Sixty Years of Art Cinema 1960-2020 : Bruce Hodsdon continues his series - 6(55) - Cuba

Cuba                                                                                                                                               

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea  b.28    Manuel Octavio Gómez b.34   Humberto Solas b.41   Sara Gomez* b.42  

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Cuba was the first country in Latin America where it became possible to envisage a new culture, both popular and critical, of the kind imagined on a national scale by Fernando Birri, the recognised pioneer of what came to be known as the New Latin American Cinema movement. The successful overthrow of the Cuban government by left-wing guerrillas led by Fidel Castro in 1959 was followed by an escalating  series of events - expropriation of US businesses by the new government, a failed CIA-backed invasion, and the missile crisis culminating in the neutralising of any direct military threat that a Soviet-armed Cuba might have posed to the US without removing the ideological one. “During the 1960s, Cuba, as a self-styled ‘free territory of the Americas’, remained a beacon of hope for liberation movements throughout Central and South America and a source of inspiration for artists and intellectuals of many persuasions, especially in the cinema” (Nowell -Smith 47).  

 Although cinema was the most popular entertainment medium in Cuba after music, any attempt to establish a film industry had been abandoned three decades earlier with the coming of sound. Film production, distribution and exhibition became the province of American and Mexican companies. As Julianne Burton puts it, “Cuba's major cinematic role was to furnish exotic sets, sultry sex queens, and a tropical beat for Hollywood and Mexican productions.” It offered an audience as well: “in proportion to its population the Cuban movie market was the most lucrative in Latin America […] even though a large section of the rural population had never seen a film.” The foreign controlled movie industry in the 1950s employed 8,000 mainly in the production of advertising shorts and newsreels for theatres and televison”. Burton adds that “Cuba had more than its share of enterprising pornographers.”

The only serious film activity on the island had been centred in film societies. Julio Garcia Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea were members of one of the major societies, Nuestro Tiempo (Our Times), both having studied cinema at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome.

The Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC)

Based on the most reliable estimates the foreign controlled Cuban film industry produced no more than 150 features in six decades of pre-revolutionary history. Apart from newsreels, documentaries were virtually unknown in pre-revolutionary Cuba. In the 17 years, 1959-77, the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) produced 74 feature length and 12 medium length films, some 600 documentary shorts - educational, scientific, and technical as well as animated and fictional - and more than 800 weekly newsreels. Economics (the extra cost factor in fictional filmmaking), and ideology (a preference for direct confrontation with material reality) combined to ensure that ICAIC gave early priority to documentary over fictional filmmaking.

 Julianne Burton’s research identifies two periods in the evolution of ICAIC in the 60s. The first years 1959-60 were “characterised by explosive optimism and a great sense of release, the influx of foreign talent, and the debut of many untried nationals.” The first film efforts “were generally celebratory.” In the second period 1960-69 “ideological maturation and intensified class conflict” resulted in a series of debates and polemics about revolutionary art. “The pervasive influence of Italian neorealism and fascination with the French New Wave gradually gave way to broad-based stylistic experimentation in the late 60s.”

 

Humberto Solas

After being involved in the urban guerrilla resistance to the Batista dictatorship, Humberto Solas (1941-2008), in his mid-teens self-financed a short fiction film which led to an invitation to join the Institute (ICAIC) soon after its founding in 1959. Serving an apprenticeship in documentary shorts and newsreels he directed a medium length feature Manuela (1967) drawing on his own experiences of guerrilla warfare which impressed sufficiently for him to be entrusted at the age of 26 with the three part experimental feature Lucía (1969). It shares with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) the role of breakthrough film in the post-revolutionary birth of Cuban cinema. Lucía demonstrated a flair for epic storytelling in an experimental narrative structure that featured three distinct cinematic styles. Solas described the basis of his stylistic conception as “one of song, one of catharsis, and the other that reflects the obsessions of my life at the time […]  memories of writings that haunted me, by the impact of the Italian neo-realist filmmakers, the French nouvelle vague, and the cinéma vérité and English free cinema movements.” (Martin & Paddington interview). 

Lucia

Solas acknowledged that “the Cuban Left like in any country, has many different orientations and wings. The revolution may appear as a monolithic event, unique and uniform, but it has always been as much cultural as it is economic, reflecting multiple and opposing polemics. On the cultural level, the progressive revolutionaries co-existed with those that had more conservative tendencies […] I belong to [a group] that is based in ICAIC but affiliated with Casa de las Américas, an institution that has struggled for over 35 years to establish a progressive culture in Cuba. I believe in progressive experimental art when you want to arrive at a relative truth based on circumstance without heavy didacticism (ibid).”

Solas was able to maintain a steady output of 24 films including 8 features in this mode  (increasingly co-productions) without ever matching the international success of Lucia.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

Tomás Gutierrez Alea (1928-96) directed 13 features and a number of shorts and documentaries 1947-95. He is best known internationally for four features : La muerta de un burócrata/The Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), Memorias del Subdesarrollo/ Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), La úlcima cena/The Last Supper (1976) and Fresa y Chocolate/Like Water for Chocolate (1995) which he co-directed with Carlos Tabio.  Alea was raised in an affluent, progressive family. He completed a law degree and then studied cinema at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome.  Along with other young Latin American film-makers, Alea was inspired by Italian neo-realism as the aesthetic best fitted to the conditions in their own countries.  Back in Cuba in the mid-50s Alea with Julio Garcia Espinosa whom he had met at the Sperimentale, and members of a left-wing club, made a clandestine documentary, El mégano/The Charcoal Worker (1955)  about the exploitation of charcoal workers in a swamp south of Havana. The film-makers were arrested by Batista’s secret police and the film banned which established its place as a forerunner to Cuban revolutionary cinema. All who collaborated in its making went on to become leading figures in the Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), founded by decree after the overthrow of Batista as the first cultural act of the revolutionary government.

 Alea was one of the filmmakers who together founded the ICAIC in 1959. His first four features alternated between neo-realist influenced drama and comedy. The Death of a Bureaucrat is a mix of absurdist and black comedy that satirises a Cuban problem in the sixties - the persistence of bureaucratic ways inherited from the structures of the Batista regime, a bureaucracy encouraged by the establishment of branch offices of US companies and an associated network of small companies serving them. The nationalisation of foreign companies after the revolution did not put an end to the bureaucratic class seen as a brake on revolutionary action (Kernan). Alea attacks this problem with a broad anthology of parody dedicated to, among others, Bunuel, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Harold Lloyd and Jean Vigo.

 Translated by Alea and Edmundo Desnoes from his novel, 'Inconsolable Memories', the story of Memories of Underdevelopment is in the form of a diary by Sergio, a prosperous bourgeois who chooses to stay in Havana when his wife and mother leave for the US in 1961 after the failed CIA operated invasion by 1000 Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs the story bookended a year later with the Missile Crisis. The political trauma in America associated with these events meant that the commercial release of Memories was delayed in the US for nearly five years opening in 1973 in New York to critical acclaim.

Memories of Underdevelopment

While Sergio rejects many of the bourgeois ideals of his upbringing, he is unable to shake off either sexual neuroses or his European-based intellectual paralysis, continuing to live uncertainly as a rent-drawing  property owner. The ‘under development' of the title is a complex pun describing both individual and national problems of the revolution in its infancy.  Alea is anything but literary in his attack. He proceeds with highly accomplished technique, towards a perceptive and witty analysis. Many critics at the time were surprised by the strain of self-criticism running through a film produced by what is virtually a government ministry in a Marxist country  (Rod McShane, Time Out 2009)

 Certain parallels have been drawn between early Soviet cinema and the films made during the decade following the Cuban revolution. Eisenstein assumed that his aesthetic experimentation, based on montage, could be harmonised with the propaganda demands of the state. However under Stalin the rules of  socialist realism supplanted and repudiated montage-based experiments. In Cuba scope for  experimentation with a number of hybrid styles was directed at replacing Hollywood with Cuban films for local audiences unengaged by social realist imports from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.  

 In contrast to the situation with the imposition of social realism in a closed culture in the Soviet Union, the early success of Cuban films at home and abroad strengthened the position of filmmakers like Alea in ICAIC, ensuring the progressive orientation of cultural politics in a socialist economy with film as an open instrument for social awareness both within Cuba and in creating a new, more complex picture of Cuba abroad. (Kernan). By the late 60s the experimental ethos of Santiago Alvarez’s animations had spread to fiction and produced an astonishing series of films which boldly transgressed the division between genres” (Chanan). Julio Garcia Espinosa’s Los aventuras de Juan Quin Quin (1967) brought a new dimension to anarchic comedy while Holás reinvented historical epic.

 Memories of Underdevelopment was a breakthrough film.  From this point in his career “every one of Alea's films combined either an experimental attitude towards film language, or else a spirit of improvisation in technique with an independent critical attitude towards reality” (Chanan) . Mark Cousins also identifies Memories internationally as is one of the best examples of an emerging art film genre in what he describes as 60s film collage (313-4). The driving force was not cause and effect narrative but “the search for meaning.”  Nowell-Smith in Making Waves (184), endorses the film's strengths as an intellectually accomplished use of film-within-a-film as a way of looking at the formation of revolutionary consciousness or rather through the failure of its formation. However he considers the enthusiastic identification of audiences in Europe and later in US art houses, in the complexities of Sergio, was “rather more than the filmmakers intended.” 

 ICAIC director Alfredo Guevara (not related to Che) pointed out that the films made there -112 features and more than 900 documentaries in 24 years - were aimed not only at Cuban audiences but were produced for all of Latin America. “We do not direct ourselves only to a society that is building socialism but also to a continent that fights for liberation as well as socialism. That has always seemed very important for us to keep in mind.” (ibid 743) And it is important also to keep in mind when considering the political functioning of Sergio in Memories of Underdevelopment.

 The ICAIC enjoyed a good deal of autonomy. Due in no small measure to lack of resources accentuated by the US trade embargo, focus on aesthetics was in service of a cinema created as a  tool for political and social change. The main goal was to create films in which the viewer becomes an active, self-aware participant in the filmic discourse. The intention was that viewers presented with a current problem with no clear solution leave the cinema willing to become an actor in social change.

 Julia Levin notes that ICAIC switched the focus to safer historical subjects when the political atmosphere took on more oppressive overtones such as when the Soviet Union invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968 which the Castro government supported, and the philosophy department at Havana University was closed down for ideological reasons.  As Levin further notes, the vibrant 60s for Cuban art was followed by a period when vitality was gradually lost leading to what are known  'the grey years’ of the 1980s.  Alea turned to history in two dramas the experimental A Cuban Struggle Against the Demons (1971) and A  La última cena/The Last Supper (1976) a satire of Afro-Cubanism including Cuba's ambivalent attitude to slavery in earlier times.

Manuel Octavio Gomez

Writer-director Manuel Octavio Gomez (1934-88) was one of the first generation of Cuban filmmakers  who began in documentary in the ICAIC after its founding. By the mid-sixties he had moved into making feature films with a merging of issues in popular culture juxtaposed with history in an innovative blend of staged and documentary modes rejecting the idea of the conventional documentary historical film per se. His interest was in reinterpreting popular forms. To make contemporary a century of anti-imperialist struggles that placed contemporary Cuba in an historical continuity, he made La primera cargo al machete/The First Charge of the Machete (1969) portraying the war against the Spanish in 1868 by formally contrasting archaic (high contrast film images) and modern film styles (tv style reportage with handheld cameras) in portraying the machete as both an historical tool of war and a weapon in contemporary economic struggles. He continued to make feature films through the 70s.

Sara Gómez

Sara Gómez (1943-74) began working at the ICAIC in 1961 as an assistant director to Alea, Jorge Fraga and to Agnès Varda on her short documentary Salute to Cuba (1963). She wrote about the importance of didactic documentary form in the revolutionary process. Previously in the early-mid 60s two films dealing with socially black, marginalised groups had been censored by the local authorities as showcasing an “unwanted’ version of Havana” (Alonso Aguilar). From 1962-73 Gomez had fulfilled her apprenticeship, directing 10 documentaries presenting vivid snapshots of Cuba’s racialised history before co-scripting and directing a feature De Cierta Manera/One Way or Another (1974), filmed on 16mm with a very low budget. Not long after completing editing she died  as the result of an acute asthma attack. Trained as a musician and ethnographer, she came from the neighbourhood of Guanabacoa traditionally viewed as one of the centres of Afro-Cuban culture, a marginal sector with many issues such as race and gender inequality

One Way or Another

Gómez filmed a mix of real and fictitious subjects in an historically black town beginning the film like a didactic documentary with voice-overs presenting the revolution’s prescription for social integration over images of daily life. It soon becomes apparent that these images are being labelled as representing antisocial and regressive traditions existing on the margins of the revolution but backed by heartfelt renditions of popular black music. The central relationship between a black labourer and a teacher becomes a proxy for the tension between the old and the new Cuba, the representation of the former making the film “an outlier in the Cuban cinema” (ibid). Gomez continues the trend of her short films in framing historical processes with personal stories “through individuality and affectation.”  Gender and racial tension between a black freewheeling workman (a ‘lumpen’ in Marxist terms) and an intellectually stiff, mixed race, upper-class woman, re-contextualises the romantic couple “to bring to life the changing environment around them.”

 Aquilar brings attention to Cinema Novo’s filmmaking polemicist, Julio Garcia Espinosa’s seminal 1969 essay “Towards an Imperfect Cinema,” in which he positions Gomez’s film as a “truly subversive work,” one that rebels against both institutional ways of representing cinema and also in the presentation of their subjects [in which] “the directness of Cuban militant documentary tradition coexists alongside the stylised jump cuts of the French New Wave.” Transitions are rarely seamless, melodramatic outbursts of emotion are filmed by a freely flowing camera while sociological observation gives way to heartfelt musical performance.

Gómez presents a critical sociological analysis of life in marginal communities on the outskirts of Havana and the effects of marginality on the psychological, moral and cultural behaviour of the inhabitants. Her early training with Alea, along with her work on documentaries, is evident in the way documentary and fictional forms combine inextricably in her only feature. As a previous assistant to Alea, Gómez appears to follow his style in Memories of Underdevelopment in One Way or Another, a style Mexican scholar John Mraz calls “dialectical resonance.” Mraz finds a crucial difference between the two films that might be said to distinguish the generation of directors who came of age, like Alea, before the revolution with those like Gómez who grew up within the revolution. “In spite of its ultimate commitment to the revolutionary process,” suggests Mraz, “in some ways the perspective in Memories is of an 'outsider' in what might be called “critical bourgeois realism” relating to Nowell-Smith's identification of ‘a European art film perspective’ in referring to Memories. Gómez's is a vision Mraz sees as “wholly from within the revolution despite the fact that every position in the film is subject to criticism - including that of institutionalised revolution, which is presented in […] a pompous omniscient narration.” Mraz calls this perspective “critical social realism.” She makes use of distancing devices “in a rigorously analytic way.” As Aquilar concludes, “Gómez’s cinema feels liberated.”

 Public screening of the Gómez’s film was delayed by censorship and print restoration issues until 1977 - it has since been streamed internationally by Mubi. The Film Institute screened a special program dedicated to Sara’s life and work subsequently the subject of a documentary, Sara Gomez: An Afro-Cuban Filmmaker (2004), by Swiss filmmaker Alessandra Muller.

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The first entry for Cuba in the 'International Film Guide' appeared in the 1971 issue, in celebratory mood announcing that “seldom has a flourishing film industry emerged out of virtually nothing in such a short space as that of Cuba after the revolution of 1959.” The first cultural decree of the Castro regime was on film, proclaiming in the first sentence, “cinema is an art.” Through the 70s and 80s driven by the  ICIAC, Cuban film established an international presence in film festivals and an annual Festival of New Latin American cinema in 1979 in Cuba, while the domestic audience was kept successfully “entertained and informed” (comedies were popular). An ongoing US embargo not only severely denied the Cuban industry access to the lucrative American market but also kept most western films out. Production was maintained through the 80s but the IFG reports noted a growing need for revitalisation. Financial problems were compounded by the collapse of the Soviet empire. The Castro regime  destroyed the economy. Life in Cuba has been made much harder by the regime's centralised misallocation of resources. “Cuban film was facing the biggest crisis of its history [....] an exhaustion of the early themes of revolutionary cinema; a reluctance to probe contemporary Cuban life with the same frankness of the earlier days.” By 1994 “the days of Cuban cinema seem to get darker all the time. The combination of harsh political repression combined with financial problems had virtually caused Cuban cinema to ground to a halt.” In five successive years, 1995-99, there were no reports from Cuba in the IFG.

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A tendency to deal with sordid aspects of Cuban society has characterised a number of film releases over the last year. One of them, Juan Carlos Cremata's, Chamaco, is a tough story of gay juvenile prostitution, as well as personal corruption. Reportedly filmed with a budget of only US$100, it has an underground quality which is in stark contrast to its theatrical mise-en-scene. Night time in Havana has never been so tragic and oppressive. -  Jorge Yglesias, Cuba report, IFG 2012

* Memories of Overdevelopment / Memorias del desarrolio (2010) is a US$50,000 film made over 5 years in the US and Cuba by guerilla filmmaker Miguel Coyola, a unique companion to Tomas Guittiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment, a classic of Cuban cinema (q.v.). “Sergio, an ideological relative of Alea's main character 40 years later, is now an exile in the United States, weighed down by memories and remorse for past actions. A product of the digital generation, the film ranks as one of the best this country has produced. In contrast to the political and formal correctness of the film industry, the emergence of fresh talent working independently or supported by institutions such as the Higher Institute of Arts (ISA) or the International School of Cinema and TV (EICTV) continues to offer strong signs of revitalisation. ISA veers towards the style of music videos whilst those of the EICTV are more grounded in art house or experimental cinema” - Cuba report  IFG 2011.

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Julianne Burton  “Revolutionary Cuban Cinema: Introduction”  Jump Cut 19  December 1979  pp 17-20                       

Michael Chanan  “ New Cinemas in Latin America”  The History of World Cinema  ed. G.Nowell-Smith                           

Michael T. Martin & Bruce Paddington an interview with Humberto Solas Film Quarterly Spring  2001                              

Marta Alvear  Every Point of arrival is a point of departure: interview with Solas Jump Cut 19 1978                                                                                                                                                  

Peter Biskind  “Lucía: Struggles with History”  Jump Cut 2  July-August 1974                                                                       

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea  “Memories of Underdevelopment : The Viewer's Dialectic” Jump Cut 32 1986                                                                                                                                                                  

Alonso Aquilar  “Reimagining the Revolution”  Notebook/ Mubi  One Way or Another presentation.                                                   

John Mraz  Entries on Sara Gomez  and Octavio Gomez in Directors vol. Dictionary ed. C. Lyon                                                                                                                                                                

Julia Lesage “One Way or Another: dialectical, revolutionary, feminist”  Jump Cut 20  May 1978                                    

Geoffrey Nowell-Smith  Making Waves New Cinemas in the 1960s  2008                                                                                  

Julia Levin “Great Directors: Tomas Gutiérrez Alea”  Senses of Cinema October 2005

At the German Film Festival - Janice Tong reviews SOUND OF FALLING (Mascha Schilinski, 2025)

An Impression: That Quiet Fever of Girlhood

 

        The white noise in my ear tells me I’m alive. In noticing this, I also notice my                 stoic fear of impending death, when the sound of falling stills. We are fragile as         flowers.

 

        The harvester is blind to all that lies in the hay, there is no pathway in or out. The         doe sleeps the sleep of the just. The advancing future, this noise that is blinding.

 

        The white noise in my ear rings out in the night, amplified ten times in a string of         white nights. Nights without rest…this baffling call to whiteness.

 

        We are conditioned to fall, gravity (a weak force) keeps our feet to the ground,             pulling us downwards. The elevator of life – a mesmerising slow descent.  

 

In Mascha Schilinski’s film, Sound of Falling, the German title In die Sonne schauen literally means ‘gazing at the sun’, – we feel the after effects: to be blinded by its whiteness, momentarily, involuntarily. – The film is a poetic tapestry of memory fragments across multiple points of view, of four intergenerational families in the same rural farmhouse in Saxony-Anhalt in northeastern Germany, across four time periods, 1910s, 1940s, 1980s, and 2020s.

Alma (Hanna Heckt)

Alma (a prize-worthy performance from the young Hanna Heckt) is the seven year old narrator from 1910. She lives with her sisters Lia, Hedda, and Gerti, and brother Fritz. They live in this big farmhouse with cooks and maid servants, farm hands too. The scene where Alma plays at being her ‘dead self’, after seeing a photo of her doppelganger on the mantelpiece: that girl also had the same name, who appeared uncannily to be wearing the same black dress that their mother, Emma, had carefully picked out for the narrator Alma for a special feast day – the Day of the Dead, is nothing short of ingenious. 

 

Seventeen year old Erika (Lea Drinda) from 1940 is the niece of Fritz. She wanders around the largely empty house on crutches with her own good left leg strapped up, a fetishistic fantasy of her amputee bed-ridden uncle, showing an unfettered glimpse of female desire, a dare one sets oneself. She steals into his room, dips her finger into the pool of sweat from his bellybutton and tastes it. 

 

Irm (Claudia Geisler-Bading), Erika’s sister, is Angelika’s mother, an awkward woman in her late 50s; who ‘does not know when to laugh’. Angelika is the voice from the 1980s. She, at sixteen, has an allure and carefreeness that reminded me of Christina Ricci’s character in Buffalo 66 (1998). Lena Urzendowsky’s portrayal is remarkable (in fact, all the child actors in this film are brilliant and affecting) – she has discovered the power of her body, a body that can hold the gaze of another, especially that of men, regardless whether they are her cousin (Florian Geißelmann) or uncle (Konstantin Lindhorst). 

 

Unlike Angelika, Laeni Geiseler’s Lenka, a twelve year old from the 2020s, also experiences the male gaze, but an unwanted one, from her father’s friend on a summer’s day under the water sprinkler. Her sister Nelly (Zoë Baier) at five years of age, often feels left out, and readily imagines her own end. Their mother, Christa (Luise Heyer) on the other hand, is a modern woman, one who knocks down the hundred year old chimney stove with a sledgehammer. Is this her way to start their own story afresh? Yet Lenka’s navigation of her own life changes when she meets an angst-filled teenage neighbour, Kaya (Ninel Geiger) who bears a remarkable resemblance to Angelika, who has just lost her own mother. 

 

Lenka (Laeni Geiseler)

Throughout the characters' voice overs, we learn a lot about their feelings, their interior world, whether they are just describing a scene, or explaining how they are trying to make sense of what they have seen or heard – there is an underscore of violence, of threat, across all of their accounts. 

 

Their story is sprung in a temporal labyrinthine maze, the structure of which, unlike a physical labyrinth, weaves you in and out of time. Remembering that a maze is constructed with side paths and dead ends too: there are no easy answers to the life that we lead. We just struggle on the best we can, turn back from the dead ends, cheat and climb over the hedgerows if we dare. But the red thread that binds these epochs nonetheless gets loosened once it’s been pulled. 

 

The idea of letting go. The seen and unseen. The blind bind. 

 

This film masterfully builds narrative as in a dream. A catalogue of moments in time: what a family chooses to speak about, the surface of it, dressing it up for ‘outsiders’, and what gets hidden and buried, the rituals, or those unexplainable private thoughts. Schilinski, working with husband cinematographer Fabian Gamper, has created a chimeric daydream. 

 

We slip into that quiet fever of girlhood. 

 

Phantom pains from a limb that is no longer there. ‘Pretty strange that something can still hurt, even when it’s not there anymore.’ Alma says of Fritz’s cries after he had his leg amputated.

 

The sullen, moody years I also lived as a girl discovering the world, and the allure of a continent that is not yours – but another’s body, another’s mind. And the sad realisation, of the impossibility to bridge the two worlds.

 

To look there, back into those memories, those blinded moments, to feel the actual weight of the emotion as you did then: a momentary revulsion, or the first blush recognition of the male gaze, the power of your own body, an embarrassment, or an unnameable desire. 

 

Erika (Lea Drinda)

Nothing about the world is certain, but only that the world is damaged and beautiful at the same time. These traces are the only evidence of our existence. 

 

Even when we ‘see’ our own ghosts – the dead Alma on the velvet settee; Lia’s sewn-opened eyes on a similarly upholstered chair; Alma’s about face turn to look into camera; the fly that crawls into the mouth of their deceased younger brother up on the hayloft; to Angelika’s ghostly disappearance captured in mid-flight at the edge of the Polaroid, a floating blur peeling away from the rest of her family; the story of eels and drowning; Erika’s disappearance and dead mothers; a river that divides the east and the west; what remains hidden, or seen through peepholes and glimpsed in the cracks between the timber: incest, girls being sold by their families as maids, then sterilised just to be ‘visited by men lining up outside her door at night’, the ‘work accident’ of Fritz – speak of suicides, and the pull of death. What it means to live in a patriarchal world, and its socially accepted mistreatment of girls. The camera cannot help but loop back round to all the haunted places, the kitchen, bedroom, hayloft, field, and riverbank. 

 

Could the sound of Alma’s hand falling repeatedly on her lap as she ‘plays at being dead’ be the beat that precedes an ultimate action? That dull thud, like the ache of a beating heart. The down beat before take off. Before that hammer blow. The first measure of a life to be lived.

Streaming on Netflix - KYLIE (Dir: Michael Harte, Australia/UK, 2026, in three parts)

Charlie Schlatter, Kylie Minogue, The Delinquents

"Maybe I should go back to acting"....or something very similar is the absolutely only reference to the bits and pieces of film acting that Kylie Minogue has done over a forty year career in the three part three+ hour series currently screening on Netflix. 

It's not as if the series tries to avoid the many moments of mediocrity in her work. There's plenty of them in her singing career. So...mysterious. Did she not want to talk about her films or did the producers forget to ask the questions.

Her most notable appearance was in The Delinquents. There is an HD copy of the movie on YouTube if this has made you at all curious. Kylie Minogue utterly outshone bland imported Yank Charlie Schlatter and brought a lot of conviction to a role about teenage love, illegal abortion, police harassment, welfare harassment and true love winning out. Kylie doesn't sing though she appears to play the piano quite well. The real star of the production was the music supervisor, who no doubt on instruction, loaded the film up with a soundtrack of classic 50s rock and pop by the likes of Little Richard, The Platters and Gene Vincent. It's worth a look and when I watched it on YouTube it was uninterrupted by advertisements.

More recently the film's modest box office back in its day was used as the starting point of a piece by Brendan Swift published in Inside Film a couple of years ago about the vexed question of just how government intervention in the film industry should work. You can read the whole thing IF YOU CLICK HERE. I wont give any more away but my favourite paras in the story were these:

"Retired film distributor Alan Finney, who marketed many classic Australian films including Priscilla and Muriel’s Wedding, says the question of “who decides” which films receive government funding has always been a complicated question.

“One of the problems when you’ve got a small population and a small industry is the people who you appoint to make the decisions are either of two kinds,” he says.

“They’re either people who have never been in the industry and know nothing about it, and are therefore criticised for not being in touch with the key factors of decision-making, or they’re people that have been in the industry, and then the criticism is made that either they’ve got vested interests or they’re obviously failing in their job in the industry, which is why they’ve been appointed to the board of this state or federal funding body.” 

At CINEMA REBORN - Beaudicea Smith-Davies' introduction to the Sydney screening of 36 FILLETTE (Catherine Breillat, France, 1988)

Beaudicea Smith-Davies is a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. Her research focuses on monstrosity in the works of contemporary French female filmmakers. This is a slightly edited transcript of her introduction to the screening of 36 Fillette during the Sydney season of Cinema Reborn 2026.

This is the fifth transcript of an introduction to a program in the Cinema Reborn 2026 season. Previous introductions published by Margot Nash on the Australian Social Realism program,  CJ Johnson on One Hour with You, Barrie Pattison on The Watchmaker of Saint-Paul and David Heslin on The Asthenic Syndrome can be found if you click on the author's names.

 

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Catherine Breillat 

36 Fillette (1998) is Catherine Breillat’s 3^rd film and was inspired by her novel of the same name. The untranslated title refers to the European dress size ‘36’ and ‘fillette’ means little girl: the equivalent of an Australian XS or calling someone ‘petite’. Breillat was born in 1948 in the provincial town of Bressuire near the city of Niort in north west France. As a teenager, she spent many of her summer holidays with her older sister on the south west coast, hitchhiking to bars and nightclubs in Biarritz, where this film is set. When it was first released in 1988 it was not a hit in France, but it proved popular with audiences in the US where it was billed as the French Lolita likely due to its focus on a relationship between a teenage girl and an older man. Breillat’s 14-year-old protagonist Lili is played by Delphine Zentout, who was 16 at the time the film was shot, and the relationship between her and Maurice, played by Etienne Chicot, is largely told from her point of view.  Her quest to use the summer to lose her virginity is the driving force behind the story.

 

At the beginning of her career, the teenage girl’s journey of self-discovery, her desire to explore her body and sexuality on her own terms as she morphs into a woman, arose as a central concern of Breillat’s work.  At 17, she wrote her first novel ‘The easy man’, L’homme facile (1968). A work of erotic fiction about the sexual awakening of a teenage girl. Her first film, ‘A real young girl’, Une vraie jeune fille (1975), explores this same theme. While teenage girl characters were already present in French cinema such as the teenage sisters in Eric Rohmer’s ‘Claire’s Knee’, Le genou de Claire (1970), and Claude Miller’s ‘The Impudent Girl’, L’effrontée(1985), starring a 14 year old Charlotte Gainsbourg, Breillat’s vision is neither festishing like Rohmers nor paternalistc like Millers but honest, and female — a rarity for its time. The metamorphosis of bodies, especially female bodies, Breillat films without ceremony and the gaze her camera produces is as direct and unscrupulous as her dialogues.

 

Lili (Delphine Zentout), 36 Fillette

Even though she is often thought of as a feminist filmmaker with a specific female or feminine gaze, when speaking about her manner of filming bodies and sex, she insists on the authority that being a ‘metteur en scène’, a film director, grants her. She says: ‘nothing must be censored[...] the director avoids filming what they don’t want to see and we see exactly what they want to see[...] this is what I call a ‘gaze’. The gaze is placed where the director wants[...] and nowhere else[...] and it’s there that the audience is going to look [...] and nowhere else.’ Sometimes considered provocative or shocking, Breillat offers an alternative to society’s moralising gaze and a refusal of puritanical censoring of what can be projected on the big screen. In her home country, audiences and critics only started taking an interest in Breillat’s cinema after the commercial success of her 1999 film Romance, which includes a scene of unsimulated fellatio and the casting of male porn star Rocco Seffredi. Rather than an anomaly, Romance situates itself within a broader movement of films that at the time flirted with the border between art cinema and pornography — Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny (2003) and Virginie Despentes’ Baise-moi (2000), loosely translated as ‘screw-me’, are two examples of this. 

 

J-P (Stéphane Moquet), Lili (Delphine Zentout)

Generally better known for her cinema, Breillat has since the start of her career always engaged with literary writing; many of her films are adapted from her written work or her films have provided the subject matter for her books. Representations of women’s lives dominate her body of work, of which a large portion is either semi-biographical, as is the case of 36 Fillette or entirely autobiographical. Like Breillat, our protagonist Lili, is precocious, aspires to be a writer, has outgrown her peers and is ready to burst through the tight seams of a world already too small to contain her. Still an adolescent herself when she first entered the French literary scene there is an apparent parallel between Breillat’s personal experiences and those of the fictional female protagonists she represents, and Breillat frequently acknowledges the translation of her own life into her work.Today 36 Fillette (1987) the novel is currently out of print, although in France, several of her novels are readily available. Her well-known text Pornocratie (2001) was translated into English in 2008, and includes an introduction by American writer Chris Kraus, and a very recent book, published in the form of a series of interviews with Breillat, ‘I only believe in myself’, Je ne crois qu’en moi (2023), appears in English as well. 

 

Lili (Delphine Zentout), Maurice (Etienne Chicot) 

After suffering a stroke in 2004, Breillat experienced a form of renaissance, in France anyway. Her stroke left her hemiplegic, and she published a book ‘Abuse of Weakness’ Abus de faiblesse (2009), which she adapted to film in 2013, about how she was swindled out of a fortune by a conman in the immediate period of her recovery.  Breillat’s highly publicised personal tragedy transformed public perceptions and ignited renewed interest in her as an artist. It prompted a return to her earlier, more avant-gardist works, such as the case for 36 Fillette.

 

The biographical impulse behind much of her work is evidence of a creative process that arises from a place of intimate personal experience, and throughout her career Breillat has written, filmed, re-written and reimagined what she knows constantly returning and revisiting bodies, sex, desire and intimacy. At the same time her stories move beyond the personal realm and extend to the universal. ‘Blue Beard’, Barbe Bleue (2009), and ‘Sleeping Beauty’, La Belle Endormie (2010), two films from her mid-career are reimaginings of Charles Perrault’s classical fairytales. 

 

Like Breillat’s films, Perrault’s tales were never intended for children. We know that he wrote them to prove to his peers at the academy that the popular tales of the common folk contained some of humanity’s oldest myths. Her most recent film ‘Last summer’, L’été dernier (2023), returns to relationship depicted in 36 Fillette, where a woman has a romantic relationship with her teenage stepson performing a gendered inversion of the dynamic we see between Lili and Maurice. ‘Last Summer’ is itself a remake of Danish film ‘Queen of Hearts’, Dronningen (May el-Toukhy, 2019), and Breillat self-consciously includes a reference to Hans Christen Anderson’s ‘The Little Mermaid’, acknowledging her film’s Danish roots. 

 

Lili (Delphine Zentout), Bertrand (Olivier Parnière)

36 Fillette equally reaches into the wondrous when Lili leads Maurice to a beach that takes its name from a local legend, a tale that itself recalls the tragic drowning of forbidden lovers Hero and Leander from Greek mythology. 40 years on from its first screening, Lili and her creator continue as forces to be reckoned with, and the film still feels as bold and incisive today in the wake of contemporary debates. Watching Breillat’s films, I find, can sometimes feel like trying to dry swallow a pill and staking a bet that the immediate discomfort will eventually give way to an enlightened sense of relief. I hope you enjoy the film! 

On Leonardo Sciascia - Rod Bishop reviews A SICILIAN MAN: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul

A SICILIAN MAN: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul, by Caroline Moorehead, Chatto and Windus, 2026  

The great Sicilian author Leonardo Sciascia dedicated most of his life to exposing the Mafia and the widespread corruption he saw in Italian institutions. 

Remarkably, he lived long enough to publish 14 books and copious essays, with many of his works adapted for the screen. These included 11 feature films and 7 feature length television programs.

Lifelong friends with Pasolini, there were also unrealized film collaborations with Roberto Rossellini, Sergio Leone and Michaelangelo Antonioni.

In this impressively researched biography, Caroline Moorehead gives a detailed account of the rise of the Mafia after WW2. She includes the scandalous friars at the Capuchin monastery in the central Sicilian town of Mazzarino. 

In 1956, shots were fired in the monastery and Brother Agrippino emerged wounded from his room, a victim of mistaken-friar-identity. A letter soon arrived threatening to destroy an entire monastery and kill all its friars unless two million lire was paid in ransom. 

A local landowner was then murdered in his Fiat 600 after ignoring dire warnings from an older friar during confession in church.

The local police uncovered:

“…a web of corruption and extortion, organized by friars during confession and carried out by Mafia enforcers, with local people obliged to hand over large sums of money to the monastery’s gardener. In the monastery itself, were found stashes of cash, guns and vast quantities of delicious food. The friars, who had taken vows of poverty, had set up bank accounts all over Sicily and were making loans at extortionate rates. They had become millionaires.”

A Mafia-run criminal covenant no less; the friars a microcosm of the Mafia’s re-emergence in Sicilian life after WW2. Kept under some control during Mussolini’s Fascist dictatorship, the Mafia stayed underground until the end of the war. 

Moorehouse writes of the Allied invasion of Sicily; and Charles Poletti, a former governor of New York who was parachuted into Palermo and tasked with the preparations for rebuilding and restoring democracy in a liberated Sicily and the rest of Italy.

Despite Poletti’s fluency in Italian (including Sicilian and Neapolitan dialects) he had an interpreter and driver named Vito Genovese, who had been a Mafia Don in New York, but was now back in his Italian homeland with the Allied troops.

Genovese had donated $4 million to Mussolini’s fascist party, but switched sides with the Allied invasion and offered his services to the US Army.

He was a close friend - since childhood - with the notorious Mafia drug lord Lucky Luciano, a Sicilian regarded as the single most important figure in the creation of the American Mafia. 

Mafia boss Genovese, as an interpreter to Colonel Charles Poletti was able to offer him advice: who better to govern than the proven anti-fascists, the men who had been imprisoned as mafiosi by the Fascists in the late 1920s? 

The Mafia were subsequently appointed to government, mayoral and high administrative positions by the apparently politically naïve Allies, who couldn’t leave Sicily fast enough. 

“The Mafia was now back in business. The Allies had profoundly, disastrously, misunderstood the reality of Sicily…not surprisingly, the first thing the Mafia did was to organize a vast black market…and the Mafia grew very rich”. 

The Mafia black markets supplied 70% of Sicily’s food supply. Genovese established one of these black markets, and he with Poletti, are two significant figures in Francesco Rosi’s Lucky Luciano (1973), a crime drama that clearly places the blame for the rise of the Mafia after WW2 at the feet of the Americans. 

Vito Genovese can be seen posing in US army uniform in a photograph with the notorious black market bandit leader Salvatore Giuliano. Among those murdered by Giuliano’s bandit gang between the Allied invasion in 1943 and his death in1950, were 87 Carabinieri and 33 Polizia (see also Salvatore Giuliano, dir, Francesco Rosi, 1962).

 

Leonardo Sciascia

Leonardo Sciascia was born in the impoverished Sulphur mining town of Racalmuto (‘a dead village’) in 1921, with no electricity or water, and grew up with Mussolini in power. 

From an early age his view of a Sicily as corrupted by Fascists, the Mafia, the Catholic Church, the carabinieri, and later the Christian Democrats, was fully formed. He witnessed the Mafia spread all over Italy and by the late 1970s, his fame as an anti-Mafia author was known nationwide. Fellow author Gesualdo Bufalino said: “Sciascia became spokesman for the collective conscience of Italy.” 

He did more than any other writer to reveal and expose the Mafia and the corrupt politics endemic to Italy.  

Sciascia’s novels, stories and screenplays become notable additions to Italian cinema, and its growing sub-genre of Mafia gangster films. 

They include: To Each His Own aka We Still Kill the Old Way, dir. Elio Petri (1967); The Day of the Owl, aka Mafia and aka The Mafia Makes the Law, dir. Damiano Damiani (1968); A Matter of Conscience, dir. Giovanni Grimaldi (1970); Bronte, chronicle of a massacre, dir. Florestano Vancini (1972); Illustrious Corpses, dir. Francesco Rosi (1976); One Way or Another, dir. Elio Petri (1976); A Sold Life, dir. Aldo Florio (1976); The Moro Affair, dir. Giuseppe Ferrara (1986); Open Doors, dir. Gianni Amelio (1990); A Simple Story, dir. Emidio Greco (1991) and The Council of Egypt, dir. Emidio Greco (2002).

There were seven feature length films for television – The Man I Killed, Board Game, Western di cose Nostre, Grand Hotel des Palmes and remakes of The Day of the Owl, The Council of Egypt and To Each His Own.

Recently, a collection of writings on the cinema by Sciascia was published in Italian as Questo non è un racconto (This is not a story).

Included are 17 pages from 1972 by Sciascia titled Per Sergio Leone. It’s an unrealized treatment for a film on Italo-American hoodlums in prohibition-era New York City, and with recognizable similarities to Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America (1984).

There are seven writer credits on the Leone film, including Harry Grey’s autobiographical novel The Hoods, but Sciascia is not included.

Although these 17 pages are not mentioned in A Sicilian Man, Caroline Moorehead refers to an acrimonious lunch in Palermo between Leone and Sciascia over a film collaboration. It seems Sciascia, abandoning lunch, left the table first with Leone following soon after.

Among other projects mentioned in Questo non è un racconto is a 62-page script for Rossellini’s Viva I’ltalia! later titled Garibaldi (1960), but without a credit for Sciascia. Also, a never realized project with Michelangelo Antonioni, Patire o morire (To Suffer or to Die).

Although quite different men, Sciascia was a long-term friend of Pier Paolo Pasolini and helped him to set up Officina, a new magazine in Bologna. Pasolini, who believed “the intellectual courage to tell the truth and political reality are incompatible in Italy”, told Sciascia that his book Todo Modo (One Way or Another) was the best metaphor he had ever read for thirty years of Christian Democrat rule and Mafiosi power.

The two men saw themselves as fighting side by side against the Christian Democrats, and the spread of corruption and Mafia power. They also mourned the lost dialects and the peasant worlds of their youth. After Pasolini’s murder, Sciascia said: “Now he is no longer there, I realise that I have to speak louder.”

Sciascia wasn’t necessarily enamored by the cinema: “The truth of literature and the fiction of the cinema work on two untranslatable planes.” He did praise Francesco Rosi’s adaptation of Illustrious Corpses (Cadaveri excellenti) and thought it penetrated the “agitated labyrinth of our daily existence”. In that film, magistrates, judges, police and reformers are gunned down by a vengeful Mafia. Sciascia felt Rosi had kept faith with his view of venal leaders and discredited institutions.

But he suffered through his friend Pasolini’s final film Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom: “It’s terrible, terrible…one should never make such despairing films.”