I want to call this brief presentation of the first issue of Fantasma Material – which will have more of a perhaps chaotic form of comments and glosses of an avid and enthusiastic reading such as I haven't had for quite some time, and which I was scratching out in the messy notebook in which I comment on that small group of things that I am finding and that I know I need to treasure –, as I said, I want to title it “The margin of freedom”, borrowing Gilberto Pérez's phrase in the essay included in this issue and about which I will do some observations later. I dared to give it a title because, perhaps like Borges, I cannot contain the fever of vowels and consonants and the need to produce the name to get to the thing. And, in this case, the thing is of a doubly dubious materiality that stretches into a false bifurcation: cinema as light and trace of a past that is lost at the speed of the light that projects it, and that of Cuba, as noun and adjective, a word that seems to contain everything and nothing, a painful fiction and also, as physicists would argue, always in the past. 

Material Phantom, as its editors recognize, begins with that ghostly materiality that is Cuba and its cinema, because it is that ghost, that spirit suspended behind us while we roam this planet –sometimes invisible, sometimes manifesting in strange ways–, to the which, as good conscious and unconscious spiritualists, we are always trying to find his glass of water held high, so that he can clarify and ascend, so that he can find light. And that light is the same dizzying light that travels and does not wait for us, that makes us live in the past because there is always a gap between what we see and its origin. The first merit of this magazine is to think of Cuba as a medium, to think of Cuba as one thinks of the cinematographic medium, in that triple theoretical, historical and political enterprise that makes the text by Gilberto Pérez that gives its name to the magazine essential for thinking about Cuba and its cinema, which has also been one of the ways in which the island exists.

Guillermo Cabrera Infante, in a beautiful and brief text included in his book Mea Cuba, titled “My end is my beginning” – note the closeness to the maxim “The end, but it is not the end” of NGL, one of the special guests in this issue–, defined in similar terms the ghost of the noun and the adjective that accompany us: “To be Cuban is to carry Cuba in a persistent memory. We all carry Cuba inside us like an unprecedented music, like an unusual vision that we know by heart. “Cuba is a paradise from which we flee trying to return.” Like Cabrera Infante, the editorial note of Fantasma Material addresses displacement, non-localized cinema, the entanglement of distant particles that affect each other. Cuban cinema, the editors seem to say, is an increasingly sovereign system that affects itself and affects us, that in its creative search has a quantum imagination and also a quantum listening – in the words of Pauline Oliveros –, a hypersensitivity that flee from exactness and predeterminations; a cinema that listens to everything simultaneously, that in its desire for freedom confronts with its casual being there, off-center and irregular, empty militancy and fascism of all types and colors. Hence this issue summons the powerful spectrums –like cinema–, the free and material ghosts that inhabit us –like NGL–, to which we always return with questions to try to navigate, perhaps transform the reality that surrounds us and, As the editors state, only then produce “the new.”

The first section of the magazine, “Pensamiento de Gilberto Pérez,” which addresses Pérez's thoughts as a central author for film studies, sometimes not sufficiently attended to in the spaces of Cuban film criticism and theory, provides the point starting point of this number. Gilberto Pérez's theoretical investigation, his particular way of defining the cinematographic medium and the impact of his work both in the academic world and in that of film criticism, organize the intellectual journey that Fantasma Material proposes in this issue – which I am convinced will continue in future issues. The power (even in its Lezamian sense) of this definition of cinema as a material ghost that contains a piece of reality opens the first text of the magazine, “From materiality to eloquence,” by the important Australian critic and academic Adrian Martin. This text places Gilberto Pérez not only as a personal inspiration for the author, but above all as an intellectual reference in the work with the moving image as an antidote to the empty criticism dictated by formless reflections, which ignore the materiality of the medium, which is , ultimately, its specificity and what opens the doors to the always promising possibilities of the cinematographic image today. 

Martin's text is followed by an excellent translation of Gilberto Pérez's introduction to his book The Material Ghost. Films and Their Medium, titled “Cinema and Physics.” This introduction to the book published by the John Hopkins University Press in 1998 is at the same time an exercise in autobiography, a journey through the history of cinema and an evaluation of the predominant theoretical and academic trends in film studies in the 20th century. . An essential text of admirable intellectual wealth and erudition. Starting from the influence of Cabrera Infante's film criticism in the awakening of his enthusiasm for cinema, Pérez takes us by the hand in a historical and intellectual review of the medium that includes directors such as Griffith, Dovzhenko, Eisenstein, Welles, Capra, Antonioni, Hitchcock, Kubrick, among many others, while constructing eloquent analogies. The theoretical physics that he studied in his youth is identified with film theory, but without the provincial snobbery of supposed intellectual superiority that separates both from their empirical counterparts: experimental physics and film criticism. Pérez rejects these binarisms and navigates a different sea of ​​possibilities: finding questions to explain the world and cinema, not from the ideology imposed a priori, but from a productive skepticism that recognizes the importance of the multiplicity of knowledge, its multiple character, abstract, empirical, complex, which like light, time and space curve and bend, and can almost never be reduced to straight and simple lines and movements. The admirable theoretical review that Pérez proposes moves comfortably from the author's theory to post-structuralism and semiotics, from Lacanian psychoanalysis and the Althusserian apparatus to feminist theory and the readings initiated by Laura Mulvey, and from there to post-theory and the cognitive positions from David Bordwell and Noel Carroll, through fundamental historical figures such as André Bazin, Béla Balázs and Sigfried Kracauer. Within this constellation, the author, practicing his productive skepticism, reaches conclusions that are as accurate as they are direct. 

For example, to quote the fragment that gives the title to this presentation, Pérez defends that “there is a margin of freedom when it comes to making a film and when it comes to watching it, a margin to make the type of film that invites the freedom of viewer response; and that margin of freedom can make a difference”; thus rejecting easy determinisms. Finally, the very definition of “material ghost” points to an ontology of the cinematographic image that clarifies the Bazanian idea of ​​continuity between the world and what is captured by the lens. If for Bazin the photographic image is a hallucination that is also a fact, Gilberto Pérez redirects us towards a perhaps more complex system: the cinematographic image captures something of that world, a material fragment, a trace that, at the same time, is unreal, It is a specter of an unrepeatable past moment. It cannot be done, although it has something of it, nor can it be a hallucination. The oxymoron of the immaterial, dubious, elusive materiality of light that fascinates us in cinema is, precisely, what explains its unreal reality, the way in which it merges with life without taking over it. 

And it is this malleability that, as we will see in the next section of this issue of Fantasma Material, entitled “Contemporary Cuban Cinema: Limits and Possibility,” informs the hopes, aspirations and concerns of filmmakers, scholars and critics who respond to a series of questions proposed by the editors of the magazine with the aim of generating a conceptual map of contemporary Cuban cinema in its current condition, sometimes elusive, but always expanded and energetic. The section is a luxury that Fantasma Material gives us. It features the most important voices in the production and study of Cuban cinema in an unprecedented, personal format, without the rites of the restricting academic formula. It is, rather, one of those conversations that mark us forever and that updates us in a different way: like someone opening a beer with friends on a balcony while trying to solve the mysteries of the world. It is a revelation of freedom and knowledge that we all needed. Dean Luis Reyes, Miguel Coyula, Zaira Zarza, Ángel Pérez, Walfrido Dorta, Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, Dunja Fehimovic, Juan Carlos Rodríguez and Carlos Quintela, among others, offer us a different panorama of concerns and projects, they venture and risk to rehearse hypotheses and theories, they set out to create or refine concepts without the scholastic burden of the (failed) pretension of infallible knowledge of academic thought and its artificial harmony. 

In this section of Fantasma Material, the participants do not agree, they argue, they overlap and deny, they agree half or completely, almost like someone who opens another beer and renews the topic in each text. “A field of studies does not live on essays alone,” the editors seem to tell us. And they are right, because the energy of this section overflows the magazine and portrays an era and several generations of intellectuals. The future of Cuban cinema and studies on Cuban cinema will appreciate this section for what it is, an injection of vital energy. Dean Luis Reyes delves into the definition of locus as a concept in Cuban cinema, while Dunja Fehimovic moves between the impossibilities of the collective, the digital and the ecological critique of coloniality. On the other hand, while Miguel Coyula reflects on the meanings and limitations of the “independent” category and what it means to film in Cuba and about Cuba, Eliecer Jiménez Almeida returns to the idea of ​​escape—of Cuba as a physical place and of Cuban cinema as a mirror of that place—and about the need to treat binary divisions (independent cinema vs. institutional cinema, etc.) with the necessary caution. Along these same lines, Walfrido Dorta shares the conceptual log that could guide a possible notion of Cuban cinema that, coinciding with Eliecer, moves away from the empire of binary oppositions that justify themselves in their exclusive simplification. For her part, Zaira Zarza explores emotional and affective exile as a map that records the world and defines contemporary Cuban cinema as a specific way of experiencing and being in the world. Finally, Juan Carlos Rodríguez returns to Nicolás Guillén Landrián to give us a series of theses on the current moment of Cuban cinema, which moves between escape – a recurring motif in this section –, the archive and the perennial condition of always being a foreign cinema , outside of himself, who lives in the third person. 

This point opens the door for the third section of this issue, lighting a candle to one of the material ghosts that have accompanied us from the beginning: Nicolás Guillén Landrián. “NGL File” includes four texts about Nicolasito and I would dare to say that it represents the collective critical approach to his most important work since the publication in 2019 of the compilation Guillén Landrián o el discocimiento filmico, edited by Julio Ramos and Dylon Robbins. The first of the texts, “Guillén Landrián: Documents in the shadow” by Rafael Rojas – originally published as part of his most recent book Brief history of censorship and other essays on art and power in Cuba in 2023 – brings a fresh look to the Guillén Landrián phenomenon as a cinematographic fact that produced an irreverent way of narrating the Revolution and the changes it brought through the use of avant-garde devices such as close-ups, à la Vertov, and the cine-eye, introducing a noise in the instrumental rationality of the (failed) state modernization of the sixties. Rojas correctly defends that, by clearing the marabou of the discourses desired from the power of a stopped and frozen revolution - if we want to borrow the title of another contemporary filmmaker of Landrián and like him a critic of stopped revolutions -, Nicolasito breaks the space of dominant self-reproductive representation of its time, in the same spirit of the thinkers of the Frankfurt School or the French Tel Quel group. 

For his part, Néstor Díaz de Villegas gives us an exquisite analysis of one of Guillén Landrián's most emblematic films in his “Ociel del Toa: Landrián queer”. Díaz de Villegas enters Landrián's documentary from a queer reading of the bodies in the documentary that expands towards a queer structure of the documentary or a queer poetics that dismantles the normative rigidity of the politics of the time based on the detail, the environment, of the looks and the atmosphere that the camera captures. Landrián emerges from this text as a contemporary Sannazaro, manufacturing that lost Arcadia that is always elaborated from a present of loss, violence and mourning contained. This Sannazaro from the Cuban East, Díaz de Villegas proposes, produces an illuminated manuscript that documents a space that, when it was filmed, was already pointing to extinction in the tide of spiritual poverty of the corpse-revolution in power. Díaz de Villegas reads Ociel as a text full of Deleuzian gestures in which Landrián's most tenacious resistance was perhaps to embrace the becoming-other, to reject fixed identities, to be able to be anything at any moment, as the only possible political project.

Ruth Goldberg, in a text that comes from the aforementioned volume by Ramos and Robbins, delves into Reportage as a sensory labyrinth, between cynical and didactic, that disorients. The cinematographic image, Goldberg warns us, is a trap here that clouds perception, like almost any discourse. Landrián uncovers the rhetorical operation that hides behind the image of the revolution and shows the viewer how a discourse is constructed: how using sound, image and editing anything is transformed into criticism or irrefutable proof of consensus. In this sense, it is the ultimate didactic enterprise and, as such, it complicates the binarisms typical of revolutionary discourse, above all, the “us vs. them”, so dear to the Cuban authoritarian power in its desire to divide Cuban society into two exclusive camps.

Finally, the “NGL File” section delivers a writing by Ernesto Daranas: an invaluable look at the process of reconstruction of Landrián's life and work that culminated in his successful documentary Landrián (2023), which has toured prestigious festivals such as the Venice Film Festival. or Il Cinema Ritrovato in Bologna. Daranas' text brings the edge of the scalpel of the filmmaker, the restorer, the historian and the critic, and cuts through decades, institutions and intrigues of dark characters with the clarity and honesty that have always characterized his films, his writings and his statements. Between the testimony and the sharp eye of the historian, Daranas takes us into the figure of Landrián in a way that no one has done before, collecting pieces, gluing fragments like someone who glues frames with rubber, just like in the old days, stripping history oral from friends and contemporaries, until finally we almost touch the body of the ghost and better understand its dimension of caustic presence in the middle of the socialist realist almanac that fell upon the most talented of that generation. Daranas does not tell us about his film: he tells us about a journey in which Landrián, the history, the collective, the pain, but also the creativity, magic and commitment of the filmmaker come to the fore as a testimony of the defeat of the who wanted to wage war, lost beforehand, to extinguish his light as a stubborn and hopelessly unusual ghost.

Fantasma Material ends with a transmedial moment, an intersection between visual and aural arts, a critical and manifesto text that returns to the spectrum and hauntology to leave us with a final reflection that returns us to the beginning, to Gilberto Pérez, and adrift on an island that It lives, as the authors aptly describe, with its back to the sea: an imploded map, a piece of rusted steel at the bottom of the sea. That abyss, however, is a principle and, as the editors of this issue proposed in the first sentence of this magazine, a condition of non-localization of a noun and an adjective: Cuba and Cuban, inoperative to define a being in the world and a cinema that has long resided anywhere, like the ghosts that we are. In this sense, Material Ghost is an event to celebrate, an opening towards a quantum network of solidarities and fluctuations without geopolitical predeterminations, a productive escape in which the use of what Stuart Hall called the critical imagination marks the possibility of imagining and bending. the times, spaces and multiple presents of the cinematographic image that moves on an infinite, spectral island, from which we always escape trying to return.