Santiago Álvarez
1963-1979 - Cuba - Noir & Blanc - 143'
In 1959, the first cultural act taken by the new revolutionary government was to create the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, the ICAIC. Santiago Álvarez was a forty year old journalist who had no experience in cinema. He nonetheless accepted the invitation to direct the Noticieros of the ICAIC. Weekly reports of around ten minutes on important events in Cuba or abroad, these Noticieros were printed in sixty copies and then distributed to filmhouses around the country to be projected before the main feature. As certain people would not be able to see the films until two to three months after their production, Álvarez and the others were always careful that the content should not be too constrained by current actuality but, on the contrary, express a desire to be timeless. Successfully competing with television news, the Noticieros informed in another manner, more diversified, synthetic and inventive. Álvarez lost sleep every week by personally directing each reel for at least fifteen years. When he finally gave up this role, he remained in control of the news division which in 1982 employed twenty-five people, including seven cinematographers and three directors. It was the great editing school of Santiago Álvarez. Very quickly, he broke the bounds of journalistic format and, abdicating his supposed impartiality, became a true chronicler. Until 1998, the year of his death, he directed a hundred documentaries, as well as six hundred of the fifteen hundred Noticieros produced by ICAIC between June 1960 and July 1990. His creativity was limitless: photos, drawings, texts and typographics, archive images, sound effects, animation, the narrative use of music, etc, Álvarez combined all the elements he had at hand to communicate, denounce and convince, doing without the traditional voice over narration. The impossibility of filming something, or a lack of means, stimulated his imagination. While never losing sight of his ideological position, he subverted the language of documentary cinema and influenced dozens of filmmakers around the world to this day.
Photography : Santiago Álvarez
Production : ICAIC