by
Marie Corbin and John Corbin
This screenplay is an anthropological fiction. While it draws on our joint fieldwork in Andalusia over some thirty years and on J.R. Corbin's individual anthropological/historical interest in the Spanish Civil War, it does not depict real people we have known, specific circumstances we have experienced or actual historical events that have taken place. Its characters and situations are composites, a melding together of individuals, places and times, drawn from written ethnographies and histories, our own and others, as well as our personal experience. A list of relevant published sources is appended.
The story is of the townspeople of Alcala, a town in that time in Spain when military rebellion against a democratically elected left wing government sparked a social revolution. Here, the Civil War was not a war of soldiers and battles, military glory and heroism, but a war of personal worlds of kinship, friendship, work and neighbourhood, riven by the violent acts of civilians one upon another. The story pivots on Mercedes, a woman of aristocratic background, 'unwomanly' political involvement, and left wing sympathies at odds with those of her family and class. As verbal ideological battles--of nationalism and republicanism, fascism and democracy, 'right' and left', order and authority against godless communism and anarchy--erupt into revolution and give way to brutal attacks and summary executions, Mercedes is propelled into a drama of divided loyalties that is to span some forty years.
There are many Alcalas in Spain. The screenplay is, in a sense, the story of no one of them and of all of them. Though a fiction driven by plot and character, the story tries to convey some kind of a truth in what is essentially mythical form--a truth both about Andalusia and about anthropology. The structure of the story depends not only on an experience of Andalusia but on a specifically anthropological analysis of some aspects of Andalusian culture and of the 'civil' nature of the Civil War. Consequently, while it attempts to tell its audience something about both, the screenplay does not purport to render either as Andalusians themselves might. The screenplay thus required inter-locutors, the 'foreign' eyes through which the culture is viewed. These are provided by Mercedes' visiting American friends, Eleanor and Raymond, an artist and a journalist respectively, who are drawn irrevocably into the drama. Initially they are fascinated by the 'exotic' in Spanish life, fairs and flamenco, bandits and Gypsies, bull-fights and religious processions, redolent with imagery of animality and the human effort to transcend it. The 'red' shootings of landowners, burning of churches, killings of priests, the fascist executions of 'reds' and chastisements of their women, echo and transform this imagery as they tie Eleanor and Raymond to Mercedes and Alcala.
Writing the screenplay has, we believe, been a worthwhile anthropological enterprise as well as a personally engrossing one. The project grew out of conversations with a Cuban-American friend in the film world about our ethnographic work, the making of documentaries, and debates in anthropology focusing on the relationship between ethnography and fiction, authority and authorship. The appeal of film as a medium was that much of our analysis is highly visual, dependent on place and space and analogical connections. The appeal of 'fiction' was the possibility of creating an 'anthropological' narrative that would be accessible and interesting to a broader, non-academic audience less likely to view a documentary on the Spanish Civil War.
We have written a screenplay, but ideally we were 'writing a film'. However, as anthropologists,we have neither the expertise nor the resources to make such a film and even in producing the screenplay we are acutely aware of being amateur intruders into a highly professional sphere. But perhaps as a written text rather than a film the narrative remains closer to its anthropological roots. Actually making the film would add a whole range of additional 'authors' whose starting points and 'messages' would be less easily identifiable. At one level, the screenplay stands on its own, has its own integrity--it may be read straight-forwardly as an adventure story or may be related by readers to their own knowledge of Spanish ethnography and the Spanish Civil War in a variety of ways. However, in a later publication we intend to document in detail the 'origins' in the published literature of figures and events in the story and the ethnographic materials and analyses drawn on as part of a discussion of the relationship of such 'fictions' to other anthropological forms.