“Mi Cuba, maravillosa, polémica, pero siempre digna de ser conocida, amada e interpretada.” – Fresa y Chocolate
The Cuban Revolution spawned a new era in Cuban Cinema, one sponsored by the state in the Culture Division of the Rebel Army. This later formed the ICAIC, Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográficos (The Cuban Institute of Art and Cinematography Industry). In an article from The Guardian in 2003, Chris Payne interviewed the current director, Julio Garcia Espinosa.
… Gets to the heart of what the school is about. In the 1960s, García was among a group of left-wing academics who witnessed what they saw as the “colonial decimation” of Latin American cinema. “In the 1930s and 1940s there were lots of great films being shown in our cinemas, then it dropped right off,” he says. “The American studios claimed it was due to market forces, but of course it wasn’t. If we wanted one of their hits they would force us to take nine other films of lower quality. The glossy-produced films with big budgets were always put in the best cinemas, so Latin films screened in the less well-kept theatres. The public therefore assumed their own films were inherently inferior.”
In this light especially, we can define all Cuban cinema as “independent,” simply because it is produced outside of Hollywood and in competition with it. Additionally, films produced by the ICAIC come from students working collectively in a creative environment to produce something that will exist in contrast to the hegemony of Hollywood.
Payne does, however, go on to describe the current state of the school and frustrations many students have experienced in trying to produce unorthodox films, or films which contradict state beliefs, like horror films or “zany” scripts.
…there is frustration at the control exercised by Cuba’s film commission over everything from script development to distribution. To develop or finance a script they have to submit it to a committee of 14 bureaucrats, none of whom has made a film for 10 years.
(http://www.countercurrents.org/arts-payne281103.htm)
Despite this, a lot of Cuban cinema since the revolution (perhaps more so directly following it) has provided what might be a surprising amount of honest exploration of these themes. One of the most notable Cuban filmmakers is Tomas Gutierrez Alea. He produced his first film, a documentary titled El Megano, about charcoal maker, in Italy and was heavily influenced by Italian Neo-realism. This movement focused, like much of his work and Cuban film, on addressing the lives of average people and the mundanity of life. His film Death of a Bureaucrat, for example, tells the story of a man dealing with various obstacles to exhume and rebury his father when he needs to recover an identification card left in the coffin. The film is alluding to various traditions of comedy and the eternal struggle of man versus paperwork, but clearly takes aim at the difficulties communist rule creates for the citizens.
In class we screened “Memories of the Underdeveloped,” an Alea film exploring many of the prominent themes of both the movement known as New Latin American Cinema and the contemporaneous post-revolutionary Cuba: the reorganization of Cuba under communism, resulting class collisions and social strains.
Current Cuban films, many coming from the EICTV and ICAIC address the same themes, if in different ways. Much of the work is documentary-style film making, looking at the lives of actual Cubans.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_neorealism
http://www.greencine.com/static/primers/neorealism1.jsp
http://www.ejumpcut.org/archive/onlinessays/JC19folder/CubanFilmIntro.html
“I blog therefore I exist”: http://www.havanatimes.org/?p=12875
and the related blog: http://cine-cubano-la-pupila-insomne.nireblog.com/
