War That Won'T Die: The Spanish Civil War in Cinema - Tapa blanda

The research is rich in specifics, and makes abundantly clear why the conflict presents a particularly fruitful subject of analysis in relation to these issues. In one of Archibald's aforementioned first-hand interviews, Guillermo Del Toro is quoted as saying that "every real event....needs an imaginary re-telling," and The War That Won't Die seems to concur, demonstrating the diverse ways that cinema can contribute meaningfully to debates about the past and its influence on the present. 'Archibald successfully demonstrates through his detailed and wide-ranging analysis, the 'elasticity of cinematic depictions' (p. 184) of the war and its unresolved political, emotional and social legacy. He emphasizes the importance of these contributions in helping understand both events of the Civil War and the difficulties of representing the past, from the point of view of the artist and the historian. The book demonstrates the appositeness of its title, 'The War that Won't Die' in that recent artistic depictions help us understand why the war's legacy is still so contested. While the book's lengthy and often unnecessarily detailed synopses of the films can at times create burdensome readerly headwinds it is a masterful case study on film's contribution to understanding historical events. Its accessible style will benefit students and more advanced scholars of film and the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath.' Sarah Lonsdale, CINEJ Cinema Journal, Vol. 7, No. 1 (2018) -- .

The war that won't die charts the changing nature of cinematic depictions of the Spanish Civil War. When the civil broke out in 1936, a significant number of artists, filmmakers and writers - from George Orwell and Pablo Picasso to Joris Ivens and Joan Miró - rallied to support the country's democratically-elected Republican government. The arts played an important role in shaping popular understandings of this dramatic historical period and this book examines cinema's specific role in this process. The book's focus is on fictional feature films produced within Spain and beyond its borders between the 1940s and the early years of the twenty-first century - including Hollywood Blockbusters, East European films, the work of the avant garde in Paris and films produced under Franco's censorial dictatorship. In providing critical analyses of a diverse range of cinematic depictions of the period, the book draws on, and situates these analyses within, contemporary debates on Spanish Civil War historiography, the philosophy of history, and the relationship between the past and its cinematic representation. The book highlights the elasticity of cinematic depictions of one historical event, and suggests that the civil war setting will continue to be one to which filmmakers turn as the battle for Spain's future is partially played out in the cinematically recreated battles of the past. The book will appeal to scholars and students of Film, Media and Hispanic Studies, but also to historians and, indeed, anyone interested in why the Spanish Civil War remains such a contested political topic.