“What we need, as well as you, is to resurrect Don Quixote, our ideal, who deals with theatrics with hacks and blows”.

Fernando Ortíz for Miguel de Unamuno

Finally the Nineties are over, that decade that according to many Cubans was the longest of the century. The century is over — and with it the millennium —, and we left behind who knows how many unmet goals, how many broken dreams, how many chimeras to be fulfilled. Progress, or better yet, “the illusion of progress”, kept orienting its trajectory towards what is superior. In spite of the popularity of the Christian reclaim that perfection is not, as the Hellenic tradition used to say, to always aspire to something that cannot be outdone in appearance, but in any case the conciliated descent of the mighty in front of the weak, of the sick in front of the healthy, that is, the equality of human sentiment, such precept was not able to be met, as they say, the way God intended it to be. The poor were still poor; the rich, always richer, therefore the loss of faith and social hate made that, more than ever, the impression that collective dreams were not indispensable, as well as the grand utopias directed to the betterment of the common good, became visible.

From the old times, the quest for the common good had made famous the phrase respice finem — which means “look towards the end” and it is used to express how vital it is for men to always set a goal, a last end, and ideal. One of the most moving reflections that I know about the origin of utopias, is the imperative that is manifest in every human being as “the longing for a more beautiful life”, this is written by the Dutch Johan Huizinga in his celebrated book The Autumn of the Middle Ages, and he affirms: “Every time longs for a better world. The deeper the desperation, caused by a chaotic present, the more intimate is that longing”, (1) that same reasoning allows me the intuition that, even though it is something of the past century, the Latin American film utopia of the Sixties is still for many, an object of radical fervor, and within this, the way of making films in Cuba; and it is that, when the best of Cuban cinema (what would be called in due time “the new Cuban cinema”) erupted on the screen on those times, and the planet was announcing its wish of changing the existential look and leave behind the comfortable grayness of being content with being what we already were. We are talking about a Dionysian decade, as few have existed; a decade in which in large part of the world was intent in redrawing the ethical budgets that until then we held their behavior. The immense mass of exploited people understood that life should be organized in a different way, and cinema (an excellent mirror of the moment that was lived) could not subtract itself of the thrill of being a witness and participant of the euphoria, of the optimism. But not a cosmetic optimism, a tragic optimism, one, which was fecund, and that turned sacrifice into the mainspring of hope.

Latin American film in the Sixties and the Seventies, the new Latin American cinema, is about all of that; it doesn’t matter what the name is for what we know today as (“Imperfect cinema” by García Espinosa, “Aesthetics of hunger” by Glauber Rocha, “Liberating cinema” By Solanas and Getino or “Popular and revolutionary cinema” by Sanjinés), what identified it, can be traced in the common calling of asking about a utopia: that in which we dreamt that the audience can be something more than a simple puppet moved by the skills of someone who in turn was manipulated by a traditional morale, imposed by the system du jour.

That is where the essence of what wanted to be expressed when speaking with so much enthusiasm about Latin American film of the Sixties was found, enthusiasm that, psychologically would benefit everyone, including that Cuban cinema that rises with the ICAIC and then as everybody knows, was born practically out of nothing, since contrasting with Mexico or Argentina, there was no film tradition in Cuba. There were directors like Ramón Peón or Manolo Alonso that have offered their work to the cultural assets of the nation in some other film of unsuspected size (La Virgen de la Caridad (1930), Siete muertes a plazo fijo (1950), or Casta de Roble (1953), a true plural end was lacking, which in its time, was a reflection of the absence of what Lezama Lima would name an insular teleology; or Jorge Mañach, a collective loving, dissatisfactions that did nothing but extend that reflection by José Antonio Ramos, when at the beginning of the pseudo-republic would say with lapidary emphasis: “[...] our people is not a defined race, with lineage and with pains that suggest a common aspirations”. Those, as far as cinema is concerned, what could be perceived was the amount of accumulated dreams shared by a very small group of youngsters (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Julio García Espinosa, Alfredo Guevara, among others), whom, from cultural spaces such as the association Nuestro Tiempo, would try to denounced and fill the spiritual emptiness. El Mégano (1955), with its imperfections and formal ingenuities, was a gesture that acted as a best witness of this creative anxiety.

The 1959 revolution gave the hope for general strategy, oriented to fulfill the “emptiness of collective intent from Cuban life and the craft in which us Cubans are prepared to create an encompassing national program, that would lead the country towards a destiny”. (2)

Without the proposals and the social and cultural transformations generated by the revolutionary process, sense and orientation would have not existed in the new aesthetic expression; only under the light of this phenomenon we can explain the relatively fast consistency of Cuban film, in spite of the mentioned lack of a productive routine. And beyond unskilled directors, juvenile anxiety for changes, they were living on a common existential support, under which the density of dreams, the texture of the aspirations, would determine the quality of the result. Filmmakers from those times would think that their life depended on film, that the country could be saved from this or that trickery from the enemy with the consistency of a film ideal that could be practiced, or to say it in the words of Julio García Espinosa: “They enjoyed enormous utopia that was to think that they could be happy without the inconvenience of being selfish”. This is precisely ­ I am under the impression ­ what is lacking in Cuban films of the Nineties, or ­ in order not to be reductionist ­ the audiovisuals of the Nineties: what is shameful of national cinema is that, it is precisely in this decade and as well as in a large part of the world’s cinema, we have also past, without any transition, from the gravity of dream to the lightness of realism. That is: we have walked from the collective poetry of Cuban cinema towards the invertebrate set of isolated poetries of Cuban filmmakers, stubborn in making their cinema but not the cinema.

All attempt of insightful thinking about Cuban cinema of the Nineties, carries the danger of being exaggerated, the risk of talking about something that hardly exists: would it be more convenient to meditate about the words of some filmmakers in particular instead of referring to tendencies or fashions? Can one reflect about an industry that is still suffering under the worse economic crisis that is lived by the whole country and that produced during this period just a handful of titles that are relevant to the international context? Can we talk about continuity or permanence of a cinema that, as in the three preceding decades, offered the revelations of a collective teleology or, on the contrary, can we talk about a fragmentary filmography that lives of memories, that improvises without a real improvement program, that justifies the lacking of creative originality and renewing proposals with what is intertextual or substitutes them by the imitative tendency and the huge call to tradition and to what’s the expectation of the audience?

Are we talking about a cinema that, in the face of the lacking of a telos (a foreseen ending that guides him in the ascent), in the best of cases he’s pleased with repeated formulas of old, as if these ­ given the old credits ­ by themselves can represent the truthfulness and therefore the way to transcend? And if so, where was that renewing and collective utopia confiscated, the one that allowed those international actions that ­ with a name of Perestroika or Glasnost ­ would coincide at least in general purpose, with the calling sent from the island to a radical “correction of errors” (3).

The “filmmakers of the late Eighties”, who in their first works as directors have opted for a politically correct language, lacking of conceptual paroxysms and formal experimentations, towards the end of the decade they linked toward a less complacent cinema. From this “unconfortable” tendency and while irregular, still collective, we can mention films such as Plaff (Juan Carlos Tabío, 1988), La inútil muerte de mi socio Manolo (Julio García Espinosa, 1989) Papeles secundarios, La vida en rosa (Rolando Díaz,1989) Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (Daniel Díaz Torres, 1990), María Antonia (Sergio Giral, 1990), La soledad de la jefa de despacho (Rigoberto López, 1990), Adorables mentiras (Gerardo Chijona, 1991) or Fresa y chocolate (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea y Juan Carlos Tabío, 1993). If you look at it, it is a cinema that, behind the plurality of stylistic interests, reveals poetry of common transgression; on the other hand, Cuban films after Fresa y chocolate lack that capacity of balance and profound penetration; it is not a cinema of plural poetry, but of very unconnected and clashing individual pretensions. True that in its general sense it’s still provocative (understanding as provocative in its more primary of phenomenological comprehension), but also in the general sense not very subtle, and its critical realism is sometimes that of an adolescent stridency, since it uses more appearances than essences: that is why it sometimes gives the impression of a powerful choir made up of out of tune voices, vigorous voices that have lost the sense of harmony that, behind the plurality of interests, brings the common vocation that every big artistic enterprise should own, as it was owned in its time by the new Latin American cinema. Therefore, and starting from that moment, it is more correct to speak about significant individualities within the Cuban cinema of that period, and not of a significant Cuban cinema of the Nineties.

Which was the last great goal that was to be reached during the Nineties by Cuban filmmakers? Which have been the ideological and aesthetic perspectives, including those of the younger ones, those that make what I call “the submerged Cuban cinema”? I am sorry, but I don’t know, when I hear them speak or I exchange ideas with them, most of the times I end up finding, with extreme ease, of the pains that implies to find enough money to make the next film, but not so of the artistic and philosophic thinking that moves the project, such as one would listen in the past while walking the hallways of that important institution of our culture which is the ICAIC. Maybe individually every filmmaker is worried for being up to date on the principal tendencies of international cinema, of the latest narrative ideas of current audiovisuals, but when there is no true space for reflection, a grammatical anemia is produced and one can see it in a good many of the films conceived in the last years during the recent decade, as well as the inconsistent way of communicating conflict or setting dramatic interrogations. Someone could answer: for a filmmaker what’s most important is to make a film and period, but I like to remember that the most important thing about cinema is life, and that a cinema alien to the mysteries of existence is condemned to meet an ephemeral and prescindible narcotic role; though, it is essential that Cuban cinema (Cuban filmmakers) regain the capacity they have to turn provocation and debate into another subtle way of understanding reality and, within this, understand ourselves. A provocation that is capable of awakening that mass ­ audience that, especially thanks to Hollywood, has attained the pedestal of the untouchable.

The existence of this solid interior thinking was, since always, the prime responsible of Cuban filmography produced during the revolutionary period and can be seen beyond the notable differences that every decade imposed in its history. That poetic proposal was so collective that during the Sixties it dreamt with founding a “new republic of the image”, just like the one in the Eighties gave priority to the debate around the already saturated dramaturgy of the new Latin American cinema and reconsidered returning to a less transgresive model; just like by the end of that decade, it made the so-called Grupos de Creación a reality, for the one that after the witches feast of Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas and the announcement of the possible disappearance of the ICAIC, which mobilized the sense of belonging of filmmakers who signed a document that set aside differences, and joined common interests in order to save a collective space of creation. (4)

What I what to emphasize is that, from its beginnings, the ICAIC imposed its own internal reflection in front of the clear conscience that debate between filmmakers was what could move a more fruitful thinking, an internal reflection that is lost during the Nineties. (5)

Be it the Sixties, the Seventies or the Eighties, the common trait was the definite will of thinking films from the inside. It was the very own filmmakers (not the cultural bureaucrats) who would comment, argue, orient and make the different tendencies meet so that the whole industry would act upon, and this was given (even though the search was not premeditated) a healthy coherence to the project, a balance, an emphasis on the sense of belonging to an ideal that in the long run would give dimensions to artistic results. One cannot think that it was accidental that precisely by the end of the Eighties one could see the features of a cinema that shared spaces with the more transparent one (La bella del Alhambra / Enrique Pineda Barnet, 1989, Clandestinos / Fernando Pérez, 1987, Plaff). While well done, proposes a complex way of narration and explores while being provocative of reality (Papeles secundarios, Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas, El siglo de las luces / Humberto Solás, 1992) a process that would synthesize both flows that reaches a beautiful ending with Fresa y Chocolate, the film that from the well known aristotelic point, discovers the universalness of its conflict.

I supposed there are infinite reasons to understand and explain why this creative interaction between Cuban filmmakers starts to vanish, so that instead some kind of atomization and in many cases paralysis or reversal occurs. I supposed that there are multiple and complex reasons and some that I might never get to know, but there are five, which seem to be the most evident:

a)    The complex ideological crossroad that starting from the Eighties is lived by the leftist movement of the world and that concludes with a crumbling of the socialist camp;

b)    The severe economic crisis that hits the country starting in 1993, determines the absence of the traditional film production financial backing by the state, and makes way for co production;

c)    The lack of stimulus for mechanisms of discussion to find solutions or alternatives to the crisis within filmmakers;

d)    The absence of a strategy that would allow to inject the industry with the points of view of younger generations and

e)    The illness and death of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea in 1995.

I would like to start by setting the fundamentals of the latter. Starting with the last century (that XX century that still resembles ours in many senses); George Bernard Shaw said something that could sound truly atrocious, especially if the irrefutability of the idea is proved: “savages revere stone and wooden idols; civilized men revere flesh and bone idols” (5). More that an idol (that is, an untouchable and invulnerable fetish who never was wrong) I have always wanted to see in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea an exceptional man, with great merits and, also with a great capacity of turning his mistakes into the natural ladders of a cognitive staircase that allows the ascension of beings to a higher level. Such a set of virtues gave him an important role within the guilt of creators, even though when his way of making films was not recognized as the exclusive paradigm, and it is understood that his death, in a country where his name was associated to the filmmaker of (greatest importance), would reveal at the same time as a sign of ideological and aesthetical loss of almost irreparable consequences. It is not that Titón was the none plus ultra of Cuban film, an adjective that he would have shown himself, but that true a personality that knew how to combine an agglutinating charisma with critical cuteness, there was still within Cuban film the possibility of a reference that invited adhesion. It is not for anything that Fresa y Chocolate was left in our film imagination as the great standard film, either because you agree with its narrative strategy or by denying it.

Actually, with Titón died a space that defended up to the last moment the dialogue between the most diverse tendencies that he did not exclude even though he would have his inevitable and human preferences, and his films made in the Nineties can be the best examples of this. Fresa y Chocolate participates of the narrative maturity that Cuban films insinuated in those years: it not only shows technical precision that at that time the industry had shown completely, but its language is made a accomplice of the semantic subtlety exposed in different senses in the plastic arts of the time, and that films such as Papeles secundarios, Mujer transparente (M. Vilasís, H. Veitía, M.Segura, M.Crespo, A.Rodríguez, 1990) or Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas had tried to insert, with good fortune, in the respective discourses. True that the reception of Fresa y Chocolate in the country and in the whole world makes more emphasis in the beauty of an anecdote that transcends local and temporal limits, to turn into a universal song to tolerance, but from the dramatic perspective, film is also a point of advancement that is estimable and not suppurated in this period. His handling of filming time ­ in a story that does not want to be involved with a specific time but with all that is perdurable, with what is humanly etern ­ is of a subtlety and an elegance that some times remind us of the best of Antonioni, which when dealing with non apolinean filmmakers such as Alea and Tabío, it is a clear emblem of self defiance. This provocative subtlety is the one which in a general sense was never present in Guantanamera (T. Gutiérrez Alea and J. C. Tabío, 1995) a film vulnerable not because of the reality it shows, but because of the way in which it shows it, filled with common places, visual redundancies and too evident emphases.

If I spoke of the death of Titón as one of the factors that more strongly contributed to the actual dispersion of the objectives of Cuban cinematography, I did not do it as a way of fetishising his achievements in an apologetic fashion. In truth (and with this I identify with the Cuban thinker Enrique José Varona), I have always believed seeing in the emersonian thesis that “great men as producers of history” as an existential reductionism. Cuban cinema is the sum of everything recorded in front of the camera, and that gathering of impressions, with its rights and wrongs, is what determines the greatness or nullity of a project. The virtue of great men lies in making others take note of great aspirations, those in which the human being finds himself perennially unsatisfied of himself, always wishing to be someone else, and in that sense the films of Alea were the ones that better showed those paths, even though to be denied of them, but there were many cinematographic Cuban tendencies at the time, which paid evidence with the presence of the three creative groups (lead by Titón, Humberto Solás and Manolo Pérez) or with less known poetries more personal, that the films of Julio García Espinosa or Manuel Octavio Gómez just to name a couple, reported. (7) It is true that many tendencies coexisted but to stimulate others to grow over themselves, to be suspicious of the pleasant operation in which the act of simple imitation of dictated canon of Metropolitan Centers and the distrust of the infantile satisfaction that represents to be what one already is, not everybody can assume this as a mission: you also need personal talent, charisma, heretical aptitudes and at the same time the sensitivity to guide the path of debates, all the time that life would be an impressive compendium of clashing forces, of contrasting tendencies and, from Titón’s point of view he was the one who more strongly was heard internationally (as demonstrated first with Memorias del subdesarrollo and later with Fresa y Chocolate).

To evaluate the Cuban films of the Nineties wouldn’t be more than describing the possible equilibrium or disproportion of the different tendencies or intentions that conform it as a whole. Using Husserl’s language and in phenomenology in the general sense, every human action is intentional or biased, because it is oriented towards something different from the self: will direct the action; understanding of things; appetites pretend to obtain the object, and conscience is what it is because there is always the conscience of something. If we look at it as a whole, Cuban cinematography of this period seems to start to reveal an intention an active appetite, that makes use of its art to give it that reality that examines a more universal dimension; on the other hand, towards the end of the decade that tendency is turned passive: it is content with receiving stimuli of that same reality and show it just as it is (or such as it seems to be). Yet, this aesthetic involution is not, as sometimes it has been tried to justify, as a single daughter of the economic crisis that suddenly hits the country, but, in any case, is the first result of a severe ideological crossroad whose negative balance would later be increased by the economic problems.

Perhaps Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas is the saddest example, for bing so concrete, of the incidents of the crossroads that were exercised at that point on the film works of the Nineties. The aesthetics that Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas would show and that were so furiously chastised by the official press, is not more renewing than what have been proposed before by Papeles secundarios or, even during other periods, films that are so upsetting as Memorias del subdesarrollo or De cierta manera (Sara Gómez, 1974), but Alicia... is brought to light in a moment in which the socialist world would give weekly growing symptoms of crumbling and the detractors of the Revolution were essaying dates on which they thought the social process initiated in 1959 would end.

Alicia... with its incisive signaling to bureaucratism, double morality, fraud, corruption and other social evils against which the very own Revolution had tried to fight under the motto “rectification of errors”, turns into an huge target for journalists and “critics?” who were not interested in looking at the polisemic features that every authentically artistic expression has to shown, but look after the ideological clarity and the apologetic transparency (the only one that certain bureaucrats seem to understand, in the words of Che Guevara); from there, most of the critiques, signed by people who did not work systematically on film critique, made theirs, the pejorative and ad hominen tone, instead of a measured analysis of a work that, when beyond the circumstances of its apparition, would not create not even a fourth of the hubbub promoted by that occasion. “The Alicia case”, with time and with all was a lesson in more than one sense, but the way it affects the way of doing films in the decade, had rather negative and paralyzing effects, because unconsciously it would promote an aesthetics that if not abandoning the interest by the circumscribing reality, would rather assume a (critical study) not through direct chronic but to the creation of symbolic or parallel worlds, to the style recreated in Madagascar (Fernando Pérez, 1994) or Pon tu pensamiento en mí (Arturo Soto, 1995). For Orlando Rojas one of the filmmakers that at the end of the previous decade renewed Cuban cinema with more force and paradoxically, not filmed anything in the following decade (the filming of his possible film Cerrado por reformas was stopped), the Nineties perhaps would turn not to be “a time as bad as the Seventies”, even though:

What bothers me the most of film of the Nineties is a manipulative poetic will. That “poetry” does not come from the story or the characters, or the subject, it is forced upon. It is a desire of turning things into poetry above and beyond parallel realties; thus, it is not realism nor symbolism nor anything: it is just the one thing to escape to a possible “scratching”. It is nothing: creation on top of a false poetry. Except for three or four good films, there is not enough reality or enough poetry. It is a cinema that I don’t think is going anywhere because it doesn’t create a new reality through art nor is it capable of turning every day life into poetry even though it is from an intimate point of view. (8)

Quantitatively, the Nineties meant for Cuban cinema about forty films. (9) Although every time I hate more the selections made by “experts”, because they just seem to me as compilations of a state of mind, frivolous catwalks for the intellect instead of rigorous rationalism, I will risk mentioning some of the films whose imprint is left in our minds, from my very modest point of view determined or emphasized the most active tendency of the decade for Cuban cinema: among this they could be Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas, María Antonia, Adorables mentiras, El siglo de las luces, Fresa y chocolate, Madagascar, Reina y Rey (Julio García Espinosa, 1994), Amor vertical (Arturo Sotto, 1997) and La vida es silbar (Fernando Pérez, 1999).(10)

In a general sense, almost every one implied the creation and study of Cuban cinema agree in recognizing that the Nineties belong to Fernando Pérez. (11) Both Madagascar as well as La vida es silbar are revealing in that active intentionality that I mentioned before. Cuban reality in Fernando Perez’s films is not a common and mediocre landscape, filled with imposing palm trees or mulatta fatales, but a more intimate reality, a deeper one perhaps more prescient than felt. Madagascar can exemplify the formation ideas. His beautiful reflection about human communication in limit situations is a tale that becomes a poem that does away with realistic logic, in order to set up a film of these essences. When five years later the very own Fernando Pérez gives us La vida es silbar Cuban cinema won one of its most intense and beautifully film tales: histories that crisscross, that talk about the permanent quest for happiness, that give credit to the utopian possibilities of men and turn these into the center of any benefit, beyond the high sounding collective interests, constitute a call of attention that seems to indicate a forgotten truth in this time of intellective distension: the certainty that we can make an engaging film without the need of sacrificing what’s intelligent.

I know that in this case the concept of “amusement” will be for many a true vagueness, since a hundred years of film tied to novel models of representation, have dictated supposed rules of communication. If by “amusing” one understands only something that complies with the Aristotelian ABC of presentation, development and ending, La vida es silbar somehow nurtures of its opposite: of its decided vocation of common narrative structures and, paradoxically, of its radical interest for thrilling the audience, make him a accomplice of the affective comings and goings of those beings who look a lot like us (that is humans, not only Cubans). The quest for rather intimistic emotiveness, perhaps is another sign that characterizes Cuban films of the Nineties, and here we can talk about a more congruent correspondence with what happens in the region, starting from the re-updating of Mexican melodrama ala Arturo Ripstein: films as Hello Hemingway (Fernando Pérez, 1990), María Antonia, Adorables mentiras the so many times mentioned Fresa y chocolate and Madagascar or Reina y rey, who opted for rescue a melodramatic tone and be accomplice with the feelings in stories that pretend to move and then to make a reflect.

It is not that the greatest human questions that transcend concrete being, to be turn into universal atemporal disquieting, were not present in Cuban films of the Nineties. All the opposite: Humberto Solás the creator of Manuela (1996) and Lucía (1968), arguable Cuban film classics, tried to convert disquisitions into images that Alejo Carpentier had elaborated upon in el siglo de las luces. The result is a visually impacting film that uses the irrefutable skill of its photographer Livio Delgado in order to build a crushing universe because of the immenseness of its views, the studied framings, the camera movements and, in a general sense, an important staging. Nevertheless the disquieting ideas slid by Carpentier around Men as a small link but an important one within that great story that is called history, to not reach the coherence that was expected. With all certainty, the TV version pays more attention to the transitions that explain, in every case, the comings and destiny of the characters implied in the story. Solás would return to the cameras just at the start of the new millennium with Miel para Oshún (first experience in digital cinema in the island). A film that surpasses any transcendentalist pretension, from a realism that also looks for immediate emotion, it brings us back to the formal origins of the director, with Manuela and also third episode of Lucía.

Miel para Oshún is not a perfect film. Men, not gods, make films. Men are imperfect. Though, every film is imperfect. The evidence that lies in this syllogism allows me to discover the limitations and high points of a film that does not simulate its wish of reaching its audience through simple emotions and catharsis that, in Cubans as in with every human being, can provoke the examinations of subjects that tear us apart such as abandonment, exile and family displacement. In the Nineties, the subject of exile/return had been present, sometimes explicitly, others tangentially, in works such as “Laura” (episode of Mujer transparente), by Ana Rodriguez, Vidas paralelas (Pastor Vega, 1992), Fresa y chocolate, Madagascar, Reina y Rey, La ola (Enrique Álvarez, 1995), El Sardina (Manolo Rodríguez, 1996) y La vida es silbar. The way Solás treat the subject is in its beginnings truly moving, with images and reflections that seem to extend the memories of the underdevelopment forty years after; but in its later twenty minutes, the film turns into a snub reflection of its surroundings, in an unforeseen change of tone that does nothing for helping the reflexive complicity promise at the beginning. The use of digital media in its filming, if it is a historic point for Cuban cinematography, from the point of view of language, does not mean a renovation not even in the work of its author who had reached a bigger visual ease in previous opportunities, helped by the iconoclasms photographer Jorge Herrera.

Another film that made his the question of philosophical pretensions was Pon tu pensamiento en mí with the huge influence of myths from the collective imagination, its manipulation of the need that masses have of recognizing a guide, a superior being (be this God, Christ, Napoleon or John Lennon) these are some of the targets of this film as polemic as disconcerting. The terrible reading that Nietzsche made of Nazism besides its desolate acritude for the great masses, turn the ideas of this thinker that would made “philosophy with a hammer”, made him always to be excluded from art discussions, but the preaching of Nietzsche that tells us of the arrival of “modern domesticated cows” is easy to confirm evaluating the non-critical consumption of so much entertainiment culture, of the desire to not think. Sotto’s film gazes on that direction. The film is arguable because of narrative reasons more than for the concepts that are locked, even when these can also be presented to diverse reflections. In its debut with a full length feature, and after that disquieting exercise that was Talco para lo negro (1992), his graduate thesis at the Escuela Internacional de Cine de San Antonio de los Baños), Sotto makes a pronouncement for tales of great visual proportions, closer to the tradition imposed by Humberto Solás with his historic frescoes (Cecilia / 1982 and El siglo de las luces) from which Manuel Octavio Gómez (Los días del agua / 1981) and talks for the first time in Cuban film about the manipulation of myths.

It is known that when one wants to tell everything simultaneously this is more of a handicap common to those who debut in any communication space; it is the typical anxiety of that who knows that there are important things to be told and that life is short to hear them in its totality. This is a legitimate longing, albeit adolescent because it is naïve, it endangers the harmony of the expressed discourse, and in film it can end up relegating its spectacle reason to the undelayable obligation of telling a story where legibility (not a simplification of language, but a transparency that every coherence brings) allows thinking from the audiences’ emotions. Thus, one would have to admit that the narrative of Pon tu pensamiento en mí is dispersed in its objectives, that it’s covered with elegant clothing but does not clearly show what the moral of every character is, even when one suppose that there are, in its concepts, ideas so primordial as that of pronouncing against the cancellation of thought. The main limitation that I see it’s is in capacity to connect affectively with the audience, it’s believe that an intelligent idea can guarantee an intelligent film, when it’s the film which should provoke clever ideas, otherwise, we would talk about films for philosophers, critics, researchers who wish to confront previous concepts with what the films shows, and not films in its literal sense. That is, film as a promoter of imagination.

Anyway, in its moments a serious debate on Pon tu pensamiento en mí would have been enriching, but regrettably the many detractors the films had hardly stopped and think about its semantic ambiguities, and they missed the possible narrative values of debutant Sotto. I particularly think that Amor vertical, his second film, shows him paying more attention to the story, with more desire to tell something and obtaining a determined emotional effect on the viewer. Although the utilization of symbols persists ­ some kind of post-modern obsession of Sotto’s, to play with what exists and more than creating, re-creating ­ you can rediscover an anecdote, that, in its own simplicity (the frantic search for love) makes us participants of the main characters’ comings and goings and, at the same time, this anecdote seems clearly narrated. On the other hand, I believe that Amor vertical, somehow, began the tendency that became predominant towards the ends of the decade: the one that opts for transparency in its narrative structures, its adherence to comfortable standards and easily recognizable conflicts by the audiences, and from which films such as Kleines Tropikana (Daniel Díaz Torres, 1998), Las profecías de Amanda (Pastor Vega, 1999), Un paraíso bajo las estrellas (Gerardo Chijona, 1999), Lista de espera (Juan Carlos Tabío, 2000) and Hacerse el sueco (Daniel Díaz Torres, 2000) participate.

I don’t agree with those who see in this phenomenon something dangerously new and absolutely harmful: “light” cinema has always been present in Cuban filmographies, including in its so-called “heroic time” (remember Las doce sillas / 1962 or La muerte de un burócrata /1966, both by Gutiérrez Alea).

In any case, more than being alarmed by the existence of an operating cinema (that I agree that it has to exist, when we talk about an industrial art that requires an indispensable capital to reach the realization of a “author or thought cinema”), what alarms is the backing of a cinema that does not have the signature of an author but isn’t even “commercial”, because it hardly brings in less than one fourth of what was invested into it after its international circuit. I am under the impression that this is one of the zones, which is virgin for debate, not of the Nineties, but in all of the history of cinema done since 1959. What can be the subject of the Cuban cinema that is interesting beyond the borders of the island? What could be a cinema that is engaging, without concessions, for Cubans but also to Spanish, French, and Mexicans? The ideal would be to reach Aristotle’s middle ground (so many devoted to though, so many for entertaining). But to reach such status even the same Aristotle warns us that it is a very difficult task.

The other debate that is missed of the Nineties is the intergenerational one, because if something is outstanding in the Cuban cinema of the period, is the almost radical absence of a dialogue between directors with a trajectory and aspiring directors, something that was manifest by the end of the Eighties with the existence of the Taller de Cine de la Asociación Hermanos Saíz, for example: young filmmakers (perhaps with the exception of Sotto and Enrique Álvarez) have hardly been able to nurture from the teachings of the elders, because the latter seem obsessed with the threat of not been able to film more, and of course, the possibility of joining an industry that turns into some sort of chimera. In October 2000, the directors of the ICAIC backed the happy initiative of convoking the Primera Muestra Nacional del Audiovisual Joven. The essential purpose was to do something like an inventory of creation made on the margin of our principal producing center of film memory, as everybody knows it’s not the only one. The Muestra was successful in every sense: the young (some not so young as a first impression may suggest: Juan Carlos Cremata or Jorge Molina, for example) showed their films, but also their points of view, their yearnings and, why not say it? Their abundant disorientations, and at the same time, they listen to what creators like Humberto Solás, Juan Carlos Tabío, Nelson Rodríguez, Raúl Pérez Ureta, Livio Delgado and Iván Nápoles witnessed from their own experiences, although it is revealing that most of the “already established” directors within the industry hardly participated at the screenings and much less on the theoretical debates.

In spite of being very daring to speak about “a very new Cuban cinema”, the Muestra allowed to detect that in spite of the sleepiness of the official productions of the Nineties, an audiovisual memory has been guaranteed for the nation and through digital support, although also in this, in virtue of a center that agglutinates, it’s impossible to track the conscience of a group mission. Actually, much of the material presented has big narrative problems, an also a clear dependency of representation models that have been abandoned, but one should not forget that we are talking of directors who were initiated on the edge of the industry, without a desirable material or theoretical support; even so, I discovered sensibility and a desire to take advantage of established rules to revert them and create the impression of novelty in directors such as Miguel Coyula (Clase Z Tropical / 2000), Jorge Molina (Molina’s Test / 2001), Pavel Giroud (Manzanita.com / 2001), Aarón Vega (Se parece a la felicidad / 1998), Hoari Chong (Bien dentro de mi / 2000), Gustavo Pérez (Caidije, la extensa realidad / 2000), Esteban García Insausty (Más de lo mismo / 2000), Leandro Martínez ( ¿Me extrañaste mi amor? / 2000) y Humberto Padrón (Los zapaticos me aprietan / 1999, Y todavía el sueño / 1999).

Precisely from Humberto Padrón it is very warming to see the medium length Video de familia (2001), also his graduation thesis at the ISA. Played by Verónica Lynn and Enrique Molina, the film conceptually prolongs the colloquium Memorias del subdesarrollo about exile, dismembering and other subjects of great universality, at the same time providing emotional denseness for today’s Cuban, but it’s especially attractive for the looseness with which the young filmmaker manages a formal proposition where he can conciliate the conscience of living the so-called digital age of cinema and the need to assume ancestral inquietudes, some of them left behind by our more official, “more serious” films. In a general sense, the works of young Cuban directors reveal limitations which are typical of every first work but, at the same time, they’re appreciated by the looseness with which they try to assume their points of view in face of reality, and the clear vocation towards polemic with which they try to renew some old and rusty codes.

In a moving segment of its monumental work El otoño de la edad media Huizinga has told us: nothing has contributed to extend the feeling of fear of life and the hopelessness facing times to come as the absence of a firm and general will of making a better and happier world”. (12) Precisely in the middle of a world that today has proclaimed the end of so many things (including the end of ends), it would be important for Cuban cinema to resurrect that intimate collective ideal of fecund transgression, which might be the only solution to solve many financial problems; to transgress is not expensive, and that was shown in the Sixties, the cultural earnings, on the other hand, can be huge: of course it has to be a transgression with imagination. And I’m warning that it’s not a matter of being slave to that splendidly transgresive past that some, through hangover dreams, have already loaded on their backs as a burden, since to continue with Huizinga, the road of simple yearning “is the most comfortable way, but if you walk through it, you always keep yourself from the same distance to the goal”. (13)

In any case, looking back will allow us to ask, why is it that today so many Latin American films mean so much that in the past we acclaimed as our classics; what was, if not the gravity of those collective dreams, what determines that regional cinema (including the Cuban) with rich universal resonances, a privilege that we miss today with a peculiar mysticism but that we hardly care to re-edit? Weren’t those actually prodigy films, that is, films that keep inviting us to a dialogue beyond the space and time context that originated them, or have they become very heavy burdens that once and again we feel forced to imitate, and therefore, we look at them more with tiredness that with gratitude? And especially, why do some of them are still influences and appear in front of us once and again quoted, recontextualized, manipulated, criticized, exalted, different and new in spite of being the same? Is it that in the end, every past is the future spied through a rear-view mirror?

Therefore facing this false optimism that suggests living satisfied with sterile self-pleasing, we should ask where was the film utopia confiscated? Someone very dear to me asked me with suspicion, what did I mean when I was talking about a “confiscated utopia”: confiscated by whom, by what? For me it is very clear: the Quixotic way in which film was wanted to be done in Cuba, in Latin America, the way in which we stubbornly try to make our own film utopia come true, is being relegated to a dark corner where the audience is always more average, always more mass viewer, is threatening with not ever turning back its gaze. To confiscate the dreams of the periphery always has turned to be a defense mechanism with which the great Academy of Good Taste turns them into hygienic zones, harmless, the uncomfortable quality of the outer limits, and us (even without noticing) could be contributing to this with our current inertia. Notice that I say confiscated: not annulled. To confiscate in this case means to temporary hold the personal dreams of people with the alibi that others (with more resources) are spending millions to turn the world into a gigantic “Jurassic Park” and we design to perfection, convenient fantasies to all of us (not the ones that we need to express individually). So that, utopic animals in the end, we still know that utopias can be covered, confiscated, but they never disappear completely. Utopias are like those rivers that in some moment hide their course and reappear a little further beyond, perhaps grown, more vigorous: utopias are born, they hide, and they come back, and they return, and infinitely so on...

*This text is part of the book La edad de la herejía, published in 2002, by the Editorial Oriente in Santiago de Cuba. Translated by Luis Villa for The Thinking Eye www.thethinkingeye.com

Notes:

(1). Seventh edition, Selecta de la Revista de Occidente, España, 1967, p. 50.

(2). Jorge Mañach. “Palabras preliminares", en Diálogos sobre el Destino de Gustavo Pittaluga Editorial Sudamericana, 1953, p. 11.

(3) In the IV Congreso de la Unión de Escritores y Artistas de Cuba, the Vicepresident at that time of the Consejo de Estado and member of the political bureau, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, reads an address of which the following fragment can be revealing of the prevailing cultural spirit at the time: “the Revolution to which writers and artists are called to serve is not fixed, in which only apologists and acolytes fit. [...1 we should not forget nevertheless, that even though liberalism is dangerous and complacency unacceptable, in the terrain of culture and science, intolerance and dogmatism are still more dangerous. Those cannot penetrate ­ because of their political sign ­ in our united and strong Revolution. But if we don’t defeat dogma, it would corrode us and it would close the road towards the wide and noble culture of socialism, in which, just like Máximo Gorki proclaims, the word of Man has to be a beautiful one”. In La Gaceta de Cuba, p. 7, March, 1988.

(4) The eighteen people who were part of the commission and signed documents of discrepancy with the official decision were: Santiago Álvarez, Rebeca Chávez, Guillermo Centeno, Enrique Colina, Rolando Díaz, Daniel Díaz Torres, Ambrosio Fornet, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Juan Padrón, Senel Paz, Fernando Pérez, Manolo Pérez, Mario Rivas, Orlando Rojas, Jorge Luis Sánchez, Humberto Solás, Juan Carlos Tabío and Pastor Vega.

(5)           Not without reason a director as Eduardo Manet, in the early decade of the Sixties, subscribes a reflection as follows: “I think it is time for filmmakers, actors, photographers, sound engineers, to write and discuss about the problems that concern them. We know that our critics are inept, almost always frivolous, and many times paternalistic; we already know that while almost no one writes critiques or essays about philosophy, literature, and decorative arts, everybody thinks they have the conditions that are needed to become a film critic. This is not negative; it rather indicates the enormous force and the capital importance of film in our time. What is negative is that people who could speak with a solid bases, won’t (or speak only on hallways) and that they always wait for some foreign critic to take our deficiencies to the light. There’s a comfortable position and I would even dare to say a coward one of not participating actively in discussions that are healthy and urgent”. Manet, Eduardo. "Juan Quin Quin y sus aventuras (after the premiere...)", Cine Cubano, no. 38, p. 46, July, 1968.

(6)           Manual del revolucionario y las máximas para revolucionarios, La Bolsa de los Libros, Montevideo, 1923, p. 80.

(7) About the Grupos de Creación (Groups of Creation) and their influence in productions of then filmmaker Manolo Pérez has said: “I don’t think that groups have been a wonder, that they were a solution to every problem. Even in a Cine Cubano’s interview with directors in the groups, at the moment of its creation, I think I was the more cautious one in front of the challenge that we faced, but I repeat once again that the experience in general was favorable, in spite of the arrival of the Special Period and the crisis started by Alicia [the hurricane] that interrupted their work precisely when they could have started maturing the results. The groups were not a dogma. As it’s known, they were formed in an absolutely voluntary way, to the extreme that some of our mates never belonged to any of the three, and would rather keep discussing their projects directly with the directives of the ICAIC. I think that the discussions of the group left a positive sign in some of the films”. See interview with Arturo Rangel (“Manuel Pérez o el ejercicio de la memoria”) in La Gaceta de Cuba, no. 5, year 35, p. 13, September/October 1997.

(8) Dean Luis Reyes. "Conversación con Orlando Rojas: una década después, el arte sigue siendo incómodo", Cine Cubano, no. 149, p. 37.

(9) Even though in other occasions I have insisted on the need to disempoverish this concept of Cuban cinema that only takes in account what is made by the ICAIC, for reasons of space we have limited this analysis to the production of that producing center, excluding what I called “underground Cuban cinema”, that is, productions by creative film clubs, the Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisión de San Antonio de los Baños, etc. In order to have an idea of how wide this production is, look at the chronological index of Cuban cinema printed in: Juan Antonio García Borrero. Guía crítica del cine cubano de ficción, Editorial Arte y Literatura, La Habana, 2001, pp. 373-380.

(10) When I talked about a “more active tendency” I intentionally left aside the possibilities of debate, either for or against, that in every case a Cuban film may bring, since it is a common place now to warn that, for a viewer in the island “to speak in favor or to speak against their cinema” is some kind of a national sport or mystic fervor: everybody feels they’re obligated to comment about all misgivings even though they don’t know the rules or knows too much technical things.

Under this view, you can appreciate also as an active tendency the sometimes passionate reactions provoked by films such as Vidas paralelas, by Pastor Vega; Guantanamera, by Gutiérrez Alea and Tabío; Pon tu pensamiento en mí, by Arturo Sotto; La ola, by Enrique Álvarez; Las profecías de Amanda, by Pastor Vega, or Un paraíso bajo las estrellas, by Gerardo Chijona, just to mention a few of the films less or not favored by the critics at the time. It is true that, sometimes, it’s even better to be trashed than to not be paid attention to, as happened with other films of the decade who right now I don’t even remember if they really were screened or were just a bad dream, but that is not the type of “active possibility” to which I refer.

(11)       By mid March 2001, the Asociación Cubana de la Prensa Cinematográfica published the results of a poll among its members with the idea of selecting the more representative Cuban film of the Nineties, as well as the more outstanding directors of that period. Specialists mentioned sixteen films, and the first three places were for Fresa y chocolate, Madagascar y La vida es silbar; while Fernando Pérez was selected as the director with more relevant contributions. Also in the polls registered by the Guía crítica del cine cubano de ficción, pages 30 and 33 you can see the interest that those who studied the work of Fernando Pérez have, when including his films Madagascar (fourth place) and Clandestino (twenty eighth place) among the more significant Cuban films of all time...

(12) ) P. 60

(13) Idem