The filmmaker Peter Davis, who died in Vancouver this past December, was born in 1933 near London, where he lived through World War II. He studied English at Oxford with J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and lived in Sweden before emigrating to North America to work in television and film. With his own production company, Villon Films, he produced dozens of political documentaries. An activist filmmaker in the school of Joris Ivens, he fought against South African apartheid and was involved in the global fight against HIV/AIDS. In 2017, he released Digging the Spanish Earth, a film about The Spanish Earth, the 1937 documentary by Ivens and Hemingway. Alex Vernon and Almudena Cros, who worked with him on the project, remember.

Alex Vernon

In September 2012, I received an unexpected email from Peter Davis, with whom I had been in contact a few years earlier about my research on The Spanish Earth. In the 1980s, Peter had started a project about the Spanish Civil War, for which he had filmed interviews with two war correspondents, Martha Gellhorn and George Seldes, and with Helen van Dongen, the editor of Ivens’s film. Peter told me that he had decided to “revive” the project and politely asked: “Do you retain an interest in the subject, or have you moved on to other things?”

Thus began my small contribution to Digging the Spanish Earth. The highlight of that experience, and the source of some of its footage, was the week I spent in central Spain, in June 2013, with Peter and Almudena Cros, an art historian, Madrid tour guide extraordinaire, and president of the Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales. In a Cineaste review, Thomas Waugh called Peter’s film a “rich and illuminating hybrid.” He continued: “Most refreshing, perhaps, is the meandering tour of the twenty-first-century Spanish earth over which the other elements are layered, a survey of the original geography of the conflict and the documentary—and even a few surviving local dramatis personae.”

What an astonishing, exhilarating week it was! Since this was only my second time in Spain with the war on my mind, I was learning far more than I was consulting. The three of us discovered much along the way. As I reported in an article for The Hemingway Review, we found the gravestone put up by the Nationalists after the war alongside a road into Fuentidueña de Tajo for the priest murdered in August 1936. We visited the village’s present-day “fascist” bakery. We located the meeting hall where Ivens and John Fernhout had filmed a rally for the formation of the People’s Army, featuring speeches by Enrique Lister, Gustav Regler, “Carlos” (the war moniker of Vittorio Vidali), José Díaz, and La Pasionaria.

Spain that summer was HOT. Peter was seventy-nine years old, slight of frame, yet oversized in energy and curiosity—go, go, go, nonstop—while also gracious, cheerful, and witty. Whereas he had had a lifetime’s worth of such filming adventures, it was my first and only—yet he treated me and Almu as peers.

When he and I first communicated over email, he felt obliged to tell me that he wasn’t that Peter Davis, whose film Hearts and Minds (1974), about the war in Vietnam, won an Academy Award for Best Documentary. I knew a little about Peter’s career from a few minutes of internet sleuthing, and he shared a few stories during our time in Spain, but when I read his obituary, I realized how much more modest and humble a man he actually was. And his adoration of his wife, Joy, and their family shone.

Any factual errors in Digging the Spanish Earth are mine. I regret that I did not help enough in post-production. Ever the gentleman, Peter invited my feedback but did not complain about my lapses. More than that, I regret that I did not find other occasions to interact with this amazing, creative, passionate, kind, and lively man. To know him was to be enriched.

Alex Vernon is the M.E. and Ima Graves Peace Distinguished Professor of English at Hendrix College outside Little Rock. More at alex-vernon.squarespace.com.

Almudena Cros

I am very saddened by the passing of Peter Davis, a gifted and hard-working documentary and film-maker.  Peter contacted me in 2012 with the idea of Digging Spanish Earth, and we finally met in person in 2013.  Peter Davis and Professor Alex Vernon embarked on the adventure of tracing the locations and possibly surviving witnesses of the filming of the legendary 1937 documentary ‘The Spanish Earth’.  Running on a shoestring budget and relying on public transportation to reach Fuentidueña de Tajo, we managed to find some of the settings where the original documentary had been filmed.  We ventured into this village with barely any equipment and without any previous contacts with the locals we wanted to interview.  It was spontaneous when we found somebody elderly enough to interview.  The former mayor of the town welcomed us into his private home, and he proffered some memories of Joris Ivens visiting the town in 1985.  We kept traveling to Fuentidueña to record various locations; I particularly remember standing for a long time in the blazing sun while Peter kept filming a wheatfield in Fuentidueña without any protection.

I will forever cherish the memories of our excursions to Fuentidueña, as well as my numerous conversations with Peter Davis via email, who entrusted me with the bureaucracy involved in securing original footage from Filmoteca Española.

Peter was a wonderful, witty, knowledgeable, and keen observer of society and political events, and his talent is obviously reflected in his corpus of work.  Behind his lens, Peter managed to shed light on some dark chapters of world history, and he deserved more awards and recognition.  I sincerely hope that he will be granted a posthumous acknowledgment for his lifetime commitment and professional legacy.

Thank you for the wonderful memories, Peter.

Almudena Cros is the President of the Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales (AABI).