By Marie Trigona
For the Herald

The Leopoldo Lugones theatre is showing the retrospective, Anarchist film during the Spanish Civil War: Images from the rearguard, a series of documentary and fictional films reflecting ruffian counterculture, working class struggles, women’s emancipation and land collectivization during the years 1936-1938.
Angel Santos Garcés, curator of the series organized by the Huesca Film Festival, explains that filmmakers who followed an anarchist or libertarian ideology used the camera as a political tool.
"The filmmakers struggled to maintain an ideal and promote ideas." Santos Garcés added that these films reflect how the anarchist vision for a working class revolution changed with the war. The anarchists were not only fighting to defeat the rise of Francisco Franco but also fought for an egalitarian utopia.
The Spanish anarchist umbrella union, the National Confederation of Workers (CNT), produced over 100 documentaries and feature length fiction films between 1936 and 1937, in the midst of the war against fascism and a revolution. Film production during this period was collectivized and theatres functioned as political centres. The anarchists used the camera as a political organ and as a tool to reflect the subjectivity of the revolution. Film directors envisioned the films to show daily realities and social conflicts behind and on the battle front.
Santos Garcés explains that, for the series in Argentina, organizers decided to show the feature length films accompanied by short documentaries for the simple reason of time constraints and convenience. However, the CNT used the short documentary as a way to inform audiences of what was happening on the battle front at a time when television didn’t exist. First the news reel was shown and then the main feature came.
These films had wide distribution because of the reach and support of the CNT. The CNT managed 110 theatres in Barcelona alone. Films were also taken to the countryside with mobile movie theatres. The film workers’ union financed political cinema by selling tickets to Hollywood films. The CNT didn’t see this as a contradiction because it permitted the union to produce cinema which reflected the interests of the working class and exploited sectors. But like most film makers today documenting social conflicts, the films were made with very little resources.
"Many of the cameras went to the front lines and most of the best filming was done on the front. El frente y la retaguardia (The front and the rearguard) is the best one they made," said Santos Garcés. Filmmakers who stayed behind to document the organization behind the front (inside the factories now run by the workers, public services collectivized, and political assemblies) had little training in cinema.
However, the retrospective includes narrative films produced in the rearguard that maintain technical, artistic and political qualities in the script, photography and montage. These movies border traditional genres of cinema but with a particular libertarian vision and aesthetic. Santos Garcés said that even in the time of war the anarchist thought a lot about the importance of what went on behind the battle front. Filmmakers felt that the battles and victories in day to day life needed to be documented. "When we organized the festival, we decided to forget the battle front so that the images of the war also represent life behind the front line, which the majority of the population lived," said Santos Garcés.
Many of the films included in the retrospective were recovered, restored and premiered 70 years after the films’ original premiere. Not only did Franco liquidate soldiers and activists fighting for a democratic republic, his regime destroyed much of the historic documents from the anarchists and socialists. "When Franco took power in Spain, material produced by the Left was confiscated and destroyed," said Santos Garcés. Representatives from the Huesca film festival found much of the material housed at the Spanish film archive in Barcelona. However, organizers found 100 rolls of anarchist film in Mexico. A descendent of a combatant in the Spanish Civil War had smuggled the film out of Spain. Among this material, Aragón trabaja y lucha 1936 (Aragón Works and Struggles) was rediscovered.
Aragón Works and Struggles was lost after the war and only recovered recently. It was premiered again after nearly 70 years and was shown as part of the retrospective. This 16 minute documentary shows life in the Aragón region — peasants working on collectivized land, soldiers from the CNT front fighting in the trenches, the leader Buenaventura Durruti speaking to a rally, the power of the press, women and men dancing during their leisure time from the revolution.
Carne de fieras, a fiction film which will be shown on Saturday at the Sala Leopoldo Lugones, breaks conventions and taboos about sexual attractions and infidelity. During the presentation of the series at the Sala Lugones, Santos Garcés said that in the middle of the film’s production the director, Armand Guerra, wanted to stop and go film the battle front. The film workers’ union made Guerra finish so the crew wouldn’t lose their jobs. The film was completed but didn’t premier until the 1990s. Santos Garcés said that when the film was complete distributors found a full nude scene — a dancer stripping in a lion’s cage during a circus performance. They decided then to paint a bikini on the film strip to cover up the dancer, but the cost of this process was higher than the entire film production. Distributors decided to ban the movie from theatres.
While times have changed, we can now see this material restored and uncensored. This retrospective is a historic document of the rebellious spirit captured by the anarchists’ cameras. These films have never been released in Argentina and no prints will be left behind, meaning the Sala Leopoldo Lugones is indeed offering us a rare opportunity to view these historic films.

Where & when

TSM - Sala Leopoldo Lugones, Av. Corrientes 1530. Thursday: La silla vacía 18’, Nuestro culpable 87’; Friday: Barcelona trabaja para el frente 23’, ¡Nosotros somos así! 31’, El frente y la retaguardia 22’, La última 15’; Saturday: Carne de fieras 68’; Sunday: Otro futuro 160’
At 2:30, 5, 7:30, 10pm.

By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO

NEW YORK — For 20 years, German dance-theatre star Pina Bausch has been challenging audiences with her raw, monumental works.
As Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch prepared for its latest US premiere on Tuesday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, rumour had it that the celebrated queen of angst would present a more hopeful vision in Fur die Kinder von gestern, heute und morgen (For the Children of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow).
After viewing the three-hour spectacle, you’re left mainly with a sense of life’s absurd fragility.
The audience entered to find the curtain raised on Peter Pabst’s three-sided white room, an oversized classical salon with an imposing slab of a ceiling suspended from above. Fernando Suels eased himself over the rectangular back window and out a side entrance. He and Jorge Puerta Armenta returned carrying a table, on which they sat. Ever so slowly, Suels tipped to one side and over the edge, gaining speed. His head was inches from slamming into the floor when Armenta grabbed an ankle, righting him to delighted gasps and laughter from the audience.
Bausch repeated the joke several times, and each time it seemed Suels would crash — a surprising but apt metaphor for the sense of impending disaster that so often pervades contemporary life.
The 2002 work was reportedly developed, in part, from a Native American myth, How the Bat Came to Be, in which a squirrel, blinded and badly burned after freeing the sun from a tangle of tree branches, was rewarded with the gift of flight. In the fable, as in Bausch’s world, joy and pain go hand in hand.
An operatic whirlwind of theatrical vignettes, oft-repeated gestural themes, musical collage and chaotic action, Bausch’s enigmatic dance-theatre both sates and confounds those looking for meaning. Famous for avoiding journalists, when the 64-year-old choreographer does talk about her art she is, wisely, noncommittal.
At a recent press breakfast, for example, Bausch said, ‘‘I always try to speak about our wishes, our hopes, our desires, our fears. About love. About being human — how beautiful and fragile each person is. I think all of this together is what I have to say.’’
At the heart of her vision lies a desperate, unrealized hunger for connection. Though less violent than some of Bausch’s earlier takes on male-female relationships, beneath its patina of whimsy and wicked humour, For the Children... did not offer much hope for lasting understanding.
In one section, veteran Wuppertal dancer Dominique Mercy tried to compliment Nazareth Panadero on her beautiful figure, ‘‘so lovely and round.’’
‘‘You mean I’m fat,’’ came the reply, delivered in her wonderfully harsh and rich voice. The conversation quickly unraveled into a stiff-legged, flouncing solo by Panadero, as she and Mercy joyously tossed off breakup cliches: ‘‘Either you go or I go. If you go now, don’t come back.’’
The two seemed to be only playing at a relationship. Indeed, throughout the work there’s a sense of make-believe, as if the cast of 15 dancers were children, abandoned to their own devices amid Pabst’s movable walls. Emulating adult behaviour, they often tapped into bewildering emotional forces, only to jettison their roles for the latest distraction — be it the construction of a giant sandcastle or a game of Red Rover that had the women flinging off their stilettos and gathering up the skirts of designer Marion Cito’s party dresses.
Threaded through all of this mayhem was a series of brief solos performed by various Wuppertal members. Sadly, these ‘‘pure’’ dances did little to enhance the work’s emotional thrust, and did not differ enough from one to the next to allow the performers’ rich personalities to show.
Despite these weak points, For the Children of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow swept the audience into an imaginative smorgasbord that was, true to Baush’s words, ‘‘about being human.’’
Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch performs at BAM through November 21.
(AP)