Programme notes: Introduction to David Leach’s Voices from a Mountain
Marshall Mateer, IBMT Film Co-ordinator
During the period of the Spanish Civil War newsreels played an important part in making the
public aware of events in Spain and in shaping their emotional responses to it. Footage of
the bombing of Madrid in 1936 - showing civilians running through devastated city streets brought already widespread fear of ‘technological’ warfare throughout Europe to a new pitch.
The sounds of planes overhead and explosions on the ground reverberated in cinemas
throughout the land and provided a soundtrack for the images and stories in the
newspapers. The noises of bombing on the newsreels must have replayed in many reader’s
minds long before they had finished reading the accounts of Guernica or Barcelona.
The narration on the newsreels often sought balance between the Nationalist and Loyalist
sides in Spain, sometimes even confusing what side was being shown as footage was
edited together. They mixed the new edge of journalistic ‘actualité’ with humanitarian
concern and a tendency to distance the conflict from British interests.
Independent film-makers, such as the Progressive Film Institute, or PFI, in Britain, sought to
create a different, committed documentary form often using editing techniques influenced by
Russian film-makers - in particular Eisenstein - to record and present events. They also used
a different method of distribution: classified (small) ads in newspapers at 2d per word; 16mm
projection screenings in halls and meeting rooms throughout the country. The PFI film The
Defence of Madrid (Dec. 1936) was shown in hundreds of venues and raised £6,000 for
Spanish Relief. Discussion of Spain proceeded and followed the film shows and here in the
DCA today, in showing David Leach’s film Voices from a Mountain, we are following in that
tradition.
In Spain volunteers saw a mix of old features from Britain such as The Private Lives of
Henry Eighth and educative films of Soviet heroes such as Potemkin, Chapaiev and We are
from Kronstadt. In Madrid’s cinemas Marx was the big draw – Groucho and his brothers
rather than Karl. And in one instance, film might even have made a very practical difference,
when cinema projectors were used as searchlights.
For Whom the Bell Tolls, made in 1943, is the obvious example of Hollywood ‘doing’ the
Spanish Civil War and taking a ‘Republican’ point of view. But perhaps surprisingly, from as
early as 1937, Hollywood produced a whole sub-genre of Spanish Civil war romantic war
movies starring everyone from Ava Gardner to Dirk Bogarde. For example, the advertising
posters for Confidential Agent made in 1945, and based on a Graham Greene potboiler
written in 1939, declared; “You'll see the screen cook/when ‘the Lover’ meets ‘the Look!’" this was Charles Boyer vs Lauren Bacall. The format of romantic leads playing out their
passions through the stress and action of war in 1930s Spain became a standard form …
even reappearing many years later in such non-Hollywood films as Land and Freedom.
During the war itself the Spanish film industry in major cities such as Madrid and Barcelona
turned itself to propaganda and education film. As well as the newsreel footage some full
scale documentaries were made by production teams from outside Spain including the
American Spanish Earth - made by Joris Ivens with a script by Ernest Hemingway – which
appeared as early 1937. After the Civil War and the WW2 period, for the general public,
there were long periods of time when nothing new emerged and during which time newsreel
experience and the older films were forgotten.
Mourir à Madrid (To Die in Madrid), by Frédéric Rossif, was made thirty years later in 1963,
editing together archive footage Rossif had sourced from Spain and Russia. There are
French, Spanish and English versions. Heralded at the time it is now seldom seen; the
French version is on YouTube.
In Britain the silence was broken for many in 1983, the 40th anniversary of the War, with the
Granada TV series, The Spanish Civil War which, following the death of Franco in 1975, was
able to use newly available archive film and stills. The series appeared the year after Bill
Alexander’s Volunteers for Liberty was first published.
In Spain that more profound silence was broken with the emergence of independent voices
in Spanish cinema, even before the end of the Franco era with films such as the Spirit of the
Beehive using allegory and metaphor to skirt the censorship of the Spanish regime.
Today the plethora of documentary clips and films to be found on the internet rather clouds
their origins, as though everything had risen from the sediments of history to float around on
the surface; very accessible, some would say democratic, but without much context or a
sense of time. It certainly has created the opportunity for the hundreds of little home-made
films that mash up stills with music and that flood YouTube.
David Leach’s film, his labour of love, was made, twenty-five years later - at the beginning of
the new millennium in 2001 - but still before the rich flood of memoire and history we have
on our bookshelves today became available - three years before the publication of Richard
Baxell’s British Volunteer’s in the Spanish Civil War (2004) and well before archives and
citizen historians were digitising their collections and making them available worldwide
through the internet.
David’s film begins with the sun breaking through clouds over the Sierra Pandols, the high
mountains that rise above the River Ebro, whose dark waters flow past Zaragoza down to
the Mediterranean and which marks the line of The Republic’s final attempt to stem the
Nationalist advance. It was the longest battle of the Civil War lasting from July to November
of 1938 with the units of the International Brigades set amongst the lines of the Republican
army - they sustained terrible losses - not just the British and Irish but volunteers from
around the world and thousands of Spanish – casualty figures in the hundred thousand vary
with around 10,000 deaths on the Republican side and 6,000 on the Nationalist.
Since the war the rocky mountain slopes have undergone afforestation in many places with
pines growing alongside wild oaks and fragrant thyme. It was on such a hillside – Hill 666,
the site of fierce fighting - that a small concrete ziggurat was found in 2000 during
excavations in the area. It was constructed in August 1938 and on it are incised the names
of 35 fallen Brigaders, including from Britain: Lewis Clive, Harry Dobson, David Guest, Dr.
Haden Guest, Morris Miller, and Wally Tapsell. The memorial had remained hidden from
Francoists and escaped the edict to destroy all Republican graves and memorials; it became
the touchstone for David’s film.
David then raises the lens of his film to look beyond the Ebro to the wider Volunteer
experience - why they came, how they came and how they got on - through interviews with
five volunteers; George Wheeler from South London; Alun Menai Williams from South
Wales; Jack Jones from Liverpool; Sol Frankl from the East End of London; John Dunlop
from Scotland. The film ends with the return of the Brigaders to Britain and the famous
welcome home at Victoria Station.
In 2012 the IBMT led a tour of the Ebro battle fields and one evening David Leach joined us
and gave this brief introduction to the screening of his film, in another country, in another
small community hall, the Cultural Center at Cambrils – a small Spanish town on the coast.
David explained “It’s not ideological … it’s story-telling “. Recalling that his critics had
described his work as “an exercise in extreme left wing propaganda” he paused and said,
“I’m proud”- the audience applauded.
David was a trustee of the IBMT for some years, before moving to Spain where he organised
a plaque erected high in the Pandols on Hill 705 for the 90 members of the British Battalion
killed in the Battle of the Ebro. David moved to Australia where died in 2016.
Notes:
A 3-minute film of David Leach introducing Voices From a Mountain during an IBMT tour of
the Ebro iin 2013 can be seen on IBMT YouTube.
David Leach IBMT obituary – Page 16 Issue 43 3-2016 IBMT Newsletter – download as pdf
here:
http://www.international-brigades.org.uk/sites/default/files/IBMT3-16Web.pdf
Voices From a Mountain is on YouTube, placed there by David Leach himself, in four parts.
Part one: https://youtu.be/-iUIIqn8v58
The plaque to the British Brigaders on Hill 705 is on a wall with other plaques part of the
construction of a paved area jutting out on one side, it almost seems as if into space, with
panoramic views across the mountains. The central monument – a huge stone cube resting
on one of its corners with a peace dove sculpted into one surface - is to the ‘Quinta del
Biberón’ – the Republican teenage conscripts killed during the Battle of the Ebro.
Film Credits
Writer and Producer David Leach; Narrator Peter Wight; Director Andrew M Lee; full listing
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0415354/fullcredits?ref_=tt_ov_st_sm
For further information please contact [email protected]
IBMT www.international-brigades.org.uk