The International Journal of Cuban Studies

(Online) ISSN 1756-347X

Lights and shadows: new perspectives on Cuban cinema

Dolores Tierney welcomes the special issue of Spanish film journal Archivos de la filmoteca devoted to Cuban cinema. She surveys the essays and evaluates their radical and revisionist approach to Cuban cinematic history.

Cine y revolución cubana: luces y sombras, Archivos de la filmoteca Vol 59
Edited by Nancy Berthier
Instituto Valenciano de Cinematografía, 2008
Valencia (Spain)
241 pages

With Cuba about to celebrate the fiftieth year of its Revolution, it seems appropriate at this juncture to look back on the half century of cinematic production since the founding of its national film institute, ICAIC (Instituto Cubano de Arte y Industria Cinematográficos) and the beginnings of what is characterized as a truly national industry. The latest issue of Spanish film journal Archivos de la filmoteca, entitled Cine y revolución cubana: luces y sombras (Cuban cinema and revolution: lights and shadows) devotes itself precisely to this task. The issue includes twelve essays organized into an introduction and six separate sections. Each section takes different focus on Cuban cinematic history; the past, theory, documentary, history, filmmaking at the margins, and finally contemporary young filmmakers and what their work augurs for future cinema production in Cuba.

As the editor Nancy Berthier points out, the aim of this special issue of Archivos is not to sum up the entirety of Cuban cinema history, but instead to offer new approaches to the subject and critiques of the way it has been approached in the past. She suggests that the thematic and methodological variety of approaches in the different chapters reflects generational and geographical differences between the authors. These include scholars from Cuba, the US, the UK, Spain and France - among them leading figures in the field of Cuban cinema scholarship, including Michael Chanan, Juan Antonio García Borrero and Berthier herself.

In practice, many of the essays collected together in this issue evidence a number of radical and new approaches to orthodox Cuban cinematic history. Firstly, in "Discurso oficial y mito del 'punto cero': una historia en/de Cine cubano", French scholar Julie Amiot scrutinizes the creation of a 'year zero' myth of origins that posits Cuban cinema as being born along with the Revolution. This myth she suggests is largely created by the writings of Cuba's premier (and only long surviving) film journal Cine cubano and also to the language of the 1959 law which brought the journal and film institute into being. A companion essay to Amiot's by renowned Cuban author, critic and scriptwriter (most famously of Pastor Vega's Portrait of Teresa, 1979) Ambrosio Fornet, "Del silente al sonoro: la prehistoria del cine en Cuba" ("From Silent to Sound: Cuba cinema's prehistory") centres on precisely this disavowed cinematic history. Through his own analyses of landmark films (including La virgen de caridad, 1930, El romance del palmar, 1938, Casta de roble, 1953, and Siete muertes a plazo fijo, 1950) and certain directors (Enrique Díaz Quesada, Ramón Peón and Manolo Alonso) and through citing the young Tomás Gutiérrez Alea writing in Nuestro Tiempo in 1954, Fornet argues against the idea that all films made in Cuba before 1959 were (in the words of Alfredo Guevara writing in Cine cubano) "banal folkloricism" and "populist naivety".

A particularly radical perspective on Cuban cinematic history is offered by Cuban-Spanish academic Carlos Campa-Marcé, who submits two of Cuba's canonical essays of film theory to an intense critique. He concludes that the very popular and much reproduced Por un cine imperfecto (For an Imperfect Cinema) by veteran filmmaker, and sometime head of ICAIC Julio García Espinosa is "unconvincing" and "imprecise" whilst the less well known (outside Cuba) Dialectica del espectador (The Spectator's Dialectic) by another veteran filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is a much better and more thorough text. He argues that the popularity of the former text has a lot to do with its fit within the year (1969) in which it was published (the height of the New Latin American Cinema and its theoretical pronouncements with which 'cine imperfecto' had much in common) and equally that the relative obscurity (outside Cuba) of the latter text has to do with the year (1983) of its publication (the aftermath of the Mariel boatlift) and the absence of a hook as appealing as 'imperfect cinema'.

Approaches to the documentary in Cuba also evidence a revisionist perspective. In the essay by Spanish academic María Luisa Ortega's, "El 68 y el documental en Cuba", she argues that the documentaries of Nicolás Guillén Landrián (Coffea Arábiga, 1968, Ociel del Toa, 1965) are far from simple texts of the Revolution but actually point out some of its contradictions and make Cuba's revolutionary future seem quite uncertain. Whilst Nancy Berthier explores the little studied documentaries of Alea investigating both why they have been so neglected by scholarship (lack of availability, hegemony of the fiction form over documentary) and how these are related to his fiction film. The essay is very enlightening (although one should point out that El megano (1956), the film also worked on by García Espinosa and subsequently banned by Batista's police, is not a documentary but a neo-realist inspired fiction film).

And finally, US scholar Anne Marie Stock's essay "Visionando el Cine Cubano de Hoy: un montaje de la 6a Muestra Nacional de Nuevos Realizadors" looks at the new generation of filmmakers emerging in Cuba, transforming the way the island is imagined through resourcefulness and the use of new technologies. By focusing on the young filmmakers featured in the ICAIC-sponsored 6th National Festival (2007), Stock details the new strategies used by young filmmakers like Aram Vidal and others ("inventamos todo"/"we invent everything") which recall to the reader the similar ingenuity and experimentation filmmaking in the years of scarcity immediately following the Revolution.

The essays in this issue of Archivos bring much needed new perspectives on the history and important texts of Cuba's cinema. I would single out in particular Chanan's essay on how Cuban cinema's representation of the Revolution has shifted over time and also García Borrero's essay on Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (Daniel Díaz Torres, 1991). Generally, this collection will be of much use to the scholar interested in Cuban cinema in as much as it works against conventional historiographical approaches to Cuban cinema and because it charts and suggests new directions in Cuban film scholarship.

Dolores Tierney is Lecturer in Film at Sussex University. She has recently published a monograph on Emilio Fernandez (Manchester University Press, 2007) and has a forthcoming co-edited anthology Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinema and Latin America (Routledge).

Copyright
Copyright for this work is held jointly between Dolores Tierney and the International Journal of Cuban Studies under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative 3.0 Licence http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/

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