by Renata Adler
Lucía, played by Adela Legrá, is young and married. She wants to work and to learn to read in the country’s alphabetization program, but her husband has the traditional Latin quality of machismo. His pride and his sense of manhood require that his wife be completely dependent on him and remain at home. He is enormously suspicious of anyone who wants to take her out of the house and into the revolution. A leader of the local agriculture settlement—a lovely, wizened, officious black woman who unconsciously imitates Premier Castro’s mannerism of repeating an important sentence now and then, with bent knees and index finger pointing toward the ground—tries to reason with him. It is no use. Lucía leaves him. They have a sad and hopeless meeting on the beach, and the question of machismo is left unresolved.
Cuban audiences, whose members include even the most clearly machista men, adore the film, laughing at all the parodistic touches, particularly at the Premier Castro imitation and at elderly farmers being appalled by miniskirts. But young intellectuals tend to prefer the first two chapters for their style and to have reservations about the third for its simplicity, although they respect the sense of doubt and ambiguity at the end. Cubans acknowledge that machismo is a problem for the revolution—resisting the liberation of women and even affecting the use of modern machines. A man’s pride in his strength and in the work of his hands can bring him into conflict with a tractor or a piece of factory equipment.
“Yet the problem is difficult,” Mr. Solas, a tall, gentle young man, who became a guerrilla in the mountains at the age of fourteen, said of this chapter of his film. “It is, after all, the machista spirit that creates revolutionaries. Machismo is simply not suited to social relations. It can also be a factor in the government’s relation to the people. Maybe it will be overcome now that everybody studies.” Asked whether, for example, a machista spirit in government might be what inhibits young people in boarding schools (many of whom object to the system of fifteen days’ confinement to school, with one day off) from registering any form of protest now, he said that it might. “For me, as a boy, fighting Batista was easier,” Mr. Solas said. “He was hated. It was simple. Now the young have a complex of admiration and fear. The men of the revolution are Greek statues to them, and to say that the marble might be flawed or the statue might be missing one arm is difficult.”
Mr. Solas described Lucía as an exercise in which he rid himself of the influence of international directors he admires—Luchino Visconti, Ingmar Bergman, Roberto Rossellini, and Buñuel. His next film will be completely Cuban, examining in greater depth the problems of Cuba now, the contradictions, the people who have somehow been left outside the revolution. “It is important not to regard them as monsters,” Mr. Solas said. “There is a tragic aspect. Even people who don’t understand the revolution are giving everything.” As examples, from his next film, he mentioned a guerrilla who, after the revolution has succeeded, becomes a functionary and misses the excitement of his life. Or a mother who is committed to the revolution because her sons are revolutionaries, but who secretly longs for them to become doctors or to have some other form of bourgeois success. Or an opportunist who becomes an interpreter for foreign visitors only to have contact with the products they bring in. Mr. Solas believes that these revolutionary dilemmas will disappear as the revolution develops.
Another vital and controversial film in Cuba now is Memories of Underdevelopment, directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, and based on a prize-winning novel by Edmundo Desnoes that was published in the United States as Inconsolable Memories. More than 600,000 people have already seen the film, which is a highly intellectual study of a writer living in affluence at the time the revolution comes. The writer’s wife and friends leave Cuba, and he is unable to hear their voices when they step to the other side of the window in the airport waiting room. His life is full of Scarlatti, Botticelli, dry martinis, and girls, and he has doubts whether his love of the revolution does not derive from an artist’s hatred of the bourgeoisie. Mr. Desnoes himself appears in the film in a panel discussion, which ends when Jack Gelber, the American playwright, asks why, “if the Cuban revolution is really a total revolution,” there should be a roundtable format “about issues with which I am familiar,” instead of an open discussion with the people. “The American is right,” the narrator says, a psychologically difficult sentence in Cuba these days.
The film is full of documentary footage, interior monologues, flashbacks, abrupt cuts and avant-garde touches. Cuban audiences seem extraordinarily receptive to avant-gardism of every sort—electronic music, surrealism and absurdist comedy. Cuban intellectuals explain this in two ways: Before the revolution the masses in Cuba had not been exposed to art of any kind and, since tastes had not been “deformed” by popular art, avant-gardism seems quite natural. And most artists struggle consciously to keep the artistic and political vanguards together, against the “populist” idea that only representational art can reach the people.
In describing a fiction film in progress, a Cuban filmmaker is likely to begin with an abstraction—and sometimes leave it at that. Jorge Fraga, a twenty-three-year-old director, explained, for example, that his film The American War is about “two forms of violence, active and passive, generated in two brothers by the inevitable ambience of colonial war.” Pressed about the actual content of the plot, Mr. Fraga revealed an intensely dramatic story of rape, cowardice and murder, but the original equation was clearly uppermost in his mind.
While shooting The American War, Mr. Fraga’s crew stayed at a former resort hotel, now a convalescent home, in the village of San Diego, which is in Pinar del Río, the nation’s westernmost province. The home is near a spa, whose waters are still believed to be medically restorative. It was not a cheerful place—a murky swimming pool surrounded by plaster swans; eggs and an unidentifiable soup for lunch; people in ragged bathrobes wandering about; a salon, whose furniture consisted of two facing rows of seventeen slatted rocking chairs. But the crew of fifteen actors and technicians did not seem to mind.
The actual shooting took place in a remote area at the end of a pitted road, on the Hacienda Cortina, the estate of a pre-revolutionary senator. This is near the site of one of the tourist resorts being built for Cuban workers, who, in their twenty days’ yearly vacation, have no place outside Cuba to go. The filming, like all filming, consisted mainly of waiting—for the sunlight to be right and for the old Zeiss 16-mm. camera to be properly set up. Vicente Revuelta, the brother of one of the Lucías and himself one of the best-known Cuban theater actors and directors, was wandering about making jokes. Since the situation in Cuban theater is not just now as liberal as in cinema, Mr. Revuelta has temporarily moved to the film institute.
A great many jokes were made about a truly hideous dog that was staggering around the crew. From the conversation, it was clear that the dog had nearly died in the night and that its owner, because of anxiety, had refused to eat. The dog, which was white, had a red band of what appeared to be medication around its neck, covering what seemed to be a hairless rash. It seemed for a moment to reflect all the misery of Latin America that such a repellent creature should exist, and that even its owner could care whether it survived. Then it suddenly became clear that the dog was in the film. There was no rash. The red band had been painted on because one of the characters in the film was supposed to strangle the dog. On the preceding afternoon, Mr. Fraga explained, he had injected the dog with a drug so that it would lie with its tongue hanging realistically out. Mr. Fraga had given the dog an overdose that had almost resulted in its death. The dog was fine, merely slightly looped, as it wandered about. It was still not handsome; its health still did not inspire much confidence, but it was waking up. The red band would be washed off when the shooting was done.
The New York Times
February 11, 1969
HAVANA
From the early days of the Cuban revolution, the priority of films, and particularly documentaries, has been so high that the government’s first law dealin
g with cultural matters established a national film institute, ICAIC, in March, 1959. Film-projection crews began to move, in twenty-five-day trips, to the remotest villages. In addition, documentary filmmakers were instructed to overcome the influence of Western “films of a commercial nature which are ethically disgusting and artistically dull,” to “serve as a narrator and protagonist of the revolution,” and to bind city and countryside together in a revolutionary consciousness. Cuban television has never been of much importance, partly because the campesinos do not have sets and partly because it is not suited to public places, where people gather and discussion takes place. Television is still steeped in propaganda of the crudest sort. (A recent program reported that the reason Israeli forces were so strong in the Middle East was that they were led by Nazi generals.) Since television, which existed before Fidel Castro’s revolution, is ideologically single-minded and technically archaic, it is films that are taken with the greatest seriousness as national sources of information and of art.
The quantity of propaganda in Cuban newsreels and documentaries is roughly comparable to the amount of advertising in American television, with the difference being that Cuban films advertise only one product, socialist revolution, and that propaganda is now integrated in what has become a distinctively Cuban style. Films characteristically cut, with great suddenness, from the pure study of a subject, with great respect for the quality of the subject’s life, to an extremely blunt and remote political point. There is also a wider surreal and sometimes consciously comic conception of the relation between life and revolution. Cubans say that Cuba was the only socialist country to show Morgan, the irreverent English treatment of insanity and Marxism.
Among the most prolific, simultaneously folk and surreal filmmakers of ICAIC is Santiago Álvarez, who, since 1959, has made 437 newsreels and twenty documentaries. The forty-nine-year-old Mr. Álvarez now produces newsreels at the rate of one a week. At the time of the revolution, he was a music archivist for Cuban television who had never thought of making films. Asked how he happened to become a director, he said he had been caught up in creative revolutionary activism, “the same way Fidel became a guerrillero.”
Mr. Álvarez’s films contain strong elements of what, to a foreign observer, seems absolute panfleto, that is, pure propaganda work. But Cuban filmmakers say that although in the present struggle over artistic freedom the socialist realist, “populist” forces will try to claim Mr. Álvarez for their side, he will place himself firmly on the side of relative liberalism.
An Álvarez documentary about North Vietnam, called Hanoi: Tuesday, December 13, is one of the most beautiful films ever made about Asia, capturing, with the delicacy of a scroll, the rhythm of Vietnamese life, the hats, nets, fish, rice shoots, rivers, water buffalo. But intercut with a kind of poem about patience and tragedy (“We turn our hatred into energy,” a Vietnamese says, in preparing for a bombing raid), with a surprisingly contemporary narration from a children’s book about Indochina, by the turn-of-the-century Cuban poet and patriot José Martí, are scenes of what seems like crude and dissonant propaganda. President Johnson is suddenly introduced with literal, breech birth scenes of a woman and a cow. Asked whether he had put these scenes in out of personal artistic necessity or for didactic reasons, Mr. Álvarez replied that his reasons were emphatically personal. “I have to put them in. They are what I feel,” he said.
Except for Lucía and Memories of Underdevelopment, which are the most important of Cuba’s few fiction films, the most distinctive films in Cuba are still documentaries—nearly all made with Álvarez-like juxtapositions of fact, with a strong, unpolitical sense of human misery, and the most blatant ideology. Looking at Cuba’s documentaries is like watching ten years of Cuban history—the Bay of Pigs invasion, Hurricane Flora, the 1961 literacy campaign, speeches by Premier Castro, a film in which Major Ernesto Che Guevara appears, scarcely able to speak because of his asthma. (“We had to splice it together in a few days,” Mr. Álvarez said, “to give the people something after the death of Che.”) In the film institute’s 1,500-seat cinémathèque, however, there are quantities of American films made before 1960, and subsequently nationalized. And there are frequent retrospective exhibitions of Hollywood films, including a recent retrospective of Marilyn Monroe.
The parodistic sense in Cuban films is so strong and so deadpan that it is not always possible to tell when it unambiguously exists. There is a completely solemn film, for example, about the artificial insemination of cattle, with shots of three men at a kind of console behind a pane of glass, as a cow, flopping one idle ear, is inseminated with a single pill—coded blue, green or red, according to the breed of the bull. The seriousness of the Cuban cattle-improvement program seems here to run into a strong sense of ribaldry.
Another documentary, a kind of athletic Potemkin in style, shows Cuban athletes arriving by boat in Puerto Rico to protest being barred from the Central American games. (Acceptance in competition in capitalist countries or contexts plays a large role in many Cuban films.) They were ultimately admitted, and won many gold medals, but the film shows a Cuban athlete throwing up into the sea and another being cuffed on the ear by the coach for having responded to the jeers of the anti-Cuban crowd. The film called Cerro Pelado, after the name of a battle and the boat itself, shows streets of stores in San Juan, which audiences instantly and delightedly recognize as the stores of Cubans who fled. The climax of the film is a grand melee, in which Cubans tear down a Soviet flag that Puerto Ricans had run up a flagpole to mock the Cuban victories.
There seems also to be a sense if not of satire then at least of cheerful inconsistency, when—at a time of a virulent anti-Israel campaign—a film called Now, venomously anti-West, is accompanied almost completely by a rendition, set to Spanish words, of the Hebrew song “Hava Nagila.”
Two of the most moving and poetic documentaries in Cuba now were made by Octavio Cortázar, who is thirty-one, and who describes his films as “testimonies” to a Cuba that his son will never see. The first film, About a Person Whom Some Call St. Lazarus and Some St. Babalou, is about a pilgrimage that takes place each year on November 16, near Santiago in the province of Oriente. The pilgrims are black, descendants of slaves from the Yoruba tribe in Dahomey; and the Christian St. Lazarus has merged in their beliefs with Babalou (of the song “Babalou Aye”) in the voodoo cult of Santero. For twenty-four hours they crawl, either on their stomachs or backward, in sitting positions, some with weights dragging from an injured limb, some with sick children on their backs, many groaning, to the Lazarus-Babalou shrine. Mr. Cortázar interviews priests, psychiatrists, workers, students, the Tata Nganga (the local Santero leader), and the pilgrims as they crawl, about what can be the meaning of such a pilgrimage, in the middle of a socialist revolution, on the part of people who would otherwise consider themselves Marxist-Leninists.
“I was shocked when I saw them,” Mr. Cortázar, a tall, sensitive man, who studied for two years at the film school in Prague, said of the pilgrims. “The contradiction, the superstition. I cannot speak for the new generation and say that they will not be religious. I cannot say that they will not believe in God. But I know that with literacy, in the new Cuba, this pilgrimage will not exist.” The film ends with shots of some very healthy, modern schoolchildren doing exercises on a beach.
Mr. Cortázar’s other testimony to a disappearing Cuba is For the First Time, a film about one of the film institute’s mobile units bringing Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times to villagers in the Baracoa Mountains of Oriente. Mr. Cortázar interviews the villagers, who had never seen a film before, about what they think film is. “It is like a party,” one of them says, “with couples and beautiful girls.” Another, an immensely dignified, wrinkled lady, wearing a handkerchief over her hair, says film “is something you show in a cinema—very important thing. Very good.” A young woman gets frightened and bursts into tears. At night, carrying torches, a little audience arrives for its movie, and sits in folding chairs in a
field. The faces are amused, not awed, and radiant. The children eventually yawn and go to sleep. ICAIC’s directors say that film is one of Cuba’s few windows to the outside world. For the First Time catches, simply and respectfully, a moment, the first viewing of film, that will probably never occur in Cuba again.
The New York Times
February 12, 1969
HOUSE CRITIC
A NOTE BY THE AUTHOR
In the 1960s and ’70s, Pauline Kael was not only the most powerful movie critic in America. She had become the most powerful reviewer in any medium. And her influence extended, not just to criticism of all kinds, but to journalism, to academic writing, to the appointment of faculty to film departments at universities throughout the country. Writing every week for six months of the year in The New Yorker, and publishing regular collections of her pieces, she generated admiration (for some years deserved), and then—gradually, surprisingly—fear. She had colleagues and filmmakers she liked, and others she didn’t. Her likes and dislikes became dogmatic, remorseless. She had her cliques and imitators, including a more or less servile cult, known as the Paulettes. They chattered, laughed, whispered, loudly gossiped and sneered during previews and screenings, then went back to their various publications and tried to outdo one another in agreeing with Kael.
Meanwhile, almost without anyone’s taking notice, Pauline Kael’s interest in movies was declining, even as her writing style became more and more excessive. She began less to write than to rule. The titles of her books, in their redundant, unfunny naughtiness, should have given it away. I Lost It at the Movies, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Deeper Into Movies. The joyless, fake ordinariness of it all, the aging, essentially humorless woman reveling in unimaginative talking dirty—we didn’t notice, prize committees of various kinds did not notice the underlying quality of what we were endorsing, year after year.
