The veteran Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura is to direct a film about Pablo Picasso’s emotional upheaval during the painting of “Guernica” in 1937. To be titled “33 Dias,” the movie will be produced by Elias Querejeta, who has worked with Saura on 11 previous occasions.
The script was written by the octogenarian duo with the French writer Louis-Charles Sirjacq. One of contemporary cinema’s greatest cinematographers, Vittorio Storaro, will work for the seventh time with Saura. Variety reports that “33 Dias” is budgeted at $7.7 million and will be filmed next summer in Paris and in Guernica in the province of Biscay.
Picasso’s monumental black, white, and grey mural, the most famous anti-war painting in the world, depicts the anguish and suffering of the people of the ancient Basque town following its bombardment by planes of the German Luftwaffe Condor Legion supported by Italian aircraft on the afternoon of April 26, 1937.
During the Spanish Civil War, Guernica was a point of strategic importance for the Republican Basque army, a barrier between Franco’s Nationalist forces and Bilbao. Franco gave the directive for bombardment to Lieutenant-Colonel Wolfram von Richtofen, a cousin of the World War I flying ace Manfred von Richtofen (the Red Baron). For the Germans, the bombing was an experiment in the total war against soldiers and civilians alike recommended by General Ludendorff.
Over three-quarters of Guernica’s buildings were destroyed during the three-hour raid. The Basque government initially reported that 1,654 people had been killed and 889 wounded; later reports put the number of fatalities between 800 to 3000 of the population of 5000. It is now thought that between 250 and 300 people died. Guernica had been overrun by the Nationalists by April 29.
At the time of the bombing, Picasso was living in Paris. The Spanish Republican Government had commissioned him to create a work for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair of 1937. He had been uninspired until he learned of the Guernica tragedy. He resolved to represent the aftermath of the attack in an angular, symbol-laden Surrealist-Cubist style. The mural, which he completed in mid-June, is 11 feet high and 25.6 feet long.
“Guernica” created an enormous stir when it was exhibited at the Paris exposition and wherever it appeared subsequently. In America, it debuted at the San Francisco Museum of Art on August 27, 1937 and was later shown at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art, along with 343 other Picassos.
"The Spanish struggle is the fight of reaction against the people, against freedom,” Picasso said of the Civil War as he worked on the mural. “My whole life as an artist has been nothing more than a continuous struggle against reaction and the death of art. How could anybody think for a moment that I could be in agreement with reaction and death? ... In the panel on which I am working, which I shall call ‘Guernica,’ and in all my recent works of art, I clearly express my abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death.”
The painting of “Guernica” coincided with a war closer to home for Picasso – that between his outgoing mistress, Marie-Thérèse Walter, and her replacement, Dora Maar, who Walter purportedly met at his studio on one occasion while he was at work on the mural. Picasso later alleged that they literally wrestled over him. There is no news on who will play the female rivals in Saura’s film, though José Garcia, the 45-year-old French actor (of Spanish descent), has been tipped to play Picasso.
Among the actors who’ve previously played the artist are Anthony Hopkins, in James Ivory’s “Surviving Picasso” (1996), and Marcial Di Fonzo Bo, in Woody Allen’s “Midnight in Paris,” released last year.