for whom the bell tolls: reverberations from the spanish civil war april 1997 photo: a scene from YOUR NAME POISONS MY DREAMS

"They wrote in the old days that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country. But in modern war there is nothing sweet or fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason." -- Ernest Hemingway, in Notes for the Next War, after witnessing the treachery and waste of the Spanish Civil War On the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the beginning of the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), The Film Society of Lincoln Center, ALBA (The Abraham Lincoln Brigades Archives) and the Cervantes Institute are proud to present a series of films illuminating one of the most idealistic and most tragic wars ever waged. Just three years before Hitler plunged the whole world into war, he and Mussolini bankrolled Generalissimo Francisco Franco in a brutal military coup in Spain, providing his Nationalists with arms and supplies in their suppression of the Republicans or Loyalists. The western democracies remained non-interventionist, cutting off the flow of arms to the beleaguered Loyalists; ironically, support--with strings attached--came from the Soviet Union's anti-fascist regime. From the USA, France, England, Germany, Italy, and 47 other countries, nearly 40,000 idealistic volunteers arrived in Spain to fight in International Brigades alongside the out-gunned, out-numbered, incredibly courageous Republicans. Among the Europeans were André Malraux and George Orwell. The American contingent was dubbed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade; of the 3,000 who signed up, 1,000 were killed and many of those who came home were blacklisted as "premature anti-fascists." Hemingway's Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls is loosely drawn from men who enlisted in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. This series presents Spanish and an "international brigade" of filmmakers, each of whom offers different perspectives and memories of a bloody conflict that has become the stuff of legend. -- Kathleen Murphy At presstime, we expect filmmakers Pilar Miró, Abe Osheroff, Judy Montell, Barbara Salomon, and Jorge Amat to attend. The series has been curated by Wendy Keys at the Film Society of Lincoln Center; Julia Newman, member of the Board of Governors of ALBA; José-Maria Conget of the Cervantes Institute; and Fredda Weiss, member of the Board of Governors of ALBA. With special thanks to the Cervantes Institute for support and assistance. calendar program notes and times

a scene from YOUR NAME POISONS MY DREAMS a scene from LAND AND FREEDOM

Note: DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES, WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER, LAND AND FREEDOM and FOREVER ACTIVISTS! / ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE VETERANS are mainly or entirely in English. ON THE EMPTY BALCONY will be in Spanish without subtitles. Simultaneous translation will be provided. GUERNICA is in French without subtitles. All other films are in Spanish with English subtitles. EN EL BALCON VACIO / ON THE EMPTY BALCONY Jomi Garcia Ascot, Mexico, 1962; 70 minutes Settled in Mexico, a woman (the director's wife, who also wrote the script) wrenched from her native Spain during the Civil War, revisits in memory the traumatic flight from her home. Projecting herself back into childhood, she re-experiences the fear and wonder of a child caught up in shattering adult events. This rarely screened masterwork was filmed with nonprofessional actors--Spanish exiles and Mexican intellectuals who sympathized with the Spanish Republic. BALCONY was made with the help of Gabriel García Márquez, Alvaro Mutis (playing the undercover policeman in Pamplona), poet Tomás Segovia, novelist Juan García Ponce, and many other illustrious names. Friday, April 25: 2 and 6:15 pm Saturday, April 26: 9:15 pm TU NOMBRE ENVENENA MIS SUENOS / YOUR NAME POISONS MY DREAMS Pilar Miró, Spain, 1996; 120 minutes With the title derived from a famous verse by the exiled Spanish poet, Luis Cernuda--España, tu nombre envenena mis sueños--Miró's film reconstructs the Madrid of the Civil War era and the harsh postwar period through a series of characters who embody different types of losers. It is, at the same time, a thriller, a reflection on the difficulty of "telling the story" of the 1936 war, and a tale of personal revenge--the avenger in this case being a woman. This chronicle of a disastrous amour fou was adapted from the novel of the same name by writer and politician Joaquín Leguina and stars two of the most popular young actors in the contemporary Spanish cinema: Emma Suárez and Carmelo Gómez. Friday, April 25: 4 and 8 pm Saturday, April 26: 7 pm DREAMS AND NIGHTMARES Abe Osheroff and Larry Klingman, USA, 1974; 60 minutes "Fascism doesn't like to have its picture taken," comments Abe Osheroff, the carpenter who returns to Spain many years after his service in the Abraham Lincon Brigade. Osheroff documents Franco's suppression of all dissent, especially by workers, and American complicity in the dictator's original victory and continuing power. This painful journey into the politics of pragmatism culminates in a prayer for an end to all war. with WHEN THE WAR WAS OVER Barbara Probst Solomon, USA, 1995; 60 minutes In 1948, Barbara Probst drove with Norman Mailer's sister and a young Spanish expatriate from Paris into Spain to rescue several students from one of Franco's jails. Probst's mesmerizing photographs and film reveal not only her own upper middle-class Jewish-American perspective on WWII and its aftermath, but also on the terrible complexity of postwar Europe and the young people caught between a bloody past and an uncertain future. A rich and enlightening personal memoir. Saturday, April 26: 4 pm LAND AND FREEDOM Ken Loach, UK/Spain; 1995; 109 minutes "Why does it always take a foreigner to explain our past to us?" -- Carlos Boyero, Madrid critic Beginning in the present, Ken Loach's passionately revisionist film begins as a young Liverpool woman discovers at her grandfather's death that he fought in the Spanish Civil War. Time-tripping back to 1936, this toughly immediate film shows how David (Ian Hart), a young unemployed worker and idealistic British Communist Party member, learns firsthand the ways in which Stalinists betray the anti-fascist forces. The thrust of anti-capitalist Loach's hard-hitting exposé is that the Spanish revolution could have been won by the workers and that such a victory might have changed the course of the 20th century. Ending with the old Englishman's funeral, LAND marks a demise of socialist idealism. With Rosana Pastor as the fiercely beautiful Blanca, David's Spanish love. Sunday, April 27: 4 and 8:15 pm FOREVER ACTIVISTS! / ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE VETERANS Judy Montell, USA,1991; 60 minutes A powerfully moving history of the war and postwar ordeals and the continuing activism of Abraham Lincoln Brigaders--from the Spanish front to homeland blacklisting to ambulance support for Nicaraguan rebels, on the occasion of the Brigade's 50-year reunion. with SPANISH EARTH Joris Ivens and Ernest Hemingway, 1937; 53 minutes "A documentary filmmaker has to have an opinion on such vital issues as fascism or anti-fascism--he has to have feelings about those issues, if his work is to have any dramatic, emotional or art value." -- Joris Ivens Archibald MacLeish, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, and other writers raised $3,000 to send Joris Ivens to Spain to shoot an on-the-scene documentary about the Civil War--to generate money for ambulances. John Dos Passos was replaced by Ernest Hemingway as writer and narrator. Ivens focused on the symbolic link between besieged Madrid and the small village that produced the city's food, embodied in a young peasant who has become a Republican soldier defending Madrid: "Working the earth and fighting for the earth." This landmark documentary pulses with immediacy and passion, but its spare imagery and narration aensure that it consistently transcends propaganda. Sunday, April 27: 6 pm Friday, May 2: 4 pm

a scene from COUSIN ANGELICA a scene from CANCIONES PARA DESPUES DE UNA GUERRA

LA PRIMA ANGELICA / COUSIN ANGELICA Carlos Saura, Spain, 1974;105 minutes Three times turned down by Franco's script censors, Saura's COUSIN was essentially unshowable in Spain after part of the print was stolen from a Madrid theater and a Barcelona moviehouse was firebombed for screening this cinematic remembrance of things past. As a middle-aged, bachelor businessman (the superb José Luis Lopez Vasquez) travels to Segovia in 1973 to re-inter his mother's bones, he finds himself on a psychological pilgrimage back to the summer of 1936 when, as a ten-year-old, he was stranded by the outbreak of the Civil War with his anti-Republican relatives. It was then that he first fell in love with Angelica, his cousin, now unhappily married and a mother. In dreams and memories (recalling the flow of Bergman's Wild Strawberries), Luis walks into his past and tries to alter the present. Saura paints complex history and obsessive personal memory into a picture of a whole country's waking dream--or nightmare. (Winner, Golden Palm, Special Jury Prize, Cannes Film Festival) Wednesday, April 30: 4 pm Thursday, May 1: 4:15 and 6:30 pm CANCIONES PARA DESPUES DE UNA GUERRA Basilio Martín Patino, 1971; 105 minutes Patino's evocation of Spain's postwar period takes the form of contrasting the songs that were popular at the time with the images presented in official documents. The music and lyrics are not only a review of the sentimental education of several generations of Spaniards, but also an ironic, sometimes ferocious, always intelligent commentary on the cinematographic material that accompanies the songs. Patino's complex montage was completed between 1968 and 1971, but Spanish censors prohibited its screening. CANCIONES finally premiered in 1976, after Franco's death and with the support of King Juan Carlos. Tuesday, April 29: 4 pm Friday, May 2: 2 pm RAZA José Luis Sáez de Heredia, Spain, 1941; 119 minutes Probably the only film written by a dictator to glorify a war that he initiated and that elevated him to power: Franco himself created this mythification of himself and his family. An extraordinarily revealing film about the ambitions, retrospective fantasies, and character of the man who for 40 years controlled every aspect of Spanish life. Franco also controlled every detail in the making of RAZA, including the extreme idealization of family life, the military, and his vision of the war that tore his country apart. (When RAZA was reissued after WWII, insulting remarks about Americans were excised.) Tuesday, April 29: 2 pm Wednesday, April 30: 8:15 pm Saturday, May 3: 4 pm CHRONICLES OF HOPE Jorge Amat, 1996; video, 107 minutes "You can go proudly. You are history. You are legend." -- La Pasionaria, 1938 Originally shown on French and Belgian TV, CHRONICLES consists of deeply moving interviews with survivors of the Republican Army and the International Brigades--including Enrique Lister, one of the Republic's best generals; Artur London, who later survived a Communist purge to publish an account of his interrogation and trial, turned into a film by Costa-Gavras; Henri Tanguy, commander of a French brigade; Bill Alexander, commander of a British brigade; Milton Wolff, Saul Wellman and other veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. An invaluable commemoration of character tempered in the forge of history. with GUERNICA Alain Resnais, 1950; 10 minutes Practicing for WWII, the Germans dropped enough bombs on the ancient Basque town of Guernica during the Civil War to level it. This outrage was forever memorialized, in rage and grief, by Picasso in his horrifically beautiful painting Guernica. Resnais employs the painting and Maria Casarés's narration of a passionately poetical text by Paul Eluard to create what's been called "a hymn to innocence and peace." Wednesday, April 30: 2 pm Friday, May 2: 6 pm ESPOIR / MAN'S HOPE aka SIERRA DE TEREUL André Malraux, 1939-1945; 73 minutes The history of this highly acclaimed film is almost as interesting as its plot: The only feature directed by writer and Spanish Civil War veteran Malraux, based on his novel L'Espoir, was begun in 1938 but shut down by Barcelona's surrender to Franco. Later smuggled into Paris, MAN'S HOPE was finally completed but had to wait until the Germans left for its first screening, with an altered ending and a governmental apologia tacked on. As in Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls, the story turns on the Republicans' attempt to blow up a bridge to prevent arms shipments to Franco's troops. Though MAN'S HOPE was shot almost entirely in a studio, Malraux makes warfare and death an authentically visceral experience. Thursday, May 1: 2 and 8:45 pm