Experimental short films by Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde
By Pablo Gamba – december 10th, 2023
LOS EXPERIMENTOS – BLOG DE CINE
A program of experimental films by the Villaverdes made between 1970 and 1978 in the United States was part of the INSTAR Film Festival. It included the short films 'Poor Cinderella, Still Ironing Her Husband Shirt' (1978) and 'To My Father’ (1973), by Miñuca Villaverde, 'Apollo Man to the Moon' (1970), and 'A Lady's Home Journal' (1972), by Fernando Villaverde. In addition, Miñuca Villaverde's medium-length documentary 'Tent City' (1980) was also screened.
The Villaverdes were part of the ICAIC and supporters of the Cuban Revolution until 1965. That year, the tensions between filmmakers and power that run through the history of the Cuban Film Institute led them to decide to leave the country, convinced that their place could not be in the socialist system that was being built in Cuba.
Fernando Villaverde produced one of the short films of the ICAIC's take-off period, 'The Park' (1963), whose melancholic characters living in a square clashed with the enthusiasm that the political cadres aspired the cinema to spread. The situation became more difficult for the filmmaker for similar reasons when he finished 'Elena' (1965), his contribution to the frustrated collective feature 'A Little Bit More Blue'. The abortion of his first feature film as director, 'The Sea', finally drove him into exile along with his wife, who also worked at ICAIC as a scriptwriter and as an actress, such as in 'Elena'.
When they settled in New York, after trying to establish themselves in Paris, the Villaverdes bought a film camera. They did so inspired, in particular, by Jonas Mekas, in whose cinematheque they may have found the new cinema they could not make in Cuba. The short films in the program stand out for their appropriation of the American underground.
'Poor Cinderella...' is a film that may well aspire to become part of a historical canon of Latin American experimental cinema if such a thing is ever defined. It is a recycled short film made with discarded material from another Miñuca Villaverde film, 'Blanca Putica: A Girl in Love' (1978). The way the filmmaker worked with collage, the intervention and fragmentation of the film material, the copying, and the rhythm, makes me think of Malcolm Le Griece's work as an antecedent, and of what Peter Tscherkassky would do later on.
The filmmaker's mastery of techniques is remarkable. But if Le Griece highlighted the work of physical intervention, laboratory procedures, and re-shooting as characteristic of one aspect of structural cinema. Miñuca Villaverde's short film is marked by a tension between this exploration of materiality and the artisanal wisdom of cinema, on the one hand, and the body and sexuality of women, on the other. Carolee Schneeman is an obvious reference in this other sense, since it is a film about a woman making love. But the title, the intervention, the fragmentation, and the abstract montage, based on repetitions, point disturbingly in a direction opposite to sexual liberation.
This sensibility for pleasure, but also questioning and even rebellious, if you will, contrasts the look at the father and the family gathered around him in his Texas home when he was about to die in 'To My Father'. It is obviously a film of the daughter's love, but also of observation of bodies and group dynamics.
Miñuca Villaverde films in moments ranging from the pose in front of the camera, in a curious "family photo" for cinema, to the presence of the same characters in the garden, enjoying their bodies under the sun, while the protagonist is shown there in an extension chair, with a dreadful look that made me believe he could have expired without anyone around him noticing as if there had not even been someone seeing him behind the camera that records him.
That is what 'To My Father' is about: the fragility of life, which can go from one moment to the next in certain circumstances, and the possibility that cinema has to record moments of a person's life so they can be replayed forever. This is a short film about a family and about how a film can give us the illusion, so humanly necessary, that it is possible to overcome death and bring back the living image of those it has taken away, which is conjugated here with the contrast between black and white and color.
In the last part of 'To My Father’, there is a record of a trip, presumably the return from Texas, made from a car that races along highways. It constructs a representation of the landscape as an alien territory crossed at high speed. This brings me to comment on the first of Fernando Villaverde's short films in the exhibition: 'Apollo Man to the Moon'.
Departing from the path of the feelings of the exiles in the United States towards the country they left, like those of the Cuban diaspora film classic 'El Súper' (1979) by León Ichaso and Orlando Jiménez Leal, the filmmaker chooses to investigate the foreigner's gaze on a New York that appears strange, inhospitable, and therefore, loaded with ironies regarding the promise of freedom of "America". He lucidly expresses this in a shot of the iconic statue, distorted by the low-light registration and the motifs of the moon in a sky where the night has not closed in and the arrival of the first American astronauts.
Melancholic characters like those in 'The Park' are seen again in this film. However, contrary to what happens in the Cuban short, they are dehumanized by their movement as a uniform mass through corridors and escalators. Thus 'Apollo Man the Moon' is presented as a bitter parody of the vibrant urban symphonies of the avant-garde. This includes the contrast between the exterior space and the interior domestic space of a family that seems to be from another planet.
Irony is the element that might link 'Apollo Man to the Moon' to 'A Lady's Home Journal', another film that should be included in the utopian Latin American experimental canon. It is a feminist film in which Fernando Villaverde identifies himself as a filmmaker in collaboration with his wife. In it, they explore the clash between the image required of women "in society”, as they say, which is a patriarchal environment in which the dominant gaze is that of men, and the attempts to escape towards the creation of other images, in a space that is not even the "home" of the title, the domestic sphere, but in the privacy of the bathroom, and sometimes also a bedroom, in solitude.
But the interior space in this short film is also terrible. It can be a microcosm that reproduces the world from whose gaze the protagonist tries to escape. The abyss re-opens before her in the bathroom itself, where she works on her body, preparing it for public display, and in a scene with her lying on the floor, like a return to childhood, playing in a room with the dollhouse in its modern 1960s educational version by Fisher-Price.
A surprisingly topical aspect of this short film is the display of various incongruent facets of the protagonist's self. There is another part in which she is presented as a gypsy tarot reader and in another as a dancer of disturbing eroticism with a tattooed body, as an angel who is like a romantic girl in love but also literally labeled as a gardener. This correlates to the contrast between realistic lighting in some parts and stark chiaroscuro in others, as well as different musical themes. Unlike the montage that divides the short into segments, the music segments overlap at times, adding complexity to this multifaceted yet claustrophobic representation of the self.
Just as it is ironic that this quest of the woman to be herself, to give herself her own image, leads to versions of herself that do not fail to correspond to male expectations, it is also ironic that she is always shown here for the gaze of another behind the camera, who is a man. Behind that, there is even another male gaze, the male gaze of the spectator. I believe that in this sense, it is necessary to interpret the shots in which the character of Miñuca Villaverde disappears and reappears and flickers in the image because the only possible place of encounter with herself is a gaze for no one, a non-gaze, in short, invisibility.
It is worth highlighting the contrast between 'Poor Cinderella...' and 'A Lady's Home Journal' and the prudishness that has always characterized Cuban cinema within the framework of State institutions -not that of independent filmmakers such as Jorge Molina, to mention a fairly well-known example-. That is another reason why the Villaverdes may have distanced themselves from a Revolution that was insufficiently open in depth of feelings and not revolutionary at all, in terms of bodies. But if socialism in Cuba failed to produce a "New Man" -and the use of the expression exclusively in the masculine is no coincidence-, the transformation that Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde began as part of while on the island crystallized making them a couple of new filmmakers in New York.
This also marks the gaze of Tent City, a short film by Miñuca Villaverde in another stage of her life, when they moved from New York to Miami. It is an emergency cinema film. It records a group of Cubans who arrived by the thousands in the United States in the so-called "Mariel exodus" in 1980, installed under a bridge in a "camp" of military tents.
The government of the island described these migrants as "lumpen" and "social scum". The filmmaker goes beyond denying this with her gaze and recorded testimonies to become an accomplice of several of these immigrants in the free expression of their bodies' dissidence from Cuba's socialist system regarding their homosexuality and transvestism. 'Tent City' is therefore not only an urgent but also a characteristically underground film, marked by a sensibility ahead of its time in the Latin American context. In addition to preceding it, this is how it distinguishes itself from the paradoxical conventional representation of another classic of Cuban exile cinema: 'Improper Conduct' (1984), by Néstor Almendros and Orlando Jiménez Leal.
You can read the original note here