Monday, August 20, 2007

Guernica (1950)

On April 27, 1937, in the midst of a grueling and increasingly brutal Spanish Civil War, the ancient Basque town of Guernica was subjected to an extended duration bombardment campaign by German forces in an unrelenting aerial campaign designed to demoralize the collective psyche of the Basque nation and to also show camaraderie (and military alliance) with the nationalists under Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Composed of a series of fractured, compartmentalized images that traces the evolution of the paintings and sculptures of cubist artist Pablo Picasso from 1906 to 1937 (leading to his masterwork Guernica) set against an evocative narrative ode written by French lyrical poet Paul Éluard and recited in an off-screen performance reading by Jacques Pruvost and María Casarès, Guernica is a thoughtful and passionate meditation on barbarism, warfare, and human resilience. Alain Resnais incorporates ingenious, rapid cut editing strategies and fragmented, subset images that not only visually integrate the principles of cubism in cinematic form, but moreover, reinforce the film's overarching, thematic structure of multifacetedness that subtly - but inescapably - reflect on Spain's (then) continued struggle under fascism at the end of World War II: (more)

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Download Torrent (with portuguese and english subtitles)

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