The recovered newsreels that recounted the Spanish Civil War in the US: ‘A nation divided threatens to destroy itself’
A foundation is digitizing the nearly 300 films that the Hearst Corporation recorded during the conflict and were shown in American movie theaters
“Kill or be killed is the slogan on both sides as Spaniards fight Spaniards,” said the pompous voice-over on the newsreel that was shown before watching, say, Tarzan Escapes, starring Johnny Weissmuller. American audiences got their information in movie theaters about what was happening at home and around the world through a couple of newsreels a week, each with five to nine stories. These films from the Hearst Corporation (the tycoon that Orson Welles turned into Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane) were broadcast in theaters across the country from 1929 until 1967, when another medium, television, took over homes.
In 1981, the tapes “were donated by Hearst to the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where they were not kept in optimal storage conditions,” says Spanish historian Silvia Ribelles, who has worked for the last two years for The Packard Humanities Institute, a foundation dedicated to the humanities that belongs to the technology company HP. This institution, after an agreement with UCLA, is responsible for restoring and digitizing the films and uploading them to the website newsreels.net, where they can be viewed free of charge.
This set of “thousands of recordings, totalling nine million meters of film,” adds Ribelles, recounted historical events such as World War II, successive presidential campaigns in the U.S. or the Arab-Israeli conflict, although they also include images from the end of the 19th century. The website offers the option of viewing them by topic: communism, atomic energy, space, fashion, royalty, baseball... Ribelles points out, however, that her next task will be to create a website containing only the recordings from the Spanish Civil War.
For Spanish researchers and the public, the 288 films about the Civil War are of greater interest, ranging in length from one minute to one of 26 minutes recounting the situation on the Vizcaya front. The first reference to the conflict is in the newsreel of July 27, 1936 (nine days after Franco’s failed coup d’état), with the title “Spain closes the border as the revolt worsens.” These are images without sound from a video whose description reads: “A nation isolated and devastated by war. American warships arrive to rescue refugees.” There is barely 40 seconds of footage of people crossing the border with France at Irún. To witness the opening exchanges of the war, you have to jump to the newsreel of August 10, in which, with dramatic music in the background, young militia fighters in Madrid, both men and women, some of them teenagers, can be seen taking up positions in the Guadarrama mountain range.
“These newsreels were shown in Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer cinemas,” says Ribelles, who recently presented the results of this work in Madrid. In order to be able to view this material now, including the outtakes — which were not broadcast and lack sound, except for one — “first the films were cleaned, then they were transferred from 35-millimeter format to digital format, and finally they were uploaded to the web.” “Then there was a second phase, already in digital format, in which they were cleaned of noise again,” explains Ribelles, whose doctoral thesis dealt with the humanitarian work of the “British Royal Navy in ports in Asturias during the war, when British merchant ships protected by the Royal Navy rescued some 46,000 people.”
In one of the videos, from August 3, 1936, a crowd is seen in the Plaza del Castillo in Pamplona bidding farewell to those leaving for the front. “The Church gives its blessing and rebel [Nationalist] volunteers, both men and women, enlist in the Spanish Civil War, which has already claimed thousands of lives and left many cities in ruins,” says the announcer. Next, images of attacks on priests and churches are shown: “The hatreds engendered spare no one.”
From the unpublished material, the historian highlights the images of a soldier loyal to the Republic who died in the first days of the war, Augusto Pérez Garmendia, commander of the General Staff in Oviedo. Pérez Garmendia was wounded in Oiartzun, a town in the northern Basque province of Gipuzkoa, and taken prisoner by the rebels. “The film clears up doubts about his capture.” A graphic testimony with which Ribelles “realized for the first time the value that these discards could have.” She also highlights those that show scenes in the rearguard, “especially the daily life of citizens and soldiers on both sides.”
Naturally, in many recordings the emphasis was placed on everything related to the interests of the United States or its citizens, as when the statements of the U.S. ambassador, Claude G. Bowers, are recorded: “Every effort is being made [...] to evacuate Americans from the danger points.” Later, the narrator explains: “Many [Americans] were on vacation when the hell of war broke out around them. They are frightened, but they are thankful to be out of a land where no one knows when the end will come.” The state of alert in which other neutral countries found themselves due to the situation in Spain is also recorded: “Under the frowning Rock of Gibraltar, the cannons [of British warships] are ready to defend British dominion of the Mediterranean.”
Only a month after the outbreak of war, it is reported that, according to the Red Cross, the conflict “has claimed more than 35,000 lives.” “It is a war without mercy. There are no rules.” “Desolation and death become commonplace. A divided nation threatens to destroy itself.” The Hearst Corporation boasts that its reporters capture “actual scenes of fighting everywhere, on the rebel and government [Republican] fronts” and, at the same time, “moving scenes of refugees fleeing to Hendaye, France, forced to abandon their homes.”
As the war draws to a close, a recording from March 29, 1939 reports that “indescribable terror” reigned in Madrid due to the air raids that “ravaged the ill-fated capital of Spain almost daily.” The voice-over adopts an elegiac tone: “A land of fear and despair, in which the flames of a ruthless conflict consumed entire cities.” And it predicts what could happen to the Spanish people while Franco’s soldiers are seen handing out pieces of bread to the hungry population of the capital: “After the surrender of Madrid, peace arrives. They do not know what Franco’s victory may portend, but peace today brings them bread instead of bullets.” Years of many bullets and little bread remained.
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