consists of Unamuno’s arguments with Republican friends as he stubbornly clings to his belief that Franco’s coup will restore order. (Having raised the Republican flag on Salamanca’s City Hall as a Republican deputy in April 1931, in the years following he had become progressively alienated by what he saw as the Republic’s exclusionary politics.) The film’s dispassionate representation of Unamuno makes us aware of his unvoiced feelings, but its greatest strength are perhaps the women: Unamuno’s daughter María, who argues back at him, as well as the wives of his arrested friends, who are largely responsible for making him recognize that he was wrong.

Unamuno famously promoted contradiction as a way of life, and in the DVD extras Amenábar explains that he wanted to make the point that a debate between opposing positions is healthy in and of itself. Still, the film fails to properly explain the background to Unamuno’s initial support for Franco’s coup. It does a better job showing his disillusionment with the crassness of the military leaders and his painful realization, as more and more of his friends are shot or arrested, that he got things wrong. The plot predictably culminates on October 12, 1936, when Unamuno, as Rector of the University of Salamanca, takes advantage of his Día de la Raza speech—a ceremony attended by some of the coup’s military leaders—to denounce Nationalist violence in no uncertain terms. In this scene the film omits a central detail, probably because it would have been complicated to explain. Every year, Unamuno would use the occasion to honor the Philippine intellectual José Rizal, who was shot by the Spanish colonial authorities in 1896. According to Unamuno’s biographers Colette and Jean-Claude Rabaté, it was this tribute that provoked the Nationalist general Millán Astray, as a teenage hero of the colonial war in the Philippines, to jump up and interrupt Unamuno with the infamous cry “Long live death! Death to intellectuals!”

Unlike Amenábar’s film, The Endless Trench is not a drama of ideas, although it does depict the invisible and mostly unvoiced thought processes of its protagonist, Higinio, the sole surviving councilor in an Andalusian village where all the other Republican councilors are shot by the Nationalists. The film’s length, at 2 hours 21 minutes, makes the point that 33 years in hiding is a very long time indeed. And this film, too, is a tribute to the strength of women: Higinio’s wife Rosa keeps him going, fending off harassment and earning a living as a seamstress. While the couple’s marital tensions help ward off sentimentalism, the movie also avoids high drama. When Higinio finally emerges into daylight, after initially mistrusting the news about the 1969 amnesty, there is no heroic welcome. In fact, no one notices him; he’s simply a man forgotten. The same restraint is evident in the film’s soundtrack, which relies less on music than on a sophisticated array of noises, which are all Higinio has to figure out what’s going on beyond his hiding place. Several sequences are shot in near or complete darkness, while intense use of point-of-view shots alternate with extreme close-ups of Higinio’s eyes peeping through the cracks in the entrance to his hideout.

The story is punctuated by a series of thought-provoking intertitles. The sequence titled “Ally,” for example, juxtaposes radio reports on Eisenhower’s 1959 visit to Franco’s Spain— betraying the Allies’ World War II fight against fascism— with the alliance Higinio establishes with the gay couple who use his house for their trysts while Rosa is away. Higinio keeps their secret in exchange for food. The point is clear: Francoism forced both the republican defeated and sexual dissidents into the closet.

The Endless Trench, now available on Netflix, has deservedly been a greater audience success. But While at War is an uncomfortable reminder that the story of the Spanish Civil War cannot be simplified into a mere two positions— Republicans versus Nationalists. There were many more in between.

Jo Labanyi is Professor Emerita at NYU. Her books include the co-authored Cultural History of Modern Literatures in Spain (Polity, 2021). She is working on a cultural history of the Spanish Civil War.

Book review

Christopher J. Castañeda and Montse Feu, editors. Writing Revolution: Hispanic Anarchism in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. 322 pp.

Reviewed by Morris Brodie

This new collection edited by Christopher J. Castañeda and Montse Feu fills a substantial historiographical gap in the English language on Hispanic anarchism in the United States. Several books on the American anarchist movement have ap peared in recent years, but none have devoted so much space to this particular diasporic radical community. The book follows the trajectory of the movement from its earliest days in the 1880s through to the late twentieth century, interspersing the lives of notable figures with important national and worldwide events such as the Haymarket Affair, the Cuba Libre movement and the Spanish Civil War. The focus is on the importance of Spanish-language periodicals—and individuals associated with them—in forming and sustaining the transnational networks that have been so important to anarchism since the late nine teenth century.

Readers of The Volunteer will be drawn to the book’s final part on the Spanish Civil War and exile, but to overlook the previ ous sections would be a mistake. The collection is sprawling in its ambition, with chapters ranging from discussions of early Spanish Republicanism and important but largely forgotten figures to analyses of individual newspapers and magazines. Despite this conglomeration of topics, the book flows easily, thanks in part to its chronological and thematic organiza tion. Several chapters expand on figures introduced earlier in the book, highlighting the role of individuals in maintain ing the movement. Although its subtitle suggests a focus on the United States, the book is far broader in its geographical remit, taking the Spanish language as its starting point. The result is a dismantling of the borders that sometimes frame radical history. In fact, one of the book’s strengths is how it places the experience of Spanish-speaking anarchists within the wider American and global anarchist movement. An interesting theme that emerges from the collection is how often Spanish anarchists living in Spain idealized the United States and its supposedly liberal democratic system. Immigrant Spanish anarchists were quick to correct this rose-tinted view of the young republic. Working conditions in the US were not noticeably better than those back on the peninsula, as shown by Kirk Shaffer’s contribution on Anglo racism against activists in the cigar factories of Tampa. There are surprises, too. One of my favorite chapters is Jesse Cohn’s account of a ‘global anarchist network’ in the heart of the Rust Belt in Steubenville, Ohio. This discovery challenges our perceived notions of Hispanic anarchism as primarily a coastal (East, West and Gulf) phenomenon. Castañeda has two chapters in the collection, both of which focus on anarchists’ attitudes to developments outside the US: the Cuba Libre movement of the 1890s and the Mexican Rev olution. The former is an illuminating account of the tensions between Cuban-born (creole) and Spanish-born (peninsular) activists in New York City. Some Cuban nationalists accused peninsular anarchists of prioritizing their own wages over independence, a claim that José Cayetamo Campos (a Cubanborn anarchist and editor of El Despertar) rejected outright. The chapter raises interesting questions about the relationship between anarchism, nationalism and anti-imperialism. Co-editor Feu has an equally thought-provoking contribution examining the Spanish anti-fascist exile newspaper España Libre and its anarchist editor Jesús González Malo. Feu’s discussion of ‘reformist’ anarchism after defeat in Spain is a counterpoint to those representations of anarchism as a sectar ian, ultra-revolutionary sect. The chapter on the Spanish Civil War itself is a well-argued piece by Michel Otayek that looks at the propaganda networks between Spain and the US during the conflict. Information exchanges between the Confeder ación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) in Spain and those across the Atlantic were fraught with difficulty, although I think Otayek is slightly too harsh in his treatment of the German Augustin Souchy, the head of foreign anarchist propaganda in Barcelona. The United Libertarian Organizations (ULO), the hub of US anarchist solidarity on the East Coast, initially sent its request for newspapers to the wrong address in Barcelona, which is symptomatic of a degree of disorganization on both sides of the pond. Images of some of the propaganda produced by the CNT for consumption overseas included in the chapter are a particularly welcome addition. The final chapter is an extended eulogy of Federico Arcos, a veteran of the Libertarian Youth (FIJL) during the civil war who moved to Canada in 1952. He later became a muchloved figure for the Detroit anarchist movement across the river from his adopted hometown of Windsor in Ontario. One memorable passage from this chapter by David Watson is when he describes Arcos’ desire to move forward from the civil war, unlike some of his comrades “whose watches seemed to have stopped when they crossed the Ebro River.” The anarchist movement spent decades rhetorically refighting the battles of the civil war, which served to ossify the conflict as an almost mythical ‘last stand’ between anarchism and the militarized capitalist state. This book shows that Hispanic anarchism in the US was far more than simply the civil war and its fallout—it was an enduring network of activists from an expansive geographical range, one that contributed an im portant, if perhaps forgotten, part to American working-class life and culture.

Morris Brodie is a historian at Queen’s University Belfast. His new book Transatlantic Anarchism during the Spanish Civil War and Revolution, 1936-1939: Fury Over Spain was recently published by Routledge.