Cuban filmmaker Marcel Beltrán talks about cosmic music, night houses and the zero at the end of the road
By ANTONIO ENRIQUE GONZÁLEZ ROJAS - december 4th, 2023
RIALTA
The feature-length documentary 'Option Zero' (2020) by Marcel Beltrán will open the IV INSTAR Film Festival with a screening at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) on Monday, December 4. The event's journey begins with a film about crossings, transhumance, exodus, and shipwrecks on land.
This film will be screened on Thursday, December 7, at the Maison de l'Amerique in Paris. On December 8, it will be screened at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo and the Florida International University (FIU) in Miami. It will also be screened on Sunday, December 10, the final day of the transnational event, at the General San Martin Cultural Center in Buenos Aires.
'Option Zero' competes for the Festival's awards, but two other films by Beltrán have been included in the Special Presentations program, which seeks to expand the cartographies of contemporary audiovisuals. 'Nighthouse' (2016) and 'The Music of the Spheres' (2018) will be available to Cuban audiences on the Festhome platform, from Monday, December 4 through Sunday, December 10, between 10:00 a.m. and 12:00 p.m., and will also be screened on Saturday, December 9, at the Cinemateca Brasileira in São Paulo.
The filmmaker's gaze splits in these three films, like a fractal and protean path. His exhibitions at the INSTAR Film Festival result in a brief but cardinal personal anthology that highlights one of the most striking film corpus of recent years in Cuba. I talked with Beltrán about the motivations, processes, keys, and resonances in his films.
Although ‘The Music of the Spheres’ stars your parents, their story, and their love, could it also be considered a sort of indirect audiovisual "self-portrait"?
Yes, indeed. 'The Music of the Spheres' is a self-portrait. It is very clear. In contemporary cinema, self-referentiality has gained a lot of space. During the pandemic, we all thought that, somehow, cinema was going to move towards the reflection of everything we were living, and it wasn't like that. There was a boom of a kind of "third wave of self-referential cinema", which was also very much supported, of course, by the use of the archive. I think it was foreseeable.
'The Music of the Spheres' was a gift that, in a way, I gave myself through my parents, with my parents, but in which my brother Darío Beltrán and I were not going to appear directly on screen, living the experiences and issues raised in the film. That was never the idea, from the beginning, from the very beginning.
That was a project that had to be worked on little by little, slowly, especially with my parents. I remember that the first note was something like embarking on a journey with my parents through those places that marked their relationship as a couple and to which they did not want to return, to which they had not been back for a long time or had never returned.
As she confesses at the beginning of her second feature film, 'Mafifa' (2021), Daniela Muñoz Barroso suffers from a "progressive bilateral hearing loss" that prevents her from perceiving the high-pitched sounds of the world, just like those emanating from the "bells" in the traditional congas of the city of Santiago de Cuba, whose piercing sounds tame and channel the drums, their low rumbles, into unspecified but continuous paths. For in the conga only movement matters, the forward motion. It is a perpetuum mobile of sound and fury that travels towards itself in the most absolute and uroboric self-sufficiency.
Gladys Esther Linares, better known as Mafifa, is considered by devotees of the Santiago conga as the "major bell ringer”: an object of worship, reverence, and myth since her sudden death in 1980, just on the verge of that year's carnivals, long before the filmmaker herself was born.
It belongs to a time before Daniela's time. It is a presence in fugue toward the past that leaves a trace still perceptible but in inevitable disintegration, just like the few blurred and brittle photos that some witnesses extract from old albums and precarious personal archives. The pupils that saw her alive are faded and tarnished. The newspapers that refer something of her life and death break at the slightest touch.
I was slowly working with them. They looked at me with faces of "We don't understand the point of this", but I shared with them the good news in terms of financing the film, and they were happy for me. In the end, when I won the DOCTV funding and the film was totally possible, they said, "Well, let’s take the opportunity to see the family, to revisit these places...".
There is a key issue here: I was born in Moa [Holguín province; northeastern Cuba], my brother was born in Moa, and we had never been back there. Imagine this issue of being born in a place within your own country, but of which you have no news and know absolutely nothing. That was a very strong motivation for me: to be in that space and to travel with them, through them. And so it was, fortunately.
So the film went through Moa; then, San Luis, my father's hometown; then, Havana, Santa Clara... I am a witness to what is happening, which crosses their story transversally. Although the film proposes a certain continuity, it is not about that. There are several times at once. You could be inhabiting a present that is actually a kind of past and that no longer refers to them but to me. I never think of avoiding anything, to be honest, but it was clear to me that the film could not be about me; it was not my vision of this or that. That's when the first vicissitudes arose.
When it was time to edit, there was a significant question regarding the point of view in the film. Who was watching, who was a witness to all that, how to explain what happened, who assumes, in a way, the responsibility of telling the story. Of course, it was me. So, that's where the voice-over narration comes in.
It was something that frankly I hadn't considered at any point; from the first drafts of the story, there was never a voice narrating. It's not that the voice came later or that it was an editing solution, that's not the point; it wasn't so simple. Eliseo Altunaga had been following the whole process, even before shooting, and he had already told me this could happen. Because of all the problems the film goes through: racism, the very difficult family situation with my grandfather, who never knew my father... My father is there; my grandfather is no longer there. Who was in charge of all that? Obviously, me, and that's what I did.
In none of my previous projects, I appear as a narrator. It was never a solution. I repeat: I was not trying to avoid a technique that seemed too recurrent in the contemporary panorama, such as self-referential cinema, which has a voice that explains and leads the story. But we were convinced that in this case there was no other solution. There is something that changed the film's landscape a bit: my father's death.
We finished shooting around February and then we edited, we had a cut, and, of course, the film went into another season when my father's illness began to worsen. So, imagine, he made his transition, and there was an important learning experience for me in terms of the relationship with the film. Because the images were the same and, at the same time, they were different. The way I questioned those images had changed. So, the film was edited again. That's when I got involved as an editor: I started to mourn. That's when the need for the voice was confirmed.
Maybe that was the last mark the film needed as a kind of displaced self-portrait: me reflected in others. All those issues are very submerged, very subtle because those are the ones that appear on screen. But I agree with you that, to a certain extent, it's about me. I remember my dad made several comments to me when he saw a cut of the film. He mostly referred to the way the story was being told. It seemed to him that it was not important to touch on issues that I had already overcome in some way, spiritually. So, I did my best to please him. It seemed important to me, but it was also about my wound. And the film was an arrow in the family, and it had to come out.
The intimate dimension in ‘The Music of the Spheres’ contrasts at times with infinitudes symbolized by the very universe that your father scrutinizes. Did you want the film to establish a relationship between personal history, the "minimal" facts, and the "grand narratives" of history?
There are several levels, of course. We are in the context of intimate life, of the simplest. This small world of the couple is the most important because it is a story of a couple overcoming a family problem. In the end, it is about closing the door and being alone with your partner. That's the dimension of time that interested me, as a son who looks at his parents and has a need to record them as a memory. I'm very happy to have shot this film for that reason.
It brought a lot of headaches, especially in the family, as you can imagine. But everyone is entitled to their own opinion and can think whatever they want or whatever they can. I didn't make the film either to attack or to defend. It was simply a strong need to have this portrait of my parents' relationship history, which I lived from an intimate point of view as a son. And that is the film’s perspective: portraying not the external but the internal. Of course, the internal is a consequence of all these issues that were always totally silenced. So I am always immersed in this game of the relationship between them, the micro with the macro, which is the family. And, of course, that has implications [related to] the shaping of our identity as Cubans and the very circumstances of the country around issues such as racism and stigmatization because of your racial status or whatever.
There is a very delicate, very small game there. I am aware some elements are encrypted only for my parents. Others are for me. There is another story, let's say, that everyone can keep. It has happened a lot that at the exit of the cinema, someone comes up to me, shakes my hand, and says: "Your mom is very brave, your dad is very brave. The same thing happened to me." I knew I was touching a sensitive nerve, and that is ultimately the relevant thing about making a film you want to share with others. But there are minimal coded things that relate to my dad's inner world, which in a way is the counterweight of something so (I wouldn't even know what to call it)... of so little interest to us, on a spiritual level within the family, as the issue that engages the film itself.
I couldn't make a film that somehow touched on the core of their relationship, turning it into the most important point of the story. So I also focused on leaving a trace of the esoteric world they share. I didn't insist too much either; I could have gone a little further.
Nighthouse’ was shot in 16 mm and marked a formal territory very different from the rest of your filmography. How decisive was the use of this format to build a visual poetics like the one in this film?
'Nighthouse' is a film that was made in a very different process. It doesn't have the will, the story, or the path of the other films, which have been more about having an idea, writing it, filming it, and then editing it. No. 'Nighthouse' started from the end. The first thing I did was the last shot of the Cuban flag. I was in Canada at the experimental film residency that Phil Hoffman organizes at his Film Farm in Mount Forest. Around the residency, there are only fields, cows, and Mennonites. It didn't feel interesting to me. I started looking for an idea.
You always find the flag or something Cuban when you travel. So I decided to make an overlay: to shoot with a roll, rewind it, shoot it again, and start overlaying images. That was the starting point of the film. I filmed the flag, a dog, and a fence, then filmed a fire, inked the film, applied a process called tinting and toning, and applied bleach. I used several techniques to play with what the workshop proposed. I ended up with a material that was not ‘Nighthouse’ at all.
I got a taste for it and accumulated material little by little. I was able to film with a Bolex. I went out in the city and filmed a little more. Hoffmann is closely related to this film, not only because of the Film Farm, but also because, in 2010, he was my experimental film professor at EICTV [International Film and Television School of San Antonio de los Baños (Cuba)], and then I continued assisting him in subsequent editions of his workshops at the School, so we did them together.
I learned to develop in an artisanal way, to do a lot of things that later I also dedicated myself to teaching, and the film came as an accumulation of material. Casa de la noche is from 2016, exactly the year I was editing La música de las esferas. They are two films related to my dad, because of the process of his illness. I took some distance from ‘The Music of the Spheres’, whose initial title was ‘Father’s Hands’. I left that material there for a while, but I still intended to make a film with my father, who was always full of ideas and concerns: he would sit at the computer and organize some films he wanted to shoot. He was always very restless. He studied painting at the ISA [Higher Institute of Art of Havana] but graduated with a performative work that used sound and other elements. Somehow, experimental and fantasy cinema was something he was very interested in. I had all that material. My father began to lose his voice, and one day, he woke up perfectly well, and we decided to do something. He sat on the couch next to me, we wrote the text, and he read it. We recorded, and from there, we started to put something together with these images. I sat at the computer, edited... And it came out very quickly because all the material was already filmed. From there, we got to that piece, a little bit talking about Havana with this subtle character that goes through these walls with his voice.
I'll tell you that, right now, I'm closer to processes more similar to 'Nighthouse' than to my other films in terms of writing, filming, and editing. Right now, I really want to shoot and work on movies, and somehow, I'm organizing my life to make it happen. 'Option Zero' is related to 'Nighthouse' not because of the medium but because of the character of the film. More films like this will likely come soon. We will see.
I think ‘Nighthouse’ sublimates a cinematic-essayistic will that can be seen in much of your work, even in fiction such as ‘The Cloud’. Will there be other projects that pay tribute to this more risky audiovisual mode?
I just answered that question with the previous one. Yes, indeed. There is always the difficulty of filming. There's an issue related to the digital aspect - excuse me for getting a bit professorial - but well, it's about the context. The digital era promised that everything would be cheaper, and we already know that's not the case. You shoot in 8K, 16K, and it's very expensive. Blank film for Super 8 workshops is nowhere to be found; it is not available anywhere. It's all been sold. Kodak is now releasing its Super 8 camera on the market, which was shelved for six or seven years. There are German laboratories manufacturing film.
That whole world is back, but the most important thing is not precisely what it costs but the minimum structure you need to get the film, the chemicals... having a place to develop everything. After my dad's transition, I've been trying to shoot with film [celluloid]. Even though I had the freezer full of it, and I had cameras, it wasn't pertinent; I had to force my reality too much. I barely had room for the books and for myself among all the books; imagine making a laboratory there, shooting with film. It was very complicated, very complicated.
So I think it's possible that, at this moment, I can face such projects. I have always tried to look at the digital with a certain analogical perspective, considering the digital camera as something analogical, trying to have a result that is unique in some way, that will never be repeated, that has a mark, a stain, an intention or way of looking, scrutinizing, of intervening, that provokes a certain identity contemporary digital cameras lack.
Working with film gives you this. You are always at the mercy of error, failure, or marks; even if you develop in an artisanal way, the digital traces remain engraved on the film itself. All this is a world that interests me a lot and in which you work practically alone. There are several projects and several ideas that I've been thinking about during these years because ‘Option Zero’ is from 2020. I have not released any other films. It has to do with the birth of my son Santiago, who is now two years old, and a little bit with other circumstances: other films have happened to me. But, at the same time, I have been organizing myself to reactivate that world of working with analog, with the handmade development, both in 16 mm and Super 8, which interests me a lot.
‘Option Zero’ proposes perhaps the first summary or filmic systematization of the archives generated by the thousands of Cubans who emigrate illegally through continental American routes. What "curatorial" processes did you undertake to construct this film? What ethical assumptions did you use to structure a personal thesis that, at the same time, validated the multiplicity of voices involved?
This is a critic's question. There was no curatorial process; I didn't handle it that way. But I'm going to tell you how the process went. I think that will be more useful to you because I haven't thought about it in those terms. I would have to think about it, and I haven't done that.
‘Option Zero’ is the film you find; it's not the film you're looking for. They are two different things. I was at the Panama Film Festival and, suddenly, a friend told me: "Yesterday I was talking about you because near my house there is a group of Cubans; I don't know very well what they are doing, but they are in the courtyard of a church". It really caught my attention. I asked him if he could give me a ride. "Yes, sure, it's very close."
We went and, when we passed the small patio of this place of Caritas, I found there were three hundred tents. It was totally mind-blowing to me. I started to talk to them, to understand what they were doing there, but at no time had I been interested in making a film with that. It's not like I came in and said, "Oh, here's a movie”. Not at all. I was mostly shocked with myself because I knew absolutely nothing about it. Today, it's pretty clear: it's on social media, YouTube, everywhere.
It was not obvious at the time. I had heard that there was a crisis in Costa Rica, but I had not seen it. I had the opportunity at that moment, and my first impulse was to get interested, to understand. There were pregnant women, elderly people, a little bit of everything. What were the circumstances? The Panamanian government had closed the borders only because of the Cubans. The situation had become overcrowded, and those people were there in a kind of limbo, waiting.
The festival was over and I went to Cuba. I came back and started to be in touch with them. They use Facebook, a platform I don't use much, but I reopened my account, and they started sending me audio messages. That's where the seed of the film is, in the messages they send me. Voice recordings, text messages, images. "Look, this is me, I went up here, this is how I came down," they described.
There was a moment when they told me: "They are going to move us from this camp to another," it took about seven days. I had to decide to go back to film or just let it go. Obviously, I bought a ticket and went back to Panama. I stayed in the camp with them, as just another migrant, to live there, to pass the hours.
The devices we used were elementary. One thing I realized very quickly was that this wasn't a movie where I saw myself shooting with a crew of ten people, and a very big camera and sound. It was a matter of going with what I had at hand. At that time, it was a tourist camera, a simple Panasonic, but it had a nice sensor and lens. It was my father's, by the way. I also had a simple Zoom recorder. One battery, one card. The battery would run out in about twenty minutes; I had to charge it, live with them for a while, and then go back to filming. They looked at me as if I were just another migrant. They hardly believed I was shooting a film. Even the police looked at me and did nothing because I didn't look like a filmmaker at all.
So, consciously, I tried to get as much footage as possible of what the trip implied for them. These are extremely fragmented images because they are going through a jungle, and the battery doesn't last long enough. So they shoot ten seconds, then fifteen seconds, not much. Then, ten or fifteen seconds of each one and others who shared [images] with me. Sometimes, we didn't know who had filmed certain images.
The very distortion of those phones -which were never iPhones or other high-end models- and the pixelation of the images helped me guarantee the privacy of the people, the issue of their faces, of authorizations. I began to see this as an aesthetic path: to play with the pixelation, the degradation of the image, the porosity, the precariousness of the path itself.
Between the archive, the present, and the recordings, I felt that the film existed. It's like several levels, just as it happens in ‘The Music of the Spheres.’ The film is static; it suggests a non-time, a limbo in which they await to see what happens until the last moment when they are put on a bus and leave. I stay; they leave.
Then the film moves on, and the journey happens only through the archive. It's like a past, something a little illusory. They are traveling, but never in the present. They are traveling only inside their cell phones. There is, of course, the Cuba dimension, which was the other curious thing. You would walk into that place with the three hundred tents and listen to Radio Reloj, people playing dominoes, and everybody talking about "Cuba, Cuba, Cuba." It was very strong to have that awareness of leaving a country and somehow feel that it is still with you. It hasn't left you behind.
I have thought about what George Didi-Huberman wrote about men moving out of necessity or desire, and when they move out of necessity, their heads are still in the past. That [explains] conceptually what this migratory effect was in the film.
The other interesting thing had to do with the record itself because migrants have always tried to leave a trace, to mark the walls and write their names. This has been the case since the Phoenician sailors, I imagine. There are records like that in Cuba; the pirates themselves left their names on the walls. In this case, it is the same. The peculiarity here, however, compared to other films on Arab and African migration where smartphones already existed, are the live transmissions. Many times they did not record to keep memories, but they used their phones as a defense mechanism to say: "We are alive", "We are here", "We are going through the jungle right now". I felt those on the other side, following them, protecting them, encouraging them.
This is very delicate because there is nothing behind the hashtag. You are not seeing migrants. Something very strange and impersonal was coming together from something deeply personal, and that, of course, touched me... Then, I decided that the film shouldn't focus on anyone; it shouldn't have a specific protagonist or follow someone during that journey, but something a little more difficult: it should somehow portray a situation. And there I was with my little camera following all this.
Once again the voice appears in some way. They keep referring to me throughout the film. Who is shooting this film? Who is behind the camera? Why does whoever is behind the camera come and go? Again, it was up to me to decide whether I go in or out. Do I commit myself or not? The recordings are for me, my name is on them. The text messages too. That's when I decided that once again my voice was not going to suddenly appear. It was not possible in this case but I could use this silent narrator that is created when structuring the messages they sent to me.
It was like a kintsugi effect, of the golden edge that joins all the pieces of the collage. We always talked about the film, in creative terms, as something broken. I used to say: "You have to make the film, finish it, then break it". The film is those fragments glued together again.
I have been respectful, and I still am, especially in terms of distribution, because all those lives are there, and they are still involved in the difficulties that the film exposes. I have been very careful with the film's journey because I know it compromises lives and destinies.
‘Option Zero’, I believe, also raises and stands on the dichotomy between the ways of conceiving and constructing the contemporary Cuban historical narrative. Could we see this as a discursive constant in your most recent filmography?
There is an awareness of the micro-narrative, which somehow positions itself as relevant in the face of the macro-narrative and social and official discourse. That part interests me as a context, but in order to tell the minor, invisible, less visited story, or simply one that does not contribute to the great discourse of social construction where everyone contributes. No. The door closes. There is intimacy, and something happens there that is often the most important thing to me.
Of course, telling that story offers an alternative way, a bit marginal, that works as a mechanism of evasion of that great discourse. The official Cuban discourse is one of the easiest to refute because it is like another, parallel fiction. But in the case of other fictions, which also become [official] discourses, it works the same way.
I believe that, in intimacy, when the human being is there, with the door closed, things happen... and those things interest me a lot. Of course, to make it noticeable, probably, you always need to have on the other side that great depersonalized epic, in which the individual is not noticed. The answer I would give you is a resounding yes, insofar as your question is above all an affirmation.
You can read the original note here