Miguel Coyula and Rafael Ramírez: the multiverses of two Cuban auteurs
By MAYTÉ MADRUGA - december 9th, 2023
RIALTA
In his essay La Politique des auteurs, French critic André Bazin said: "The politics of auteurs consists, in short, in choosing the personal perspective in artistic creation as a standard of reference and assuming that it will progress from one film to the next. It is recognized that certain films of great quality escape this theory, but these will be considered systematically inferior to those that possess an author's personal stamp, no matter how mundane the setting may be".
Defining an auteur is still a complex and increasingly remote exercise in this 21st century. In Cuba, the concept became a definitive paradigm and an aspiration to the utmost; for many years, some disavowed any different way of assuming and consuming cinema.
Nevertheless, Bazin's ideas serve as a reference for the analysis of two Cuban filmmakers: Miguel Coyula and Rafael Ramirez. Both creators, with cinematic works validated by academies and film festivals, have several common traits, beyond "choosing a personal perspective in artistic creation", that denote the production of a constant and inspiring film poetics for their peers.
In the IV edition of the INSTAR Film Festival, the directors were included in the special presentations with the feature films Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula 2021) and The Winter Campaigns (Rafael Ramirez, 2019). Coyula's film was screened this Friday, December 8, at the Maison de l'Amérique Latine in Paris, and Ramírez's film is being shown this Saturday at the e-flux Screening Room in Brooklyn, New York, and it is available until tomorrow for audiences in Cuba, on the online platform Festhome.
In The Winter Campaigns, Western prevails as a genre: it depicts the environment, the feelings, the strange, and, at the same time, consistent presence of the human being amid nature, in contrast to the dystopian science fiction and the end of the world envisioned in Blue Heart. In these fictional scenarios, Ramírez's characters have the certainty of the search; Coyula's, the conviction of helplessness. Thus, they appear before the camera, some with blurred faces, others showing discomfort and uneasiness. Each being in The Winter Campaigns seems to burst into the shot; each "freak" in Blue Heart wants to escape it.
Both directors have an extraordinary ability to reimagine scenarios. Ramirez, with strange cinematography and superlative color grading, in which gray symbolizes winter, the withered. Coyula, with the playful intensity offered by the spectrum of visual effects, all of which can be cut for the director/ editor/ VFX supervisor to reconfigure and recontextualize.
Both speak of this world. Both inhabit it. But they have decided to create other universes in their interior. Ramírez and Coyula seek cinematic narratives that transcend the conventional and the realistic. It is in the realm of imagination where they find their auteur language. A simple river is the river to hell; a building is the antenna that tunes in to the apocalypse.
In Hindu religions and philosophies, the soul is the first body, guide, and representation of the heart. In that sense, Ramirez's film can be defined as a path that seeks the different states of the soul. These same notions also pay much attention to the mind, which tends to identify with the ego, which always advocates an individuality apparently separated from the divine.
In Blue Heart, the ways of the ego can be identified. But, in the search, it is good to move away from negative and preconceived judgments. Ego is an alarm, a warning for all of us to be aware of our origin, our roots, which the characters in Coyula's film are incessantly looking for.
From these places, both directors do not see the camera as a device for tracing realities but as a third eye that perceives altered states and intuitive essences, which may already be in the audiovisual composition or may be inserted later in the editing room. In either case, the pretext is the primordial reality; the aim is the construction of senses focused on the sensible, which inquire into the semiotically arbitrary relationship of things.
If anything distinguishes these two auteurs, is that everything can be re-signified through the act (or gesture) of filming. The camera is a ship bound for the multiverse; the shot is only a portal, a square within which the different dimensions unfold.
Each cosmos they create gives the sensation of starting from apparently closed contexts. But they expand with each viewing by the spectators. Ultimately, the characters in Blue Heart and The Winter Campaigns can be considered experiments in parallel realities. The difference between the two is that those in the former film are dissatisfied with such experimentation, while those in the latter wander through the spaces, convinced of its necessity. There is a willingness in the characters of The Winter Campaigns to accept an arranged, simulated destiny, as in a videogame. In the characters of Blue Heart, there is a predominant resistance to the immovable, to a destiny drawn by others.
Both authors find in genre cinema the ideal resource for the dismantling of all forms of power: history as a centralizing narrative in The Winter Campaigns, the political and ideological power of the Cuban government in Blue Heart.
The traditional association of science fiction and Westerns with entertainment is used by these films to dismantle, from a playful point of view, what is recognized as authoritarian.
Language, the word as a transnational device, is another distinctive element in Rafael Ramírez and Miguel Coyula. Each language, composed of characteristic sounds, has diverse rhythms and cadences that enrich the narratives of their films. And they situate them in the vast international cinema landscape while, at the same time, constituting intellectual returns of their respective influences and backgrounds.
For these auteurs, cinema is a territory with no rigid delimitations, even when their films fall into a "generic" classification. For Coyula and Ramírez, cinema, as a language, is a repository of their creativity and their ways of apprehending the world. Their cosmogonies drink from the literature they create, the anime and video games they consume, and the dissimilar knowledge they transmute into filmic narratives.
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