‘Land without images’: The Cuban cinema of the absent
By JOSE LUIS APARICIO – 12 July, 2022
RIALTA
What is proper to the archive is its lacuna, its pierced nature. Georges Didi-Huberman, Burn the Image
If we were to gather together each missing part, we would make an inventory of the absence of man.
Juan Carlos Flores, “The excavator in the mine”
In the beginning was the verb. The verb to censor. And its reason, a film.
Which is the same as saying: a thin, tiny skin.
A membrane of lights and shadows.
The history of censorship in revolutionary Cuba (the act of twisting and violating an epidermis) begins with PM (1961), by Orlando Jiménez Leal and Sabá Cabrera Infante, a visual poem about the end of the night: that trance that, in Havana now and then, precedes the most diurnal and absolute darkness.
Orlando and Sabá went in search of the reverse, the underside of the luminous and militant island. They went into the darkness of the meridian past, and found, among the scarce and dirty light of the bars of the port, the feverish Cuba of music and dance.
A decadent country, but more real than that of the propaganda.
The sweaty nation of the poor.
Which is the same as saying: of the specters.
Before the morning horror of a guarded square rose, like a wet dream, the night of PM It was to return to the verses of José Martí (not to the verses of the national hero but to those of the poet):
"Two homelands have I: Cuba and the night - or are they both one?"
This vision of the insular night as the homeland ended up being discussed in an assembly.
"Within the revolution everything, against the revolution nothing. [...] No rights", were the "words to the intellectuals".
Fidel Castro declared the Havana night counterrevolutionary.
P.M., our first banned film, was also our first independent film. The first film that challenged the Revolution's absolute monopoly on the homeland. About its possible forms, its transfigurations.
The new Cuba and its official cinema had been designed as a concentric prison. Independent cinema committed the original sin: it crossed the line that made the effectiveness of the panopticon discontinuous.
In 1961 it was the night strip.
"The Maximum Leader announced that a U.S. invasion was just around the corner. Cuba entered a state of permanent war. All radio and television stations were put on a chain (which curiously was called the chain of freedom) to broadcast patriotic programs and heroic newscasts," Orlando Jimenez Leal tells us in El caso PM: cine, poder y censura (The PM case: cinema, power and censorship).
"I immediately made a four-minute report where I drew a parallel between the militiamen who installed cannons on the Malecón and anti-aircraft machine guns on public buildings, and the people who danced and had fun in the bars," he adds.
The people of PM were trying to reconcile "their historical responsibility with the rumba."
"In response to Castro's official slogan of Homeland or Death, I heard him say one night to a mulatto woman in a bar while she was wiggling: Chico, why not Homeland or Light Injuries?" continues Leal.
In the cinema of a country where everything can be seen, blindness is always voluntary, convenient.
As in that Julio Cortázar's story where the real became indistinguishable from the novel illusion, our cinema rehearsed an early continuity of the parks, bringing an epicenter of Havana within the walls to the quietest meadows of exile.
Without being aware of their communion, Orlando Jiménez Leal and Fernando Villaverde shot, barely a year apart, the first and second reels of the same film.
In the Park (1962, dir. Orlando Jiménez Leal) y El parque (1963, dir. Fernando Villaverde) son las caras A y B de una ciudad bifurcada por los fantasmas de la ruina y el exilio. Al cabo el mismo fantasma, pues ¿qué es el exilio sino ruina desplazada, dividida?
Orlando captured the emigrants in Miami's Bayfront Park. Fernando recorded the regulars in Havana's Central Park. Both films portray decadence: the myth of the greatness of a country in decline.
"Through images that seem distant, the loneliness of the old people, and despite the beauty of the landscape and the joy of the children playing, one can perceive the sadness of exile", says Orlando of his first film in the United States, where he was shipwrecked after PM's censorship.
In the images one breathes a terminal atmosphere, the Republic palpitates: empty ceremonies of a country that tries to recover in the stupor and the nodding of a Sunday of exile. Orlando, perhaps without knowing it, was inaugurating a subgenre.
In the Park is perhaps the first great film of the Cuban diaspora.
Exile, according to Ricardo Piglia, "is utopia. There is no such place.
The first great film about a place that does not exist.
As illusory and at the same time as painful, as real, as the homeland.
This symbolic park holds nothing but impossibility and sadness. It welcomes the one who does not belong, the one who only has one place to be happy and to be part of, but that place only dwells in his mind.
That is why a common scene becomes apocalyptic: an airplane passes by and faces freeze in the gesture of looking at it. The plane is heard, but the camera does not go up: it prefers to concentrate on the tics of this theater of exile. On longing as a reflex act.
Six decades later, In the Park has never been screened in Cuba.
In the Park, not only the gaze caresses, but also the words. Its morose narration, written by filmmaker Miñuca Naredo, Fernando Villaverde's partner and collaborator, is a sort of poetic correlate to the images of the Central Park, the one with the statue of José Martí in the center, although the camera never goes up to look for it.
Fernando is more interested in the statues of the listening nymphs.
And the beings that look like living statues.
In the midst of revolutionary fervor, El parque longs to flow in another time, to capture a cadence that is erased. It dwells on those who build nothing, who could not be integrated into the new society. Those who are rather a vestige or a remnant.
He shifts his gaze to the elderly, to their imperturbable limbo.
He sits next to them in the shadows.
To decipher the eyes of these defeated beings could be a maneuver to remain outside of time. To be out of time, at times, is desirable in an era so consumed by history. It is easy to turn our heads and look at where things happen. It is easy to disdain the inconsequential.
An entire country could become intoxicated with effervescence.
Not to mature: from naivety to decline and death.
The park was barely spared from censorship, because in Cuba, according to Fernando, it is exhibited as little as possible, as a documentary to accompany the films of the communist countries that empty theaters.
It was selected at the 1963 Leipzig Festival, along with other Cuban documentaries produced by the official film institute. After its screening, Soviet filmmaker Roman Karmen asked the organizers to withdraw it from the festival for being "pessimistic", among other sins.
El parque also marked the beginning of a kind of subgenre.
That of the cinema that looks at the country from the outside, although it is born well inside.
A strange cinema, which takes distance, perhaps from a sort of exile.
Fernando Villaverde and his wife Miñuca, a couple of years and censorship later, would join Orlando in exile. His early works glimpsed the germs of failure, doubt and uneasiness. They were also premonitions of the future country.
This Cuba of today, aged and immobile, where young filmmakers have begun to film the old to attest to the shattering of a dream. From vivisection we move on to autopsy. From witnessing the "utopia" to dismantling it.
It is not a country for young people, when before it seemed not to be a country for old people.
In his essay Arde la imagen, Georges Didi-Huberman writes: "It is no longer possible to speak of images without speaking of ashes".
By way of paraphrase we could say: It is not possible to talk about Cuban cinema without talking about its denied or lost films.
"If, for example, we wanted to write the history of portraiture in the Renaissance," Didi-Huberman explains, "it would not be possible to understand anything of this major art without taking into account the nothingness left by the mass destruction, at the time of the Counter-Reformation, of the entire Florentine production of wax votive effigies, set on fire in the cloister of the Santissima Annunziata".
The Cuban film archive, hegemonically ruled by official institutions since 1959, is a compendium of censorship and omissions. The result of endless purges and persistent bonfires. If we wanted to write its history, it would not be possible to understand anything without taking into account its absences.
Not to mention films like El Parque, In the Park or PM.
Just three examples.
Three sharp splinters of a broken image.
According to Cuban creator and theorist Julio García Espinosa: "a country without an image is a country that does not exist". A paranoid reading of his words would support the attempt to annul certain ideas or versions of the nation through the control and kidnapping of a significant portion of its imaginary.
Country that I don't film is a country that doesn't exist.
Not by chance, García Espinosa, a filmmaker as well as an official, was responsible for some of the most traumatic cases of censorship in the history of Cuban cinema. Ironically, his dual role as artist and censor did not keep him safe from bans or from being removed from his position as president of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) after defending a cursed film.
(Cuban intellectuals, according to Che Guevara in Socialism and Man in Cuba, committed the original sin: for not having participated in the struggle “they are not authentically revolutionaries.” This guilt is carried by some artists: it leads them to contradiction and ridicule).
The ICAIC was the first cultural institution founded by the Revolution, just a few months after the triumph. Fidel Castro, like Lenin and Hitler, considered cinema the most important of the arts; to art as the most efficient propaganda.
Alfredo Guevara, Jacobin dandy, served as his tropical Goebbels.
This sugar cinema czar, an outdated neorealist, promoted a cinematographic model with a strong orientation towards socialist realism: a trend that quickly became a rigid, schematic mold, like the cultural policy he represented. The discursive demand was transformed into aesthetic hegemony. Any difference was immediate reason for censorship and marginalization.
The perfect revolutionary cinema is pure formula, programmatic.
Anything that is not pleasing is out of your field of vision.
Both the film genres and the dreamlike and existentialist cinema of the European avant-garde were considered harmful influences on the new filmmakers, since they came from a bourgeois or capitalist conception of culture. Even styles that worked directly with reality, such as cinema verité and free cinema, were condemned for offering a spontaneous, that is, uncontrolled, vision of reality.
Official Cuban cinema fluctuates between comedy of manners, social melodrama and historical-didactic pamphlet. Any attempt at research or experimentation must be consigned within the limits of a popular and naturalistic discourse, easily accessible to an indoctrinated viewer. “Uncomfortable” official cinema negotiates with power: it avoids the essence, the real cause of conflicts.
The “uncomfortable” thing about him is appearance.
A truly critical gesture must be neutralized.
For long decades, the almost absolute monopoly over the means of production and the successive suffocation of dissent allowed the ICAIC to produce a falsified image of the island. Any divergent or anomalous vision was purged. Every heresy found its punishment. In a process of autophagy that is already cyclical, filmmakers who do not conform to the norm are sentenced to prison, ostracism or exile.
Their films, those that survive, become fodder for neglect and oblivion.
The gap, though outlawed and precarious, is in independent cinema.
A movement they try to systematically break, but it always finds ways to survive and reorganize. It often operates on the margins of the law, under harassment, in complete exposure. Its consolidation from the 1990s and, especially, in the 2000s, is one of the most notable acts of resistance in contemporary Cuban culture.
"The archive," to return to Didi-Huberman, "is almost always grayish not only because of the time that has passed, but because of the ashes of everything that surrounded it and burned in flames. When we discover the memory of fire in each sheet that did not burn, we manage to revive the experience of barbarism documented in each document of culture."
Tierra sin imágenes explores "the memory of fire."
In the manner of Michel Foucault, it proposes a sort of archaeology.
It aims to look at the hidden zones of Cuban audiovisuals over the past sixty years: what we could define as its repressed unconscious, its catacombs. Not only those uncomfortable films that barely escaped totalitarian inquisition but also the vestiges of those forcibly lost, aborted works.
Works like El mar (1965) by Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde, taken from its authors during the editing process, mutilated, and disappeared. A melancholic film about two young lovers discussing their future (to stay or leave) while walking along the beach of a ruined town.
Like Buena gente, that script by Nicolás Guillén Landrián, about a man whose only flaw was the desire to kill a political leader. Nicolasito, who had already suffered electroshocks and internments, had that project taken from him in a trial. Any script in Cuba, before it becomes a film, could become incriminating evidence.
Like Un día cualquiera (1991), the performative piece by Marco Antonio Abad and the Ar-De group, which led a prosecutor to ask for a fifteen-year sentence for their “insulting and offensive remarks about President Fidel Castro.” A seized film, perhaps incomplete, that remains inaccessible in the State Security archives.
(In Cuba, Counterintelligence archives better than the Cinematheque.)
What would have become of Cuban cinema had these films been born?
If censorship hadn't intervened to frustrate and distort so many others?
What would our imagination be like if we had the cinema of exile?
If in our cinemas, Fresa y Chocolate (1993, dir. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea & Juan Carlos Tabío) and Conducta Impropia (1984, dir. Orlando Jiménez Leal & Néstor Almendros) coexisted?
Tierra sin imágenes tries to answer these questions, but not from lament or speculation, but from the praxis of a restitutive experience.
It's not a complaint about what wasn't done or what remains to be done.
It’s the act of doing it.
Of gathering all these films in one space.
Of putting them to dialogue, to look at each other, like in a game of mirrors.
Of thinking also about their gaps, the empty spaces.
If we thought about the face of the island, in a sort of aleph, a total or definitive vision, we would have to include these veiled images, these mutilated or lost icons.
We invite you to a séance de cinéma.
To cinema as a séance.
To remount the country from its absence, its ghostly dimension, its negative.
*These words are the introduction to the exhibition Land Without Images: The Absent in Cuban Cinema, a retrospective of alternative/independent Cuban cinema, curated by José Luis Aparicio as part of the presence of the Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR) at documenta fifteen, one of the most significant contemporary art events in the world, held every five years in the German city of Kassel.
You can read the original note here