The Man Who Lost the Civil War: A Documentary Film (review)

2003 ◽  
Vol 67 (2) ◽  
pp. 649-650
Author(s):  
Joseph G. Dawson
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Review

Filming History and The Spanish Earth

2019 ◽  
pp. 127-156
Author(s):  
Lisa Nanney
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Military Personnel ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Ernest Hemingway ◽  
Multiple Perspectives ◽  
Relief Effort ◽  
Russian Military ◽  
The Relationship

Dos Passos was instrumental in initiating The Spanish Earth, a 1937 documentary film relief effort for the Republican fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War, although he likely did not contribute to its writing. Yet the dangerous, divisive circumstances surrounding the film’s creation and his collaboration with its Communist director Joris Ivens and with colleague Ernest Hemingway during its production in Spain challenged Dos Passos’s beliefs about the relationship between politics and art and profoundly affected his subsequent career. The execution of a Spanish friend, José Robles, at the hands of Russian military personnel who were ostensibly Republican allies, and a subsequent coverup, led Dos Passos to re-evaluate his leftist political positions, his professional alliance with Ivens, and his longtime friendship with Hemingway. The film and its circumstances raised complex questions about the dynamics between fact and fictionalization in documentary and the artist’s ethical and aesthetic responsibilities. Dos Passos’s choices to report fully on the repercussions of factionalization in the Spanish anti-fascist cause, to represent multiple perspectives of the looming greater European conflict, and to articulate unequivocally his conviction that Communism was compromising both European and U.S. leftist movements earned opprobrium from literary critics who had theretofore lionized him.

scholarly journals Film Review: The Fruit Machine

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-98
Author(s):  
Lynne Gouliquer ◽  
Carmen Poulin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Review ◽  
Dark Period ◽  
Canadian History ◽  
State Institutions ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Fruit Machine

The following is a review of The Fruit Machine documentary film directed by Sara Fodey. This documentary sheds light on a dark period in Canadian history. Using the testimonials of survivors and historical expert, The Fruit Machine film illustrates how a democratic state could legally wage a discriminatory campaign against its own citizens whose only crime was being (or suspected to be) “homosexual.” For fifty years, Canadian state institutions hunted down and interrogated thousands of individuals suspected of homosexuality. This film is a must see.

Documentary Film Review

1979 ◽  
Vol 2 (4) ◽  
pp. 423-424
Author(s):  
Craig A. Everett
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Review

Documentary Film Review

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 167-168
Author(s):  
Eva Knoll
Keyword(s):  
Documentary Film ◽  
Film Review

Memory within and without the photographic frame: Wadad Halwani’s The Last Picture… While Crossing

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 279-293 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Saadi Nikro
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Documentary Film ◽  
Video Footage ◽  
Public Exposure ◽  
Public Audience ◽  
A Site

Wadad Halwani’s short documentary film, The Last Picture…While Crossing (2009), is in the main about the late Odette Salem, whose two children were disappeared in September 1985, during the civil war in Lebanon (1975-1990). This essay discusses how Halwani adapts photographs and previously made video footage to situate Salem as a site of memory. While the film constitutes a memorial practice to tell a story of Salem and her activist milieu, it works to situate memory of her plight as an ethical modality of address and response. In doing so, the film exposes a public audience, both actual and potential, to Salem’s and Halwani’s circumstances and their arduous efforts in engaging their circumstances. The argument foregrounds memory as a circumstantial tension between the significance and resonance of photographs, in respect to circulations of photographic reproductions and exhibitions as modalities of public exposure.

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