The recent spate of Cuban films being shown in London (principally during the one week festival held during Mid-July at the National Film Theatre) in honour tenth anniversary of the Cuban Socialist Revolution establishes one thing above all: that a Socialist Cuban film Industry is producing some of the most important films on either side of the Atlantic. Four feature films in particular Memories of Underdevelopment directed by Tomas Alea about a bourgeois intellectual trying to come to grips with the new life entailed by a Socialist Revolution, Death of a • Bureaucrat also directed by Alea about the Kafkaesque excesses of the red-tape profession.
Juan Quin Quin a whimsical comedy directed by Julia Garcia Espinosa about "post-Revolutionary adventurer and his ill-gotten attempts at easy success, Lucia a 2¾ hour study of the development of female emancipation in Cuba as revealed in the personal experiences of three different Lucia's at three critical periods Cuban history, are undoubted masterpieces feature film production.
Similarly, the documentaries Santiago - Alvarez particularly the biting visual indictments of American imperialist societ contained in L.B.J., Hanoi March 13, Now, and The Death of Joe Jones - must rank among the finest examples of documentary film-art.
Cuba's post-revolutionary success story is truly remarkable. Prior to the Revolution of '59, the "Cuban film industry' - a misnomer if ever there was one since it was entirely American controlled devoted itself with - profligate abandon to the production of slicker-than-slick skin films for the American sex market. There were no Cuban directors, no art films and the flickering cinemas in the towns were almost entirely filled with yesterday's Westerns. In all it represented ultural nadir which no Socialist Governmen could long tolerate. Soon after the Revolution the first cultural decree announced that "El cino es un Arte" and by a law of March 24th 1959 the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos (ICAIC) was set up to organize every aspect of cine culture from film production film research (centred around the film collections of the Cinemateca). In the first few months following the establishment of ICAIC mainly didactic documentaries directed • towards such pressing social and economic problems as increasing farm output and irradicating illiteracy were made but thereafter feature films and documentaries were produced in increasing proportions so that today Cuba produces a yearly average of 8 feature films, 60 didactic documentaries and 80 agitational documentaries. In addition Santiago Alvarez working with a small but versatile unit has since 1959 produced a weekly newsreel consisting both of 'news' material and also "magazine' items and both are given historicity be relating them to analysis of Cuba's socialist development.
However, these quantitative and qualitative accomplishments the Cuban Revolutionary Government in cinema have been continually circumscribed by a shortage of basic materials and equipment - particularly film stock and equipment - due partly at least to the American embargo on exports to Cuba. When film production began in Revolutionary Cuba there was but one Arriflex camera - and even today ICAIC is still patiently waiting for a colour processing laboratory of its own. Such material shortages have been accepted as an artistic challenge by Cuban film directors - a point readily admitted by the dapper Santiago Alverez when in London for the festival. "The great inspiration for my use of photo-collage of American magazines was the American government who prevented me from getting live material."
In ways the most amazing achievement of Cuban cinema not in production but in distribution. Under Batista, cinema going was exclusively an urban phenomenon while the majority of Cubans lived in the countryside. Today, thanks to over mobile cinemas mounted on lorries virtuallv every consequence films have become such extremely popular cultural experience that television has had to take second place -phenomenon encouraged by the charging of low or non-existent seat prices. Despite these low prices, ICAIC does - according to Santiago Alvarez - more than manages to pay for its productions.
The flexibility of the organizational structure of Cuban cinema provides one explanation for its dazzling creativity. Unlike Eastern European countries which have a highly bureaucratic structure both in terms of the career structures of creative personnel and in terms of the selection of material, Cuba's film industry 1S amazingly informal. Only the technicians are given formal training most of them being sent to Eastern Europe for a year -while the directors learn their skills on the job' Most the directors come either from television (e.g. Santiago Alvarez) or from Castro's guerilla army (the present president of ICAIC) and this "lack of experience' has almost certainly served as a source of spontaneity Working in such an informal organizational structure directors are able to develop their own ideas and styles without capitulating to the grey sludge of "Socialist Realism'. "Provided that the directors accept that we live in a socialist society" says Santiago Alvarez "ICAIC does not object to criticism. In fact we encourage it". Examples of such criticism can be found in several of the main feature films -most notably in Death of a Bureaucrat in which the excesses of socialist bureaucracy are brilliantly taken to bits.
individual and revolutionary experience in various stages of Cuban history. "Memories of Underdevelopment" focused most keenly on this theme with the individual being a sad-faced intellectual bourgeois who becomes a complete misfit in the new Cuba. The bourgeois.
intellectual - non-chalantly played by Sergio Corrieri perhaps Cuba's leading actor - has too many liberal sympathies to emigrate with his parents and wife and other gusanos but on the other hand he is incapable of participating in the revolutionary experience except as a pathetic parasite. His attempts to find love end in a court-case for rape while his creative excursions lead merely to the narcissistic isolationism of the writers conference.
In "Death of a Bureaucrat" it is the bureaucrat at the cemetery - and all those who are similarly inhuman in their insistence on the observation of abstract rules — who become the true isolates of the revolutionary experience; in their midst the gallant nephew of the decease "exemplary worker" in the plaster caste factor of Jose Marti who is buried with his vital work card so removing his wife of her chance to obtain her pension is reduced to a series of humiliating escapades unworthy of people-caring socialist society. But perhaps the tenderest and certainly the most dramatic film on this theme is "Lucia". a beautiful tri-episodic study of the fight for women's liberation at three critical phases of Cuban history (1895, 1932 and the present day). In the tirst phase (1895) Lucia is a beautifu woman of high society who falls in love with handsome middle-aged Spaniard who turns out whose frustrations with city life lead him te political banditry and finally death. In the las phase (an unspecified year in the period since the revolution) Humberto Solas using a good deal of documentary-style Colast work portrays a self-confident newly wed who has a likeable but ineffectual layabout for a husband.
Similarly Cuban documentary films exhibit certain key features in common. The ones shown in London were selected from that category which were intended for international distrubution - consequently there they were concerned with international agitational subjects. As such, the most effective ones were probably L.B.J. - a biting satire of an America which produces President capable of systematically destroying children in Vietnam while self-indulgently cuddling them in New York, "The Death of Joe Jones", the story of what it takes to make "just an ordinary American brought up on Coca-Cola" and "Now" about American Racism. I he significant feature of these documentaries is style whereas Western documentaries tend to use commentary to explain and opinionate the visuals in Cuban documentaries the visuals accompanied by an intensely dramatic collage of music, are left to speak for themselves without editorializing. The effects produced are astonishingly poignant: for instance Tomas Gutierrez Alea in Assemblea General skilfully manages to demonstrate the essential humaness of Fidel as he addresses an overflowing square of gesticulating Cubans by contrasting his personal quirks (e.g. the way he puts on his black-rimmed glasses with a slightly embarrassed smile on his face with the impersonality and emptiness of the Congress of American States. In all these documentaries a conscious attempt is made to relate historic events to personal experience - thus in Jose Massip's documentary film about the fight of Portugese African revolutionaries against Portugese imperialism we are taken into the personal worlds of the principal revolutionaries The finest and most touching example of this personalization com his ombres contained in Alejandro Saderman's Tempo" in which five old men recount their experiences of guerilla warfare in the late 1890's against the Spaniards.
The most impressive technical feature of these documentaries is the tremendously dramatic use of sound, although all the documentaries show a predilection for very rhythmic African music, western music particularly pop music is used to great effect (thus for instance in L.B.J. snippets of the Halleluiah Chorus flicker meanancingly on the screen. In addition, a variety of techniques are used to heighten the political meaning of these films - particularly montage, freezes, hand-held camera distortions, superimposed cartooning Such technical virtuosity is also apparent in th features where for instance in Juan Quin Quin (to give but one example) in a crucial scene the hero suddenly freezes and a "think balloon" emerges from the corner of his mouth giving away his inner thoughts to the audience, In L Primera Cargo Al Machete hand-held camer work, highly contrasty black and white film stock and out-of-focus close ups contribute to very powerful battle sequence On the whole, however, the feature films use actors in an essentially non-dramatic way; with the exception of Lucia the action is kept cool by naturalistic action and dialogue. This tendency towards neo-realism and it is no accident that at least one of the Cuban film directors namely Tomas Alea was trained at the Centro Sperimentale in Rome - is also carried through by placing the action in a realistic documentary setting such as the historical settings of La primera Cargo Al Machete, Davi (the story of the life of Frank Pais) or by usin documentary material itself (as in Memories of Underdevelopment) intercut with acted sequences. Only in Machete however does a Cuban film director go to the full neo-realistic position of using non-actors for all the parts.
With the festival of Cuban films at an end it will be a pity if the British Public are allowed
*General Glap, according to the Vietnamese