Civil War
“My idea was to see if I could find out what it actually felt like if you were in that period. I realised that what I was looking at was a battle of ideology, of ideology battling humanity. That is the real story of the civil war. It’s not the atrocities or all the other things that we know – the betrayals and so on. Ken Loach has done a very fine movie about that, as have others. But what hasn’t been explored is the tension between ideologies and the human stories, which is what fascinates me. That, for me, is the story of the civil war: the sacrifice of human beings for the sake of ideology, but also the way human beings can be valued above ideologies, which of course is what JosemarĂa struggled for. The trouble, I think, with tending to look at the Spanish civil war through a purely ideological prism is that you get a distorted view which will make you angry and take you further away from the individual experience in that war. So for me the job, always, was to comb my way through the histories – and I read as many as I could; I always felt that my job was to look beneath the ideological conflicts to find the human beings. I think it would be very arrogant of me to presume that I could find a new way of interpreting the war. I wouldn’t be up to it: I’m not a historian; I’m not a philosopher. What I felt was that, if I could take a step that is rarely done, namely to concentrate, utterly, on what the human experience was, that itself – quite apart from my own intellectual capacities – would throw the war into a different light. It means people could enter into the story of the civil war in a very different way. The whole film is about the problem of ideology, and how ideology rarefies and solidifies thinking – how dangerous ideology is.” [100 Qs]
