2022 Doc History: Revolution in Cuba Doc History: Revolution in Cuba
to Jean-Louis Comolli
I caught the sudden look of some dead master
Whom I had known, forgotten, half recalled
T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets. Little Gidding, 1942
The history of Cuban documentary cinema of the golden age [1] (from the Revolution in 1959 to the hardening of Castrism at the beginning of the seventies) is still too little known and deserves a first historical and critical exploration [2]. The Revolution introduced modern cinema to the island. There was no real cinematic tradition in Cuba and the young revolutionary filmmakers were ready to absorb the most significant experiences of the post-war period. The ethics of Italian neorealism (Esta tierra nuestra, 1959, by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea), the baroque formalism of Soviet film (Historia de un ballet, 1962, by José Massip), the rebellious spirit of English Free Cinema (Gente en la playa, 1960, by Néstor Almendros and P.M., 1961, by Alberto Cabrera Infante and Orlando Jiménez Leal), the formal experimentation of the French New Wave (Guantánamo, 1967, by José Massip), the tropical anticolonialism of Brazilian Cinema Novo (Simparelé, 1974, by Humberto Solás), the mix of documentary and fiction in the Czech nová vlna (Hombres del cañaveral, 1965, by Pastor Vega), the reflection on history and memory of the new Hungarian cinema (Hombres de Mal Tiempo, 1968, by Alejandro Saderman), the reflexivity of direct cinema (Por primera vez, 1967, by Octavio Cortázar), all these are so many influences which were immediately assimilated with a critical eye, to the extent of becoming a repertory of images and styles that have become truly Cuban[3]. Documentary films played a central role in this revolution. Immediately after taking power, the government created a public cinematographic institution, the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). Among its founders were young intellectuals and filmmakers, membres of the cultural association Nuestro Tiempo, which under the Batista dictatorship had collectively made El Mégano (1955): Alfredo Guevara, Julio García Espinosa, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and José Massip, among the names of the future greats of Cuban cinema.
During at least fifteen years, Castro wanted the ICAIC to make artistic and creative films and not only pure and simple state propaganda. This is the decision which founded modern Cuban cinema, although must never be forgotten the famous words of Castro on film censorship marking the space and limits within which cultural politics were to develop: “With the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing.”
It is important to define the technical limits of Cuban documentary in order to understand its innovations and its formal development. At the beginning of the 1960s, synchronised 16mm cameras had appeared in the capitalist world stimulating the revolution of direct cinema, but in Cuba this shift did not take place because the American embargo forced filmmakers to continue working with old and heavy 35mm cameras. It is precisely because of this limit that the island’s filmmakers learned to re-invent and theorise the documentary as an “imperfect” cinema [4], the only one adapted to an under-developed nation in struggle against the American empire [5]. Cuban documentarians defended technical imperfection against the models of Hollywood industrialism and European aestheticism, and claimed that aesthetic imperfection was a way of rejecting a form considered closed, finished and dead. Following this credo, Santiago Álvarez [6] managed to, with the limited means at his disposal, create a new aesthetics for the television news broadcasts of which he was responsible, the Noticiero revolucionario. His cinematic approach can be situated somewhere between a pop art collage and the political vanguard of Soviet heritage [7]. Álvarez re-used and appropriated everything he had at hand, still images and rushes, news magazines and animation, photos and titles, reintegrating them into a kind of Dziga Vertov style super-montage but mixed to the sauce, ambiance and music of the Caribbean. “We recognize here the necessity to invent a new and specific form of montage which gives us the possibility of communicating what the analogical and mimetic image alone cannot express, a formal process that stretches beyond the frame of representation, or at least that enlarges it.” [8] With it, Cuban documentary no longer hid from the Yankee enemy and the capitalist world: henceforth Cuban documentarians would constantly aim at unmasking the dynamics at work in contemporary society by practicing a cinema of questions, immerged in life, in the transformation of the processes of production and distribution. It is a cinema of the Real that, on the formal level, assumes the necessity to make explicit its own view on reality — taking the risk of falling into propaganda — unmasking the hypocritical and bourgeois separation between interested and disinterested art, and going to the point of renewing the key points made by the avant-gardists of the 1920s with entirely contemporary forms and structures.
The Noticiero became a real school for an entire generation of young filmmakers who learned to produce their films with no money, no equipment, rapidly, by experimenting with new forms of montage, often highly rythmical and joyful (music is ubiquitous) but that were also ideologically coherent for the films had educational and formative goals. People hybridised forms, crossbred aesthetics, experimented with genres often associated with satires, pamphlets or essays.
Among the great documentary filmmakers who emerged from the ICAIC, we cannot forget Nicolás Guillén Landrián and Sara Gómez. Guillén Landrián represented a counterpoint to Santiago Álvarez [9]: contrary to the latter, who always had solid revolutionary certitudes, he had an interrogative and provocative attitude towards reality and its contradictions. He always tried to transgress, dynamite and demolish all preconceived idea of cinema. He had an exacerbated inclination to saturate the senses and to explode meanings, obtained by a polyphony of heterogeneous elements edited together at frenetic speed. His films are constructed on a multiplication of chaotic, dispersed perceptive stimuli, as if the filmmaker lived in a sort of delirious state that allowed one to look at the world from innumerable points of view and audition at the same time. His work is characterised by the impossibility of wrapping up a discourse, of choosing a single thread of thought or of having any possible guarantee of documentary truth. The chaotic form of his films reveals itself to be the only possible tool to investigate our fractured reality, the only way to reveal the field of heterogeneous forces at play in the reality of the cold war. Guillén Landrián in this way invented a film model based on a nebula of associations and quotes, made up of fragments of meaning that cannot be peacefully organised or harmonically pitched amid a reassuring and coherent philosophical model of reality.
Sara Gómez was part of Cuba’s black intelligentsia and she is considered today the first feminist filmmaker on the island [10], having always defied post-revolutionary Cuban machism in all its forms. Her films on the young, women, afro-descendants and their cultures are postcolonial portraits demonstrating great lucidity and moral and political firmness. A partisan of speech-based documentary, she chose a different path than that of Álvarez and Guillén Landrián, grafting elements of anthropological film and cultural research on the sociological inquiries of direct cinema. And yet Gómez refused all pretence to neutrality or objectivity, her point of view is declared and exposed in the image. As an interviewer, she appears in her films alongside her interlocutors, testifying to an intimate need to verify within the dialogue their goodwill and frankness. As an editor, Gómez avoids formal beauty giving to her films a calculated imbalance and a consciously sought out lack of style. She earned her signature as a creator and won respect in the highly masculine surroundings of the ICAIC. Sarita was the first filmmaker to speak of herself in front of a camera, claiming the right to her own subjective vision and body, memory and thought, embodying thus an urgent need for decolonisation, at once on political, ideological and identity levels, in order to definitively break Cuban society’s links with traditional values.
Cuban documentary was for a long time a true school of emancipation on several fronts: emancipation of the Cuban people from the material and imaginary chains of pre-revolutionary society, emancipation of production from the traps and rigidity of industrial systems, emancipation of filmmakers from the obligations of propaganda. And today the films of this brief hommage are for us an act of emancipation within documentary cinema from the reign of the “totally visible and totally filmable” and from the myth of “objectivity” that is imposed everywhere. Cuban documentarians remind us that the world is not transparent, and neither are cinematographic images, unmasking in this way the false impartiality of capital and imperialism, indicating that the only possible act is that of a radical questioning of the Real through a conscious filmic gesture of one’s own artifice, through a complicit way of looking refusing the separation between the one who looks and the other who is looked at [11]. The truth claimed by “objective” forms is only illusion and falsehood, the final vertigo of a world becoming spectacle [12].
Federico Rossin
[1] Michael Chanan, Cuban Cinema, Minneapolis, Minnesota University Press, 2004.
[2] Paulo Antonio Paranagua (dir.), Le Cinéma cubain, Paris, Editions du Centre Georges Pompidou, 1990.
[3] Julie Amiot-Guillouet et Nancy Berthier, Cuba. Cinéma et révolution, Lyon, Le Grimh-LCE-Grimia, 2006.
[4] Julio García Espinosa, Por un cine imperfecto, Hablemos de cine. nº 55/56, Lima, set/dec, 1970. pp. 37-42.
[5] AA. VV., Teorie e pratiche del cinema cubano, Venezia, Marsilio, 1981.
Screenings hosted by Federico Rossin.
In partnership with ICAIC and Ina.