Room 208.04

Armand Guerra was the pseudonym chosen by Valencian anarchist and revolutionary José María Estívalis Calvo to make his work as a film-maker. After travelling extensively around Europe, he became part of one of the first ventures of proletariat cinema, the creation of the Parisian cooperative Cinéma du Peuple in October 1913. Founded by workers with libertarian leanings and run in a way that was both modest and artisan, it sought to “make film made by the people for the same people”. Adhering to the anarchist conception of art (non-professional, collective, low cost and of mass circulation), Cinéma du Peuple championed socially committed film-making that would reflect the lives of the working classes and address pertinent political and social issues as a tool for greater awareness and popular mobilisation.    

Armand Guerra thus directed, wrote and played a central role in different films within the context of the cooperative, including La Commune (The Commune). The film focuses on the defence of the cannons of Butte de Montmartre, the proclamation of the Commune and the execution by firing squad of Versailles generals, but does so through an alternative lens that contrasts sharply with the mainstream commercial film industry. It also features pioneering techniques, such as the split screen and the transition from fiction to documentary, and incorporates at the end real survivors of the Commune. It ends at the Communards’ Wall, the monument erected years later in memory of the thousands of communards shot dead by the walls of the Parisian cemetery Père Lachaise in the State’s brutal reprisals against the Commune.