Guernica (1950)
Directed by Alain Resnais, Robert Hessens

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).

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..?