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; Nicolasito, who doubts, reveals” (Zayas qtd. in Guerra 342) has been an often-repeated and vitally important framing of Landrián’s body of work to these filmmakers who Dean Luis Reyes and others have recognized as “los hijos de Landriån.” Many of them echo similar valorizations along a central theme: “he lets us see for ourselves instead of teaching us what to think” (Barriga interview with the author, 2013). The larger implicit claim at stake is that Landrián documents and reveals a previously untold truth in contradicting the official triumphalist narrative of the era. This framing of Landrián’s work as a revelation of truth that allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions is a central element of his canonization.

Framings like these have a great deal to teach us about how Landrián’s work matters and is taken up in the present, and point towards important future investigations into ideologies of reception and retrospection. His work is imbricated in and inextricable from the definition and policing of the words “revolutionary” and “dissident,” and from the larger struggles over representation of the Revolution that haunt the historiography of Cuban documentary film.

The Uncanny Case of Reportaje

There are examples to support Zayas’ framing of the distinction between Alvarez-as-panfletero and Landrián-as-oracle, and there is also (at least) one case that resists this categorization. In Reportaje (1966, also known as Plenaria Campesina) his most didactic and cynical film, Landrián does teach from a position of knowing, and in a radically innovative way that deserves our close attention: applying the disjunctive techniques of Surrealism to the task.

In satirizing the official documentaries of the period that Lillian Guerra (Guerra 340)  has described as the “hyper-real” representation of the Cuban Revolution, Reportaje – itself a masterwork of constructed visual rhetoric – heartily embraces the rhetorical methods it proposes to critique, leading the viewer into a dizzying labyrinth of questions about subjectivity and political filmmaking, and disturbing our understanding of the documentary form.

Here, Landrián harnesses the seductive power of orchestration in the documentary context, inserting provocative staged enactments, unsettling asynchronies between sound and image, thematic music, slow motion and Foley sound effects into an allegedly simple “reportaje.” Even as it revels in its own ironic subjectivity and constructed-ness, however, at first glance Reportaje also presents a convincing realism; forcing the viewer to tread carefully in examining its truth claims, as the film systematically undermines any certainty about the historical record as recorded by ICAIC or the documentary form itself.  The claims for Landrián as a filmmaker who refuses to fix the meanings of his films in the ways typically associated with propaganda films may inadvertently do the filmmaker a disservice in this case, because Reportaje, which, on the surface, looks like his simplest effort, turns out, on closer scrutiny to be one of his most impressive, persuasive and formally complex orchestrations.

One of the most effectively destabilizing aspects of the artist’s orchestrated vision of these events, however, is that Landrián also problematizes the question of whether any of his own film is “true” in the way that has been claimed, in drawing our attention to the audiovisual constructions he uses to ensure that the viewer sees only what he sees. For all of its artistic beauty, reflexive experimentation and poetic elegance, the more he tampers with the sound and sequencing of the original footage in the service of imposing a single perspective, the more Landrián gleefully appropriates and subverts the traditional techniques and methods of the propaganda film.

A Note on Documentary and Strategies of Representation:

While we may understand that documentary, as a genre, is a complex negotiation between filmmaker and reality, the truth claim is still at the heart of most documentary work: i.e., that an unmediated truth has been captured because unscripted materials were observed happening in nature- and thus, the text built out of them is truthful as well (Godmilow qtd in Shapiro, 90). Beyond producing a description of the events, however, documentarians also have the rare opportunity to engage the audience in considering the politics and “ideological constructions that are buried in representations of history – constructions as basic and enduring as the oppositions good/evil, normal/abnormal, and the big one, us/them” (Godmilow qtd in Shapiro, 91).

Reportaje builds its passionate argument on a complex framing of the dichotomy between “us” and “them,” by creating a layered, polarizing tension between binary opposites. Landrian represents the us/them binary as “us,” (the campesinos, with whom the viewer is directed to identify), and “them” (the revolution, which the filmmaker represents as an external imposition). The us/them dichotomy is further developed in the sharp contrast Landrián draws between “official” culture (for him, a menace) and what he sees as an “authentic” rural culture.

In the form of the film itself, Landrian charges the tension between the constructed “us” and the constructed “them” in the discontinuity between sound and image that Marcel Beltrán has described as a masterful “semantic game between what is seen and what is heard” (Qtd in Valladares) which I will examine here in detail.

Landrián’s uses of discontinuity and asynchrony come directly from the Surrealist documentary tradition (Reyes) of appropriating the themes and disjunctive methods of the dream world to explore taboo subjects. Indeed, more than anything else, Landrián’s films function as the unconscious of Cuban cinema, in much the same way that our own dreams give us the opportunity to know aspects of ourselves that might normally remain hidden. It is fitting, then, that in this Surrealist documentary homage, Landrián’s principle strategy is one that psychoanalysis attributes to the dream work: the “splitting” of objects and affects into good objects of affection and bad objects of hostility; using thematic music and the entire range of tools of audiovisual communication to achieve his goals. These techniques deserve a closer look.

 El muerto delante y la gritería atrás

 The third film to utilize footage that Landrian shot in Oriente in 1965, Reportaje documents a revolutionary rite performed out in the Cuban countryside. Before the film begins, 90 seconds of jarringly discordant music over the opening credits set the tone for the viewer to expect a tense and unpleasant dramatic experience to follow. The incongruity between the 12-tone score and the pastoral imagery of the film creates a powerful surreal charge, jolting the viewer to attention. This is one of the forms of asynchrony that most characterizes Reportaje: the use of “anempathic” music (music of a different character than the images on the screen) in the classic counterpoint of sound and image as described by Eisenstein (Donnelly 34). Throughout the film, Landrián leverages this discordant musical score and dramatic pauses of silence to create a sense of tension and aversion to the events. Against this avant-garde soundscape, a group of villagers parades a coffin along a dusty road in imitation of a funeral procession. The modern score utilizing a piercing flute and harshly strummed piano is wildly at odds with the rustic country setting where signs of modernity are barely evident.

The sounds of footsteps marching on the dirt road are amplified over this sequence in a characteristic Landrián distortion of sounds[1]– his homage to Bresson. The grammar of film language suggests that we are hearing the sound of the action on the screen (the marchers marching), but this is one of the film’s many reflexive mis-directions. What we hear is not the sound of the group’s actual footsteps. The amplified marching is a Foley sound effect, added during post-production to dreamlike effect.[2] The orchestration of the soundscape forms a key rhetorical strategy at the film’s most impactful moments, here imposed over the edited images to suggest a solemn forced march.

Enactment is another of the key elements borrowed from fiction film in this sequence. According to interviews, the march was not planned as part of the day’s events, but Landrián wanted to show the mass of people marching together and they obliged in following his direction (Zayas).  It is one of several moments in which Landrián directs the campesinos to do what he wants them as if they are actors in a fiction film. (Contemporary viewers who might hope to mine the documentary text for evidence of how the campesinos felt about the revolutionary process in 1965 suddenly find themselves down a rabbit hole, realizing that everything we have seen and heard thus far is an orchestration: the march itself, the Foley sound effects, the emotional influence of the music, and the serious expressions of the campesinos who unexpectedly find themselves marching.) Even in this opening sequence, Landrián pushes so hard against the boundaries between documentary and fiction that we would be hard-pressed to locate them.[3]

The campesinos arrive at a gathering spot where fervent political speeches are delivered under portraits of Castro, Martí and Lenin. Meanwhile, the camera lures the viewer into a powerfully intimate, subjective encounter in a series of static shots: the campesinos are deadly serious– standing around looking suspicious and bored during the assembly, in contrast to the impassioned political rhetoric that appears not to move them in the slightest.

The rhetorical choice not to show what they are looking at (the speaker or the source of the sound) communicates the director’s absolute disinterest in what is being said. The static shots of the campesinos, by contrast, create an uncanny sense of portraiture, lingering to suggest that the artist has turned his camera to look deeply at what is important: the individual. This sequence also functions to create an extreme tension between sound and image. A young woman with a crucifix peeking out of her shirt shifts uneasily under Landrián’s penetrating gaze, accentuated by a long moment of complete silence as the camera registers the crucifix. Villagers look directly at the camera without expression. Positioned against the distorted sound of the speeches, these powerful images assert the extreme disengagement of the protagonists from the rhetorical context in which they find themselves. The unsettling disjuncture between what we see and what we hear during this sequence knocks the viewer off balance, into a state of profound unease.

By juxtaposing the triumphant charge of the spoken words with the disengaged and lifeless expressions of the campesinos, Reportaje satirizes the insertion of a complex political ideology into communities like this one. The ominous musical score accentuates a series of cuts backs and forth between the participants and the portraits of Castro, Martí and Lenin, painting the sequence with an exaggerated sense of menace and foreboding, as the revolution is reduced to nothing more than a disembodied voice and a few photographs, not even granted a living human presence. Through this rigorous orchestration of signs, Reportaje asserts that these iconic political figures, this rhetoric, have no valid connection to the onlookers. The campesinos, the film suggests, are just putting up with it.

In the orchestration of sonic and visual elements, Landrián deepens his layered dichotomous metaphor of us and them—the image is us, the people, with whom the viewer is led to identify. In this sequence, the sound is them, the disembodied outside force of the Revolution. Both the brash and unsettling musical score and the disembodied voice that delivers the political speeches are equated with the Revolution, and are represented in this sequence as violent, unwanted intrusions on an otherwise peaceful and bucolic setting.

K.J. Connelly has described how lapses in synchrony between sound and image in film create a powerful uncanny effect, “…the lack of synchrony between sound and images has to be characterized as potentially disturbing for the audience, perhaps even as moments of aesthetic and representational danger” (73). And indeed, from this point forward, Reportaje becomes a kind of manual of the various ways that asynchrony may be used to disturb an audience.

We hear the applause, but the corresponding image doesn’t show any of “us” applauding. Instead we only see onlookers staring in silence, unblinking. Landrián achieves this effect by masterfully inserting shots that are both asynchronous with (and contradict) the recorded sound.

The grammar of audiovisual communication dictates our understanding that we are watching the participants hearing what we hear. (“…sound appearing at the same time as image is often understood as a single event” Donnelly 76.) But a closer viewing reveals that the campesinos are not actually watching or listening to the speeches at the moments when they are shown to be doing so.

Editor Walter Murch forever changed how editors and viewers assess sequences like these, by teaching us to look for the blinks, the involuntary human reaction to cognition at the instant when a sound phrase like a sentence or a round of applause is comprehended (Murch 95). Reportaje asks us to believe that the campesinos were unmoved by the political rhetoric of the speeches, but also asks us to ignore that the onlookers do not display the autonomic physical reaction of human beings listening to the spoken word. Sound and image were recorded separately during this period, of course; but the filmmaker still had the option to show the source of the sound and/or to synch reaction shots to their moments. Here no one is shown applauding even though we hear applause, and this counterpoint creates a meaning for the viewer.

These discontinuities indicate that the images used here as reaction shots may have been filmed throughout the event and then re-ordered during the edit to suggest reaction.  Ultimately, we can’t ever know the full spectrum of truths of that moment of fifty years ago; of who applauded or how they felt about it. We can only look closely at the powerful impact of the construction: a reaction shot in which no one reacts. The juxtaposition suggests that the actors have agency and choose to remain impassive, but that meaning is not revealed through a simple act of observation. It is the director who creates that meaning through this masterful use of asynchrony between sound and image.

There are several moments in which the film lets its seams show—allowing us to see that the director is intentionally orchestrating the formal elements of the film to advance his poetic vision. The assembly culminates with the campesinos symbolically burying their ignorance, as they set the coffin and effigy of “Don Ignorancia” ablaze. These are the only moments during the film in which Landrián lets us hear the natural, animated chatter of the people’s voices, a sound fragment that stretches across two visual sequences. In contrast to the disinterest proposed in the earlier “speeches” sequence, now we both hear and see the young people crowding around the coffin, excited for the fiery finale.  Landrián doesn’t allow the viewer more than a moment of respite to register and enjoy the enthusiasm, however. He imposes the revolution’s ominous thematic music over the young voices, bringing the score to a chilling crescendo.

 El muerto al hoyo y el vivo al pollo

 The arresting image of the burning effigy melts seamlessly into the following sequence: suddenly the tension dissipates and we are allowed to relax into the ambient noise of a sunny afternoon among friends. The change in tone offers a welcome relief after the extreme tension of the previous sequence. The official ritual is over, and strikingly, the campesinos are suddenly more at ease as a party breaks out, with sandwiches and music and dancing. We witness a ballet of hands; hands making sandwiches, hands passing sandwiches, hands stuffing sandwiches in mouths, hands pouring drinks, hands playing instruments. Easy, familiar, organic movement.[4]

Suddenly, people are smiling, and the camera lingers on the faces and the bodies of the dancers, who move slightly but increasingly out of sync with the rhythm of the music.  The camera closes in on the fixed gaze of one young woman as the ominous musical score returns one last time, crashing in on any momentary sense of security we may have achieved, as the sequence dissolves into slow motion, a body almost in trance. The two musical themes (that of the revolution and that of the people) overlap in dissonance, until the music of the people is eclipsed by that of the revolution; but still the body of the dancer moves unstoppably, uncannily, in time to the rhythm of the changüi. Her fixed look directly at the camera seems to suggest: you can impose another culture on top of this one, but this authentic rhythm is in the Cuban body; this music, this rhythm, is the nature of this body (read: nation), and it will endure.

his extreme use of asynchrony culminates in the film’s most potently disturbing moment. K.J. Donnelly has described the effect that the cognitive dissonance of asynchrony between sound and image has on the nervous system, provoking extreme anxiety in the viewer (11, 84) and achieving an alienating Brechtian effect. This is combined with the other jarring and unexpected aspect of the sequence: the fixed stare of the dancer into the lens of the camera to suggest that the image tells the truth of the contradiction. During the filming, Landrián directed the villagers as actors in this sequence— moving through the middle of the dancing with the camera, yelling “Mirame! Mirame en los ojos! No deja de mirarme!” in pursuit of his vision (Reyes);[5] and in staging the action and then editing to create an extreme tension between image and sound, Landrián does effectively communicate his poetic vision of these events. From his point of view, these two cultures are out of sync in every way. Here, in the food and music and dance, he suggests, is an authentic rural Cuban culture.[6] The revolutionary overlay, after Landrián’s cynical revision, is positioned as a dangerous spectacle.

 Fin…pero no es el fin

 In crafting the formal elements at his disposal to create a sense of contradiction between official discourse and individual experience, Landrian also provokes innumerable enduring questions and contradictions for the viewer, without offering a sense of resolution. Instead he offers us a final provocation in the form of a title card describing reportage as an informational genre currently of enormous importance. In general, it provides a vivid account of an event or reality that is studied and exposed.

This final irony resists closure of any kind. In Reportaje, Landrian disrupts the official narrative of the revolution, leaving us little room to feel anything other than the discomfort he feels. The film’s many subjective orchestrations effectively communicate his vision, but also deny us any possibility of drawing alternate conclusions or of seeing the event for ourselves. We are left unsure of what we would have seen had we been present. Ultimately, since Landrián both adopts and exposes the power of documentary film to construct history in Reportaje, our primary task is to look carefully both at the film’s constructions and at how we project onto them. The difficulty arises only when viewers accept the information uncritically as if the film were unmediated visual evidence of a historical moment.

With the final provocation of the title card, Landrián troubles our understanding of the nature of documentary evidence itself —leaving us with nothing firm or certain to grab onto except for the certainty that there are many truths to a historical moment and many ways to tell them. Fin…pero no es el fin.

Note: This article was originally published in “Guillén Landrián or filmic confusion.” Julio Ramos and Dylon Robbins (eds.) Leiden: Almenara, 2019.

 Works Cited

 Barriga, Susana. Personal Interview. 5 Jul. 2013.

Donnelly, K.J., Occult Aesthetics: Synchronization in Sound Film. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Print.

Guerra, Lillian. Visions of Power in Cuba: Revolution, Redemption and Resistance, 1959-1971. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Print.

Murch, Walter. In the Blink of an Eye: A Perspective on Film Editing, 2nd Edition. Los Angeles: Silman-James Press, 1988. Print.

Dean Luis Reyes. “La mirada del otro: el documental surreal de Nicolás Guillén

Landrián.” Paper delivered at the LASA International Congress, May 28, 2015.

—. Personal Interview. 5 Jul. 2013.

—. “Nicolás Guillén Landrián: El iluminado y su Sombra” Miradas, No. 7. Publication

 Date? Web. 15 May 2015.

Shapiro, Ann Louise. How Real is the Reality in Documentary Film? Jill Godmilow, in Conversation with Ann-Louise Shapiro.” History and Theory 36, no. 4 (1997): 80-102.

Valladares, Lisandra Puentes. Interview with Marcel Beltrán. Cubacine Website. 24

 Apr. 2015. Web. 15 May 2015.

Zayas, Manuel. Personal Interview. 16 Feb. 2015.

[1] This technique is used masterfully in Taller Linea y 18 in which machine sounds are edited to unsettling effect.

[2] Sound designer and Foley artist Bill Toles was kind enough to analyze the sequence. He explained that a sound designer can hear that the Foley effect was recorded in an enclosed room with three or four people walking in place over gravel, captured by a microphone in a fixed position. According to Toles, the sound of the large group of people walking outside in a wide open space would have made an entirely different set of sounds.

[3] This is not to suggest that the portrayal of political disaffection in Reportaje is “untrue,” but rather to illustrate that the film’s meanings are carefully constructed to enroll the viewer in the director’s vision and require equally careful scrutiny.

[4] Here, again, the debt to Bresson is striking.

[5] Some critics have suggested that the dancers look uncomfortable in the sequence because of the performative nature of the revolutionary ritual, but we might also have to consider the presence of a very large, wild-eyed stranger running through the dance floor with a camera yelling “mirame en los ojos!” as a contributing factor.

[6] Although this, too, is a construction. The music we hear is not the music the musicians are playing, but a recording done in a studio at another moment.