Waiting room to a dream.

Cuban Cinema

by Michael Chanan

Cultural Studies of the Americas, Volume 14

University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2004/538 pp./$77.95 (hb), $25.95 (sb)

In Giron, Cuban filmmaker Manuel Herrera's 1972 documentary about the Bay of Pigs invasion, a former militia member who helped defend the island characterizes the story of her participation as disappointingly uncinematic. Carrying a secret note from her militia unit to headquarters, she hears a suspicious sound and, inspired by the Hollywood films she saw as a child, tries to eat the note. The paper, as it turns out, is quite difficult to chew.

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In his book Cuban Cinema, Michael Chanan posits this realistic, quiet kind of heroism in Cuban revolutionary cinema as the antidote to capitalist cinema's over-inflated notion of "superheroism." The book is a celebratory meditation on precisely these kinds of ideological effects of revolutionary Cuban cinema--an "imperfect cinema," in Julio Garcia Espinosa's words, that refuses to lull the audience into passive consumption. Although at times one-sided in its interpretation of Cuban cultural policy, the book is a rich and engaging social history, full of quirky anecdotes and sharp analyses of dozens of films. In a thorough exploration of the institutional context of Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos (ICAIC), the Cuban film institute, Chanan reveals the political, economic and social circumstances that have shaped film in Cuba. Cuban Cinema is an expanded and updated version of Chanan's 1985 book The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba. Chanan has added a new introduction, four additional chapters and many small revisions throughout. While the original chapters are sometimes an irritatingly dogmatic apologia for revolutionary policy and ideology, the newer parts, recounting developments in film since the beginning of the "Special Period" (the period of Cuba's economic crisis that began with the fall of Eastern bloc socialism in 1990 and continues today), are less ideological and gently recognize the contradictions and paradoxes that the Revolution has come to embody.

Chanan sees post-1959 Cuban cinema as a socially redemptive consciousness-raising medium. He writes that revolutionary cinema changed the relationship between film and audience: rather than offering vapid entertainment that alienates viewers from themselves and their social reality--as capitalist cinema does--Cuban revolutionary cinema engages the audience, inviting viewers to become participants in the revolution they are observing.

In commercial (read: Hollywood) cinema, Chanan writes, the emerging screen vocabulary "locked ... the ideological message onto the screen," keeping the audience in a state of "naive consumption" and undermining its power to re-interpret the images. Revolutionary filmmakers, on the other hand, used a radical film language to shift this relationship. The dominant philosophy at ICAIC, especially in the early days of the Revolution, was that filmmakers needed to subvert what many viewers took to be the indexical relationship between screen images and reality, drawing their attention to the fact that filmic images were only the filmmakers' interpretations of reality, and that truth in cinema was manipulable.

Although even during the 1970s--the most hard-line period of the Revolution--Cuban filmmakers and artists were not expected to conform to Soviet realism or any other particular formal language, there was and has continued to be a clear expectation, institutionalized in ICAIC, that films should function to raise the audience's conciencia (which translates as both revolutionary consciousness and conscience); the revolutionary filmmaker ideally sees himself as "involved in a collective process" to redefine truth in accordance with the Revolution's goals.

Chanan traces how, with this approach to cinema, Cuba became recognized throughout Latin America as the only place where a "third cinema," or a cinema of liberation, operated within, rather than in opposition to, the system. Cuba was seen by many Latin American filmmakers as the only "filmically free territory." But how much freedom of expression is actually permitted in Cuba, and what role film plays or should play in political critique, have been controversial issues in Cuba and among outside observers. Chanan's approach to these questions shifts as he moves from recounting pre-1990 history to discussing work produced during the "Special Period." In the chapters reprinted from the 1985 edition, he is dogmatic in his defense of the Revolution; in considering more recent history, his consideration of freedom of expression is more nuanced.

For example, in 1961, at a moment when artists and intellectuals were still generally united around the excitement and momentum of recent events, a crisis arose around Saba Cabrera Infante's film P.M. The short film, shot in a "free cinema" style, impressionistically depicted an underground Havana nightlife of sensuality, drinking and dancing. Although it had no explicit ideological message, P.M. was seen by some in ICAIC as decadent and bourgeois, and was confiscated. A group of liberal artists, filmmakers and intellectuals united to defend the film, and debates arose between them and the communist leadership of ICAIC about the possibilities and dangers inherent in the filmic medium. The drama culminated in a series of meetings attended by Fidel Castro and prominent members of the intellectual and artistic community, in which P.M. became the first film to be banned by the revolutionary government. In his famous closing speech, Castro outlined the basic tenet of revolutionary cultural policy--that while there should be formal freedom in the arts, when it comes to content, artists should accept the maxim "within the Revolution, everything; against it, nothing."

In recounting the conflict, Chanan makes no bones about his own sympathies, describing the confrontation over P.M. as an essential part of the revolutionary process, wherein artists experience "rupture," realizing that their bourgeois individualism must be discarded in favor of "a new self-image as a cultural worker." But he undermines the perspective of those who defend the film, portraying them as naive, lacking in political consciousness and effeminate, writing, for instance, that after one meeting they "went away to sulk and scheme." (1) His lack of respect for those who were excluded, whether socially, politically or artistically, from the Revolution, renders his account suspect in its one-sidedness.

Chanan's tone changes in the last section of the book. Like many foreign supporters of Cuban socialism who visit Cuba today, he recognizes the frustration that many Cubans feel over their voicelessness in a system that seems to respond to its people less and less. In his account of Tomas Gutierrez Alea's last two films, Fresa y chocolate (1993) and Guantanamera (1994), both of which offer very thinly veiled critiques of Cuban bureaucracy and Castro, Chanan recognizes the limits on free speech outside art. He quotes Gutierrez Alea, describing the reaction to Fresa y chocolate: Cubans loved the film because it "says aloud what many people think but don't dare utter."

The trajectory of the first book was triumphal, while the later edition ends on a somber note. In 1985, Chanan traced Cuba's evolution from a nation dominated by the cultural imperialism of the U.S. film industry to a bastion of thriving socialist cinema at its height in the 1980s. He wrote the first book during a time when it was inconceivable that global socialism might be on the verge of collapse, even before perestroika began threatening the Cuban economy. The last paragraph reads, in part, "Cuban film-makers are in an enviable position: they are making films with the knowledge that it matters, and that what they produce will be actively taken up ... Cuban films ... continue to stimulate discussion and debate throughout the land."

Unfortunately for Cuban filmmakers, and for all Cubans, the new book cannot follow this triumphal trajectory. The final chapter paints a picture of an ICAIC dispirited by lack of financing. Production has fallen, and those in the film industry must work for foreign coproductions that capitalize on Cuba's "exotic" locale. Filmmakers and actors see the dangers in these coproductions, which "override aesthetic judgment and cultural authenticity" in favor of marketability to international audiences, but ICAIC today must not only earn its own way but make a profit.

As it moves from a celebration of Cuban cinema at its height to a description of today's film industry, Cuban Cinema reads like an elegy. Chanan ends with a description of Juan Carlos Tabio's film Lista de espera (Waiting List, 2000) in which a group of people, stuck for days in a bus station at the edge of town, paint the walls, create a library and cook a collective meal together. Then they wake up and realize that they were only dreaming. As lead actor Vladimir Cruz told Chanan, "What we have constructed, rather than the dream, is the waiting room to the dream."

NOTES

1. The film's supporters included several later exiled and prominent artists, such as filmmaker Nestor Almendros and novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, brother of the filmmaker. Several of those Chanan Portrays as wimpy decadent, bourgeois liberals were gay, which, in the homophobic context of the Revolution, may help to explain the hostility toward them.

JENN GUITART is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology and the Program in Culture and Media at New York University.