Cuckoo Clock Speech Analysis

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In a famous scene from the film ‘The Third Man’, Orson Welles gives a speech that has since been known as ‘The cuckoo clock speech’ in which he said; ‘In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they have five hundred years of democracy and peace- and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.’ Welles was illustrating how the greatest works of art are more often produced during times of social strife than in peace. The war against Republican Spain and the Nationalists led by General Francisco Franco in 1936, was one of the most politically and socially

As Eric Hobsbawm said in his book ‘Revolutionaries’: “In creating the world’s memory of the Spanish civil war, the pen, the brush and the camera wielded on behalf of the defeated have proved mightier than the sword and the power of those who won.” Famous artists such as Picasso were galvanised into action whilst Joan Miró, although at first shocked into creative silence, later started producing propaganda art such as 'Aidez L 'Espagne ' for the Republicans. The Spanish surrealist culture became more than just a visual voice of the civil war 's terrors. In my paper, I hope to explore the correlation between the surrealist aesthetics and the politics during the Spanish Civil War; how the artistic practice offered a unique insight into the cataclysmic debacle of war and the intense struggles plaguing the country. In other words, I hope to examine the role of the artist as the activist during this period of growing political and social instability. The surrealist works of Spanish artists such as Dalí, Picasso & Miró (amongst others), became signatures of the satirical content of the Spanish Civil War. The artistic movement became much more than just a visual manifestation of escapism, but a weapon in the battle between left and right wings