MY FIRST REVIEWS - Bruce Hodsdon kicks off a new series and we recall A KIND OF LOVING (John Schlesinger, UK, 1962) and THE LEFT-HANDED GUN (Arthur Penn, USA, 1958)

My first reviews and their reprise

Following the recent invitation to submit early attempts to write film reviews to the blog I came across what I believe are my first two attempts at film reviews, certainly the first to be published - as program notes for film society screenings back in 1965. I further realised that there were companions to these reviews in the form of one paragraph catalogue entries written in my role as film study officer for the National Library's Film Lending Collection which had been established in 1975 to service film societies, schools and the newly emerging film studies at a tertiary level with prints across the spectrum from experimental shorts to commercial feature films. As FSO I had a free hand and a substantial budget to select films for purchase within a broadly framed collection development policy – a  dream job for a cinephile.

These two films had impressed me on first (and subsequent) viewings and remained on the priority list for (pre-video) acquisition when the opportunity arose two decades later. In the interval, film magazines covering a broad range of critical positions had proliferated and the publication of serious books on cinema had exploded so there was much to draw on. My initial review of The Left-Handed Gun coincided with the publication of Andrew Sarris's immensely influential reappraisal of American cinema in Film Culture. A couple of years earlier the then young auteurist turks in Britain had launched Movie magazine to challenge critical orthodoxy centred on the BFI's Sight & Sound.The four entries span that seminal period in film criticism. I don't recall referring to my original reviews in writing the later entries for which severe limitation of space focused the mind, although there are connecting threads.

The initial reviews appeared in The Armidale Arts Council Film Group Programme Notes in 1965.

John Schlesinger

A Kind of Loving(I962) Dir John Schlesinger with Alan Bates, June Ritchie, Thora Hird.

For those familiar with the radicalism of the new British cinema , the basic attitudes expressed in this film are nothing new. What makes it worth viewing is the freshness and subtlety of the treatment of what might otherwise have been cliché. The plot centres on the relationship between two young northerners in the industrial town of Burnley. [A plot summary then follows in which I committed the sin of revealing the ending]....

This was the first feature directed by Schlesinger and gives ample evidence of a talent more fully realised in his next film, Billy Liar. After the somewhat heavy-handed direction of Tony Richardson, Jack Clayton et al, Schlesinger's objectivity (perhaps closer to that of Karel Reisz in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning in this respect) is refreshing in its avoidance of obtrusive camerawork and 'landscape mongering' which mar the work of his compatriots who often seem to confuse 'cinematic' effect with style (very much the case with Jack Clayton's latest feature The Pumpkin Eater). Schlesinger's intention is for us to observe rather than identify with the characters. He is as interested in milieu as in character to bring wider issues into focus; the alienation of a class of young people who can neither realise their ambitions within a working class ethos nor that of petit bourgeois gentility. The confusion in their relationship mirrors their inner conflicts. Unable to differentiate between love and lust, only the necessity of circumstance brings some sort of clarity as they come to terms with their situation through compromise.

The lack of originality in theme combined with the objectivity of Schlesinger's direction could have reduced the film to the banal. However, his style is well suited to the low-key naturalistic dialogue of the Hall and Waterhouse screenplay which preserves the essential character of Stan Barstow's novel [I hadn't read the novel, but a reasonable assumption for this genre]. The cast, with uniformly fine performances, has maintained this naturalism which called for a range of gesture of a testing kind. Only occasionally does Schlesinger's camera go in search of gratuitous effect as when he pans away from the lovers to [ironically] take in the graffiti and posters on the wall of a bus shelter. In general he avoids glib identification with a point-of-view.

Two decades or so later, in a curatorial role having selected the film for purchase on 16mm for the  film study lending collection I wrote/compiled the following catalogue entry for A Kind of Loving:

The constrictions of life in a Northern industrial town are delineated through the relationship between Victor and Ingrid, a draughtsman and a typist working in the same factory. A sharply observed documentary 'feel' is heightened by the economy of the dialogue and the acuity of the acting achieving a certain balance of sympathy which forestalls easy judgements. As the central characters painfully come to terms with each other, their feelings and motives seem both conditioned by and suspended somewhere between middle-class gentility and a fading sense of working class community.

Arthur Penn

The Left-Handed Gun (1958) Dir. Arthur Penn. With Paul Newman, John Dehner, Hurd Hatfield

Although ostensibly within the western genre, like Nicholas Ray's Johnny Guitar, this film stands apart from the genre's conventions. In this case director, writer and actor combine to produce something unique.

The theme, based on the play by Gore Vidal, is an overt attempt to destroy the myth of Billy the Kid. The film attempts to show his career free of cliché, Billy being shown as a man of sorrows very different from the legend. At times the effect is quite bizarre. Frenetic violence alternates with several sequences of curious elation. Billy makes his escape from the jail in a near surrealist penultimate sequence of crazy angled camerawork and almost expressionist lighting.

An amazing first film from Arthur Penn, the film has been described as “the ultimate in the application of the Method to the western.”  Both The Left-Handed Gun and The Miracle Worker are concerned with the problems of physical communication when the spoken word is virtually useless, gestures and monosyllables doing the work of conversation. With a theatrical background, Penn shows a distinct cinematic flair. “The intense physicality of the performances in his two films serves to counter-balance a strained reading of the lines. A director of force rather than grace, Penn may yet re-assert the plastic role of the actor in the scheme of things.” (Andrew Sarris, Film Culture 28).

My catalogue entry two decades or so later:

"The psychological orientation of Gore Vidal's teleplay, on which the film is based, transforms the  Billy the Kid legend into a youth-in-revolt drama with Billy on an ultimately tragic oedipal quest. There is a complex balancing of sympathies, in a precarious social order, between Billy, potentially subversive, and Pat Garrett, the bearer of the new reality and social norms. The film is also overtly concerned with the gap between the legend and an often painful reality.”

CINEMA REBORN - The Presentations (4) - Rod Bishop introduces IN A LONELY PLACE (Nicholas Ray, USA, 1950)

This is the fourth transcript of the introductions given at  CINEMA REBORN. The previous posts can be found if you click on these links. 

Margot Nash on WANDA

Sylvie Le Clezio on MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT

Jane Mills on YOL - THE FULL VERSION

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Rod Bishop introduces In A Lonely Place

I want to talk about my Dad…and In A Lonely Place.

Thirty years ago, I was in America when Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan opened. I went to a suburban cinema to see the first session on the first day. There were only about a dozen of us in the audience. We were all single males and all spread around a very large cinema. 

Everyone else was my Dad’s age – they were Second World War veterans or perhaps men who had lost loved ones in the war.

I’ve always been interested in Second World War veterans in Film Noir.

Dixon Steele, played by Humphrey Bogart inthis film, is a Hollywood scriptwriter and a Second World War veteran.

Gloria Grahame, Humphrey Bogart, In A Lonely Place

By the time In A Lonely Place was released in 1950, there had been five years of veterans in Film Noir.

They were a given, so we only learn of Dix’s wartime service in a couple of throwaway lines. 

In the Second World War, my father had served in Palestine, Borneo and had been attached to the US Forces in the Solomon Islands Campaign.

The war was the undoubted highpoint of Dad’s life. He had about 20 rules that ran his life and his children and we were subjected to a sort of military rule upbringing. 

He remained detached and overwhelmingly judgmental all his life. 

When he died, I was given his wallet and inside were a set of photographs of Dad and his army mates in the desert in Palestine.

I had never seen him look like that.  

He looked alive and happy and contented. 

I didn’t know this person.

He seemed like a complete stranger to me. 

Dixon Steele, in In A Lonely Place says things like: “Are you going to arrest me for a lack of emotions?”

My father could have easily have said that.

I’d love to know how Dad became so trenchantly rightwing. He even found the DLP too far to the left. 

After he died, my mother said to me, when I was complaining yet again about Dad’s political hatred of all things left: “You’ll probably be surprised to know that your father voted Labor all his life”. 

Surprised?

Mum was always prone to understatement.

And where Dixon Steele in this film clearly enjoys goading every other character into believing he is capable of murder, so my Dad obviously enjoyed making us think he was politically rightwing when he was not.

In A Lonely Place is not a typical Film Noir. There’s no expressionistic cinematography … no hard-boiled femme fatale…

Rather, as Eddie Cockrell points out in his excellent program notes, the Noir elements live mostly inside Dix’s head.

The film is often celebrated for dismantling misogyny and while this is true of the events on-screen, it wasn’t necessarily the case with events off-screen.

At the time of production, the lead actress Gloria Grahame was married to the director Nicholas Ray.

A “Mr. and Mrs. Contract” was written between Gloria Grahame and Ray. It stipulated, and here I quote –

“my husband shall be entitled to direct, control, advise, instruct and even command my actions during the hours 9am to 6pm every day except Sunday, during the filming.

I acknowledge that in every conceivable situation his will and judgment shall be considered superior to mine and shall prevail” 

Another clause forbade Grahame to:

 “nag, cajole, tease, or in any feminine fashion seek to distract or influence him.”

The executive who wrote the contract claimed it: “was based on my 25-years of experience as a married man”.

In a Lonely Place. 

Enjoy.

Rod Bishop
4 May 2019

Rod Bishop has had a long career in film as a critic, teacher, producer and administrator. His films include the Oz cult classic Body Melt (Dir: Philip Brophy). He is a former CEO of the Australian Film Television and Radio School and a founding member of the Organising Committee of Cinema Reborn.

CINEMA REBORN - The Presentations (3) - Margot Nash introduces WANDA (Barbara Loden, USA, 1970)

This is the third transcript of the introductions given at  CINEMA REBORN. The previous posts can be found if you click on these links. 
Sylvie Le Clezio on MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT
Jane Mills on YOL - THE FULL VERSION

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I would like to acknowledge the Gadigal People of the Eora Nation upon whose ancestral lands we meet and pay my respect to Elders past and present, acknowledging them as the traditional custodians of knowledge for these lands.

Margot Nash introduces Wanda

I would also like to thank Geoff Gardner for giving me the opportunity to introduce Barbara Loden’s Wanda. The film has been described as a feminist masterpiece, but I had never seen it, so I was curious. 

Wanda was finished in 1970, the same year Germaine Greer published The Female Eunuch. It was a time when feminism was starting to sweep the world. It started like a match thrown out of a car in dry country or a series of spot fires spontaneously bursting into flame in remote areas.  It took many people by surprise with its ferocity and power. What it did was challenge male power and that made many people very uncomfortable. Loden’s film also makes people uncomfortable. At the time she said:

When I made Wanda, I didn't know anything about consciousness raising or women's liberation. That had just started when the film was finished.The picture was not about women's liberation. It was really about the oppression of women, of people... Being a woman is unexplored territory, and we're pioneers of a sort, discovering what it means to be a woman. [1]

I think Loden’s film is remarkable because it explores the ‘experience’ of women’s oppression. This is what makes the film so uncomfortable and Loden’s performance as the main character, Wanda, who is pushed around by a series of men is, at times, profoundly moving for she inhabits the character entirely without judgment. Loden describes herself as growing up in a poor hillbilly town and there is an authenticity to her performance that clearly comes from her own experiences and observations. 

Barbara Loden (1975)

I put off watching this film because so many people said they hadn’t liked it when it came out because the character was so passive and the film was hard going at times. It is. Yet Wanda’s internalisation of society’s judgement of women as worthless and inferior to men is what makes her passive and this is, of course, what Loden, as both writer, director and actress was trying to show. This ‘experience’ of invisibility, which Loden brings so powerfully to the screen, shows the consequences for a woman who has grown up thinking she was nothing. 

British academic Laura Mulvey’s ground breaking 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema[2]used psychoanalysis and film theory to argue that the spectator in the cinema was defined as masculine, and images of women were there for the pleasure of what she called the ‘male gaze’. In 1974 John Berger’s Ways of Seeing[3]argued that images of women, in particular the nude in art history, were there not just for the pleasure of the male spectator, but to flatter him.  

Wanda’s image on screen does not flatter the men she meets. Instead it reveals them at their worst. No wonder it was ignored for so many years. 

It was also pretty much ignored by the early women’s liberation movement. Perhaps because women at the time desired heroic role models of remarkable women, not downtrodden images of women who were the passive victims of unremarkable men.

In the 1973 issue of Women and Film, which was published in California, an attempt was made to list all the films made by women since the beginning of cinema. The list is of course incomplete with the only Australian entry being the McDonagh sisters. I had to really search for Wanda and finally found a brief mention in a section on American ‘women who made promising starts as directors in the 60s and the first few years of the 70s. It is described in 4 just words… to set a mood (Barbara Loden’s Wanda). [4]

Barbara Loden, Wanda

Yet Wanda was the only American film accepted by the Venice Film Festival in 1970, where it won Best Foreign Film, and the only American film presented at the 1971 Cannes Film Festival. At the time Marguerite Duras cited it as an inspiration, particularly for Loden's ability to inhabit her character onscreen, saying in an interview with Loden’s husband the film director Elia Kazan, "I think that there is a miracle in Wanda. Usually there is a distance between the visual representation and the text, as well as the subject and the action. Here this distance is completely nullified; there is an instant and permanent continuity between Barbara Loden and Wanda."Duras described Loden's performance of Wanda's "demoralization" as "sacred, powerful, violent and profound."[5]

Loden was a lifetime member of the famed Actors Studio. She married Kazan, who was 23 years her senior, in 1966 - 15 years after Kazan had directed A Streetcar Named Desire and there is, I think, a hint of Blanche in Wanda, particularly as we meet her when she is homeless and staying with her sister.  Kazan was at times condescending when speaking about Loden, but he also encouraged her to make the film and he always respected her work as an actor.   

"There was always an element of improvisation, a surprise, in what she was doing. He said. The only one, a far as I know, who was like Brando when he was young. He never knew exactly what he was going to say, therefore everything would come out of his mouth very alive."[6]

Wanda has been variously described as “an existential rumination on a poverty-stricken woman adrift in Pennsylvania coal country” and “ asemi-autobiographical - portrait of a "passive, disconnected coal miner's wife who attaches herself to a petty crook. It was inspired by a story Loden read in a newspaper where a woman, who had been on the lam with a bank robber, thanked the judge for putting her in jail. Not surprisingly Wanda was unlike the romantic Hollywood outlaw movies of the time like Bonnie and Clyde, which Loden disliked.

She is quoted a saying: I really hate slick pictures... They're too perfect to be believable. I don't mean just in the look. I mean in the rhythm, in the cutting, the music—everything. The slicker the technique, the slicker the content becomes, until everything turns into Formica, including the people.[7]

Wanda’s mis en scène was innovative in its cinéma verité and improvisational style,and closer to Italian neo-realism, in its use of locations and non-actors and also, of course, to the raw improvisational work of John Cassavetes.

Watching the film I was reminded of a 1972 Australian short called Woman in a House by the late photographer and visual artist Sue Ford. This film was very poignant in this context for me for two reasons.  The first was its content for, like Wanda, the ‘woman in the house’ is depressed and trapped in a domestic world she yearns to escape from. Wanda walks out, but the woman in the house only escapes in her imagination. Both women have few choices to survive alone and both are vulnerable to exploitation.

The second reason Woman in a Housewas poignant for me was because when I tracked down a clip on Sue Ford’s web site (which her son set up after she died) it was magenta. [8]Clearly it had been taken from a 16mm print that was fast turning to vinegar. I did a quick search of the NFSA web site and sadly could not find any listing for preservation materials for the film, although I did find a listing for Sue Ford - untitled film. Sue made a number of important films. It seems unthinkable that almost no preservation materials are in the archive, that her films may never be ‘reborn’.  

The second film I was reminded of was the late, great Agnes Varda’s 1985 feature film Vagabond starring Sandrine Bonnaire.  Like Wanda it is the story of a young woman, a vagabond, who wanders, this time through the wine country in the south of France one winter. Both women are unknowable, disconnected and at risk. They are not great heroines of the feminist revolution.  They are the reason there had to be a revolution.

I think it should be remembered here that second wave feminism set up the first women’s refuges for women. It also offered an analysis of male power for young women like myself who were often adrift, and it fought against discrimination. Loden may not have been directly influenced by women’s liberation, but she was part of a historical movement, which began to speak about the hidden lives of women and actively campaign for change. 

I would like to finish with a short feminist poem, which appeared anonymously in the 1970s. When I tracked this poem down I contemplated not reading it tonight because it didn’t quite fit in with Wanda sitting outside the women’s liberation movement of the time, but perhaps it does speak to that place where Loden, Wanda and feminism intersect.

In a woman’s world of men… 

Who like us free… to give in bed and… everywhere

We are ……. some of us

 dying… and… some

of us playing life. I do not mean to…

glorify…….. our plight

in your…. martyr terms

but rather to quietly.. and in a woman’s way…

tell you that this is just…

about the last time I 

will say this in quite this way…from now on 

you will be either with me.

Or you will be without.. me.

Barbara Loden died from breast cancer 10 years after she made Wanda.  If she had been alive today she would probably have survived due to the lobbying work done by women to raise money for breast cancer research.

I’d like to dedicate this screening to her memory.

Margot Nash   

3^rdMay 2019

Margot Nash is is a Freelance Screenwriter, Director and Script Editor. She is currently an Honorary Associate Teaching & Research in the School of Communications at the University of Technology Sydney.

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[1]Acker, A. Reel Women - Pioneers of the Cinema, 1896 to the Present, The Continuum Publishing Company, New York 1991 pp.78-91

[2]Mulvey, L. (1975)Visual Pleasure and Narrative CinemaOriginally Published - Screen 16.3 Autumn (pp. 6-18)Oxford UK.

[3]Berger, J. (1974)Ways of Seeing Penguin, London.

[4]Smith, S. (1973)Women Who Make Movies Women and Film Vol 1, Nos. 3 & 4 Eds: Beh, S. & Salyer, S. (p. 79) Santa Monica Cal.

[5]Duras, M. and Kazan, E. (2003). "Conversation on Wanda, Cahiers du Cinéma (excerpts from an interview in Cahiers du Cinéma, December, 1980). 

[6]Duras, M. and Kazan, E. (2003). 

[7]Brody, R (January 26, 2010). Wanda, The New Yorker.

[8]http://www.sueford.com.au/FILMVIDEO.html

On Blu-ray - Scott Murray remembers Joan Chen's 'achingly beautiful' AUTUMN IN NEW YORK (2000)

According to Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, it appears I am one of the few people in the world who adores Joan Chen’s Autumn in New York. These sites rate it at 4.1/10 and 2.4/10, respectively.

The reviews I have read are also almost universally unkind. Not even those who rightly highlight films directed by women seem to have shown any fondness for this movie at all.

However, I am not actually alone in my love of this film. A few years back, it was reported that Autumn in New York was the most illegally downloaded movie in the world. Some people have great taste (though I would naturally prefer that the filmmakers got their just royalties).

Autumn in New York is the love story of Manhattan restaurateur Will Keane (Richard Gere) and young hat-designer Charlotte Fielding (Winona Ryder). It was written by Allison Burnett, who wrote the fabulous Feast of Love (directed by Robert Benton) and several novels and is also a director (including Ask Me Anything, from his novel, Undiscovered Gyrl).

As someone who from day one wrote endlessly about Paul Schrader’s American Gigolo and the greatness of Richard Gere, I actually like Gere more in Autumn. Even though his character in Gigolo– a male escort – is playing a part, there are times Gere is fractionally too noticeably playing a person playing a part. 

In Autumn, however, I surrender totally to the belief that he is a womanising restaurateur, greedy for experience and scared of getting too close. (If you study the Enneagram, he is the archetypical Type 7.)

Winona Ryder, Richard Gere Autumn in New York

As for Winona Ryder, she is as incandescent here as the young Audrey Hepburn, heart-breakingly mesmeric and allowing herself to appear more fragile than we have seen her before. 

That fragility is so intense that some of Charlotte’s close-ups are almost too much to bear. It is like being blinded with light – or by grace (as Schrader might say) or the existence of the divine (as Robert Bresson most certainly wouldn’t say, although every moment of every film he has ever made declares otherwise).

Both actors are perfect and I believe absolutely, as I do in so few modern romantic movies, that Will and Charlotte are actually in love. Yes, a major issue imperils that love,but I love the women’s-movie genre and I am fascinated by films where a lover dies. Because people’s lives are about falling in love and dying. 

To me, what this genre does best are stories, like here, where the doomed (usually a woman) saves the partner, as in – to name just two gems – Sydney Pollack’s Bobby Deerfield and Jean-Jacques Beneix’s 37.2^o le Matin (Betty Blue). (The latter was scored by Gabriel Yared, who also scored Autumn, superbly.) 

I don’t care about the gender of the person who dies, I just love the storytelling concision. A few months of the character togetherness is enough to make the point. 

Autumn in New York is set (as the title so clearly announces) in autumnal – and snow-bound – New York. The city has never looked more gorgeous, more romantic or filled with such kindly souls. (I particularly like the sweet doorman played by Bill Raymond and an absent daughter played by Vera Farmiga.)

Autumn is Chen’s second film as a director but feels like her twentieth. How does anyone master the craft so quickly, so effortlessly? Her compositions are precise and resonant, and her DOP, Gu Changwei (Red Sorghum, Life on a String), supports her by capturing rare wonders of light and colour. It is achingly beautiful.

Yes, like the weather, the film’s second half turns sombre, the colours muted and the locations increasingly claustrophobic, but it also full of surprises.

When one of the lovers dies, Chen focuses not exclusively on the pain of the lover, family and friends, but also on the deep anguish of a surgeon (J. K. Simmons) who has been asked to pull off a never-before-attempted operation. The tension is as much about his triumphing – a man cursed by genius and asked only to do what others can’t – as about a precious and valued life being saved. (This unexpected and poignant shift in our focus reminds me of the great John Ford.)

I have no idea of how happily or otherwise this film was made, whether the director and writer were always eye to eye, but the collaboration feels seamless, and the understanding with the actors close to note-perfect.

Yes, the film falters slightly at the 46-minute mark (during a listless scene in the kitchen of Will’s best friend), but I would happily rate the opening 46 minutes against any other recent Hollywood romance. 

I don’t care that Autumn never consistently sings quite so perfectly again, despite mostly wonderful scenes. Perfection may be an artist’s ultimate aim, but sometimes perfection feels dead. The minor flaws here don’t impinge in any way on this story’s joys and sadnesses, or the way it merges with and enriches our own experiences of love. (And I am not even sure they are flaws; I suspect they may be more to do with me being caught up in the sadnesses of others, one trapped in a negative view of their core self, and the other battling life and a partner afraid to let go.) 

Some don’t like the film because it is an age-gap story, with Will 26 years older than Charlotte. There is nothing one can do about that, just as there is nothing I can do about feeling I have already seen enough violent Hollywood movies to last me several lifetimes. 

And, in the history of Hollywood mainstream age-gap movies, who else but Chen and Burnett have had the courage to raise absent-father and -daughter issues, to offer delicate insights into the vagaries of caring, and of need, that in no way diminish the characters or their love story.

But, as in Feast of Love, Burnett goes even further, discussing, almost subliminally, connections – soul contracts – between people and across time. The moment when the long-absent daughter places a hand on her belly as her yet-unborn child kicks (you’ll understand) is heart-stopping.

In addition to all these pleasures, some of the most touching moments involve Will and his business partner (Anthony LaPaglia, never better). What we see is how many men behave and care, but cinema too rarely recognises.

And sometimes men in fact cry. The shot of Michael Marnet (Charles Boyer) weeping at the end of Leo McCarey’s Love Affair is one of the reasons I place it as No. 3 in my all-time Top 10, and incidentally why I prefer it to An Affair to Remember, because Cary Grant can’t cry on screen. Richard Gere can.

Unlike with a film directed by say Catherine Breillat or Jane Campion, one would be challenged to argue Autumn in New York is more obviously made by a woman than Bobby Deerfield. Instead, it feels perfectly balanced between – and outside – gender. 

Autumn in New York is about two souls lucky enough to meet and be together and share moments of life, and then argue and break apart, and then come together again and, in the ecstasy of their rekindled love, face death.

Buy Autumn in New York on Amazon 

CINEMA REBORN - The Presentations - (2) - Sylvie Le Clézio introduces MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT (Tomás Gutierrez Alea, Cuba, 1968)

Editor's Note: The second of the transcripts of the introductions to the Cinema Reborn 2019 program. Sylvie Le Chezio  (below) is a producer (ALLIES and THE COCA COLA KID among many), festival director and a patron of film culture in Australia. She has recently published with John Lyons "A Balcony Over Jerusalem". Her introduction to MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT was coloured by her friendship with the film's director Tomas Gutierrez Alea.

Luciano Castille, a historian and critic who was also the director of ICAIC (Instituto Cubana del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos/ the National Institute for Cuban Cinema) speaks of  the 1968 feature Memories of Underdevelopment as the Cathedral of Cuban cinema.  He also said that the film was one that was shot yesterday for an audience of tomorrow.

It still resonates today. 

In 1974, Memories of Underdevelopment won a National Society of Film Critics award in New York which carried a $2000 prize. A big sum in those days.  The director, Tomás Gutierrez Alea, was invited to pick up the prize but his visa application was declined and a US Treasury official advised the Critics Society that anyone who received the prize on his behalf would be arrested.  Such were the relations between Cuba and the US at the time.

Tomas Alea actually said that he thought the ban to be ironical given that one of the issues that the film confronts was the issue of disinformation between the US and Cuba.

Perhaps I could tell you a little about Tomás G. Alea, the director (above).  

He was a friend.  I met Titón, as he was called by everyone, in the late 70’s.  I was lucky to meet him a number of times over a decade and many visits to Cuba.  

After meeting him and a few other Cuban directors, I was approached to do a Cuban Film Week in Sydney.  The film week was held in 1981 at the opera House and Titon was one of two filmmakers who attended. 

Titón came from a privileged family in Havana. He studied Law at Havana University.   He then decided to study cinema in Rome and was quite influenced by Roberto Rossellini.   He came back to Havana just before the revolution and was to make the very first film feature film of revolutionary Cuba – Stories of the Revolution (1960). 

Before that, he had made a number of documentaries… these were the days when political documentary was at its height with filmmakers like Pennebaker, the Maysles Brothers, Joris Ivens, Jean Rouch, Chris Marker etc… but even then Titón was conscious of the importance of films in forming ideas and said to his colleagues  “all attempts to portray reality while avoiding judgement on it, are problematic, Sometimes this leads to half-truths, which can be more immoral than a complete lie”.   

He talked about the responsibilities of the filmmaker.   He talked about creating an active audience as opposed to a passive audience and wanted cinema to be an instrument to help the audience develop a critical sense of their own reality. This objective is realised in Memories of Underdevelopment which is a stylistic tour de force and a subtle and complex study of an uncommitted intellectual from a bourgeois background who is swept up in a vortex of revolutionary change during the Cuban nuclear missile crisis.

To place Titón in post-Revolutionary Cuba, Supporter but critical. 

Alea was supporter of the revolution but he was also critical of the realities of post-revolutionary Cuba.  Alea always kept a balance between his dedication to the revolution and his criticism when he felt that his idealism had been betrayed.

The late 70’s and 80’s were difficult time for him. His daughter had left in the Mariel Boatlift with the hundreds of Cubans fleeing the country’s economic difficulties.   By the time Titón came to Sydney in 1981, it was difficult for him to make films via the Cuban Film institute. He said that he would have to go directly to Fidel to get the OK. He did make many acclaimed films — including the Oscar nominated Strawberries and Chocolatein 1993, three years before his death.

When in Sydney, Titon visited a number of hardware stores, and kept saying there is no reason why we can’t have this in Havana; it is just a failure of the bureaucracy. He was always pointing out the pretensions and contradictions within Cuban society. For example, Cubans' aspirations to be like Americans.

In Havana, he would show me the long lines of people waiting for a bus, and said they thought it was beneath them to ride a bike, so they’d stand in long queues for an hour instead of taking a 10-minute bike ride.   He would also talk at length about how fabulous the medical system was, one of the very best on the world at the time, an incredible achievement of the revolution, but he would add “but when there is no toilet paper, it becomes personal”.

He was supportive whilst never averting his critical eye in the hope of promoting change. 

He was a fascinating man, a totally international man despite living in a country so completely blocked off from the world.  He lived in a modest house, full of art and music, and a beautiful view.  As my friend Linda reminded me, under his balcony ran a small river which sometimes delivered gorgeous wooden ceremonial objects from a voodoo or Santeria ceremony -- one of those was a wooden turtle which he had in the living room.  

He was an extraordinary man, a talented, wonderful filmmaker.

I hope you enjoy the ‘Cathedral of Cuban cinema”