The Cameraman's Revenge

Finishing off the Cuban Revolution box (from which we previously saw Memories of Underdevelopment and Lucia a while ago) from Mr Bongo at last. This brings us into more recent times, but the film is still set in the past (as all the films in the set are to some extent or other)… in this instance, 1979, which was no doubt picked cos that was the year Cuba finally legalised homosexuality (although I don’t recall many specific references identifying the exact year beyond a TV report about the deposing of the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza), although I only gleaned that latter detail from other reviews and would not have learned that from the film itself (how that lack of knowledge would’ve affected my reading of the film I don’t know). Our two main figures are Diego and David, two men who could not initially be more different; Diego is a middle-aged gay man of doubtful political convictions, David is younger, straight, and a good Communist who initially uses their chance encounter (when Diego tries to pick him up at an ice cream stand) to, frankly, inform upon him. The more they meet, however, the more the differences between them wear down, as Diego’s greater feeling for culture breaks through David’s indoctrinated ignorance and we learn Diego had initially wanted to contribute to the revolution David believes in, but the revolution didn’t want a homosexual to be part of it. In short, you could glibly sum this up as a “poofs are people too” story, although obviously the Cuban context—the mixof “revolutionary” conformism and Hispanic machismo—gives it a certain resonance it might not have had in quite the same way were it set in the US, for example; as in Memories of Underdevelopment, director Tomas Gutierrez Alea finds plenty of room for criticism of the way the revolution panned out as a less than unmixed blessing for the Cuban people. It’s a small film and I wasn’t hugely blown away by it, but it’s nice enough.

The other major Cuban film from 1968, Lucia is a film in three parts, set in three periods, made in three styles to boot. This 1970s interview with director Humberto Solas sums up his approach, and I may as well just quote him directly therefrom: “women are traditionally the number-one victims in all social confrontations. … Because they are traditionally assigned to a submissive role, woman have suffered more from society’s contradictions and are thus more sensitive to them and more hungry for change. From this perspective, I feel that the female character has a great deal of dramatic potential through which I can express the entire social phenomenon I want to portray. This is a very personal and a very practical position. It has nothing to do with feminism per se.” The female characters here are three women, each called Lucia, each of them situated at various major points of Cuban history (the war of 1895, the fall of the Machado dictatorship in the 1930s, the aftermath of the revolution); the first story probably grabbed me the least, being copped somewhat from Visconti’s Senso and prone to melodramatics. Probably liked the second one best, this Lucia marries a revolutionary and winds up participating in a riot while he’s having a gun battle with cops elsewhere, but once the shooting is over and Machado’s crumbled he becomes disillusioned with the classic “meet the new boss, same as the old boss” situation that results. I wonder if there’s an at least implied critique of the later revolution buried in this story (or am I just reading it that way); certainly the last story turns on the notion that a revolution in politics won’t necessarily engender a revolution in Neanderthal macho attitudes towards mistreating women. A fairly long slog at 159 minutes, and variable across that length, but pretty good on the whole, though Solas is probably right to distance his approach from feminism, since actual feminists would likely consider the film patronising at best for having committed the sin of being directed by a man…

“Third cinema”, as they used to (still?) call this sort of thing, isn’t one of my strong points, so I took the suggestion of James at Title in Surry Hills (when I was there a few months ago) to check out Mr Bongo’s Cuban Revolution set in order to explore at least a few of the better-known titles. Because I’m trying as much as possible to get through the unseen titles on my list I’ll be looking at I Am Cuba later and will be doing the other three films in the box first. This one, apparently, is one of the best known films to have come from Cuba in the 60s, directed by Tomas Gutierrez Alea who would appear to have learned a few tricks from Godard; it’s a film that’s light on actual plot and fairly heavy on ruminating. Set in 1961/62, the main figure is a somewhat adrift fellow in his late 30s called Sergio, whose family and friends have all fled for the US, leaving him in Cuba at something of a loss in his marked ambivalence towards the revolution. From what I can gather Alea himself was a good revolutionary, which meant he was in fact the worst sort of revolutionary, i.e. one who still took it seriously after it had succeeded and become just another dictatorship like the one it had displaced. As such he was not uncritical of it, which makes Sergio an interesting figure here, somewhat lost in Castro’s brave new world and hostile to it, a yesterday’s man who is nonetheless treated sympathetically by the filmmaker. Alea presents this man and his world through an array of techniques, dressing up fictional narrative with non-fictional footage, newsreels, speeches by Castro and Kenneday, etc. I thought it was good, if a little dry, and I dare say I’d like it better if I could see it again in a print that wasn’t as beaten up and covered in dust and old-looking as Mr Bongo’s is.