Staging the Spanish Civil War: History and Re-enactment in Joris Ivens’ The Spanish Earth (1937)

Abstract

This article studies how Joris Ivens deployed re-enactment in his Spanish Civil War documentary, The Spanish Earth (1937), relating it to the use of re-enactment by the historian R. G. Collingwood. By examining the historical context and analysing the film and texts by Ivens and Collingwood, I argue that re-enactment is in tension with the ethical responsibilities of documentary vis-à-vis criteria of authenticity. With re-enactment, Ivens inserts fictive elements into documentary even as he remains loyal to a certain ‘truth’ about the war, forging a style that is based on political documentary but which blurs the frontier between performativity and reality.