The parallelisms between the boom-and-bust of the 1920s/30s and our current economic and political meltdown are ubiquitous and uncanny (eg, here and here).  These unsettling coincidences form the knot of “Wearing Lorca’s Bowtie,” a wonderful production that will run at the Duke Theater on 42nd  Street until December 17, 2011. The great Spanish poet and...
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Agustí Centelles (1909-1985) is one of the most important photojournalists of the Spanish Civil War, and his work should be studied alongside that of Robert Capa, David Seymour, Gerda Taro, Hans Namuth, and Georg Reisner. This much is clear in the wake of the successful exhibit Centelles in_edit_¡oh!, which has been on show...
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In a recent post in the Spanish-language blog FronteraD, filmmaker and novelist Alfonso Domingo reviews these two new books: Spanish translations of the memoirs of the Lincoln volunteer, James Yates (From Mississippi to Madrid:  Memoirs of an African-American in the Lincoln Brigade) and of the complete writings of Langston Hughes about the war in Spain....
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Several months ago, President Zapatero appointed a committee of experts to put together a report with recommendations on the future of the Valle de los Caídos, the pharaonic monument and burial place of José Antonio Primo de Rivera (founder of Spain’s fascist party, Falange) and the Generalísimo himself, Francisco Franco.  The committee issued its...
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The Spanish daily Público reports:  Spain’s Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts has uploaded to the Ministry of Culture’s youtube channel a selection of 93 film documents from its historical archive and from the Spanish Civil War holdings of Spain’s Filmoteca.  Many of the Civil War documentaries were included on a wonderful DVD collection...
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It was in 2006 that I first saw this phrase, on a button worn by a young man on the uptown 6 train.  I was on the subway heading up to the Museum of the City of New York for a meeting related to the exhibition “Facing Fascism:  New York and the Spanish Civil...
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From News of Spain, November 9, 1938 New Pellagra Cure to Madrid Thirty-nine of America’s leading scientists, incuding three Nobel Laureates and thirteen members of the National Academy of Sciences, joined last week in sending to pellagra victims in Madrid a special gift of twenty-five pounds of nicotinic acid, the newly discovered cure for...
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I’m feeling a bit guilty for having subjected the students in my graduate seminar this week to the viewing of all 77 minutes of  Defenders of the Faith, a pro-Franco documentary filmed between 1936 and 1938 by the American journalist Russell Palmer.  The film is narrated by Palmer himself. To assuage my conscience, I’ve...
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While poking around ancestry.com, I somehow ended up in a cache of documents from the National Archives and Records Administration –“Reports of Deaths of American Citizens Abroad, 1835 – 1974- Spain, 1930-1939.”  As you can imagine, each document there is the germ of a novel or film, and, not surpisingly, there are a significant...
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Two-thirds of the way into Trisha Ziff’s brilliant documentary about the re-discovery in Mexico of 4,500 Spanish Civil War photographic negatives of Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour, two Mexican intellectuals comment on the donation of that vast archive to the International Center of Photography in New York.  Photographer Pedro Meyer openly says...
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