The Exile of a People

After the fall of Barcelona on 26 January 1939, “La Retirada”, a massive flight of the remnants of the Republican Army and civilians toward France, began. Photographers, reporters, and newsreel cameramen—mostly French, though from other countries as well, international, awaited the arrival of this human tide at the border crossings. Aware that the end of the war was imminent, they filmed the disarming of soldiers, the abandonment of belongings, livestock, and other property, the long wait at the border by the sick, women, and children, as well as others who crossed the snow-covered Pyrenean paths. Professionals with their 35mm cameras captured all this from privileged vantage points, and Pathé, Éclair, and Gaumont produced newsreel sequences that moved the world through the mournful tone of a narrator’s voice, concise and effective editing, and the creation of some of the most enduring icons of this humanitarian crisis.

In contrast to this professional treatment (the compression of events into powerful, technically accomplished images, good lighting, emotive language, and musical sound design), Louis Llech, a shopkeeper and amateur filmmaker from Perpignan equipped with a three-lens 16mm Paillard Bolex camera, shot and edited a 28-minute homemade film in a handcrafted manner during the same period and on the same subject. 

Llech’s gaze differs from that offered by professional newsreels in four essential respects. First, Llech plunges into the midst of the protagonists of that chaotic procession of civilians, gendarmes, and soldiers, moving among them rather than observing from a distance. Second, he constructs an almost simultaneous tableau of actions, as chaotic as the experience itself must have been during those weeks. It is no coincidence that this chronicle, with hardly any chronology, bears the subtitle “Février 1939.” Third, the lightweight camera, positioned at the height of the people, moves nimbly, searching out details not immediately apparent and others that arise unexpectedly. Fourth, the presence of the cameraman is so visible that numerous glances reveal him at the eye of the hurricane—met with curiosity, yet also blending into the crowd. Llech introduces segmentation by means of intertitles that identify places (Le Perthus, the refugee camp at Le Boulou), materials (trucks and anti-aircraft guns), protagonists (the International Brigades, the concentration camps), and situations (absence of a Spanish consulate to help them).

In sum, The Exodus of a People  (L’exode d’un people) comes across as a chamber film, intimately human and deeply engaged with its characters, contributing to a “history from below.” Its closing images of the concentration camps—filmed from outside the barbed wire that already surrounded some of them—show that its central focus was that dramatic February of 1939, when the ordeal of refugees, exile, and the camps foreshadowed the end.

VSB