The second edition of the INSTAR Film Festival ended just three days ago and, once again, the independent event contributed to make visible the plurality of voices present in the Cuban artistic fabric, despite facing a hegemonic political power bent on regulating the country's cultural life. Among the Festival's program, a retrospective of filmmaker Manuel Marzel stood out with remastered versions of three of his relevant works: A Norman McLaren (1990), Evidentemente comieron chocolate suizo (último rollo) (1991) and La ballena es buena (1991); a well-deserved tribute that places one of the most authentic and audacious voices of our cinema in front of the critics' lens once again.

Marzel is another name in the long list of cursed Cuban artists. Condemned to live in exile by a policy that punishes different thinking, this filmmaker has forged a work of priceless value for the insular art, which has remained for too long in the peripheries of the history of national cinematography. His aesthetic adventure -certainly Dadaist, as critics have described it- was too out of tune with the cosmetics favored by the powers that be, and inevitably paid a high price.

This creator boasts in the turbulence of experimentation. At the time of his appearance, the films he made were the apotheosis of difference at the center of an overly standardized cinematographic body. He was, then, one of the signs of rupture -perhaps the most radical- that at that moment foreshadowed the advent of the new.

In the nineties, A Norman McLaren, Evidentemente comieron chocolate suizo and La ballena es buena reviewed the tradition of experimental cinema from a genuine authorial emancipation. These works reveal an authentic filmic thought, impacted by the best avant-garde legacy. By returning to them, the Festival has sought to position their author in the rightful place in the evolution of Cuban cinema; an essential gesture in the rewriting process that its history has been undergoing for several years.

For too many decades, the historical narrative of national cinema has been governed, first, by the political imperatives of the "revolutionary" discourse and, second, by the authority of the narratives and aesthetics privileged by the cinema mainstream -which represses so much the freedom of cinema itself-. The rescue and visibilization of Marzel's audiovisual work is the demonstration that Cuban cinema has never been monochord, and demands a new adjustment of its memory and conception.

Made at the ICAIC, at the EICTV or outside any institution, these films are part of a tradition of Cuban cinema that has yet to be properly rigorous. Their aesthetic conception, in principle, ignores the sociologism that has constituted the measure of the insular cinematography. Marzel -along with a few others who accompanied him in his time- had the great audacity to rethink the rules of the game: not only the way in which the audiovisual language was conceived/handled, but above all the terms of the relationship of that language with the real, with the course of historical events and politics.

In Cuba, the kind of creative relationship that this director maintains in his films with the moving image -the mockery of the referent in favor of an autonomy of forms and the continuous catharsis of language- has always been subordinated to the need to describe the world, the outside. (Even the critics have been too determined to read the films from an angle that prioritizes their links with the context). By refusing in the most emphatic way to participate in this panorama, Marzel was empowering inventiveness and artistic daring. In his films it is possible to perceive an audacity that redeemed Cuban cinema from a programmatic fence that had condemned the artistic rebelliousness it enjoyed in the sixties. The powerful singularity of this creator promised to make the decade of the nineties also prodigious.

A Norman McLaren, the first of Marzel's extraordinary short films, reveals an absolutely determined artist. It is difficult to find an early work that boasts, not the experimental verve and irreverence, perhaps the fruit of youth, but the sharp filmic vision, the originality in the handling of forms, the organicity and imaginative richness of this film. Some animation techniques, film discards and a precise soundtrack were enough to build an audiovisual essay that turned everything that was being done at the time upside down. The visual frenzy of A Norman McLaren is an outpouring of heterodox sensibility that lashes out against every mold and methodology. Unfortunately, the path that was widening the gaze of our cinema at that time was frustrated -even other creators who shared Marzel's spirit have not returned to show the virulence that at that moment dynamited all enclosures-. Seen with the privilege of time, this short film was an explosive at the very heart of the language crisis experienced by Cuban cinema at the time.

Then, the latent creative ambitions in Evidentemente comieron chocolate suizo, all the resources used to create this chaotic world plagued with absurdity and irony, are evidence of a prodigal creative maturity. In the nature of the staging -markedly theatrical-, in the dynamics of the characters' actions, in the dialogue between image and music (Amaury Pérez leads with two of his songs throughout the film) there is a very essential perception of that which we could call Cubanness that has escaped the excessive realism of our cinema.

Moreover, without the need to point it out in its plot, this film, as well as La ballena es buena, was able to grasp the sensibility of an era whose model of society was in full decadence, shaken by forceful historical events. In both works, in order to understand their true relevance, the beauty and expressiveness of the photography should still be noted; the precise elaboration of the shots, both in their external and internal composition. Certainly, the dynamic between the action of the characters and the photography/montage duet is of extraordinary intrepidity in each of the films.

In the end, Marzel's entire filmography is marked by a spirit of transgression that baffles the viewer even today. This director's passion for moving images grafted in Cuba a rethinking of cinema itself. It was not understood...

A Norman McLaren, Evidentemente comieron chocolate suizo and La ballena es buena, and the rest of Marzel's films, at the time, were a cry for creative freedom. But that freedom did not reside only in the irreverent character with which the expressive repertoire was instrumented, nor in the playful principle that supports the structure of the story. That freedom was found where the poetics forged by the director was impenetrable to political power; the images of Marzel's work could not be capitalized by the ideological entrenchment of any era.

By rescuing Marzel's work, the INSTAR Film Festival leaves a lesson: as long as the technological, industrial, political, productive or nationalist paradigms dictated by the norm to write History are privileged, the aesthetic power of this creator, the door that his work opened for Cuban cinema to expand beyond itself, and the real complexity that this same cinema has experienced over time, will never be noticed with certainty.