The Spanish Earth

The film was a cause before it was a work: Contemporary Historians, Inc. — Hemingway, Dos Passos, Lillian Hellman, Archibald MacLeish among them — formed to fund Ivens's camera, and Hemingway went to Spain with it, drafting commentary at the front. The narration he finally spoke himself, after Orson Welles's recorded version was judged too round for footage this raw; Hemingway's flat delivery — the writing plain as captions: the earth, the water, the men — became part of the film's power. The premiere circuit was surreal: the Roosevelts at the White House, then Hollywood, Fitzgerald in the audience, raising ambulance money by the reel.

The book is its own small story: a Cleveland teenager named Jasper Wood secured the text and had it printed by J. B. Savage in 1938 in a limited edition — an act of fan-devotion Hemingway met with mixed feelings, insisting his proceeds go to Spanish relief. The volume preserves what the soundtrack can't slow down for: sentences built to walk beside images of dust, bread, and artillery, the style pared past even its own famous minimum. It is the hinge document between the correspondent of 1937 and the novelist of For Whom the Bell Tolls.

The film's narration in sequence: the village of Fuentidueña and the irrigation project that will water its dry earth; the road to Madrid and the men who go up it; the front itself — training, waiting, the attack; the city under bombardment, bread queues and broken houses; and the return to the ditch, the water finally moving, the argument of the whole film in one image — the earth defended because it feeds.

Twenty minutes' reading, best taken alongside the film if you can find it — the words were built to walk at the footage's pace.