The International Journal of Cuban Studies
(Online) ISSN 1756-347X
Long journey towards the light
One of the first post-revolutionary filmmakers Julio García Espinosa challenges definitions of cinema itself while charting the development of the film industry in Cuba and its influence throughout Latin America.
Before anything else I ought to point out that the title is not intended as a metaphor. It refers to a long journey towards the light of the projector. As you know, the first film cameras had a double function - that of filming as well as projecting. In Cuba, as in the rest of Latin America, filming and projection have always been separate activities. They have belonged to different teams, different spaces, different interests. To think of them as an inseparable whole has in effect been a long journey towards the light, towards the light of this elusive projector.
The first images created by the new technology arrived in Cuba from France at the dawn of the last century. In 1895 when the Lumière brothers first showed their film reels, our country was at war with Spain (1). The news of their invention, as could be expected, drew the attention of film directors nearby in the United States. So it was that the images of Cuba were among the earliest filmed in the entire world. Since that time we have been trying to maintain a leading role in the creation of our own image.
The first efforts at film-making took place in the 1910s when the film industry was still in its infancy. The great precursor was a man who, as one might imagine, had nothing more than his obsession with that magic lantern which seemed capable of defeating death itself. His name was Enrique Díaz de Quesada and, despite the rudimentary nature of the tools available to him, he managed to make a considerable number of films. Regrettably, nothing is left of his work since a fire subsequently destroyed everything. All that is left are a few minutes of a documentary that he filmed in an amusement park.
It was in the 1930s and 1940s that Ramón Peón emerged; he managed to make some films following the blueprint that had led to some success in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil . These successes had been associated with popular music and popular theatre which in those countries as much as in Cuba boasted a long tradition. But Ramón Peón's work did not achieve any widespread support, and his efforts - together with those of many others - were not crowned with success.
In the 1950s, when Italian neo-realism was at its height, a number of Latin American film directors, including myself, went to study film in Rome. Imbued with the neo-realist vogue which favoured the creation of an unadorned cinema - that is, films without stars or expensive sets - we went back to our respective countries. Just as the long, hard journey towards the light in the world of cinema was taking shape, so too the long, hard journey of the Cold War was beginning.
From the mid-1950s until the fall of the Berlin Wall the Cold War would lead to more than 100,000 deaths in our midst. Latin American film directors suffered persecution, torture; some were murdered and many went into exile.
After finishing our studies in Italy Gutiérrez Alea and I returned in the mid-1950s to Cuba, when that famous dictator, Batista, was still in power. Even so - and armed with the drop of madness which our predecessors possessed - we decided to attempt to bring cinema to Cuba. And thus it was that, in 1955, the short documentary El Megano (The Charcoal Worker) was born. We went to prison as a result. We realised that it would not be possible to make films unless Cuba as a whole changed. And in 1959 our country did change.
With the triumph of the Revolution we tried to resurrect the old dream of bringing together the creation of films and showing them to the public. Producing films required having our own laboratory where we could develop films as well as a sound studio where we could create the sound tape. And it did eventually come about. Film directors, though, would get their training via a process of improvisation. There was not enough time to train them at a film school. We were faced with unrepeatable events and we had to film them, even if the results were not always to a professional standard.
It was in this way that the first documentaries were made. The first two movie features in Cuba were made by Gutiérrez Alea and myself but they were not very successful. They conformed to a rather naive neo-realism which was, furthermore, outmoded. The great master of neo-realism, César Zavattini, was with us in Cuba in the 1960s and we realised that Italian cinema itself had already moved on to another stage. Other film movements - such as Free Cinema, the New Wave, Independent North American Cinema - were emerging, and they were beginning to influence us. During that magnificent decade in the 1960s some of the best film directors in the world came to visit us and we had the opportunity of opening ourselves up to a more plural world. Those were years of enormous innovation. Colonialism seemed to come crashing down to the ground around us. The world was changing and Latin America was as well. The struggle for a true definitive emancipation seemed to be knocking at our doors. It was at the time that what we now know as the New Latin American Cinema came into being. During this period the early Cuban films now regarded as classics were produced: Memories of Underdevelopment, Lucía, The First Charge of the Machete and The Adventures of Juan Quinquin. An impressive documentary movement led by Santiago Alvarez also emerged at this time, as did a cartoon tradition pioneered by the film director, Juan Padrón.
Despite all of the above, achieving the right to show our films in our own country proved to be a traumatic experience. The commercial sector refused to share their jealously guarded freedoms with the film directors. They guaranteed their business profits by opening their doors subject to conditions which were imposed by the big North American companies. They required you to buy ten second-rate films before you were allowed a first-rate film. This prevented the possibilty of creating a space for national film production and also prevented us from seeing films from other parts of the world. There was only one way of guaranteeing the existence of a national cinema as well as the equally important right to see foreign films: nationalizing the movie theatres. Flying in the face of all the predictions, movie attendance figures grew sharply during this period. Producing films and showing them - which for more than fifty years had been separate activities - were finally merged. Cuban cinema began to take the long road towards integration within national culture. The past and the present achieved concrete embodiment in the national cinema of this period, and this was brought about by, on the one hand, avoiding the dogma of the apologists as well as, on the other, avoiding the critique of those who were hypercritical of the Revolution.
The long journey towards the light was not exactly a straight line towards the future. At an early stage we had the opportunity of speaking to an African film director. We had spoken to him about our concern that revolutions always seem to lead to the idea that cinema needs to be based on propaganda. His words of wisdom were as follows: "In Africa we don't have a film industry and, therefore, neither do we have commercial cinema; we don't receive aid from the state and therefore we don't have propaganda cinema. The problem is that we simply don't have any cinema." We understood that just having cinema meant that we would be able to solve the main contradiction in our society. There would inevitably be contradictions but they would involve tears which were less anachronistic as a result.
Of course there were film directors who did not support the socialist agenda offered by the revolution, and they left Cuba. Those who remained, despite the errors and confusions which arose on the journey, made sure that the independence which we had just won remained a top priority. The elimination of Salvador Allende - although it should be remembered that the latter's political programme did not in any case adhere to the Cuban model - alerted us to how important it was to defend our independence. It was for the same cause that film directors in Latin America were fighting. This was why Cuban cinema became identified with the destiny of Latin American cinema and never adopted the postulates of socialist realism.
Indeed the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) became the vanguard of Latin American and Caribbean cinema. It is true to say that a number of great Latin American films would not have been made were it not for Cuban cinema. The creation in 1979 of the Havana Film Festival offered a forum for the annual meeting of film directors. Before that we had only had sporadic - although they were important -- meetings in Viñas del Mar, Chile; Mérida, Venezuela; Montréal, Canada - as well as an equally important meeting in Pesaro, Italy. But, as a result of the annual meeting at the Havana Film Festival, the Latin American Film Directors' Committee came into being and it effectively consolidated Latin American cinema as a movement providing a broad-based cultural identity for the whole region. Cinema during those years favoured the creation of a consciousness of Latin America and the Caribbean as the larger home country (what, in Spanish, we call our patria grande) - something, indeed, which our leaders had proclaimed so frequently.
It was this very committee that would promote throughout the 1980s the establishment of institutions such as cinemateques and film clubs in Latin America. Finally the New Latin American Cinema Foundation was founded by Gabriel García Márquez, which in turn set up its most important project: the International Film and Television School in San Antonio de los Baños (2).
The cinematic movement had managed to bring about a situation whereby the film directors were the theoreticians of their own work. It was not a question of defining only one aesthetic model although, in fact, all of us, in his own way, was attempting to find an aesthetic response to our political positions. It was in this way that the theoretical works of Fernando Birri and Jorge Sanjinés, 'Third Cinema' by Fernando Solas and Octavio Getino, 'The Aesthetics of Hunger' by Glauber Rocha, and my own essay 'For an Imperfect Cinema' came about.
The disappearance of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall put a stop to this great cinematographic movement whose main aim was to close down once and for all the colonial cycle which we have suffered for more than five hundred years.
Cuban cinema went during this period from almost twelve full-length movie features a year to no more than four, although even during this difficult stage we continued to produce films as important as Strawberry and Chocolate and Suite Havana. New generations of Latin American film directors are showing vigorous signs of life; in effect they are embarking on their journey towards the light of the projector. The candle on the horizon has been lit in countries such as Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela.
What type of films are being made at the moment? We are making any films we can. There are films which are not guided by any particular interest in mind. For what brings us together is the desire to defend the right to show any film - whatever the film is like - in our own countries.
Nevertheless the experiment must go on. We know that our first duty remains that of making Latin America visible. Our countries are invisible countries. A country without an image is a country which does not exist. Death in a country without an image is less painful than a death in a country which has its own image. For that reason any film, whether experimental or not, is welcome if it makes us more visible.
The search for a more authentic cinema, one which belongs legitimately to the people, even one which is more competitive, must not stop. We do not have stars, nor can we create them. What we need is a cinema in which the character is more important than the star, where people do not leave the movie theatre talking about the stars rather than the characters. We need a cinema in which new ways of telling stories do not eliminate the critical spirit of the spectator.
I want to conclude by quoting the last part of my recent brief essay entitled 'The End of History'. It reads as follows:
"Cinema, as Walter Benjamin would say, loses the aura of the unique and unrepeatable work of art, and thereby de-legitimises the traditional 'cult' of the work of art. Looked at from this point of view, cinema de-sacralizes the relationship with the work and brings about a more open, profane and free communication. This constitutes the essence of its irrevocably popular character.
In the early days cinema, as we all know, disconcerted its audience. It was not clear what to do with it. Was it a spectacle suitable for entertainment? Was it a new visual art? Did the moving image have the status of the fine arts? Some years would go by before it was in effect recognised as the seventh art. Intellectuals and artists from all over the world would rush to legitimise it within the traditional concept of an art form. Europeans would interpret it as an art form. The North Americans saw cinema as an industry. Europeans would rank it according to a predetermined hierarchy as if it were a type of pre-industrial art. The North Americans would take advantage of it as if it were a product designed for the masses. Both the European and the North American approach - and even a mixture of the two - would lead to valuable works. Nevertheless both approaches tended to hamper the liberating potential of this new medium. The former would turn cinema into a new cult, but within a traditional framework, while the latter simply degraded it.
It is true, though, that Hollywood from very early on realised that a film could also be a unique and unrepeatable work of art. Hollywood film directors saw that the aura intrinsic to a painting found its equivalent in the unique and unrepeatable charisma of the actor or the actress. In the early days they proved that the masses, as well as a more refined audience, enjoyed the authentic charisma of a Greta Garbo or a Charlie Chaplin.
But Hollywood ruined its own innovation. The profit motive was imposed. As a result a cinema based on actors rather than characters grew up. The star system was born and, along with it, a system of fabricated personalities and immoderate promotions, which tended to create false auras. The spectator went to the movies to pay homage to fame rather than talent. Even great actors and excellent actresses, when they acted out good stories or played complex characters -- as a result of the million-dollar promotions - could not escape becoming more important than the characters they portrayed. The industry was the winner. But not only did art itself lose out, the critical spirit of the audience was lost, and the possibility for a freer communication - which is embedded within cinema - was frustrated. These are the rules of the game which underlie story-telling in Hollywood. For this reason this 'institutional representation', to use Noël Burch's phrase, requires more experimentation, another way of telling stories (3). It needs a cinema whose most striking novelty would consist precisely in transgressing these game rules, thereby opening up the so-called seventh art to the possibility of having a more adult and unalienated spectator. This would be the end of history such as it is narrated nowadays, as well as the end of History with a capital letter which has mutilated us for too long.
It is not a question of ignoring the importance of the actor nor of replacing him with special effects, however seductive or fascinating these may be. It is rather a case of seeing acting (and the same might be said of photography, music and scenography) as simply one element among many enhancing the significance of the characters and consequently the plot.
These ideas are just as applicable to film making which, like ours, cannot rely on - nor has it any realistic hope for economic reasons of creating - a star system. Using the same paradigm as that which underpins the star system without actually having a star system is not only inappropriate; it implies that we are still lost in the labyrinth of incompetence and controlled markets.
The identity of cinema is in crisis, and film festivals should reflect this situation. Recognition should be given to the 'most unalienating film' and to the 'best character' rather than the 'best actor', even to the worst illustrated novel. It is fundamentally also a question of believing that art is not something to compete over. Art is for sharing with others.
The problem is that, in its own way, cinema has brought about a crisis within art as a whole. Nowadays the new technologies are subverting more than ever the traditional concept of art. Cinema can still be called the seventh art and its history can be written in the same way that the history of the fine arts can be written. Nobody thinks of television as the eighth art nor of telling its history with the aid of traditional paradigms. Cinema has its own form of museum in the cinemateques. Yet TV does not have its own 'telematheques'. And even more disturbing is the appearance of the computer or the PC. It is not by chance that there is so much talk nowadays of the demise, or the crisis, of art. But what is art today? It was easy to say when new technologies did not yet exist. It will be a vain project to attempt to hierarchise these new technologies paying them a homage which is, indeed, alien to them. The transition from the sacred to the profane seems irreversible."
Julio García Espinosa founded the Cuban Institute for the Arts and Cinematographic Industry (ICAIC) in 1959 and is the former Director of the International Film and Television School (EICT) in San Antonio de los Baños, La Habana. One of his most influential publications is 'Toward an Imperfect Cinema'.
This work was originally delivered in Spanish as a lecture at University College London on 16 February 2005 and translated into English by Stephen Hart.
Notes
(1) In 1898 the Spanish-American War drew camera operators to Cuba, but they were shut out by the U.S. Army. Since they could not capture the battles on film, many went into studios and created them using models and painted backdrops - the start of scale-model effects. See Armando Cristóbal, 'Documentary in Cuba: Santiago Alvarez, a Paradigm', cubanow.net, 2007.
(2) The story of how Fidel Castro proposed the idea of a national film school is told by Carl DiOrio in 'Cuban film industry waits for next revolution', The Hollywood Reporter, 20 March 2008.
(3) See Noël Burch, Life to those shadows, University of California Press, 1990. Central to the institutional mode are the principles of visualization, camera placement and movement, lighting, editing and mise-en-scène, that filmmakers and audiences came to internalize over the first three decades. Special emphasis is laid on the all-important change that occurred in the placing of the spectator.
Also view
Michael Chanan's presentation 'Screen Memory in Cuban Cinema' on the IISC website.
Copyright / Acknowledgement
J.G. Espinosa, 'The long journey towards the light', in Nicola Miller and Stephen Hart (eds) When Was Latin America Modern? Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, reproduced with permission of Palgrave Macmillan.
