Spain, a country in arms: How the Civil War was reported in US newsreels

The new year opens with the release of Modern Times, Chaplin’s final film, which reflects the mentality, daily life and precariousness of North American industrial society. The magic of cinema allows audiences to forget, leave the crisis behind and project a new truth to the world. Minutes before the film — then circulating across the United States — begins, viewers watch the newsreel, a visual roundup of current events. The screening on July 15, 1936, is devoted to the San Fermín festival in Pamplona, the city where the civic-military coup came to a head soon later, in the words of chief planner General Emilio Mola — a thwarted coup that leads to a long civil war. Barely 10 days later, American cinema audiences witness the closure of the French border and see their own ambassador announce the dispatch of ships to rescue compatriots. The camera returns to the streets of Pamplona: the festival has become a military parade and women’s organizations march in perfect harmony with the background music. The American eye, like the rest of the world, fixes on Spain, a country in arms, turned into Europe’s battleground.

These previously unseen images are part of one of the largest historical film archives in the world. A vast collection — nine million meters of 35mm film — shot at locations around the globe to produce the so-called Hearst newsreels, produced by the press magnate William Randolph Hearst’s corporation and shown in U.S. cinemas between 1914 and 1967. Within this enormous collection are 288 reels recorded during the Spanish Civil War. They amount to nearly 30,000 meters of film, most of it unknown. All this material, donated to the University of California in 1981, has been digitized and can be consulted on the website www.newsreels.net; it is part of a large project still under development.

Researcher Silvia Ballester, who has worked on it for years, acknowledges that the original descriptions of the films are incomplete and, in many cases, erroneous. This is a problem shared by most of the major collections that have surfaced in recent years on the Civil War: the National Library, the Keystone Agency — which has transferred part of its holdings to the University of Alicante — Gerardo Contreras’s in Madrid, Jalón Ángel’s in Zaragoza, Gerda Taro’s in Barcelona, and Katy Horna’s and Margaret Michaelis’s in Amsterdam, to name only some of the most recent. All of them have undertaken major conservation and digitization work on images that often lack dates, identifications of people, or the places and circumstances in which they were taken. Despite these limitations, they open a portal back to the moment when Spain captured the world’s attention, while connecting to another phenomenon that began then: how political decisions are projected to public opinion through images.

The American stance takes shape quickly. Neutrality and humanitarian aid become the two basic principles the newsreels begin to repeat at least from August 3, 1936, when the narrative of nonintervention first appears fixed in images. They structure three distinct groups: the two warring sides, the suffering of the civilian population, and humanitarian assistance to refugees. That same day, for example, footage of northern cities controlled by the rebels is shown again, but a striking visual contrast is introduced with scenes from the east and the south of the country. American audiences see, for the first time, a train filled with Republican militiamen with their fists raised. Tension is resolved in the final minutes thanks to a camp of children laughing and playing with the large helmets of the British police in Gibraltar. Like British and French newsreels, the American ones sought to be impartial; they did not convey the idea of an internationalized conflict but rather its consequences, through spectacular, emotive shorts with a breathless pace. A week later, under the usual whirlwind of silent films, fighting in the Sierra de Madrid and the siege of the Alcázar of Toledo — “the Spanish West Point” — follow. Their cameras arrived before military censorship and rival propaganda intervened. An army in espadrilles, armed with outdated weapons from before World War I and made up of men and women alike, storms the Castilian city. While the voice-over speaks of revolution and a merciless war, an endless line of dead stretched out on a road to nowhere. That is where we must look. A tragedy, a horror, that we never fully internalize. The newsreels return us to the heart of our barbarity while allowing us to explain and defuse the visual machinery of deception and lies that still surrounds the Spanish Civil War.

An important particularity of these newsreels is that they preserve outtakes and footage that were not projected in cinemas. Material that is very difficult to locate but offers enormous historical and anthropological richness about the Civil War. They are true masterpieces of the seventh art. Amid the smoke and the rush toward Madrid, one can see the rebels’ arrival in the satellite town of Getafe, the moment they spot their objective — the capital. Battle scenes and hand-to-hand combat are shown, in which women are fully present. They are aimed at an audience accustomed to such content, with a weekly slot dedicated to “women’s topics.” The war is inserted into leisure and entertainment — cinema — with everyday scenes from Guadarrama to the Casa de Campo in Madrid and from Málaga to the Aragón front, of that improvised popular army called the “militia,” one of the few echoes of its own civil struggle. There are other, much less known and more unusual images, such as the interview with Manuel Hedilla, the Falangist leader who carried a safe-conduct allowing him to move freely and who spoke of his political project before falling from favor after refusing the Franco unification decree. This material, discarded in some cases for its harshness or in others for departing from the American official narrative of neutrality, also undermines a false stereotype: neither the agencies nor the foreign war correspondents massively supported the Republic.

In early September, 1936, in fact, when the advance on Madrid reaches an unstoppable pace, Secretary of State Cordell Hull declares that “the color of peace is the color of civilization,” a clear reference to the anticipated end of a conflict that the international community takes as a given. This is not his only appearance in the newsreels. His messages are based on reports from Ambassador Claude Bowers and on coverage by the main newspapers following the civil war. The New York Times, The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and The Nation show the intense pressure from the Catholic lobby to impose the Neutrality Act and to implement an arms and oil embargo — measures that clearly favored Franco, who was supplied in much larger proportion. However, a significant portion of public opinion — acknowledged by the secretary of state himself — was sympathetic to the Republican cause; thus, without departing from the nonintervention policy designed by the British, U.S. attitudes toward the Spanish Civil War evolved. A calculated ambiguity that is transmitted visually through cinema and the newsreels. The shift of the war to the north, to the country’s industrial heartland, is one such turning point. Reports with maps and graphic materials prepared by the Embassy and the State Department followed one another, warning of German plans to incorporate Morocco and Spain into their colonies. While Italy celebrated the annexation of Ethiopia and the voice-over spoke of the half million dead in Spain’s war, the screen fixed its attention on one point: Gibraltar.

Shortly after, the first recordings of the bombing of Guernica are shown — “the sacred city of the Basques” — as dawn breaks over smoking ruins and burning houses; a feeling of terror and anguish that increases with the launching of the Deutschland, the German warship heading for the Strait’s waters, which contrasts with scenes from Bilbao or Santander where hundreds of starving children crowd the ports until ships arrive with humanitarian aid. This image of refugees is the last American audiences will see for a time. The Spanish conflict drags on, losing interest as attention shifts to the Sino-Japanese war, and the battle for Shanghai ultimately moves the focus to the Pacific. In the summer of 1937 Land of Spain premieres at the request of President Roosevelt himself, who invited League of Nations delegates to a White House screening. The project was entrusted to Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, with a script by writers Ernest Hemingway and John Dos Passos and a monumental narration by Orson Welles. It is one of the most harrowing testimonies of what was at stake for the entire world — and particularly America — in the Spanish war. After the screening, Roosevelt publicly expressed his sympathy for the Republican cause but acknowledged that he could not adopt any position other than nonintervention. The film was excluded from the distribution channels of a film industry unwilling to support any movie that might generate controversy or depart from the “American pacifism” declared by the president.

Despite the stance of most studios, screenwriters, writers, actors, and directors who put their vision of the conflict on film were not lacking. Many films were inspired by or fully depicted a war that became the world’s first media war. This is the central axis of Hollywood Against Franco, a documentary by Oriol Porta awarded at the New York Film Festival, which does more than compile those films: it explains how many were sidelined and ignored and, even more surprisingly, how some of cinema’s most iconic scenes from those films that were successful were neutralized or used to produce a version entirely contrary to the original. The best-known example is undoubtedly Casablanca, in which Rick’s past as a member of the International Brigades helps build Bogart’s character. Released in a context marked by the United States’ entry into World War II, it reaffirms the idea of freedom, civilization, and an irreconcilable conflict — images the Civil War newsreels had been showing for years. Rick’s Café Américain is the same place that shelters those fleeing terror, refugees leaving Europe for America, evading the Germans and their French Vichy collaborators. In Spain, the film premiered at the end of 1946 without the La Marseillaise scene and with Bogart placed in Ethiopia and Austria to avoid any of those references. But problems did not come only from Francoist censorship, as the case of writer‑screenwriter Alvah Bessie shows. After fighting with the Lincoln Brigade he returned to Hollywood, where he continued working until the witch hunts began and he was arrested by order of the House Un-American Activities Committee led by Senator McCarthy. Years later, the foundation that manages Charles Chaplin’s rights banned the use of a shot of the actor beside a poster that read, “The Nazis bomb Guernica,” deeming it a political exploitation of his image. The Civil War remains an uncomfortable past and its images continue to lie at the center of the global dispute.

Although the discourse of neutrality was deeply rooted in American cinema newsreels, they soon turned the growing external threats toward their own national security. After witnessing the devastating air power of the Axis, audiences saw J. Edgar Hoover present his flagship project, the FBI. Shortly after, in June 1938, they learned of the existence of an American counter‑intelligence agency through reports on Japanese naval power and Russian rearmament. By then, news of the war in Spain arrived with notable delay. Franco’s troops reached Castellón and entered Barcelona almost simultaneously. The war was lost for the Republicans. The Battle of the Ebro — the longest and most decisive of the war — vanishes from coverage, as does Juan Negrín’s intervention before the League of Nations. “Europe awaits the Czech surrender,” referring to the occupation of the Sudetenland by German troops, while the newsreel calls the Munich agreements a “pact of peace.” Preparations begin for recognition of Franco as the sole legitimate government of Spain, a position advanced jointly by the British and the French. Finally, the newsreels show the refugee exodus to France, insisting that they receive medical and humanitarian aid. There is no trace of the French concentration camps in the minutes devoted to the prisoners of war — “for them, the war is over.” The change of image culminates with the entry into Madrid. Franco, the new statesman, promises there will be no reprisals and replaces bullets with loaves of bread to aid a vast starving population. A fleeting message of peace that also fades amid the countless conflicts that unfold before American viewers’ eyes.

Prague, Warsaw, Paris, Dunkirk and, finally, Pearl Harbor. Spain will take a long time to reappear in American newsreels, in the context of the Cold War, when messages and technical means change completely. Traditions return — San Fermín and the Holy Week processions — but the lunar landscape of war disappears forever. Hollywood stars are received in Franco’s El Pardo residence and color floods the beaches. All these films are part of our history and have recorded hundreds of thousands of faces, moments and scenes that we must continue to identify and make available to general audiences, not ruling out the emergence of further important discoveries. Because the Civil War, like any history, remains a work in progress.

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