The Tree of Guernica

In the opening dream-like scene, festively dressed children run with red and black flags. In the following sequence, we observe a traditional folk holiday, some kind of local carnival. The relationship between these two scenes forms the essence of the main aspect of the film: the eternal folk/human desire for joy, pleasure, collective merriment, and entertainment was transformed into a specific historical form in 1936 through the republican revolution - the carnival of red flags, collectivism, land confiscation, and the abolition of the yoke of lords and the church. This folk desire for pleasure and freedom forms the essence of the collective unconscious of all truly human characters in the film and has its two main protagonists Vandale and Goya. Vandale as a witch (an ancient anthropological method in which mankind connected with that unconscious desire through forms of mysticism, etc.) and Goya as a surreal anarchist are symbols of different approaches to the same collective desire. Symbols of possible unity of the people and all progressive beings in the revolutionary act of the Republic. Against them, however, stands the exact opposite of humanity, inhumanity - the fascists are just mindless forces of torture, armies, and clergy (this motive was perfected by Picasso, not in the painting "Guernica," but in "Massacre in Korea" in 1951). This conflict between the human and the inhuman is at the core of the surrealist sequences in which Arrabal unmasks and ridicules the fetishes of alienated humanity, from the uniforms of macho idiots to the sacraments of the Catholic Church. (14/12/2014)