“Cinema cannot avoid being directly nourished by aspects of reality and conforming with them a work that, by force, has to have a meaning and an impact on reality itself.” These words from the Havana filmmaker Tomas Gutierrez Alea (1928-1996) express in a synthetic and forceful way the ideas of the cycle called Restored classics of Cuban cinemawhich will take place at the Leopoldo Lugones Room of the Teatro San Martín from this Tuesday until May 18 inclusive.
The exhibition –carried out thanks to the collaboration of the Cuban Cinematheque, the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry and the Cuban Embassy in Argentina- is made up of eight feature films in restored prints sent especially from Havanaand includes essential films made on the island during the 1960s and 1970s, including five films directed by Gutiérrez Alea himself and the essential Lucyof Humberto Solasand In a certain wayof Sara Gomez.
As it could not be otherwise, the cycle begins with that milestone of Cuban cinema that was -and still is- memories of underdevelopment (1968), by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who thus recalled the circumstances of the film’s premiere on the island: “1968, the year it was released memories of underdevelopment, is one of the climactic moments of the anti-bourgeois political effervescence unleashed by the Revolution and, nevertheless, all the reflections that the film makes have as their starting point and intellectual nourishment the experience of a petty bourgeois. That is the reason why the film initially aroused such bitter criticism in the popular sectors of the Cuban government, and even in other less orthodox ones who distinguished it as a danger to the ideological purity of the process of change that should be carried out in Cuba”.
On Wednesday the 10th the show continues with In a certain way (1977), by Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez, who in 1961 became the first woman to enter the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), created by the government after the revolution to promote political cinema and a culture native film. The film focuses on Yolanda, a new teacher from the Miraflores neighborhood, who faces the differences and conflicts that arise in her love relationship with Mario, in which the clash between the old macho mentality and the new revolutionary attitudes is manifested. “No one had yet made, until then, a film as clear and consistent as this one”, wrote Peter B. Schumann in his History of Latin American cinema. “The only Cuban film made by a woman and on the subject of women, turned out to be the great masterpiece of the 1970s in this country. Sara Gómez could not give proof of her extraordinary talent again: she died while she was finishing In a certain way. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio García Espinosa, who had advised her in making the film, had to finish the film”.
Friday the 12th will be seen Theresa portrait (1979), by Pastor Vega, with Daisy Granados. A worker at a textile factory accepts the position of cultural secretary of the factory. Her husband believes that these chores take away time for homework and accuses her of being negligent, but she reacts in defense of her emancipation. “It is symptomatic for Cuban cinematographic development – wrote Peter B. Schumann – that it was precisely this film that provoked controversies that did not arise around In a certain way some years earlier, despite the fact that Sara Gómez’s film contained a much more explosive emancipatory charge than Theresa portrait”.
Sunday the 14th goes Lucy (1968), by Humberto Solás, which presents the political process of national emancipation expressed symbolically in the emancipation of three Cuban women.
Other fundamental titles by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea will also be seen, such as The death of a bureaucrat (1966) and his historical-metaphorical triptych made up of A Cuban fight against the demons (1971), The Last Supper (1976) and The survivors (1978) where “anecdotes found in historical essays serve as a starting point for the filmmaker to create dramas that force us to look back on lessons not learned from history,” according to Cuban critic José Antonio Évora.
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Restored classics of Cuban cinema | In the Leopoldo Lugones Room