The Cine Technician (1938-1939)

THE CINE-TECHNICIAN The Journal of The Association of Cine-Technicians Editorial and Publishing Office: 145, WARDOUR STREET, LONDON, W.l. Telephone: GERRARD 2366. Advertisement Office: 5 and 6, RED LION SQUARE, LONDON, W.C. 1 . Telephone: HOLBORN 4972. Volume Four, Number Fifteen MAY-JUNE, 1938 Price Ninepence SHOOTING IN SPAIN By SIDNEY COLE. THE Italian bombers came at 10.30 p.m. Tbat was March 16th. Their raids continued through the night at half-hour intervals until 1.30 a.m., and alter that at 7.35 a.m. and 10.15 a.m. Lawson, Montagu, and I arrived back in Barcelona at 5 o'clock that afternoon in time for the further raids at 10.30 p.m., 1.15 a.m., 4.30 a.m., 7 a.m. and 10 a.m.. with two in the afternoon of the 18th (1.15 and 2.50) to finish off. To the envy of my colleagues I managed to sleep through two of the raids during the night. In these raids 1,400 people were killed and about 3,000 more injured. The Calle de Cortes, one of the big streets of Barcelona, was the scene of the most damage. Two hundred yards from the University, on either side of a street f.bout twice as broad as Regent Street, seven solidly built eight-story houses had been completely shattered. Two or three of them had vanished completely and it was possible to see through into the next street. Shots of this destruction figure in the two films — "SPANISH A. B.C." and "BEHIND THE SPANISH LINES" — which the units I was with went to Spain to make. The units comprised Ivor Montagu, producer; Thorold Dickinson and myself, directors; Arthur Graham and Alan Lawson, cameramen ; Kay Pitt and Phillip Leacock. cutters. But our main object was not to stress such horrors as these, but rather the every-day life of a country fighting a war on its own soil, an angle that gets rather overlooked when people have become accustomed to journalistic exaggeration. When I got back I saw the English papers of that period, with such headlines as "Barcelona In Flames". That was wildly far from the truth. Unless you happen to wander down the particular streets that have been hit the town presents a quite normal appearance. Another press comment that surprised me on m\ return was the article in the March issue of "World Film News" by Richard Butler, Lathe cameraman. Mr. Butler was only in Spain for nine days, whereas our stay was for ten weeks, and the picture he paints is very different from the one that we knew. All cars, he says, have painted on them the initials of the organisation to which the owner belongs and, of course, a sickle and hammer painted on somewhere". I never saw a single car with the initials of any political organisation jjrinted on it, and the absence of the sickle and hammer would probably have disappointed T/ie Daily Mail. The only initials I did see were U.G.T. and C.N.T. on the tramcars, buses and trains, to signify that the two Trade Union organisations, formerly deadly rivals, have composed their differences. In complete amity and very efficiently they conduct the transport services of Barcelona. I heard nothing of the loud-speakers Butler mentions as broadcasting propaganda and political songs until 1 a.m. in the morning. He must have been very unfortunate too, in the roads his chauffeur chose to take in his attempt to get to Madrid. Spanish roads are few in number but the main roads, although a little narrow for great volumes of traffic, are in good repair and quite well surfaced. But Butler's strangest anecdote is about the sentry who demanded his papers and then "mumbled something in Russian." I gather from the rest of the article that Butler possesses small French and less Spanish. He probably was not in Spain long enough to realise that Spain has quite a number of dialects and that what he rather hastily assumed was Russian was probably Catalan, the language of Catalonia, or even that almost entirely incomprehensible language, Basque. Anyhow, if it was Russian, Butler scores over us, because we did not see or hear one in the whole of our ten weeks. I was sorry to read that he got himself arrested (although newsreel cameramen are surely not entirely surprised when that sort of thing happens to them in a war zone). Had he been able to produce an A.C.T. card he would have found that membership of one's Trade Union carried weight in Republican Spain. We ourselves obtained all the facilities we wanted from the Foreign Press Department, who. although transport facilities were rather difficult at times, invariably gave us all the help they could. We became very used to being stopped on the roads by the controls stationed outside each town, and soon realised the paramount importance of possessing the proper credentials and authorisations. The cafes are full, even if some of the liquor sold doesn't exactly live up to the name on the bottle. The cinemas are always well attended. They have not been receiving any new films but the old favourites, such as Eddie Cantor, Popeye, Mickey Mouse and the Marx Brothers are run again and again without any diminution of popularity. I visited a Music Hall, a sort of Barcelona