“1937-2017: Ricordando The Spanish Earth”

This essay traces the making of Joris Ivens’ documentary film The Spanish Earth (1937) in relation to the complex issues of memory and oblivion of traumatic events rendered in/through art forms. It was during the Spanish Civil War that people started to «see» reality in real time, through a «screen» (a documentary, a film, a photograph) and almost simultaneously on both sides of the ocean. It was during that war that a new perceptive schizophrenia started because, through new mediators of memory, people learnt to be simultaneously inside and outside the event, at once actors and spectators. Ivens, Hemingway, Gellhorn and Dos Passos are here discussed as questioning the ontological status of their diverse art forms, as well the ethical implications that the new scenarios of the time were posing to creative thinking. Hence, the making of The Spanish Earth becomes an interesting outpost to investigate the growing role of media in the construction of «historical accounts», as well as of shared or divided memories representing traumatic events. Similarly, it sheds lights on the thorny issue of USA neutrality at a time when opposing ideologies were fasting leading to a new, tragic World War.