#943: GUTIÉRREZ ALEA, Tomás: Memories Of Underdevelopment (1968)

GUTIÉRREZ ALEA, Tomás (Cuba)
Memories Of Underdevelopment [1968]
Spine #943
Blu-ray

This film by Thomás Gutiérrez Alea is the most renowned work in the history of Cuban cinema. After his wife and family flee in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the bourgeois intellectual Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) passes his days wandering Havana in idle reflection, his amourous entanglements and political ambivalence gradually giving way to a mounting sense of alienation. With this adaptation of an innovative novel by Edmundo Desnoes, Gutiérrez Alea developed a cinematic style as radical as the times he was chronicling, creating a collage of vivid impressions through the use of experimental editing techniques, archival material, and spontaneously shot street scenes. Intimate and densely layered, Memories of Underdevelopment provides an indictment of its protagonist's disengagement and an extraordinary glimpse of life in postrevolutionary Cuba.

98 minutes

Black & White
Monaural
in Spanish
1:66:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2018

Director/Writer

Based on a novel by Edmundo Desnoes.

Screenplay by Desnoes and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.

Alea was 40 when he directed Memories of Underdevelopment.

The Film

Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) is typing.

“For years I’ve said that if I had the time, I’d write a book of stories or keep a diary.”

We never witness Sergio writing anything after this, but the film becomes his novel.

A beautiful and difficult restoration job, Criterion has given us this gift. A gritty and realistic portrait of life in Cuba in the 60s, it displays its revolutionary and/or socialist bona fides without conking us over the head with them.

His loved ones have left him (‘61) for decadent, imperialist Miami. He is all alone in his upper-middle class high-rise apartment with his paintings, books and Wollensak tape recorder.

He is lonely, and picks up a young woman, Elena (Daisy Granados). She seems delightful — but after a visit to Hemingway’s house

where she appears indifferent to the ephemera of the great writer, he tires of her underdevelopment, and ghosts her.

His friend Pablo (Omar Valdés) is fixated on his (American) car, but can’t even get the oil checked, because the gas station doesn’t have any. He also departs for Florida.

His housekeeper, Noemi (Eslinda Núñez) is similarly underdeveloped, a Baptist to boot (he imagines her baptism as erotic, but we later see the real, untitillating truth), but he beds her with the same amount of boredom as he displays when attending a round table discussion about the linguistic-ideological tangles …

Of all the attendees, it is a ex-pat American (Jack Gelber, a real person!) who asks the relevant question:

“Why is it, that if the Cuban revolution is a total revolution, they have to resort to an archaic form of discussion such as a round table, and treat us to an impotent discussion of issues that I’m well-informed about — and most of the public here is well-informed — when there could be another, more revolutionary way to reach a whole audience like this?”

**

The film contains much cinema verité footage of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the tortuous interrogation of the collaborators, the missile crisis and Castro’s fiery speech.

A crisis concerning Elena develops, and then it all fits together like a Picasso puzzle (where is Picasso’s dove, Sergio wonders … just another rich French communist, he muses) …

A magnificent film.

Film Rating (0-60):

57

The Extras

The Booklet

Eight-panel foldout with poster.

Essay by author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro.

“The Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) was born in 1959 … In ‘61 Castro made his famous proclamation about what would be allowed when it came to creative expression: ‘Inside the Revolution, everything; outside of it, nothing.’ … films like Humberto Solás’s Lucia (1968) {Spine #1045} had become touchstones on an island where even rural people, thanks to mobile projectors, could also absorb the layered documentaries of Julio García Espinosa. But perhaps no one was more responsible for cinema’s unique place in Cuba’s new society than Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, a cofounder of ICAIC who went on to become not merely Cuba’s most important filmmaker but also a signal figure in world cinema of the twentieth century.”

Commentary

None.

Interview 1

With film critics B. Ruby Rich and José Antonio Évora.

Évora:

“In 1961, Fidel Castro called together many Cuban intellectuals at the National Library and told them ‘within the Revolution: everything. Against the Revolution: nothing.’ Everyone took that to mean that critics would not have a seat at the table. The thing is, the triumph of the rebels led by Castro engendered a wave of hope and enthusiasm that swept over the country. But as they began limiting discussion and questioning anyone who didn’t blindly obey, Gutiérrez-Alea began to feel he had to maintain his position as a revolutionary — not one subservient to those in power, but one who wants to transform the status quo.”

Rich:

“By the end of the film, when we — as viewers — if we have given in … if we think that he’s the hero, and we are left stranded, we are left stranded much the way he is, because we’ve been deceived by a certain perseverance of class trappings, of education, of a world view that, in the end, leaves him not in a superior position, but in an outsider position an abandoned position — a disconnected position, and we are left in that kind of vacuum of a man who belongs to a world that doesn’t exist anymore, and yet is unable or unwilling to enter the world that’s outside his building.”

Interview 2

With novelist and screenwriter Desnoes.

A revealing interview with the author.

Titón: From Havana to ‘Guantanamera’

A 2008 feature-length documentary on director Alea’s life and career.

Alea’s widow, Mirta Ibarra, wants to explore her late husband’s legacy with others who knew him. She starts with his sister:

• Marina Martel
• Titón (Gutiérrez-Alea’s nickname) …
• When Machado was in power, their father opposed him and had to go into exile. He left for Miami. When they were over Key West, the plane had to return to Havana due to a malfunction. When he arrived home, my mother was there with some friends who were comforting and consoling her. He suddenly appeared, and they thought he was a ghost ... dad was still trying to escape, so he left in a fishing boat. He told mother that when Machado was ousted, she should hang a sheet from the balcony, which he’d see from afar. Then he’d know he could return.
• Gutiérrez-Alea (archival):
• “It wasn’t until 1959, immediately after the triumph of the Revolution, that I was able to make my first film: historias de la revolución (Stories of the Revolution) (1960). The film consisted of three stories … and was modeled after Rossellini’s Paisan (1946) {Spine #498}.
• [a look at his next films]: General Assembly (1960); Death to the Invader (1962) {Che was on the location!}; The Twelve Chairs (1962); {Mel Brooks’ version!}; Cumbite (1964), a flop; Death of a Bureaucrat (l966):
• Gutiérrez-Alea: “I was ready to actually kill some bureaucrat, but I would have gotten in trouble. So I symbolically killed one in a film …”
• A Cuban Fight Against Demons (1972). In 1672, Cuban revolutionaries launch an uprising against the Spanish. Solás:
• “It’s a great metaphor about intolerance, seen from an earthy, sensual perspective.”
• The Last Supper (1976). A pious plantation owner attempts to teach Christianity to 12 of his slaves by inviting them to participate in a reenactment of the Last Supper.
• Nelson Rodríguez, editor:
• “That 50-minute sequence was extremely well done, without a single continuity error; the continuity was flawless: the food, the candles, the wine, the food on the plates, the wine in the glasses; how they gradually got more and more drunk. With the roast pig, chicken, and salad, they’d laid out a beautiful spread, which was demolished as they ate. A Creole meal like that under the bright lights of the film set starts to go bad. By the third day, no one would touch it. The smell was unbearable. So every three days, the food had to be replaced — entire chickens and suckling pigs — and eaten down to the same point as before. The actors were quite happy about that …”
• Los Sobrevivientes (The Survivors) (1979). An aristocratic family decides to isolate themselves from the changes brought by the revolution and begin living History in reverse. A surreal voyage from Socialism to cannibalism.
• Hasta Cierto Punto (Up to a Certain Point) (1983). A theater director and script-writer falls for a female worker from the Havana docks, but his machismo, social and working conflicts, and the Cuban woman’s condition interfere with their relationship.
• Gutiérrez-Alea:
• “It’s a simple love story between an intellectual — in this case a film director — and a dockworker at the Port of Havana … the idea came from a Basque song. It’s a song by Mikel Laboa that I think is extraordinary. The lyrics more or less say ‘if I wanted, I could clip its wings, and then it would be mine, but it wouldn’t be able to fly, and what I love is the bird.’”
• Cartas del parque (Letters from the Park) (1988). Matanzas, Cuba, 1913. Two young people who are in love communicate through letters written by a penman. When the young man leaves town to become a pilot, the girl discovers she is really in love with the one who wrote the letters.
• “Based on an anecdote from Love in the Time of Cholera by García Márquez.”
• Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry & Chocolate) (1993). This Oscar-nominated film is the story of two men who are opposites: one gay, the other straight; one a fierce communist, the other a fierce individualist; one suspicious, the other accepting; and how they come to love each other.
• Guantanamera (1995). A satire about life in Cuba, members of a funeral procession and some truck drivers who need to take the same route begin to talk about God and the world and they end up discovering that life for both groups has many similarities and many differences, depending on the point of view.
• Ibarra:
• “He had this sudden burst of energy and vitality. He was bounding around during the shoot. He was like a kid, the picture of health. He really enjoyed the entire shoot. He knew that death wasn’t far off; he wrote lots of lines for the little girl who embodies death, but during editing he realized that all that rhetorical dialogue was pointless, that the girl’s presence was enough.”

A thoroughly engaging documentary.

Segment

From a 1989 audio interview with Gutiérrez-Alea.

Recalling the first-time use of capturing natural sound (except for the outdoor scenes) … and the ambiguity of the protagonist. 

Segments

From 2017 interviews with actor Granados and editor Rodríguez from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Visual History Program collection.

Granados, using an orchestral analogy:

“One gives their utmost to make the best film possible and to do their part in that great orchestra that’s under the director’s guidance. He conducts his different instruments, which are us, the actors … he allows us to contribute our parts, of course, but he holds the baton and he’s directing the film. So one tries to stay in tune with him and the crew and the other actors to achieve the best result possible”

Rodríguez (why a great editor is of such benefit to a great director):

“There were long sequence shots with night lighting. Some areas were brightly lit while others were in shadow. As we watched that footage, Titón revealed what was on his mind. ‘I want to reshoot all this, because there’s no way to fix it. In these shots, the bright parts are too bright, which detracts from the dramatic power. And it can’t be fixed, because other parts are practically in shadow; you can’t see a thing. If you darken one part, you’ll darken the others. I need to reshoot it so we can adjust the lighting.’

Being in my Godardian phase at the time, I said, ‘let me try something. It just might work. I’ll pick this footage apart. No more long sequence shots. I’ll splice it together Godard-style. That will eliminate those shifts from very bright to very dark. With the dark parts removed, you can darken what’s too bright, and the rest can be left as is.’

So I made a bunch of cuts, which also helped on another level. For viewers, it intensifies the character’s mental conflict, the drama of his being in that situation, with the constant cuts of him wandering aimlessly — now this way, now that way, and so on. It convey’s Sergio’s mental chaos in a way that’s much more subtle, but still in keeping with the point of the sequence. So he said, ‘okay, I’ll watch it tomorrow and decide if we reshoot.’ He watched it … and he loved it! ‘But I’m a step ahead of you again,’ he said. ‘What did I do wrong this time, Titón?’ He said, ‘if you’d watched it dispassionately, you’d have realized that adding in some fragments of archival footage of the military mobilization would drive the point home.’ So we added some shots where he walks back and forth, and then you see a close-up of a tank, and then Sergio pacing again. It completed the scene perfectly.”

Kudos also to cinematographer Ramón F. Suárez and composer Leo Brouwer.

Trailer

Obviously cut by Gutiérrez-Alea. I wish all trailers followed his example. Mostly stills, some distorted from their original image, and no dialogue giveaways!

Extras Rating (0-40):

36

57 + 36 =

93

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