IV.

The Spanish Civil War

In contrast to the films from the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, the films made during the Spanish Civil War were more positive and were often used for fund-raising purposes abroad. Although there were both Italian and German feature films supporting the Nationalist cause, most important propaganda films supported the Republicans. The Dutch director Joris Ivens’ documentary The Spanish Earth (1937) was made at the instigation of a group of American writers that included Lillian Hellman and Dorothy Parker; Ernest Hemingway, who travelled with Ivens, read the commentary. It was filmed in the most difficult of circumstances, during bombing raids on the civilian population, and was immediately recognized as a passionate plea for humanity. Ivor Montagu, a British producer and Republican sympathizer, was responsible for three films: The Defence of Madrid (1936), Behind the Spanish Lines (1938), and Spanish ABC (1938), although Thorold Dickinson, who shared the credits on two of them, described them as being less like documentaries and more like “news reports ... snapshots in every sense of the word”. Spanish ABC, however, is certainly propaganda, although less for a regime than for education. “All the misfortunes of Spain”, Dickinson quotes from a Fascist newspaper, “come from the folly of teaching men to read.”