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L'espoir
Andre Malraux' film of his own novel of the Spanish civil war, Man's Hope. The location shooting was done as the war was drawing to its unhappy end, with a cast drawn largely from the Republican troops; Malraux hadn't finished it when Franco's troops took Barcelona, and the film had to wait for release until the Germans left France. As propaganda, the film has many of the elements that would later solidify in Hollywood: centered on a single bombing raid over a Falangist airfield, it resembles in particular Howard Hawks's Air Force. Yet Malraux' strange stylistic brew of documentary footage, poetic symbology, and the novelistic division of the action into episodes and chapters seems designed to defeat the intense emotional involvement that propaganda requires. It isn't a great film, but it is a great curiosity piece (1938-1945). |
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