OCTOBER´S OFFSPRING:
SOVIET CINEMA AND THE CUBAN FILM INSTITUTE
JOHN MRAZ
Has Soviet cinema been a significant influence on the films produced in Revolutionary Cuba? I will limit my focus here to the first fifteen years of Cuban cinema, from 1960 to 1975, an era that is both formative as well as decisive for the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC, Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos). During this time, a truly national cinema was forged, alternative film styles were explored, and a serious effort was made to develop critiques and theories that would contribute to the creation of a genuinely new way to make movies. Around 1968, the Cuban Revolution began to undergo a process of institutionalization that would eventually lead away from cinematic experimentation as part of a general cultural retreat from exploration.
1. Memorias del subdesarrollo. Sergio walks about Havana, observing the changes wrought by the revolution, while the camera reproduces his POV (Point-of-view).
During the "effervescent" period that followed the triumphs of the social revolutions in Russia, Cuba, and Mexico, cultural creativity flourished and transcendent cinematographic works were produced. Unfortunately, as these revolutions were deformed into dictatorships, institutionalization stifled the dynamic searches of the first few years. The Russian Revolution offers indisputable examples of such vitality in the films of Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, and Dziga Vertov, as well as the photography of Alexander Dovjenko (other cultural areas experienced similar exuberance). An identical scenario was played out in the visual culture of Mexico, where movies directed by Fernando de Fuentes were the counterpart of the murals produced by Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco, and David Álfaro Siqueiros, and the photography of Tina Modotti and Manuel Álvarez Bravo.1 However, the vigor of revolutionary art was smothered as culture was captured by the bureaucrats, and put to the service of legitimizing the new rulers. In the Soviet Union, one result was Stalinist movies such as Chapayev (Sergei and Georgi Vasiliev, 1934), while in Mexico cinema was channeled into the escapism of melodramas featuring long-suffering mothers, and musicals in the genre of comedias rancheras.2
In Cuba, ICAIC's effervescent period extended somewhat past the general process of institutionalization that settled in around 1970, probably because Cuban film audiences require sophisticated fare, and due to the unique relation of Alfredo Guevara (ICAIC's founder and director for many years) to Fidel Castro. I would argue that the most important Cuban films were made essentially during the decade of 1965-1975, beginning with pictures such as Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1967), Lucía (Humberto Solás, 1968), and La primera carga al machete (The First Charge of the Machete, Manuel Octavio Gómez, 1969), which were followed during the 1970s by works such as De cierta manera (One Way or Another, Sara Gómez, 1974), El otro Francisco (The Other Francisco, Sergio Giral, 1975), and La última cena (The Last Supper, Gutiérrez Alea, 1976). This was coupled with a theoretical and critical search that culminated in Julio García Espinosa's rich and complex essay, "For an Imperfect Cinema."3 "Imperfect Cinema" is a theoretical watershed of the New Latin American Cinema (NLAC), and continues to offer an alternative model to Hollywood's technological perfectionism that dominates our screens ("It's not much of a story, but the special effects are wonderful...."). Nonetheless, the populism of this text is not unproblematic and, in a certain sense, the essay straddles the two periods, with one foot in the effervescence --synthesizing the NLAC's cinematic guerrillismo -- and the other in the Fidelismo, foreshadowing the demagogic appeals to the masses, who were to be the "new interlocutors" that would provide the cineastes with "moral examples".
The magazine, Cine Cubano, is a useful point from which to begin looking into the question of Soviet influence. This has been a house publication of ICAIC since 1960, and one of the outstanding film journals in the Third World for many years. Cine Cubano contains much information on the island's directors and other production artists, usually in the form of interviews, and is a fundamental source for the study of those Latin Americans involved in the NLAC. The number of articles on foreign films and their makers, during the period 1960-1975, is revealing. Italy leads the pack, with 21 articles published about its films and filmmakers, followed closely by the Soviet Union with 20 articles that focus on the "Cinema of October" (Eisenstein, Pudovkin), while U.S. cinema trails with 13 articles. The number of pages given to foreign cinemas confirms the trend: 40 pages were dedicated to Soviet film, the same number assigned to French cinema, while Italian films received 48 pages (here, the U.S. was well behind with 20 pages). This simple quantification of the number of pages dedicated to foreign cinemas in Cine Cubano indicates that Soviet film must have exercised a certain influence, above all that which the Cubans refer to as "The Cinema of October." And, I would imagine that Cubans must have gone to Moscow to study film (as did many Mexican cineastes), but I have not encountered any filmmakers who studied there nor have I found any information on this in Michael Chanan's notable analysis of Cuban cinema, The Cuban Image.4
What is confirmed beyond doubt is the centrality of Italian cinema, particularly neo-realism. This is not surprising: ICAIC's leading filmmakers and thinkers, Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, studied in the Centro Sperimentale in Rome during the 1950s. They had a crucial impact on Alfredo Guevara and other members of the radical cultural group, Nuestro Tiempo, which was part of the resistance to the dictator, Fulgencio Batista. Several members of the group worked on El Megano, a documentary directed by García Espinosa that utilized neorealist reconstruction to denounce the wretched living conditions of the charcoal burners who lived in swamps, and which is considered to be a precursor for ICAIC. Of course, the strategies of neo-realism are attuned to making low-budget, realistic films, which were of particular interest to leftists, and this style is clearly present in works such as Memorias del subdesarrollo, De cierta manera, and El otro Francisco. However, Italian cinematic imports were not limited to neo-realism, for the operatic form that Luchino Visconti utilized in Senso (1954) was a direct inspiration for Humberto Solás's Lucía.
The heritage of neo-realism notwithstanding, perhaps this movement's impact on Cuban cinema has been overly emphasized. Many years ago, Carl Becker critiqued the notion that influences were unilateral, or easy to study:
It has long been a favorite pastime of those who interest themselves in the history of culture to note the transfer of ideas (as if it were no more than a matter of borrowed coins) from one writer to another; to note, for example, that Mr. Jones must have got a certain idea from Mr. Smith because it can be shown that he had read, or might have read, Mr. Smith's book; all the while forgetting that if Mr. Jones hadn't already had the idea, or something like it, simmering in his own mind he wouldn't have cared to read Mr. Smith's book, or, having read it, would very likely have thrown it aside, or written a review to show what a bad and mistaken book it was. And how often it happens that books 'influence' readers in ways not intended by the writers!
The material conditions of film production in Cuba were no doubt much more important to the type of cinema that evolved there than were European influences. The fact that Cuban cineastes were making films in an underdeveloped country with little prior experience was crucial in their commitment to an "imperfect cinema," which might be summarized as cheap, portable, rough, and dedicated to transforming reality. One of the characteristic techniques of early revolutionary cinema is the juxtaposition of documentary and fictional form. This is an inexpensive style and, moreover, produces a certain distanciation from the narrative, causing audiences to see film as film, through a process that bites both ways: it inserts "reality" into fictional elements while simultaneously insisting on the fact of representation in the documentary sequences. However, as Gutiérrez Alea made clear, Cuban cineastes are more interested in having their audiences understand the reality of the filmic experience than in utilizing a realist form:
We find in the integration of the two styles a way of approaching reality. It has therefore become a very natural and organic fact of Cuban revolutionary cinema. One can play with various levels of approaching reality within the same film. And the confrontation between those levels, the relationships between them, is very productive, and throws much light on the analysis one wishes to make. We think that this cannot be treated as a formula, nor as a style, but simply as an attitude. It is not a question of a realistic style based on formula, but of a realistic attitude towards film.6
It is also crucial to recognize the contribution of black culture, particularly music, to Cuban cinema. The island's cineastes have accorded much importance to audio, and the great documentarist, Santiago Alvarez, articulated this in his statement that, "50 percent of the value of a film is in the sound track."7 Cuba is a culture steeped in music, something apparent in self-reflexive jokes about the revolution: At the end of a long harangue against the time lost in dancing and singing, Fidel commands, "Que se acabe la música" (The music must end); the rhythm of the phrase is quickly captured by the crowd, who turn it into a song, and dance off in a conga line, drumming the beat and singing "Que se acabe la música, que se acabe la música....." Music is of such centrality that the very first film produced under ICAIC was García Espinosa's, Cuba baila (1960), an effort to exorcise the heritage of reactionary musicals that, ironically, began in Latin America with Fernando de Fuentes's, Allá en el Rancho Grande (Mexico, 1935). In fact, I would argue that the significance of black music in Cuban film goes well beyond what gets incorporated in the sound track: I believe that the rhythm of Cuban cinema is often pushed by a Caribbean beat, which accounts to some extent for its singular agility.
4. Lucía, 1895. Lucía I awaits her assignation with Rafael in the ruined sugar mill. The operatic influence of Senso is reflected in this segment´s melodramatic approach, reinforced through the acting excesses of Raquel Revuelta. Cuban cinema, then, is clearly a product of both its black culture and the strategies it has generated for dealing with the limitations of underdevelopment; it has also been much influenced by Italian and U.S. film. Nonetheless, Soviet cineastes had a definite impact on what may be the most unique contribution of Cuba to world cinema, that which I call "dialectical resonance." Here, I use the word "resonance" to indicate that meaning in this cinematic form is derived from the "tone" struck by the percussion of the different filmic elements; and I speak of "dialectical" in order to assert that these collisions result in the creation of higher esthetic and historical truths than would be the case in a film utilizing only one form, for the most immediate effect is to take the audience to a more critical level by making them conscious of the fact that they are watching a movie.
The concept of dialectical resonance can be illustrated in the process carried out in three films. In Memorias del subdesarrollo, it is derived from the juxtaposition of fictional and documentary form, which embodies the contradiction between Sergio's perspective and that of the "revolutionaries."8 [Frame enlargements 1, 2, 3] In Lucía, this operation is effected through the confrontation of the three different visual styles utilized by Humberto Solás in representing the segments on "1895," "1933," and "196_." [Frame enlargement 4, 5, 6] In El otro Francisco, this complex structure is utilized to both recount the history of slavery as well as reflect on who has been writing this history, and how they have written it.9 [Frame enlargement 7, 8] Thus, the movie begins as a cinematic reproduction of the idealized, romanticized, and individualized image of slavery found in the novel, employing a traditional Hollywoodian esthetic of invisible editing, smooth tracks, pans and zooms, an even gray tone produced by balanced lighting, all accompanied by classical string music. But, as the film proceeds, it develops a critique of this portrayal by showing the "real" historyof slavery in a documentary style of high-contrast grainy film, sharp lighting, hand-held cameras, and African music.
The many examples of Cuban films during the period 1965-1975 that explore this notion of conflicting perspectives require that we examine the meaning of such a strategy. I would argue that this form is a tactic which insists that truth lies in the confrontation of perspectives, in the struggle between different ways of seeing the world. Hence, as Gutiérrez Alea has affirmed in describing the opposition between Sergio's POV and that of the revolutionaries, "The truth is not in one nor the other. It is not even in the sum of one or the other, but in that which the confrontation between the revolution and Sergio suggests to the spectator."10 Immediately, the theories of Sergei Eisenstein come to mind, and we should remember that he was the director who, in 1964, Cuban cineastes asserted had most influenced them.11 For Eisenstein, "Montage has been established by the Soviet film as the nerve of cinema.... Montage is an idea that arises from the collision of independent shots -- shots even opposite to one another: the 'dramatic' principle."12 However, the Soviet filmmaker believed that conflict-as-truth went well beyond cinema; it was life itself: "Being -- as a constant evolution from the interaction of two contradictory opposites." And, it was the duty of art to reveal this reality: "Art is always conflict .... It is art's task to make manifest the contradictions of Being."13
Eisenstein insisted in the resolution of contradictions, in the synthesis achieved as the unifying theme of a film: "Each montage piece exists no longer as something unrelated, but as a given particular representation of the general theme that in equal measure penetrates all the shot-pieces."14 In a similar way, the vision of the world constructed by Cuban cineastes is not the proverbial center less onion of bourgeois atomism, but rather a commitment to the larger subjective collectivity. History -- that reality we know exists because of the pain it causes us -- is always present in Cuban cinema, a product of Marxist-Leninism and the fact of living in a world in transformation. Surrounded by dramatic changes, Cubans believe in the possibility of generating real alternatives, and they demonstrate that belief in their films.
6. Lucía, 196_. Lucía III is shot from above, trapped between Tomás and the mirror, a metaphor for the continuity of female subservience to men and bourgeois attitudes about physical beauty. The restrained approach of this segment is reminiscent of contemporany documetary form, and might be described as "proletarian clarity". The revolutionary effervescence permitted the flowering of geniuses such as Gutiérrez Alea, who engaged with Eisensteinian ideas at both theoretical and practical levels. In Dialéctica del espectador, the director dedicates one chapter to wrestling with the differences between Eisenstein and Bertold Brecht. Fascinated with the fact that both Marxist theoreticians of art were born in the same year (1898), and produced major works in the 1920s, he inquires into the fundamental discrepancy between the two (which Julia Lesage nicely captures in her translation as "Rapture and Rupture.").15 Gutiérrez Alea affirms that Eisenstein wished to establish an emotional identification of the audience, provoking rapture, pathos, and a sentimental surrender to the film. The Cuban feels that this tactic is alienating, and he points to Brecht as offering a very different vision that trenchantly rejects this identification with a work, while looking to awaken reason, lucidity, and a critical attitude in the spectator.
Gutiérrez Alea asks how we can understand this apparent dichotomy between the two Marxists artist-theoreticians (apart from the fact, as he sagely notes, that they lived in very different contexts and worked in two distinct mediums). And the Cuban's question is directed toward a pragmatic goal: How can we, as revolutionary filmmakers, utilize theories that are so divergent? He answers:
Brecht radically rejected a state of ecstasy in the spectator and Eisenstein proposed ecstasy. The divergence between both can be logically surpassed only if we consider Eisenstein's pathos and Becht's "distanciation" as two moments of the same dialectical process (rapture-rupture) within which each artist isolated and emphasized a different phase.16
This is precisely the operation that the Cuban director carried out in Memorias del subdesarrollo. He first makes us identify with Sergio by utilizing the model of the successful man offered by bourgeois cinema, with which spectators have been inculcated:
The protagonist is not only lucid and intelligent, but also cultured, elegant, handsome, and with a certain wit. He has all his time for himself, since he receives a nice amount of money without needing to work. He also owns a luxury apartment, and goes to bed with beautiful women. In this sense, he represents what every man at some point in his life thinks he'd like to be or have.17
However, once Gutiérrez Alea has created identification with Sergio, he begins to cut back against it, destroying the very empathy that he himself brought into being. Hence, the spectators initially experience the typical sensation of relating to a traditional hero of bourgeois cinema, only to have it turn around on them, forcing them to think about the filmic process of transference in which they have been engaged:
Sergio has a set of virtues and advantages which permit spectators to identify to a certain degree with him as a character. The film plays with this identification, trying to insure that the viewer at first identifies with the character.... But then what happens? As the film progresses, one begins to perceive not only the vision that Sergio has of himself, but also the vision that reality gives to us, the people who made the film. This is the reason for the documentary sequences and other kinds of confrontation situations which appear in the film. They correspond with our vision of reality and also to our critical view of the protagonist. Little by little, the character begins to destroy himself precisely because reality begins to overwhelm him, for he is unable to act.... So then what happens to the spectator?... The spectators feel caught in a trap since they have identified with a character who proceeds to destroy himself and is reduced to ... nothing. The spectators have to re-examine themselves and all those values, consciously or unconsciously held, which have motivated them to identify with Sergio.... I feel that it is in this sense that the film carries out an operation which is the most revolutionary, so to speak, the most dialectical with regard to the spectator.18
Let us now return to the question that prompted this essay: What has been the influence of Soviet cinema on Cuban film? We must first admit that much research remains to be carried out before a definitive answer can be provided. However, at this point it can be asserted that the cinema produced by the Soviet effervescence, that which the Cubans call "El cine de octubre," would seem to have had a significant influence, above all the films and theories of Eisenstein. This was "institutionalized," to a certain extent, in 1974, when Cine Cubano devoted abundant space to two articles by Pastor Vega, and a large poll of Latin American cineastes on "The Influence of Soviet Silent Cinema."19 One revealing element of these articles is the emphasis on silent film, a strategy seemingly designed to avoid having to deal with contemporary Soviet cinema. And, it is also meaningful that Pastor Vega expends space and energy in distancing himself from critiques he must have had good reason to anticipate. Hence, he asserts insistently that his interest in the influence of "October's cinema" is not a question of "cultural mimesis," nor of "searching for the tracks of an artificially imposed style" or "an expressive model inauthentically encrusted." His comments were no doubt motivated by the fact that this was a moment in which the Soviets had acquired great inroads into Cuba, beginning with Fidel Castro's defense of the 1968 invasion of Czechoslovakia. Such imperialist practices must have been producing a reaction among the more critical members of ICAIC, who would have had good reason to dislike Soviet film, as well as fear the model of Stalinist culture.
8. El otro Francisco. The documentary counterpart to the Hollywoodian sequence is provided by high-contrast, grainy images such as this of a slave hanging from a hook thrust through his ribs, an image probably inspired by William Blake´s well-known lithograph. At least one Soviet-Cuban co-production was realized, the superficial and confused Yo soy Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964). If the Mexican experience with Soviet co-production is any example, it is fortunate that ICAIC had the sense to avoid them. During the reign of José López Portillo (1976-1982), the president followed the usual nepotistic practices of the PRI by appointing his sister, Margarita López Portillo, to be the Director of the government-owned system of Radio-Television-Cinema, despite that fact that she had no prior experience in these mediums. She quickly became known as "La Macartita," a reference to her McCarthy-like purges to rid Mexican media of anyone remotely perceived as a leftist. Her incapacity for the post was confirmed by two related events. The first was a co-production undertaken with the Soviets, Campanas rojas (Red Bells, Sergei Bondarchuk, 1982). This tedious and pretentious historical melodrama is a reconstruction of John Reed's experience during the Mexican revolution, and perhaps the longest, emptiest, and most boring film I have ever seen. Mexicans roundly criticized the movie, describing it as "disgraceful" and "ridiculous," while wondering ironically if Bondarchuk were a dissident committed to destroying what little prestige remained to Soviet film.20 And, these critiques were levied before the destruction of the National Cineteca! Margarita had poured some 32 million pesos into the film (the official estimate, which was equal to more than a million dollars), rather than investing the 24 million pesos that was needed for the reconstruction of the National Cineteca. When the nitrate footage stored at the Cineteca burst into flames in March of 1982, annihilating Mexico's film history right at the moment that the government was opening Campanas rojas in many theaters, the decision to enter into a co-production with the Soviets acquired tragic dimensions.
This essay was prepared for the Film-Historia session, "The Influence of Soviet Cinema," within the 2001 congress of the Federación Internacional de Estudios sobre América Latina y el Caribe, which required a focus on the question of the Soviet impact on Cuban cinema. However, I believe it would be much more interesting to pick up the other end of the stick. Invariably, the questions asked about cultural "influences" between Europe and Latin America revolve around how the latter have drawn upon the former.21 But, let us imagine for just a minute what might have been the result of a Cuban influence on Soviet film. After all, the Cuban cinema of 1965-1975 was the most developed, and the most experimental, in the Third World. Can you picture what sort of cinema would have resulted from combining the "sculptures in time" created by Andrei Tarkovsky with the black rhythm of an Afro Cuban beat?
NOTES AND REFERENCES:
1. MRAZ, J. "The Revolution is History: Filming the Past in Mexico and Cuba," Film-Historia, Vol. 9, No. 2 (1999): 147-167.
2. On Chapayev, see FERRO, M. Cinema and History, tr. GREEN, N. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988.
3. This essay, first published in 1969, has been much reprinted in Spanish. An English translation by Julianne Burton has been published in Jump Cut, No. 20 (1979): 24-26, and in Twenty-five Years of the New Latin American Cinema, ed. CHANAN, M. London: BFI Books, 1983: 28-33.
4. CHANAN, M. The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba. London and Bloomington: BFI Publishing and Indiana University Press, 1985.
5. BECKER, C. L. The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932: 72-73.6. Quoted in PICK, Z.M. "Towards a Renewal of Cuban Revolutionary Cinema: A Discussion of Cuban Cinema Today," Cinetracts, No. 8 (1979): 26.
7. "5 Frames are 5 Frames, Not 6, But 5: An Interview with Santiago Alvarez," Cineaste, Vol. 6, No. 4 (1975).8. This is, of course, a highly simplistic rendering of a most complex work. See MRAZ, J. "Memories of Underdevelopment: Bourgeois Consciousness/Revolutionary Context," in Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past, ed. ROSENSTONE, R. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995: 102-114.
9. See MRAZ, J. "Recasting Cuban Slavery: The Other Francisco and The Last Supper," in Based on a True Story: Latin American History at the Movies, ed. Donald Stevens. Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1997: 103-122.
10. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Dialéctica del espectador. Mexico City: Federación Editorial Mexicana, 1983: 101.
11. See "Entrevistas con directores de largometrajes, fotografía, escritores y músicos," Cine Cubano, No. 23/24/25 (1964): 65-128.
12. Sergei Eisenstein, "A Dialectical Approach to Film Form," Film Form, ed. and tr. Jay Leyda. New York: Meridian Books, 1957: 48-49.13. Ibid., 46.
14. Sergei Eisenstein, "Word and Image," The Film Sense, ed. and tr. Jay Leyda. New York: Meridian Books, 1957: 11.
15. See the translation of Dialéctica del espectador by Lesage in Jump Cut, Nos. 29, 30, and 32 (1984-1987).
16. Gutiérrez Alea, Dialéctica del espectador: 82. Lesage translation, Jump Cut, No. 30, (1985): 53.
17. Ibid.: 105. Lesage translation, Jump Cut, No. 32 (1987): 59.
18. BURTON, J. "'Individual Fulfillment and Collective Achievement': An Interview with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea," Cineaste, Vol. 8, No. 1 (1977): 9.
19. Pastor Vega, "Eisenstein: el sentido del cine," Cine Cubano, No. 89/90 (1974): 39-44; Pastor Vega, "El cine de octubre y el nuevo cine latinoamericano," Cine Cubano, No. 93 (1974). 38-43; "Encuesta a cineastas latinoamericanos sobre influencia del cine silente soviético," Cine Cubano, No. 93 (1974): 44-65.
20. See the interviews in Armando Ponce, "Los críticos, implacables contra Campanas rojas," Proceso, No. 282 (19 March 1982): 47-48.
21. A fascinating exception is provided by Perry Anderson, who proposes that the ideas and concepts of both "modernism" and postmodernism" were born in Hispanic America. See The Origins of Postmodernity. London: Verso Books, 1998: 3.
