Memorias del Subdesarrollo (film)
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
3. Primary Texts: Film
Tomás
Gutiérrez Alea. Memorias
del Subdesarrollo.
Supporting References:
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“In 1946, when he was 17 years old,
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea came into possession of a 16mm movie camera.
As he related later in a Cinéaste essay titled "I Wasn't
Always a Filmmaker," his first effort was a Kafkaesque comedy
called Una confusion cotidiana (An Everyday Confusion).
"The film was about ten minutes long, I worked with actors, and
the experience was exciting and fun. From then on, I knew what I
wanted to be."
“Though he went to law school at the
University of Havana (where one of his fellow students was Fidel
Castro), he pursued his true interest even there, making two films
for the Cuban Communist Party. He wasn't a party member at that time,
but was responding to a culture of student activism that had
dominated his campus for the previous three decades.
“In 1951 Gutiérrez Alea went to Rome
to continue his studies at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.
He arrived just after the peaking of post-war neorealism, of which
his new school was still very much a center of influence. One of his
fellow students was Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Returning to Cuba two
years later, the future director found minimal opportunity to pursue
his profession, but a fertile landscape for his political and social
activism. In his absence the country had been come under the military
dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
“Gutiérrez Alea joined a group
making a clandestine, neorealistinspired film about charcoal burners,
intended to expose the conditions imposed on the poor by American
neocolonialism. The film, El Megano, which took a year to
make, was shown once, at a 1956 screening on the University of Havana
campus. It was then seized by the authorities, and the filmmakers
were interrogated. That same year Gutiérrez Alea finally found paid
work as a filmmaker, making short documentaries and humorous films
for a weekly TV series called Cinerevista. He worked for a
Mexican producer named Manuel Barbachano Ponce, who two years later
would produce Luis Buñuel's Nazarin.
“After Castro came to power on
December 31, 1958, Alea was recruited by the Cultural Directorate of
the Rebel Army to make a documentary called Esta tierra nuestra
(This Land of Ours). Meanwhile, the Revolutionary Government
was establishing an official film production house called the Cuban
Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry; it's first head was
Alfredo Guevara, who had been involved in the making of El Megano.
Gutiérrez Alea became one of its founding members.
“Over the next eight years, Gutiérrez
Alea made another documentary and three feature films, including a
satire on revolutionary excess called La muerte de un burócrata
(Death of a Bureaucrat). Then in 1968 he began work on what
was to become his most influential films, Memorias de subdesarollo
(Memories of Underdevelopment).
“Based on a novella by Edmundo
Desnoes called Inconsolable Memories, Gutiérrez Alea's film
combined its fictional elements with documentary footage to create a
portrait of a bourgeois intellectual who wants to be a part of the
revolutionary ferment going on all around him, but remains
disconnected, watching the transformation of Havana society through
binoculars from his apartment balcony. This breaking down of the
barriers between fiction and reality was widely exploited in the
Cuban film industry, and was to have a wide influence on world cinema
when it was finally shown in America and France in 1973 and 1974.
“In America the National Society of
Film Critics honored Memorias de subdesarollo by inviting its
director to a ceremony to accept a plaque and a $2000 award. The U.S.
State Department refused to grant Gutiérrez Alea a visa, and
threatened the Society with legal action if it delivered the award in
any other way. The New York Times editorialized on the
situation on January 19, 1974: "The absurdity of such sanctions
must be measured against the fact that the USA is now busily
encouraging trade with the Communist superpowers. But the
transmission of a prize for cultural achievement is treated as a
subversive act . . . At a time when détente with the Soviet Union
and the normalization of relations with Communist China are
rightfully considered diplomatic triumphs, the suggestion that Cuban
filmmakers might constitute a menace only exposes American
officialdom to ridicule."
“While Gutiérrez Alea always
defended the Cuban revolution abroad, he also accepted the
responsibility of critiquing it at home. This dual response is
exemplified by the way he responded to the issues of oppression
experienced by gay men and lesbians under the Castro regime. In 1984
the director participated over several issues of the Village Voice
in a polemical discussion with Cuban expatriate cinematographer
Nestor Almendros. This was in response to Almendros' documentary
about the official anti-gay oppression in Cuba called Improper
Conduct.
“Gutiérrez Alea forthrightly
defended the Cuban regime against what he viewed as Almendros'
"half-truths," and tried to place the attitudes against
homosexuality in a wider context of Cuba's Catholic and Spanish
traditions. Working in Cuba however, Gutiérrez Alea had already made
one film, Hasta un cierto punto (Up to a Certain Point),
which analyzed the machismo underlying anti-gay prejudice, and in
1993 he would produce a film, Frese y chocolate (Strawberry
and Chocolate) which brought the issue to the forefront of
political debate in Cuba.
“Because of deteriorating health,
Gutiérrez Alea had to bring in a frequent collaborator, Juan Carlos
Tabío, to co-direct this film. Tabío also served in the same
capacity on Gutiérrez Alea's final project, Guantanamera. The
director succumbed to lung cancer on April 16, 1996, at the age of
67. He was widely eulogized as the brightest star of the Cuban
cinema, at a time when it was matched in the hemisphere only by
Brazil in its artistic excellence and social and political
relevance.”
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“The self and society, private life
and history, individual psychology and historical situation—this is
the core of Memories, and film has rarely (if ever) been used
so effectively to portray this relationship. The dialectic of
consciousness and context is presented through the character of
Sergio, a wealthy but alienated member of the bourgeoisie who stays
in Cuba after the triumph of the revolution and whose experiences,
feelings, and thoughts in being confronted by the new reality form
the basis of the film.
“The formal
inventiveness of the film has its origin in the dialectical resonance
created through the juxtaposition of various cinematic forms, a
characteristic of revolutionary Cuban cinema at its best. Here, the
film begins by re-working the book which inspired it, taking the form
of the novel—Sergio's subjective revolutionary Cuba, presented in
documentary footage. Through this formal juxtaposition,Page 769
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of Article the film "objectifies" the
internal monologue of Sergio—criticizing and contextualizing his
psychological subjectivism and confronting his attempts to retreat
into his pre-revolutionary psychology and ways of seeing with the
"fact of history" presented by the revolutionary situation.
“Visually, the film's dialectic is
presented through the use of three forms of cinematic structure.
Documentary and semi-documentary footage is used to depict the
"collective consciousness" of the revolutionary process, a
consciousness that is pre-eminently historical. This footage presents
us with the background of the revolution and establishes the
historical context of the film's fictional present by placing it
between the 1961 exodus in the aftermath of the failed Bay of Pigs
invasion and the defensive preparations for the Missile Crisis of
1962. Fictional footage is used in two ways. The majority of the
fictional sequences are presented in the traditional form of
narrative cinema, in which the camera functions as omniscient
narrator. However, at times the camera presents us with Sergio's
point-of-view, the way in which his consciousness realizes itself in
his forms of perception—what he looks at and how he sees it. Thus,
the film shows and creates an identification with what it is
simultaneously criticizing. Through this juxtaposition of visual
forms, and through the visual contradiction of Sergio's reflections,
the film insists that what we see is a function of how we believe,
and that how we believe is what our history has made of us.
“Sergio's way of seeing was formed in
pre-revolutionary Cuba. As a member of the educated elite, he
developed a disdain for Cuban reality and a scorn for those who
believe that it could be changed. Critical of his bourgeois family
and friends (who are, however, capable of making the commitment to
leave Cuba), he is nonetheless unable to overcome his alienation and
link himself to the revolution. The "ultimate outsider," he
attempts to content himself by colonizing and exploiting women—a
metaphor for the colonization of Cuba. His personal fate is finally
and paradoxically irrelevant, for as the film ends the camera moves
out from his individual vision to the larger revolution beyond.
“The film "shocked" U.S.
critics when released there in 1973, and they described it variously
as "extremely rich," "hugely effective,"
"beautifully understated," and "a miracle." No
"miracle" at all, but simply one of the finest examples of
revolutionary Cuban cinema, Memories has also received a warm
reception from Cuban audiences, some film-goers returning to see it
again and again. Memories' complex structure and dialectical
texture merit such repeated viewings, for it transforms the now
familiar themes of alienation and the "outsider" by placing
them within a revolutionary setting. We identify with and understand
Sergio, who is capable of moments of lucidity. However, we also
understand that his perspective is neither universal nor timeless but
a specific response to a particular situation. Memories of
Underdevelopment insists that such situations are not permanent
and that things can be changed through commitment and struggle.
History is a concrete, material process which, ironically, is the
salvation of the Sergios.”
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