Film Review
Pablo Picasso's symbolic painting
Guernica
is one of the most important artistic creations of the 20th
century. Commemorating the bombardment of a town in northern
Spain by German and Italian warplanes on 26th April 1937 during the
Spanish Civil War, it is both a stark visual record of one of the worst
war crimes in history and a symbol of defiance against future
atrocities of this kind. Early in his career, Alain Resnais made
Picasso's painting the centrepiece of his own attempt to honour the
memory of Guernica, a short film which, despite its modest duration (it
runs to just over 13 minutes) is among his greatest works.
The film begins with an introductory voiceover by Jacques Pruvost
outlining the historic events that culminated in the wanton destruction
of the Basque town of Guernica with the loss of around two thousand
civilian lives. This leads straight into an arresting montage
that is masterfully constructed from fragmentary shots of paintings,
drawings and sculptures by Pablo Picasso from 1902 to 1949, including
two of the artist's best known works, the 1937 painting
Guernica and his 1943 sculpture
L'homme au mouton. The images
may be taken from static objects, yet, from the way they are presented,
sliced and diced in the Cubist manner, they seem to speak to us, their
voices amplified by María Casares's mournful reading of
Paul Eluard's poem
Guernica
and a terrifyingly ominous score by Guy Bernard. Through his
rapid yet meticulous editing, Resnais manages to capture the full
savagery of war and its human impact, through a film of remarkable,
almost hypnotic power. Throughout, the faces of ordinary men,
women and children break through maelstrom of devastation, and we feel
we can hear the cries of the innocents as they are slaughtered,
shovelled like mice into the belly of a rampaging monster.
Guernica is the darkest, the
most brutal and most intense of Alain Resnais's films. With a
kind of unstoppable machine relentlessness that characterises modern
warfare, the stark images are fired at us like hails of bullets, the
innocence of the atomised victims juxtaposed against the insane
ferocity of war. The result is a grim but moving requiem for the
dead of all wars, all atrocities. Bleak as the film is, it
contains within it shards of hope for the future. These coalesce
into a shriek of defiance in the lingering shots of Picasso's statue
L'Homme au mouton which conclude
the film. After the cacophony of fractured images that preceded
it, this venerating portrait of a saint-like man carrying a bleating sheep
serves as a harbinger of peace for mankind. The final words of
the film express what we are bound to feel having had our eyes opened
and our minds attuned to the pageant of mindless destruction that
rained down on one Spanish town in 1937: "Innocence will overcome
destruction". This succinct revelatory short serves as a
prelude to Resnais's reflections on a similar human catastrophe (albeit
one on a far grander scale) in his first feature
Hiroshima mon amour (1959).
© James Travers 2014
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Next Alain Resnais film:
Les Statues meurent aussi (1953)
Film Synopsis
The work of the artist Pablo Picasso and a poem by Paul Eluard are
woven into this personal reflection on one of the most heinous of war
crimes, the bombing of the Basque town of Guernica at the time of the
Spanish Civil War. It was an event of unspeakable barbarity in
which around two thousand people, mostly civilians, were butchered at
the behest of General Franco. It has left its scar, another stain
on the blood-soaked tapestry of human history, but does Guernica offer
us hope for the future..?
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.