Sierra de Teruel (Espoir)

This is the final sequence of the film Sierra de Teruel (Mountains of Teruel). It was directed by the French writer André Malraux that was shot in Spain in the final months of the Civil War and then completed in France. Drawing on his experience as commander of the  air squadron that he himself had organized at the start of the war that were also the basis of his 1937 novel Man’s Hope, Malraux sought to illustrate the shortages caused by the policy of Non-Intervention, the heroism of the international volunteers and the solidarity of the Spanish people.  

Malraux and his team, that included French and Belgian technicians and Spanish actors as well as villagers as extras, faced all sorts of difficulties, from the shortage of film and other material to the aerial bombings that forced Malraux to have the film developed in France. He enjoyed the collaboration of Spanish writer Max Aub and French composer Darius Milhaud, who wrote the soundtrack. 

The final editing was done in Paris. Malraux had only twenty-eight of the intended thirty-nine scenes, which makes the story difficult to follow at times. The Daladier government banned the screening of the film in France and the Nazis later ordered that all copies be destroyed. Fortunately, two, slightly different copies survived. One was in France, which became the basis of a retouched version that was shown in France in 1945 under the title Espoir (Hope). The other was found in the Library of Congress in Washington.  

With great dramatic impact that recalls the work of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein, the final sequence summarizes Malraux’s message. It was shot in the village of Collbató in the province of Barcelona and the nearby Montserrat mountain. Some 2,500 Republican soldiers who had not yet received sufficient training to be sent to the front served as extras. It includes a scene that did not appear in the original script and in which an old woman replies to the question what one can do for a soldier killed in combat, says “Thank them!” Added after the war had ended, it serves as an epitaph: even though the war had been lost, the values expressed in Sierra de Teruel remained alive.