The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, February 8-14
Heart of Spain (1937)
Directed by Frontier Films
The Spanish Civil War began as a national fight between a democratically elected government and an insurgent force seeking to topple it, then soon turned into an international fight between the Left and Fascism. The war resulted in the taking of power by Francisco Franco’s Nationalist party and, with it, an enabling of other forms of Fascism around the world. Yet the struggle waged in favor of the Second Spanish Republic between 1936 and 1939 by the International Brigades—a group of more than 30,000 fighters and activists organized from various countries by the Communist International—still continues to inspire many today through its lessons of how a united global front against tyranny might still be possible.
Light Industry will show two anti-Fascist films made during the Spanish Civil War by non-Spanish filmmakers. One of them, 1937’s The Spanish Earth, is a well-known documentary about civilian resistance and endurance shot compassionately by Joris Ivens and narrated forcefully by Ernest Hemingway. The same year’s lesser-known, remarkable Heart of Spain was made by a leftist group known as Frontier Films, with the American Herbert Kline and the Hungarian Geza Karpathi co-documenting and the tremendous team of Leo Hurwitz and Paul Strand co-editing. The film begins in a bombed-out Madrid and eventually moves from showing a variety of people who have lost blood into a hospital where others await to donate it. From images of children keeping watch over their neighbors through gentle bedside gatherings of strangers devoted to saving each other’s lives, the film finds ways to evoke a hopeful spirit through depictions of solidarity found in acts of simple human kindness. The film’s title comes from a line spoken by its narrator (John O’Shaughnessy): “From the heart of Spain bleeds blood to renew life.” Aaron Cutler (February 14, 7:30pm at Light Industry with Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth)