Frente a Guernica

The idea for my and Angela Ricci Lucchi’s film Frente a Guernica (Director’s Cut) arose from our visit to the Museo Reina Sofía on the occasion of the screening of Pays Barbare in 2014. Our sensations on seeing Picasso’s Guernica, after the work’s return from exile, prompted us to look through the materials on Spain in our possession and described in our notebooks. We did not have Robert Flaherty’s 35mm film, which was at the MoMA in New York, where Guernica had spent a long time. The film was given to us by the Museo Reina Sofía.

In the film Frente a Guernica (Versione integrale), while Lucrezia Lerro, one of the two narrators, talks about the “case” of Osip Mandelstam, I read from the diary of Mikhail Koltsov on the arrival of the writers for the congress, as well as all the other captions of Frente a Guernica (Versione integrale). This is the film that Angela Ricci Lucchi and I conceived and made together. Today I am keeping, once again, the promise I made to Angela, that of continuing our political, artistic and historical work on the violence of the 20th century.

It was profoundly harrowing to create a film about war while another war was raging. Between late 2019 and 2023, we worked on Frente a Guernica, filmed with our analytical camera and based on archival footage. The result is nine hours of material drawn from both private and public sources. The German UFA documentary captures the aftermath of the bombing of Guernica on April 26, 1937, when Nazi aviation and Italian Fascist air forces dropped bombs on the civilian population. Just two days later, on April 28, 1937, Pablo Picasso received a commission from the Spanish Republican government for a work to be presented at the Paris World Expo. Our film stands as a statement against nuclear madness—something Picasso had already foreseen with Guernica. Yervant Gianikian