The old town of Belchite was in front during the Spanish War.

He changed hands three times. He was first taken by the fascists, then reconquered by the Republicans and resumed again, finally, by those who won the war. There were many dead, some buried in the place where they fell. The Republican attack was led by the Lincoln Brigade American volunteers led by Robert Hale Merriman, a professor of economics at the University of Berkeley. He died later during the withdrawal of the Ebro.

The old town of Belchite was never rebuilt. A new town was built by decree next to the old man, as labor was used prisoners of war of the expired army. Fifty years after the battle that distinguished Merriman, in 1987, Terry Gillian, founder member of Monty Python, directed a movie entitled The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, who used the old Belchite as a natural setting. He needed an old European city destroyed by war and Belchite was a set ready made impossible to overcome with stone cardboard, but not completed artificially where needed.

I was able to photograph the result of that barbarity the day after the end of the shoot before they took it all. These images show what I saw. The town looked like a corpse made up and dressed as a clown. Very realistic reproductions of buildings, walls and plaster walls supported by permeate tube, all constructed to be seen directly, had been added in several parts. Cannons, artillery bullets, coffins, false artifacts of siege and assault remained around the perimeter of the town beside rubbish of all kinds. The original buildings in ruins had been painted with spray to look blackened by the smoke of fires and wildfire. The buildings' interiors had also been painted to hide the typical color of the region and to make the impression of being wallpaper. Watermelons were added to finish the effect. In front of the same church that Merriman had attacked the front of his men as the last enemy stronghold, he had erected a skylight in which three knots were hanging by the wind.

War as a drumming, history as a joke. Memory, sacrifice and suffering profaned by sterile bumble over unnamed tombs. Only the foolish ones take things seriously.

Francesc Torres
February 2007