Memories of Underdevelopment [1968]

 Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s masterpiece of Cuban cinema and a sensational example of the ‘Imperfect Cinema’ manifesto, Memories of Underdevelopment portrayed a pivotal period in the island-nation’s post-revolution history – the months between the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis – through an elastic form allowing interpretations shaped by the viewers’ political positions. Alea – a left-wing intellectual who admired Fidel Castro, co-founded the prestigious Cuban film body ICAIC, and fresh from his brilliant and darkly funny previous film Death of a Bureaucrat – composed a deadpan, caustic and fascinating look into the existential ennui, emotional alienation, amorous pursuits, political ambivalence, crisscrossing memories and intimate imaginings of Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), a well-to-do man and self-professed intellectual residing in an upscale Havana apartment. He harbours a disparaging view of the vapid Batista-era bourgeoisie and demonstrates scorn when he sees them fleeing the country, including his wife with whom his marriage was in doldrums. However, his inertia, privilege and false sense of self-importance, rather than any real political convictions, make him stay back. His classist attitude towards fellow citizens and moral shallowness are manifested during his frivolous and exploitative affair with Elena (Daisy Granados), a young and naïve working-class girl, who he treats with superiority and disdain for embodying his country’s underdevelopment. He therefore exists in an asynchronous flux, fantasizing about his housemaid, spying from his balcony, remembering an ex-girlfriend, attending political discourses, and sliding towards irrelevance. Adapted from Edmundo Desnoes’s novel Inconsolable Memories, this stunningly shot and composed film – interspersed with documentary footage and experimental formal choices – manifested its revolutionary consciousness through negative dialectics, sharp critique of Sergio’s entrenched bourgeois consciousness, and instigation of viewers’ participation in reconciling the paradoxes and contradictions.

p.s. This is a revisit. My earlier review of the film can be found here.

Director: Tomas Gutierrez Alea

Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Political Drama/Existential Drama

Language: Spanish

Country: Cuba

I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba) [1964]

 Produced by Mosfilm in collaboration with ICAIC to celebrate the Cuban Revolution, and made when the Cold War was at its frostiest nadir – the Bay of Pigs invasion had just been foiled, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was at its craziest peak – Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba was a dizzying, flamboyant, poetic and rousing political agitprop. Yet, ironically, it resonated neither with the Soviets nor the Cubans at the time, and was largely forgotten until its triumphant “rediscovery” by American cinephiles in the 1990s. The omnibus film, set in pre-Castro Cuba, nonchalantly glorified the country’s rebellious streak and revolutionary path through four episodes, where the respective protagonists representing diverse socioeconomic contexts – a young exploited prostitute in a decadent Havana hotel; an impoverished sugarcane farmer whose farms are sold off to the United Fruit Company; an angry student battling against the city’s despotic police alongside his guerrilla comrades; and a devastated farmer turned rebel in the Sierra Maestra mountains – are all at loggerheads with Batista’s draconian system. Sergey Urusevsky’s dazzling cinematography – filled with technical wizardry, bravura single takes, hallucinatory images crafted using wide-angle and infrared photography, oblique camera angles – made this an idiosyncratic tour de force. Its most jaw-dropping tracking shots included  the camera gliding with a fisherman along a narrow canal between shanty houses; capturing a beauty contest atop a crowded skyscraper, traveling down and plunging into a pool; slipping into a traveling bus and culminating with a 360-degree pan-zoom showing a guy’s getting off it, crossing the streets and walking into Havana University; and moving up from a packed lane into a cigar manufacturing unit, flying out of its balcony, and soaring like a bird observing a funeral procession.

Director: Mikhail Kalatozov

Genre: Drama/Anthology Film/Political Agitprop

Language: Spanish

Country: Cuba/Russia

Buena Vista Social Club [1999]

 American guitarist and “roots music” exponent Ry Cooder, backed by World Circuits Radio, came to Havana in 1996 with the intent to cut a collaborative album between Cuban and Malian musicians. The latter, unfortunately, didn’t get a visa. Hence Cooder instead hunted down renowned Cuban old-timers – some of them retired, most at advanced ages, and nearly all completely forgotten from public memory – and made an exuberant son cubano, bolero and mambo album named after the titular long defunct club – that was once a haunt for black and brown artists – in what became a smashing, Grammy-winning international phenomenon. The eponymous Wim Wenders documentary, made couple of years after the album’s euphoric release that’d turned its performers into globetrotting stars at the twilight of their lives, is a work suffused with joy, nostalgia, zest, warmth, hints of melancholy and an abundance of musical effervescence. Wenders largely employed a conventional approach by alternating “live” musical performances – mix of jamming sessions and concerts – with talking head interviews edited into monologues. It was, however, bereft of expositional voiceovers and additional contexts beyond the interviewees’ stories, and that creative choice – along with the the sense of intimacy evoked through the candid, funny, lively monologues; the enthralling vitality of the performances at Amsterdam and Carnegie Hall; and Havana’s absorbing, laidback, crumbling, cigar-chomping atmosphere – made it an infectious ode to Cuban culture. The individual stories were especially arresting, covering silken crooner Ibrahim Ferrer who’d been reduced to shining shoes, legendary octogenarian pianist Rubén González who didn’t have a proper piano in a decade, nonagenarian vocalist and composer Company Segundo who wishes to father another child, vivacious prima donna Omara Portuondo, trumpeter Manuel "Guajiro" Mirabal,  et al.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Wim Wenders

Genre: Documentary

Language: Spanish/English

Country: Germany/Cuba

¡Cuba Sí! [1961]

 Cuba – like French Indochina before it, and Algeria and Vietnam after – remains a remarkable example for the global south in how a fearless group of rebels, revolutionaries and freedom fighters refused to bow down, dared to fight, and ultimately overthrew an oppressive regime. Cuba Si!, which may perhaps be considered the final film in Marker’s initial period – wherein, like Sunday in Peking and Letter from Siberia, he made a series of highly personalized yet politically sharp travel essays imbued with his signature, idiosyncratic and ironic voice, thus honing a form that he’d make his very own over his prolific career – was his attempt at chronicling the heroic Cuban Revolution and its hope-filled aftermaths upon the establishment of an egalitarian state. The film, therefore, operated at an interesting intersection between documentary, travelogue, political testament and a surprisingly equanimous agitprop. Marker, true to his multi-faceted authorial and cinematic style, approached the subject through diverse lenses. Large sections of it comprised of evocative celebration of this defiant little Latin American country, with the air filled with music, culture, carefree bonhomie, fetes, joie de vivre and comradeship. And these were accompanied by cataloguing of their dream of building Cuba bottom-up – mass literacy campaigns; nationalization of the sugarcane and other key industries to plug the resource drain; citizens’ initiatives; etc. – along with typically free-flowing, voluble, self-effacing and perceptive words of Fidel Castro, the man himself, who’s impishly described as somewhere “between rebel with a cause and leader of the partisan”. Though the poor picture quality was unfortunate, its vigour, spirit and observations were unmissable, given that Agnès Varda too would make a dazzling film on this country inspired by it, viz. Salut les Cubains.

 

 

 

 

 

Director: Chris Marker

Genre: Documentary/Essay Film/Political History

Language: French/Spanish

Country: France

Death Of A Bureaucrat [1966]

Death of a Bureaucrat, directed by Cuban filmmaker Alea right before his international breakthrough Memories of Under development, was a trenchant and tar black satire on how incessant and mindless government bureaucracy, protocols and red tape can literally drive even the sanest person crazy. Though made in the context of Castro-ruled Cuba, even someone like me belonging to a separate era and diametrically different time zone could savour the farcical humour, barbed observations and pointed jabs at the very foundation of the system. The absurdist story begins with the death of a party loyalist who invented a machine to mass-produce statuettes of José de San Martín and dies in the process. Heeding to the silly wishes of the grandiloquent priest and the few mourners who attended his funeral, his identification card is buried along with him, and this dumb decision lands his ageing wife in a fix, as the card is needed in order to avail pension. And thus starts a Kafkaesque odyssey for the dead man’s young nephew, as his experiences with the government departments drive him to his wit’s ends and land him in a series of darkly hilarious scenarios which are enough to push anyone off the edge. Though replete with memorable gags, including some straight-out homage to silent comedies, the underlying ordeal of a common man and the ludicrous ironies he’s made to endure ad nauseum wouldn’t be lost on anyone. The fine score added to the film’s charm. In a cheeky move, Alea dedicated the film to everyone – from Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and Laurel & Hardy, to Luis Bunuel, and even Marilyn Monroe – since the days of Lumiere Brothers.

Director: Tomas Gutierrez Alea
Genre: Comedy/Black Comedy/Social Satire/Political Satire
Language: Spanish
Country: Cuba

Memories of Underdevelopment [1968]

Memories of Under development, Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s art-house classic, was a fascinating amalgamation of the political and the personal. The most acclaimed Cuban film, along with Kalatozov's I Am Cuba, after Fidel Castro's popular revolution had swept aside the Batista regime, it provided a formally, aesthetically and psychologically arresting peek into a left-minded bourgeois writer’s ennui, anger and existential crisis at the backdrop of the flux between the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Sergio (Sergio Correri) is a wealthy intellectual who has decided to stay back in Havana while his wife, friend and family, along with hordes of others, flee to the US. He despises imperialism and the bourgeois-class, even though his lifestyle is anything but that of the proletariat – and this ironic dichotomy was used as the springboard for the portrayal of his aimless existence as an outsider, his severe alienation, his casual flings devoid of emotional attachments, and his caustic sociopolitical ramblings. He faces a moment of crisis when a young and attractive but unpredictable girl (Daisy Granados) he gets involved with accuses him of rape, but even there he is hardly ruffled. The stylized and moody B/W photography was interspersed with cinéma vérité style documentary footages, which provided a startlingly here-and-now feel that marvelously juxtaposed the protagonist’s internal chaos and vacuum with the external uncertainty and developments around him. Correri, who seemed to be sleep-walking through his role, effectively captured the multi-layered Sergio.

p.s. This is an earlier review. My recent review of the film can be found here.

Director: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
Genre: Drama/Psychological Drama/Political Drama/Existential Drama/Anthology Film
Language: Spanish
Country: Cuba