Book review of On Location in Cuba: Street Filmmaking during Times of Transition (original) (raw)
Related papers
Cubanía Ahora: Beginning to Understand a New Generation of Filmmakers in Cuba
This paper was written as part of my preliminary investigations into the possible frameworks and methodologies I planned to use in writing my Master's thesis. It explores the current literature on Cuban film studies and puts forth preliminary research questions. My main research questions are, how do young Cuban filmmakers incorporate history with a new sense of transnationalism and what could this mean for them as they continue to make Cuba home for the production of their work? What underlining factors affect the film production process in the contemporary Cuban context and how do they understand their relationships to this context?
Represent Cuba: Havana Hip Hop Under the Lens
2014
Between 1997 and 2010, the Havana hip hop scene was the subject of some two dozen documentaries, the majority by non-Cubans. This article considers how the act of film making may participate in the dual process of transnational connection and division, and explores the politics and ethics of transnational cultural production, reception, and representation. While documentaries have given Havana rappers a voice, they have also exposed them to the "tourist gaze" (Urry 1990) and have actively shaped the hip hop scene on the ground as well as on film. Film makers were not only documenting censorship but actually indirectly responsible for it, and they played a role in the local hip hop economy. Events involving Cuba's leading hip hop group, Los Aldeanos, illustrated the risks that accompanied the transnational circulation of filmed images. Such problematics are elevated to a central theme of Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck's Young Rebels. When you develop your idea, when you make your documentary, when you do your job, you are going to do it in a way, without meaning to, that when you show it to anyone, we're going to look like gusanos [worms]. People who don't agree with the government, or anything. No, no, no, it's unavoidable.-Aldo Rodríguez (Los Aldeanos), speaking to camera in the documentary, Pa'lante In one of the few critical interventions on the topic of Cuban hip hop documentaries, Alan West-Durán (n.d.) notes how the film, La FabriK, documents the difficulties and disappointments that Cuban rappers have faced in bridging the gap with the United States, while at the same time illustrating a "profound afro-diasporic dialogue" across political frontiers. I would like to push this idea a step further and consider how the act of film making
The Revolution is History: Filming the Past in Mexico and Cuba
Filmhistoria online, 1999
As is their nature, social revolutions in Mexico and Cuba dramatically altered the lives of millions. 1 During the «effervescent» periods which followed the uprisings's triumphs, political and socioeconomic transformation bettered the lot of most people, and cultural creativity flourished; unfortunately, the revolutions were later deformed into dictatorships-of party in Mexico, of individual in Cuba. 2 Caught up in the midst of these soul-shaking metamorphoses, filmmakers have reflected critically on the legitimizing myths of the New Orders, as well as participated enthusiastically in their construction. The revolution itself is the founding legend, the keystone chronicle of these cultures; it is history in the simplest sense of the word, for the films are reconstructions of times past. I want to examine how some of the best directors of the better films in Mexico and Cuba have portrayed the revolutions in their countries, as well as interrogate their use of history in constructing concepts of nation and identity. I also wish to focus on how the filmic visions of both revolution and history have changed as the post-revolutionary States have mutated from their open, pluralistic beginnings into institutionalized, reified authorities. Here, one of the most interesting facets is to observe how the representations of history varies between «histories», heterogenous and pluralist stories about the past, and «History», master narratives of totalizing epics designed to legitimate the present. These are unfashionable reflections, caught as we are in a «post-modern» world of neo-liberal orthodoxy which denies both the possibility of revolutionary transformation and the relevance of history. Nonetheless, I believe that change is at least conceivable, and I am struck by the continuing fascination of the film-going public for historical pictures. In the only research I know of which attempts to quantify the number of films set in the past, Garth Jowett estimates that some 40% of the movies produced between 1950-1961 were historical. 3 More recently, the extraordinary success of Titanic-in terms of being able to find the 270 million dollars for the production, as well as itssubsequent box office triumph-would seem to indicate that people want to see the past on the screen. Infact, Titanic may be just that proverbial tip of reality, for ten of the past thirteen Oscar-winning films are set in the past, as were all the nominees for 1998. 4 Historical cinema is of particular importance in a revolutionary context. Social revolution sweeps away old ways of doing things, and makes problematic the very structures of identity which until that cataclysmic moment had reigned unquestioned. Confronted with this sudden melting away of all that seemed so solid, cultural figures such as filmmakers attempt to provide alternative versions of their history, as well as offer new visions of this reality-in-transformation which they are living. At odds with the past from which they have sprung, they have a need to give their rendition of how they got to where they are, a version presumably different from both the prior histories produced within their cultures and that offered by Hollywood. Moreover, filmmakers will confront different historical moments, and individual contexts, in which to work. It would seem that the better cinema is produced during the period shortly after the triumph of the revolution, when cultural effervescence results in transcendant cinematographic explorations into the national past; the Russian Revolution offers an indisputable example in Potemkin (Eisenstein, 1925). However, as institutionalization sets in, film is captured by the bureaucrats and put to the service of legitimizing the new rulers; one result is Stalinist movies such as Chapayev (Vasiliev, 1934). 5 More than sixty films have been made in which the Mexican Revolution serves as the context for the movie's story. 6 The best films made on this struggle are El compadre Mendoza (1933) and ¡Vámonos con Pancho Villa! (1935), both directed by Fernando de Fuentes. 7 Contrary to the great majority of movies about this event, these works by de Fuentes do not in any way glorify the civil war and the people-usually male leaders, rarely women-who made it. Rather, looking at Mendoza and Vámonos in terms of Mexico's best known twentieth-century muralists, I find them more in the tone of Jose Clemente Orozco's pessimism than the officialist optimism of Diego Rivera or the Marxist stridency of David Alfaro Siqueiros: they emphasize the pain and torment, rather than the transformations; they exude a disenchantment with the revolution's shortcomings, instead of celebrating its achievements.
Transmodernity , 2023
I offer a close look at the Cuban film El matadero, which premiered virtually in December 2021 from Havana via the 2nd annual streaming INSTAR Cuban Film Festival. In this documentary, independent Cuban director Fraguela Fosado combines a pastiche of digital modes to tell the personal story of two friends: one on the island -the filmmaker himself -and one off. I argue that the film’s uniqueness is in its use of digital and geographic spaces to capture Ana López’s concept of a “Greater Cuba.” I examine how the on-island filmmaker co-creates a platform with his off-island interlocutor enabling collaborative authorship through the use of the digital platform WhatsApp. In doing so, the film explores the friendship between the two young men through memory, archives, memes, and a particularly Cuban sense of humor. The result is a film that achieves a personal narrative of contemporary Cubanness across a digital diaspora both in the making of, the plot, and its subsequent distribution trajectory.
Mobile Cinemas in Cuba: The Forms and Ideology of Traveling Exhibitions
Public, 2012
This essay examines uses of mobile cinemas in Cuba utilized after the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Like Russian agit-prop trains that filmed peasants and screened films in the countryside after the 1917 Revolution, Cuban cines moviles also emphasized bringing cinema to the rural provinces. In the Cuban case, cinema was used both in educational and entertainment contexts, in the hope that rural areas might be integrated into the nation-building project led by Castro's socialist government. These cinemas were a sign of progress and of modernity for the revolutionary government, and a means of communication with a historically disenfranchised population. Hand-in-hand with this project was a movement for better healthcare as well as a literacy campaign that were mobilized concurrently. These "basic needs" projects worked together with the "mass education and entertainment" mobile cinema project. Cinema, in the form of 16mm projectors and films, was transported in a variety of ways: trucks, mules, and even fishing boats were equipped with film projectors, so that the fishermen would have a place in the evenings to watch films. In 1962, there were over 1.2 million spectators throughout the country; by 1976, there were over three million viewers. 1 By examining the processes and discourses surrounding the use of Cuban cines moviles via Cuban cinema histories, such as Michael Chanan's Cuban Cinema and articles in selected issues of Cine cubano, I am interested in how mobile film vehicles were utilized as a tool for development, cultural growth, entertainment, and political cd
Capturing a Transnational, Digital Cuba in the Documentary El matadero (Fraguela
TRANSMODERNITY: Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso-Hispanic World, 2023
I offer a close look at the Cuban film El matadero, which premiered virtually in December 2021 from Havana via the 2nd annual streaming INSTAR Cuban Film Festival. In this documentary, independent Cuban director Fraguela Fosado combines a pastiche of digital modes to tell the personal story of two friends: one on the island-the filmmaker himself-and one off. I argue that the film's uniqueness is in its use of digital and geographic spaces to capture Ana López's concept of a "Greater Cuba." I examine how the on-island filmmaker co-creates a platform with his off-island interlocutor enabling collaborative authorship through the use of the digital platform WhatsApp. In doing so, the film explores the friendship between the two young men through memory, archives, memes, and a particularly Cuban sense of humor. The result is a film that achieves a personal narrative of contemporary Cubanness across a digital diaspora both in the making of, the plot, and its subsequent distribution trajectory.