{"id":15348,"date":"2024-10-30T21:43:54","date_gmt":"2024-10-30T21:43:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/?p=15348"},"modified":"2024-10-30T23:04:44","modified_gmt":"2024-10-30T23:04:44","slug":"guillen-landrian-documents-in-the-shadows-magazine-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/notas\/guillen-landrian-documents-in-the-shadows-magazine-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n: Documents in the Shadows MAGAZINE 2024"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t<div data-elementor-type=\"wp-post\" data-elementor-id=\"15348\" class=\"elementor elementor-15348\" data-elementor-post-type=\"post\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-69cec2e e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"69cec2e\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-94744fa elementor-widget elementor-widget-spacer\" data-id=\"94744fa\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"spacer.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer-inner\"><\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-21f4b9b e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"21f4b9b\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-e783315 elementor-widget__width-inherit elementor-widget elementor-widget-heading\" data-id=\"e783315\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"heading.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<h2 class=\"elementor-heading-title elementor-size-default\">Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n: Documents in the Shadows*<\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-a135d03 e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"a135d03\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-ef4cb25 elementor-widget__width-inherit elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"ef4cb25\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">* Taken from Rafael Rojas: <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Breve historia de la censura y otros ensayos sobre arte y poder en Cuba (A Brief History of Censorship and Other Essays About Art and Power in Cuba)<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">, Rialta Ediciones, Santiago de Quer\u00e9taro, 2023, pp. 199-212.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-0b1b6c6 e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"0b1b6c6\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-d954b39 elementor-widget__width-inherit elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"d954b39\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">By Rafael Rojas<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-e8db727 e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"e8db727\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-1f6c400 elementor-widget__width-initial elementor-widget elementor-widget-image\" data-id=\"1f6c400\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"image.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<img fetchpriority=\"high\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"717\" height=\"1024\" src=\"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/05.-PORTADA-DOSSIER-NICOLACITO-Rafael-Rojas-copy-1-717x1024.jpg\" class=\"attachment-large size-large wp-image-15365\" alt=\"\" srcset=\"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/05.-PORTADA-DOSSIER-NICOLACITO-Rafael-Rojas-copy-1-717x1024.jpg 717w, https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/05.-PORTADA-DOSSIER-NICOLACITO-Rafael-Rojas-copy-1-210x300.jpg 210w, https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/05.-PORTADA-DOSSIER-NICOLACITO-Rafael-Rojas-copy-1-768x1096.jpg 768w, https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/05.-PORTADA-DOSSIER-NICOLACITO-Rafael-Rojas-copy-1-1076x1536.jpg 1076w, https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/05.-PORTADA-DOSSIER-NICOLACITO-Rafael-Rojas-copy-1-1435x2048.jpg 1435w, https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/05.-PORTADA-DOSSIER-NICOLACITO-Rafael-Rojas-copy-1-8x12.jpg 8w, https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/10\/05.-PORTADA-DOSSIER-NICOLACITO-Rafael-Rojas-copy-1-scaled.jpg 1794w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 717px) 100vw, 717px\" \/>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-edd3d1b e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"edd3d1b\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-cc6d179 elementor-widget elementor-widget-spacer\" data-id=\"cc6d179\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"spacer.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer-inner\"><\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-ef3c000 e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"ef3c000\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-ca846bb elementor-widget elementor-widget-text-editor\" data-id=\"ca846bb\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"text-editor.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<p>In recent years in Cuba, there has been a revived interest in the work of Cuban filmmaker Nicol\u00e1s Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n (1938-2003). In 2003, the year Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n died in Miami, in Havana filmmaker Manuel Zayas made a documentary about him, Caf\u00e9 con leche (2003), produced by the Fundaci\u00f3n del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano&#8217;s film and television school, Escuela Internacional de Cine y Televisi\u00f3n. Soon afterward, the scholar of Cuban film culture Dean Luis Reyes wrote what is, to date, the most complete essay about Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n, published in the book La mirada bajo asedio (The Viewpoint Under Siege) (2010). In 2013, Raydel Araoz and Julio Ramos directed the documentary Retornar a La Habana con Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n (Returning to Havana with Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n), an extended interview with the filmmaker&#8217;s widow Gretel Alfonso in an attempt to reconstruct his life between Havana and Miami. [1] Lastly, it is important to mention the documentary Landri\u00e1n (2023) by Ernesto Daranas, which recently premiered at the Venice Biennale.<br>These examinations of Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s films are framed by the new generation of Cuban filmmakers&#8217; re-reading of the documentarian&#8217;s work in the sixties and seventies, as well as the emergence of a new poetics of film that does not hide its indebtedness to this legacy. What does this new examination seek in works rooted in a visual tradition associated with PM by Orlando Jim\u00e9nez Leal and Sab\u00e1 Cabrera Infante and Gente en la playa (People on the Beach) by N\u00e9stor Almendros? How should we think about this archaeological endeavor from the vantage point of 21st-century cinematographic culture? There is an evident attempt to establish Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s work as a reference point for the new &#8220;reflective documentary&#8221; style on the Island, apart from the archaeological purpose of recovering a film aesthetic erased by the official archive. [2]<br>What attracts 21st-century Cuban audiovisual culture to Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n is a cluster of different ideas. On the one hand, there is a vanguardist expressiveness and style in the filmmaker&#8217;s documentaries that is seductive in the way it contrasts with the technical conventionalism characteristic of most contemporary films produced on the Island. The filmmaker Jorge Luis S\u00e1nchez and the critic Dean Luis Reyes have shown that, even beginning with his first short films, En un barrio viejo (In an Old Neighborhood) (1963) and Los del baile (The Dancers) (1965), Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n invoked the more experimental and innovative films of the sixties, influenced by Bazin&#8217;s realism, Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, the Brazilian cinema novo, the free cinema movement, cin\u00e9ma v\u00e9rit\u00e9, and direct cinema. [3]<br>We do not know if Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n read essays about the film Kino-Eye (1924) or the diaries of Dziga Vertov, but he was undoubtedly familiar with the Polish-Russian vanguardist&#8217;s book by the same title. Francisco Llin\u00e1s&#8217; translation of Vertov&#8217;s texts, published by Fundamentos in Madrid, was very popular in Ibero-American circles interested in cin\u00e9ma v\u00e9rit\u00e9 and &#8220;c\u00e1mara viva&#8221; (&#8220;living camera&#8221;) in the sixties and seventies. [4] Vertov considered the Kinok cinematic style and its practitioners, the Kinoks, protagonists of a cinematographic revolution that was actually creating a profession or vocation distinct from that of a filmmaker. [5]<br>One of Vertov&#8217;s interests was in capturing, through live footage, the birth of a &#8220;new man&#8221; in the years following the Bolshevik Revolution. A birth that inevitably had to portray the &#8220;unwieldiness and clumsiness&#8221; of the old &#8220;bourgeois man&#8221; and even the hybridizations of the old and the modern that arise during the larval state of the nascent social subject. [6]<br>Vertov said: <br>The present film [Kino-Eye] represents an assault on our reality by the cameras and prepares the theme of creative labor against a background of class contradictions and everyday life. In disclosing the origins of objects and bread, the camera makes it possible for every worker to acquire, through evidence, the conviction that he, the worker, creates all these things himself, and that consequently they belong to him. [7]<br>This stylistic orientation, updated by sixties vanguardist film movements, was evident in Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s work; the constant succession of close-ups of children and adults looking off into the distance that, combined with abrupt transitions in the background music, transmit a mixture of restlessness and melancholy. Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s documentary-style chronicles, including Ociel del Toa (Ociel of the Toa) (1965), Reportaje (Reportage) (1966), and Retornar a Baracoa (Returning to Baracoa) (1966), utilized these vanguardist cinematographic devices to tell the story of revolutionary transformation as a rupture that engendered violence against its subject, especially in rural areas of the country. Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s view of the revolutionary modernization process shared the same tones of trembling and unease evident in other testimonies from the era, such as Celestino antes del alba (Singing from the Well) by Reinaldo Arenas, some of the poetry collections published by El Puente, [8] or books about the Island of Pinos and Baracoa by leftist American travelers like Leroy McLucas, Elizabeth Sutherland Mart\u00ednez, and Jos\u00e9 Yglesias. [9]<br>Like the Russian revolution in the twenties and the Mexican revolution in the thirties, the Cuban revolution led to a socialist modernization process that removed the traditional enclaves of Catholic, bourgeois, and liberal culture from the prior republican period. Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n shared with the writers of his generation, as well as the filmmakers of the prior generation like Tom\u00e1s Guti\u00e9rrez Alea, the view that this modernization process entailed a social fracture where the revolutionary power imposed a new political order through violence, absolutism, and the very same tactics used by the previous regime, like racism, machismo, and homophobia. [10]<br>There are moments in the writing of poets published by El Puente, for example in La marcha de los hurones (The March of the Loners) (1960) by Isel Rivero or La conquista (The Conquest) (1960) and De la espera y el silencio (From Waiting and Silence) (1961) by Jos\u00e9 Mario, that exposed this fracture. Instead of unity, conviction, or enthusiasm, these poets spoke about &#8220;separation,&#8221; &#8220;loneliness,&#8221; and &#8220;resistance.&#8221; [11] The Revolution could be a &#8220;rupture by an ideal&#8221; or even the &#8220;pain that hides where one is not free,&#8221; but it was always a socially and politically combative sort of revolution. [12] As in Vertov&#8217;s poetics of film, the class struggle was still alive and well after the Revolution: nothing was farther from socialist modernization than the supposed post-classist harmony of Stalinism. As Slavoj \u017di\u017eek puts it, this was one of the clearest differences between Leninism and Stalinism: under Lenin, the authorities openly admitted to using terror as a tactic, while under Stalin, terror became a dark and obscene supplement to the political discourse that was never publicly acknowledged. [13]<br>Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s poetics of film moved from a visual documentation of this fracture to a more decided questioning of the Cuban government&#8217;s modernization efforts, beginning in 1968, which coincided with the overt alignment of the Island&#8217;s cultural authorities with the Soviet model. His documentary essays Coffea Ar\u00e1biga (1968) and Desde La Habana \u00a11969! Recordar (From Havana: 1969! Remember) (1969) transcend the textuality of chronicle or reportage while introducing a delirious and, at times, psychedelic discourse that put the rationale of the socialist State and its leaders in their place. Even though in 1971 Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n would return to journalistic storytelling, in the film Taller de L\u00ednea y 18 (Garage on the Corner of L\u00ednea and 18th), the threshold of representation had been crossed by a more tangible reflection of the filmmaker&#8217;s subjectivity, which was moving toward questioning revolutionary reasoning. <br>Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n, along with the &#8220;Generaci\u00f3n del 68&#8221; [14] in Europe and the Americas, justifiably grouped together Reason, Revolution, and Modernity, which challenged the Cold War&#8217;s black-and-white or binary partition of the world. Like Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, the Frankfurt School in Germany, and the Tel Quel group in France, the documentarian inscribed the state socialism that was being constructed in Cuba\u2014and based on the Soviet model\u2014within the same process of political reification of Western rationalism. The fetishization of reason and progress that had reached its peak with the atomic bomb did not exclude the megalomaniacal projects of real socialism, whose presence in Cuba were palpable in the Cord\u00f3n de La Habana, [15] the Zafra de los 10 Millones [16] in the seventies, and the charismatic messianism centered around the figure of Fidel Castro. <br>Like Heberto Padilla, Reinaldo Arenas, or the writers of El Puente, Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n sketched his own portrait of the Stalinization of Cuban socialism. A sketch that would make Cuba an comprehensible space for the modernization project, in its most instrumental and developmentalist form during the Cold War. Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s film essays would be a protest against the closing of that Weberian iron cage, made up of bureaucracy and mythomania, capitalism and communism, that appealed to portraying drugs, psychedelics, insanity, sexuality, religion, and rock as the irrational and repressed backgrounds of the new socialist order. Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s politics of representation converged in the generation-wide exploration of the limits of the technocratic rationalism that castrated the emancipatory and utopian impulses of the counterculture. [17]<br>Within Cuban film culture in the sixties, Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s work stands out for being situated in a specific flank that criticized pro-Soviet socialist developmentalism. In general, the questioning of this model was associated with criticism of socialism&#8217;s institutional bureaucratization, a type of criticism best expressed in fictional and documentary form by Tom\u00e1s Guti\u00e9rrez Alea and Santiago \u00c1lvarez. Both filmmakers, but above all Guti\u00e9rrez Alea, personified using film to refute the Cuban system&#8217;s movement toward real socialism, which kept the figure of Fidel Castro safe and contrasted a heterodox and originalist idea of the Cuban Revolution against a dogmatic distortion, influenced by contact with the Soviet bloc. Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n avoided these nuances and confirmed an organic assimilation of Communist modernization from the Cold War that Herbert Marcuse laid out in his book Soviet Marxism (1958). [18]<br>If in Dial\u00e9ctica del espectador (The Viewer Dialectic) (1982), Guti\u00e9rrez Alea asserted that the artistry and spectacle of cinema impedes films from being subjected to an aesthetic straitjacket to make them fit into an &#8220;ideal reality&#8221; preconceived by ideology or politics, Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s starting point was to ironize political discourses through art, leaving behind such preconceptions. [19] \u201cIdentification\u201d and \u201cdistancing,\u201d incubated from the Aristotelian tradition all the way to the social realism of Brechtian dramaturgy, while pillars of the modern strategy of representation, were deliberately abandoned by the documentarian. The premises of the creator of Ociel del Toa had less to do with the dilemmas of learned enlightenment than with a rebellion against the encr\u00e1tico (produced under the protection of the powers that be) rationalism that critical film culture upheld.<br>The rejection of developmentalism was either anti-bureaucratic, as with Guti\u00e9rrez Alea and Santiago \u00c1lvarez, or it was Third-worldist and decolonizing, in the sense of how Edmundo Desnoes, author of the novel and the script for Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) (1968), interpreted the work of Wifredo Lam. [20] But it rarely led to a central questioning of the modernizing rationale promoted by state socialism, as in the work of Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n. This quality lent an angle of insurgence or iconographic rebellion to Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s poetics of film; while this rebellion offered alternatives to the official image of power, it proposed a &#8220;sovereignty of invisibility,&#8221; similar to the one suggested by Carlos Ossa in his study of political cinema in Latin America. [21]<br>Facing the persistent construction of the collective subject\u2014the masses, the people, the nation, &#8220;social organizations&#8221;\u2014as the motor behind history and politics, Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n put forth delirium and the toxicity of personal memory as places of enunciation. In his documentaries, there is a reading of Cuban political reality in the sixties and of the entire modern history of the Island that offers an alternative platform to understand the national or revolutionary &#8220;being.&#8221; An autonomous &#8220;visual strategy,&#8221; as Ossa writes, that is nevertheless inscribed in the community connections that created vanguardist political cinema in Latin America during the sixties and seventies. [22]<br>In Desde La Habana \u00a11969! Recordar, for example, the filmmaker attempted to create a historical collage of the Cuban experience ten years after the Revolution that would encapsulate both a single decade and an entire century of modern national life. Preceded by a quote from the lyrics of the song \u201cMother Nature\u2019s Son\u201d by the Beatles, the Island&#8217;s historical milestones, condensed in Fidel Castro&#8217;s hegemonic tale of &#8220;hundred years of struggle&#8221; (wars of independence, American occupation, dictatorships of Machado and Batista, the attack on the Moncada barracks, the deaths of Che Guevara and Jes\u00fas Men\u00e9ndez, the disappearance of Camilo Cienfuegos\u2026), follow each other in quick succession like flashes in a never-ending light show of power. But at the same time, the personal recollection of the documentarian did not hide the transfer of technology brought about by the connection to the Soviet Union or the forced herd mentality of revolutionary projects. <br>The tension between a revolutionary process inscribed in the leftist and nationalist or populist paradigm, in Latin American and the Caribbean in the middle of the 20th century, and an accelerated process of institutionalization based on the Soviet model, during the Cold War, is reflected in the text of Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s films. Desde La Habana \u00a11969! Recordar is a long interrogation into this transition; in fact, question marks constantly appear on screen, and the questions &#8220;What?&#8221; and &#8220;Why?&#8221; are reiterated when it comes to the Cord\u00f3n de La Habana or the moon landing, which culminates in the superimposed voices of Nicol\u00e1s Guill\u00e9n and Fidel Castro. While the filmmaker reads his poem \u201cEleg\u00eda a Jes\u00fas Men\u00e9ndez\u201d (&#8220;Elegy to Jes\u00fas Men\u00e9ndez&#8221;), the Cuban leader reads his farewell letter to Che Guevara. The deaths of both men confirm the mutation of the national political project, and Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n mixes in, during these final scenes, the voices of the dead\u2014Guevara, Cienfuegos, Men\u00e9ndez\u2026\u2014with those of the living\u2014Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n and Fidel\u2014who represent, at the same time, two incarnations of the father figure. <br>Here there is a poetics and a politics of memory that highlights, once again, the role of mourning in any process of modernization, whether it be liberal or Marxist. Reinhart Koselleck has referred to this connection in a book about the cult of the dead and national memory in modern Germany. [23] Koselleck observes that in every transition toward modernity, there is a functional use of the representation of death in favor of the survivors, which generates a constant feeling of mourning. [24] This mechanism facilitates, at the same time, the capture of politics by affect and emotion, providing the State and its leaders with an inherited power over the collective psychology and national culture. Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s documentaries expose, like few other artistic documents from the sixties and seventies, this relationship between mourning and politics in Cuba.<br>There is a poetics of memory in these films that expose the weight of the historical in the political construction of Cuban socialism. The Revolution called into question the entire history of Cuba and the Island&#8217;s place in the world. It was a change in space and time that disrupted the country&#8217;s geographical and cultural coordinates. From there, many current rituals\u2014Fidel&#8217;s speeches, televised and print propaganda, the lists of the day&#8217;s anniversaries, the civic calendar, flowers for Camilo, the symbolic name for each year\u2014appeared as ciphers of a new temporality. <br>The filmmaker warned that the &#8220;discontinuity of memory&#8221;, as Koselleck called it, had been broken with the Revolution. [25] This break did not entail a perennial anchoring in a negative representation of the past, like the one reproduced by State-run media, but rather an interrogation of the present as the assumed ending or resolution of Cuba&#8217;s history. <br>Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n filmed people waiting in never-ending lines and apathetic and helpless faces, and he spliced in basic and uncomfortable questions directed at official triumphalism. All of this was surrounded by a specific moment in official discourse in Havana in the late seventies, where the banning of the Beatles added to a environment marked by growing intolerance and repression of the counterculture, as seen in the photo series My Sixties by Jos\u00e9 Figueroa, which portrays the hippie youth in El Vedado, [26] identified by Cristina Vives as one of many signs of cultural resistance against socialism&#8217;s civil homogenization process. [27] Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s entire body of work is situated within this iconic subversion, a Cuban 1968 countering the advance of the aesthetic canon of socialist realism on the Island. <br>Several passages in Guti\u00e9rrez Alea&#8217;s film Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968) that Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n inserted into Desde La Habana \u00a11969! Recordar functioned as part of the balance of the sixties as well as an acknowledgement of belonging to an artistic film community that shared the same sense of malaise caused by the encroaching orthodox State-sanctioned ideology about Cuban culture. Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n situated his own documentary films in the tradition of criticism of the official iconocracy\u2014to use Iv\u00e1n de la Nuez&#8217;s term\u2014of the Cuban government, founded in large part by Guti\u00e9rrez Alea in Memorias del subdesarrollo, but that, in reality, got started years earlier with PM by Sab\u00e1 Cabrera Infante and Orlando Jim\u00e9nez Leal and in N\u00e9stor Almendros&#8217; first short films. [28] In any case, Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s early homage to Guti\u00e9rrez Alea was a sign of aesthetic and political identity that came before the logic of reception of revolutionary cinema that later generations of Cuban filmmakers have espoused.<br>A good indicator of this is the proposed re-reading of contemporary documentary films in Cuba, as demonstrated in the film sampler Cine sumergido (Submerged Cinema) (2013), promoted by the academics Luis Duno-Gottberg and Michael J. Horswell, that circulated in 2014 among different universities in the United States. [29] The documentary essay approach of young filmmakers like Dami\u00e1n Sainz, Laimir Fano, Armando Cap\u00f3, and Adri\u00e1n Replansky show a poetics of film that has an undeniable precedent in the work of Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n. In recent years, the documentarian&#8217;s film Coffea Ar\u00e1biga has been a frequently visited place in the archive of cultural resistance in Cuba as well as an example of the limits of experimentation and vanguardism in the sixties.<br>The youngest Cuban filmmakers&#8217; innovation in form vindicates the poetics of artistic or auteur filmmaking, in opposition to the commercial paradigm. Nevertheless, this gesture, prevalent in reflexive documentary filmmaking, also avoids the most common technical and stylistic resources of Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s generation of vanguardist cinematography. The rejection of depoliticization in Cuban intellectual thought that has appeared across different tactical platforms over the last three decades clearly points toward the place of enunciation in the new digital and technological era, which influences the reading of these artistic documents that are relegated to the shadows of official discourse. <br>Desde La Habana \u00a11969! Recordar began with direct images of the explosions of atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, situating the viewer in the context of the Cold War or, more specifically, in the reality of a world under the threat of nuclear annihilation. The Island&#8217;s new documentary essays update Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n&#8217;s localization of the Island&#8217;s storyline within the global order, which transcends peripheral demarcations like those of the Third World, developing countries, or central geographies like the West or modernity. The new Cuban documentary fights for a reinvention of cultural space, one that encompasses the Island, the diaspora, and the world that is collapsed, inside and out, by both communities, which are one, two, and several all at once and whose ritual of choice is to make the submerged visible.<\/p>\n<p><b>Rafael Rojas<\/b> holds a PhD in History from El Colegio de M\u00e9xico, where he is a professor and researcher at the Centro de Estudios Hist\u00f3ricos. He is the editor of the magazine Historia Mexicana and a member of the Mexican academy of history, Academia Mexicana de la Historia. He is a contributor to the Spanish newspaper El Pa\u00eds and a member of the editorial board of the magazine Letras Libres. His latest book is La epopeya del sentido. Ensayos sobre el concepto de Revoluci\u00f3n en M\u00e9xico (The Epopee of Meaning: Essays About the Concept of Revolution in Mexico) (2022).<\/p>\n<p>[1] Julio Ramos: \u201cRegresar a La Habana con Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n. Entrevista a Gretel Alfonso\u201d, La Fuga, n.o 15, Santiago de Chile, 2013, &lt;http:\/\/www.lafuga.cl\/regresar-a-la-habana-con-guillen-landrian\/662&gt;.<\/p>\n<p>[2] Dean Luis Reyes: La mirada bajo asedio. El documental reflexivo cubano (The Viewpoint Under Siege: The Cuban Reflective Documentary), Editorial Oriente, Santiago de Cuba, 2010, pp. 107-149.<\/p>\n<p>[3] Ibidem, p. 19.<\/p>\n<p>[4] Dziga Vertov: El cine ojo (The Kino-Eye), Fundamentos, Madrid, 1973, pp. 9-10. (Translator&#8217;s note: the quoted phrases here are my translations of the author&#8217;s references to this 1973 Spanish translation of Vertov&#8217;s work, not direct quotations of an English translation of said work.)<\/p>\n<p>[5] Ibidem, p. 15.<\/p>\n<p>[6] Ibidem, p. 17.<\/p>\n<p>[7] Ibidem, p. 44. (Translator&#8217;s note: this extended quote in English is not my translation, but rather taken from p. 34 of Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, translated by Kevin O&#8217;Brien and edited by Annette Michelson, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984.)<\/p>\n<p>[8] Translator&#8217;s note: a post-revolution literary project that faced repression from the Cuban government.<\/p>\n<p>[9] For more about the critical strategy of some of these viewpoints, somewhere between solidarity and dissidence, see Rafael Rojas: Fighting Over Fidel: The New York Intellectuals and the Cuban Revolution, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2015, pp. 195-219.<\/p>\n<p>[10] See Alejandro de la Fuente: A Nation for All: Race, Inequality, and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba , The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2001; Lillian Guerra: Visions of Power in Cuba. Revolution, Redemption, and Resistance, 1959-1971, The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 2012, pp. 227-255; Abel Sierra Madero: \u201cEl trabajo os har\u00e1 hombres. Masculinizaci\u00f3n nacional, trabajo forzado y control social en Cuba durante los a\u00f1os 60\u201d (&#8220;National Masculinization, Forced Labor, and Social Control in Cuba in the 60s&#8221;), Cuban Studies, vol. 44, Pittsburgh University, 2016, pp. 309-349.<\/p>\n<p>[11] Jes\u00fas J. Barquet (ed.): Ediciones El Puente en La Habana de los a\u00f1os 60. Lecturas cr\u00edticas y libros de poes\u00eda (Ediciones El Puente in Havana in the 60s: Critical Readings and Poetry Books), Ediciones del Azar, Chihuahua, M\u00e9xico, 2011, pp. 183 y 250. (Translator&#8217;s note: the quoted phrases here are my translations of the author&#8217;s quotations of this work.)<\/p>\n<p>[12] Ibidem, pp. 182 y 198.<\/p>\n<p>[13] Slavoj \u017di\u017eek: Repeating Lenin, Zagreb, Arkzin, 2002.<\/p>\n<p>[14] Translator&#8217;s note: a vanguardist movement of experimental writers.<\/p>\n<p>[15] Translator&#8217;s note: the Cuban government&#8217;s proposed agricultural greenbelt around the city of Havana.<\/p>\n<p>[16] Translator&#8217;s note: the Cuban government&#8217;s proposed goal of producing 10 million tons of sugar in 1970.<\/p>\n<p>[17] Theodore Roszak: The Making of a Counterculture, The University of California Press, San Francisco, 1995, pp. 164-170. Before Roszak, the anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker had called attention to the ability of Hollywood films to deactivate the ethics of liberation via a &#8220;Dream Factory.&#8221; See Hortense Powdermaker: Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers, Little, Brown, Hollywood, CA, 1950.<\/p>\n<p>[18] Herbert Marcuse: Soviet Marxism: A Critical Analysis, Columbia University Press, New York, 1958.<\/p>\n<p>[19] Tom\u00e1s Guti\u00e9rrez Alea: Dial\u00e9ctica del espectador (The Viewer Dialectic), Ediciones Uni\u00f3n, Havana, 1982, pp. 39-52. (Translator&#8217;s note: the quoted phrases here are my translations of the author&#8217;s quotations of this work.)<\/p>\n<p>[20] Edmundo Desnoes: Lam: azul y negro (Lam: Blue and Black), Casa de las Am\u00e9ricas, Havana, 1963, p. 19; Edmundo Desnoes: Punto de vista (Point of View), Cocuyo, Havana, 1967, pp. 59-97.<\/p>\n<p>[21] Carlos Ossa: El ojo mec\u00e1nico. Cine pol\u00edtico y comunidad en Am\u00e9rica Latina (The Mechanical Eye: Political Cinema and Community in Latin America), Fondo de Cultura Econ\u00f3mica, Mexico City, 2013, pp. 91-104. (Translator&#8217;s note: the quoted phrases here are my translations of the author&#8217;s quotations of this work.)<\/p>\n<p>[22] Ibidem, pp. 138-152.<\/p>\n<p>[23] Reinhart Koselleck: Modernidad, culto a la muerte y memoria nacional (Modernity, Cult of the Dead, and National Memory), Centro de Estudios Constitucionales y Pol\u00edticos, Madrid, 2011, pp. LIV-LXV. (Translator&#8217;s note: the quoted phrases here are my translations of the author&#8217;s quotations of this work.)<\/p>\n<p>[24] Ibidem, pp. 69-87.<\/p>\n<p>[25] Ibidem, pp. 39-52. For more about the role of affect in Cuban Culture, see Jos\u00e9 Quiroga: Cuban Palimpsests, The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2005, pp. 197-204; and Rafael Rojas: Tumbas sin sosiego. Revoluci\u00f3n, disidencia y exilio del intelectual cubano (Tombs Without Rest: Resolution, Dissidence, and Exile of the Cuban Intellectual), Anagrama, Barcelona, 2006, pp. 11-44.<\/p>\n<p>[26] Translator&#8217;s note: a neighborhood in Havana.<\/p>\n<p>[27] Cristina Vives: \u201cCultura y contracultura en tiempos de Revoluci\u00f3n&#8221; (&#8220;Culture and Counterculture in Times of Revolution\u201d), Arte Cubano, n.o 2, Havana, 2013; Jos\u00e9 Figueroa: Jos\u00e9 Figueroa. Un autorretrato cubano \/ A Cuban Self-Portrait, Turner, Madrid, 2010.<\/p>\n<p>[28] Iv\u00e1n de la Nuez: Iconocracia. Imagen del poder y poder de las im\u00e1genes en la Cuba contempor\u00e1nea (Iconocracy: Images of Power and the Power of Images in Contemporary Cuba), Turner, Madrid, 2015, pp. 7-15.<\/p>\n<p>[29] Luis Duno-Gottberg and Michael J. Horswell: Sumergido\/Submerged: Cine Alternativo Cubano\/Alternative Cuban Cinema, Literal Publishing, Mexico City, 2013.<\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-ed2bfe3 e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"ed2bfe3\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-0254657 elementor-widget elementor-widget-spacer\" data-id=\"0254657\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"spacer.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer-inner\"><\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-85e1541 e-flex e-con-boxed e-con e-parent\" data-id=\"85e1541\" data-element_type=\"container\" data-e-type=\"container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"e-con-inner\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-element elementor-element-97d3501 elementor-widget elementor-widget-spacer\" data-id=\"97d3501\" data-element_type=\"widget\" data-e-type=\"widget\" data-widget_type=\"spacer.default\">\n\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-widget-container\">\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer\">\n\t\t\t<div class=\"elementor-spacer-inner\"><\/div>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Guill\u00e9n Landri\u00e1n: Documents in the Shadows* * Taken from Rafael Rojas: Breve historia de la censura y otros ensayos sobre arte y poder en Cuba (A Brief History of Censorship and Other Essays About Art and Power in Cuba), Rialta Ediciones, Santiago de Quer\u00e9taro, 2023, pp. 199-212. By Rafael Rojas In recent years in Cuba, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"disabled","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15348","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-notas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15348"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15348"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15348\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15368,"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15348\/revisions\/15368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15348"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15348"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/festivaldecineinstar.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15348"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}