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.
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| 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.”
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| 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).
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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| 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
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