Material Ghost: Annual Film Magazine (N. 1, 2024)
Directors | Tania Bruguera and Carlos Aníbal Alonso
Editors | Dean Luis Reyes and José Luis Aparicio
Production | Leila Montero
Cover design and illustrations | Claudia Patricia Pérez Olivera
Translate | Emily Hunsburger (Tertulia)
Editorial coordination, correction and layout | Rialta Ediciones
Editorial Council | Jonathan Ali, Dunja Fehimović, Eliecer Jiménez Almeida, Nils Longueira Borrego, Isdanny Morales, Rafael Ramírez, Julio Ramos, Rafael Rojas
ISBN| 9781961722316
Publisher : Rialta Ediciones / Hannah Arendt Institute of Artivism (INSTAR)
Publication | October 2024
Number of pages | 202
Format | 254 x 178 mm
Binding | Paperback
Index
Dossier: “Ideas on Gilberto Pérez”
From Materiality to Eloquence / Andrian Martin
The Material Ghost. Film and Their Medium / Gilberto Pérez
Dossier: “Contemporary Cuban Cinema: Limits and Possibility”
Dossier: “Nicolás Guillén Landrián”
Guillén Landrián: Documents in the Shadows / Rafael Rojas
Editorial
Editorial
Fantasma Material (Material Ghost) was born disturbing a specter: that of an unlocalized type of cinema, one that seeks its sovereignty of expression outside the fixed coordinates of form and production, one that is propelled toward self-invention by the desire to exist as a celebration of human imagination.
Dossier
“Ideas on Gilberto Pérez”
From Materiality to Eloquence
Adrian Martín
In the Rotterdam Film Festival of early 2024, a theme developed among a network of three films which all looked back, in different ways, to the Pan-African movements of liberation in the early 1960s. Billy Woodberry’s Mário was probably the best-publicised of the trio, due to the director’s presence at the…
The Material Ghost. Film and Their Medium / Gilberto Pérez
Gilberto Pérez
The Havana where I grew up was a great town for going to the movies. It was Havana in the fifties, under the dictator Batista, so it was not the best of times. But it was a good time and place for a kid to become a moviegoer. On the screens of my city movies from all over the world unfolded: we got all the movies from…
Dossier
“Contemporary Cuban Cinema: Limits and Possibility”
Presentation
For more than twenty years, Cuban cinema has been experiencing mutations (in its means of production, expressive dialects, themes, and styles). The total loss of the political and cultural autonomy of the Cuban film institute (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos – ICAIC), the worsening of the economic…
Ángel Pérez
More than categories, I would like to talk about processes. In fact, I would even prefer to describe states. Alfonso Reyes used to say that names are transcendental. What are we talking about when we say “Cuban cinema?” Is there an ontological distinction between “Cuban cinema” and “Cuban audiovisual media?”…
Carlos Melián
Mondays are Día del Espectador (Moviegoer’s Day) at movie theaters in the Gràcia neighborhood in Barcelona. Tickets only cost 4 euros instead of 8. I’m not always able to go, but at the Verdi theater you can see works by the most interesting filmmakers from all across the cinematographic panorama…
Carlos Quintela
Cuban cinema, with its limited annual output, is like a raft struggling to stay afloat in the middle of a storm in the Florida straits. Each of these films, valuable in their own right, takes on the challenge of capturing the vast and complex reality of a country that can’t fit into an hour and a half. This task is also a significant…
Dean Luis Reyes
My primary interest is in locating Cuban cinema. It is clearly no longer found in the historical mode of institutional production that led to “ICAIC authorship,” as Michael Chanan [1] calls the space for creation that, with support from the State, obtained greater visibility and paved the way for master classes on national…
Dunja Fehimovic
I’ve gone back and forth, but I plan to respond to these questions—valid and valuable as they are—by not responding. I’m not the right person to go out on a limb and attempt to describe current Cuban cinema. But even more so, I’m not sure how much it interests me. I’ll try to explain what I mean. I’m thinking about…
Eliecer Jiménez Almeida
Cuban cinema, like Cuba itself, is slipping away. It’s a vague sort of slipping away that crosses all kinds of borders. This prolonged slipping away, which began in 1959, has continued until the current day, becoming especially acute in the last 10 years, during which the mass exodus of filmmakers has created remarkable…
Jonathan Ali
In 2006 I became a programmer for the newly founded Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. It was exciting to be a part of this initiative in my native country. For far too long, cinema there had meant one thing—Hollywood—and here was an intervention seeking to rupture the status quo. In addition to bringing to audiences…
Juan Carlos Rodríguez
After spending a few years collecting dust in the archives, the films of Nicolás Guillén Landrián (also known as “Nicolasito”) began to be seen again at the beginning of the current century. More than one critic has recognized the importance of this moment for contemporary Cuban cinema. [3] Without a doubt, the return of…
Miguel Coyula
It’s wrong to judge Cuba’s independent cinema the way that independent cinema from First World countries is judged, since totalitarian cultural policies don’t exist in those countries. Even if the funding for a film made in Cuba comes from other countries, having a production credit from the Cuban film institute…
Walfrido Dorta
The sentence that serves as the first part of the title of this text is (almost) obviously ironic (it’s a distortion of what Manuel Vázquez Montalbán said about Francoism). The quote cannot be attributed to any filmmaker or film critic, but we can imagine a moment in which it might be said. It is a hypothetical moment…
Zaira Zarza
In current times, Cuban filmmakers are experiencing and interpreting the affective and emotional significance of exile in different ways. Melinda Meyer DeMott defines “emotional exile” as when emigrants can legally return to their country of origin, but due to the radical cultural shifts they undergo while living…
Dossier
Nicolás Guillén Landrián
Guillén Landrián: Documents in the Shadows / Rafael Rojas
Rafael Rojas
In recent years in Cuba, there has been a revived interest in the work of Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián (1938-2003). In 2003, the year Guillén Landrián died in Miami, in Havana filmmaker Manuel Zayas made a documentary about him, Café con leche (2003), produced by the Fundación del Nuevo Cine…
Ociel del Toa: Queer Landrián / Néstor Díaz de Villegas
Néstor Díaz de Villegas
Roberto Valera’s impressionist musical score for Nicolás Guillén Landrián’s film Ociel del Toa invokes, from the very first scene, the spirit of Claude Debussy’s poem L’après-midi d’un faune (Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun). The soundtrack underpins the image of the film’s protagonist, a young man from Cuba’s…
The Uncanny Case of Reportaje / Ruth Goldberg
Ruth Goldberg
Twelve years after his death and resurrection, Nicolás Guillén Landrián is now recognized as a vital innovator in the history of Cuban cinema; inspiring an outpouring of homage among the younger Cuban documentarians who have reclaimed his legacy. The claim that “Alvarez, who knows everything, teaches…