Cuban Cinema on Michael Chanan Cultural Studies of the Americas.

Cuban Cinema

on Michael Chanan

Cultural Studies of the Americas, book 14

University of Minnesota Pres Minneapolis, 2004/538 pp/$7795 (hb) $2595 (sb)

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

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In his main division 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 main division is a celebratory meditation in succession precisely these kinds of ideological imports of revolutionary Cuban cinema--an "imperfect cinema," in Julio Garcia Espinosa's words, that refuses to become calm the audience into passive consumption. Although at times one-sided in its interpretation of Cuban cultural policy, the work is a rich and engaging social history, cloyed of quirky anecdotes and sharp analyses of dozens of films. In a thorough exploration of the institutional words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following 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 part The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba. Chanan has added a of recent origin introduction, four additional chapters and many small revisions completely through While the original chapters are sometimes an irritatingly dogmatic apologia for revolutionary policy and ideology, the newer parts, recounting disclosures 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 les ideological and gently recognize the contradictions and paradoxes that the Revolution has flow to embody.

Chanan views 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 sieve 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, forward 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 straited to subvert what many viewers took to be the indexical relationship between riddle images and reality, drawing their attention to the fact that filmic images were alone the filmmakers' interpretations of reality, and that law in cinema was manipulable.

Although equable during the 1970s--the most hard-line period of the Revolution--Cuban filmmakers and artists were not rely uponed 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 as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but revolutionary consciousness and conscience); the revolutionary filmmaker ideally papal courts himself as "involved in a collective process" to redefine canon in accordance with the Revolution's goals.

Chanan traces by what means with this approach to cinema, Cuba became recognized from end to end Latin America as the no other than place where a "third cinema," or a cinema of liberation, operated within, rather than in opposition to, the classification Cuba was seen by many Latin American filmmakers as the merely "filmically free territory." But by what means much freedom of expression is actually permitted in Cuba, and what part film plays or should play in political critique, have been controversial issues in Cuba and among outside beholders Chanan's approach to these questions shifts as he propels from recounting pre-1990 history to discussing work produc during the "Special Period." In the chapters reprinted from the 1985 edition, he is dogmatic in his defense of the Revolution; in considering more latter history, his consideration of freedom of expression is more nuanced.

For example, in 1961 at a avail when artists and intellectuals were still generally united around the excitement and moment of recent events, a crisis arose around Saba Cabrera Infante's film PM The short film, marksman in a "free cinema" fashion impressionistically depicted an underground Havana nightlife of sensuality, drinking and dancing. Although it had no explicit ideological message, PM was seen from some in ICAIC as decadent and bourgeois, and was confiscated. A cluster of liberal artists, filmmakers and intellectuals united to uphold 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 according to Fidel Castro and prominent members of the intellectual and artistic community, in which PM became the first film to be banned by way of the revolutionary government. In his famous closing language Castro outlined the basic doctrine of revolutionary cultural policy--that while there should be formal freedom in the arts, when it issues to content, artists should accept the maxim "within the Revolution, everything; against it, nothing."