LAND WITHOUT IMAGES.
CUBAN CINEMA OF ABSENCE.
By José Luis Aparicio Ferrera
“The essence of the archive is its gap, its perforated nature.”
- Georges Didi-Huberman, Burning the Image
(Didi-Huberman, 2012)
“If we gathered every lost part,
we would inventory the absence of man.”
- Juan Carlos Flores, The Excavator in the Mine
(Flores, 2009)
In the beginning, there was the word. The word censor. And its reason, a film.
Which is to say: a thin, tiny skin.
A membrane of lights and shadows.
The history of censorship in revolutionary Cuba (the act of twisting and violating an epidermis) begins with P.M. (1961), by Orlando Jiménez Leal and Sabá Cabrera Infante, a visual poem about the end of the night: that trance which, in today's and yesterday's Havana, precedes the darkest and most diurnal darkness.
Orlando and Sabá sought the reverse, the underside of the luminous and militant island. They delved into the darkness of the meridian past, and found, amid the scarce and dirty light of the port bars, the feverish Cuba of music and dance.
A decadent country, but more real than the one in propaganda.
The sweaty nation of the poor.
Which is to say: of the specters.
Before the morning horror of a watched square rose, like a humid dream, the night of P.M. It was a return to the verses of José Martí (not the verses of the national hero but those of the poet):
“I have two homelands: Cuba and the night. Are the two one?” (Martí, 1971)
This vision of the insular night as the homeland ended up being debated in an assembly.
“Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing. (...) No rights” (Castro, 2011), were the “words to the intellectuals”.
Fidel Castro declared the Havana night counter-revolutionary.
P.M., our first banned film, was also our first independent film. The first one that questioned the Revolution's absolute monopoly over the homeland. Over its possible forms, its transfigurations.
The new Cuba and its official cinema had been designed as a concentric prison. Independent cinema committed the original sin: it crossed the strip that made the panopticon's efficiency discontinuous.
In 1961, it was the strip of the night.
“The Maximum Leader announced that a United States invasion was just around the corner. Cuba entered a state of permanent war. All radio and television stations were linked (curiously called the freedom chain) to broadcast patriotic programs and heroic news (…)” (Jiménez Leal & Zayas, 2012), Orlando Jiménez Leal tells us in The PM Case: cinema, power, and censorship.
“Right away, I made a four-minute report drawing a parallel between the militiamen installing cannons on the Malecón and anti-aircraft machine guns in public buildings, and the people who were dancing and having fun in the bars.” (Jiménez Leal & Zayas, 2012)
The people of P.M. were trying to reconcile “their historical responsibility with the rumba” (Jiménez Leal & Zayas, 2012).
“In response to Castro's official slogan of Homeland or Death, I heard one night a mulatto woman in a bar say as she swayed: Boy, why not Homeland or Minor Injuries?" (Jiménez Leal & Zayas, 2012)
In the cinema of a country where everything is seen, blindness is always voluntary, convenient.
As in that story by Julio Cortázar where the real became indistinguishable from novelistic illusion, our cinema experimented with an early continuity of the parks, bringing a epicenter of intramural Havana to the quieter meadows of exile.
Without being aware of their communion, Orlando Jiménez Leal and Fernando Villaverde filmed, with just one year of difference, the first and second rolls of the same film.
In the park (1962, dir. Orlando Jiménez Leal) and The Park (1963, dir. Fernando Villaverde) are the A and B sides of a city bifurcated by the ghosts of ruin and exile. Ultimately, the same ghost, for what is exile if not displaced, divided ruin?
Orlando captured the emigrants at Bayfront Park in Miami. Fernando documented the regulars of Havana's Central Park. Both films depict decadence: the myth of the greatness of a country fallen on hard times.
“Through images that seem distant, of the loneliness of the old, and despite the beauty of the landscape and the joy of playing children, the sadness of exile is perceived” (Jiménez Leal, 2016), says Orlando about his first film in the United States, where he had landed after the censorship of P.M.
The images breathe a terminal atmosphere, the Republic pulsates: empty ceremonies of a country trying to recover in the drowsiness and nodding of an exile Sunday. Orlando, perhaps unknowingly, inaugurated a subgenre.
In the park is perhaps the first great film of the Cuban diaspora.
Exile, according to Ricardo Piglia, “is utopia. There is no such place” (Piglia, 2001).
The first great film about a place that doesn't exist.
As illusory and at the same time as painful, as real, as the homeland.
This symbolic park holds nothing but impossibility and sadness. It welcomes those who don't belong, those who only value a single place to be happy and depart, but that place only exists in their minds.
That's why a common scene becomes apocalyptic: a plane passes, and faces freeze in the gesture of looking at it. The plane is heard, but the camera doesn't rise: it prefers to focus on the quirks of this theater of exile. On nostalgia as a reflex.
Six decades later, In the park has never been screened in Cuba.
In The Park, not only does the gaze caress, but so do the words. Its slow narration, written by filmmaker Miñuca Naredo, companion and collaborator of Fernando Villaverde, is a kind of poetic counterpart to the images of Central Park, the one with José Martí's statue in the center, although the camera never rises to seek it.
Fernando is more interested in the statues of the listening nymphs.
And the beings that resemble living statues.
In the midst of revolutionary fervor, The Park longs to flow in another time, to capture a cadence that is erased. It stops at those who build nothing, who could not integrate into the new society. Those who are more like a vestige or remnant.
It shifts the gaze to the elderly, to their undisturbed limbo.
Sits beside them in the shade.
Deciphering the eyes of these defeated beings could be a maneuver to stay out of time. Staying out of time, at times, is desirable in an era so consumed by history. It's easy to turn your head and look where things happen. It's easy to disdain the inconsequential.
An entire country could become intoxicated with effervescence.
Not mature: from naivety to decline and death.
The Park barely escaped censorship, as in Cuba, according to Fernando, “it is exhibited as little as possible, as a documentary accompanying films from communist countries that empty theaters”. (Aparicio, 2020)
It was selected at the Leipzig Festival in 1963, alongside other Cuban documentaries produced by the official film institute. After its screening, Soviet filmmaker Roman Karmen asked the organizers to withdraw it from the festival for being “pessimistic,” among other sins.
With The Park, a kind of subgenre also began.
That of cinema that looks at the country from the outside, even though it is born well within.
A cinema estranged, that distances itself, perhaps from a sort of in-exile.
Fernando Villaverde and his wife Miñuca, a couple of years and censorship later, would join Orlando in exile. Their early works glimpsed the seeds of failure, doubt, and unrest. They were also premonitions of the future country.
This Cuba of today, aged and immobile, where young filmmakers have begun to film the old to bear witness to the dismantling of a dream. From witnessing the "utopia" to dismantling it.
It is not a country for the young when it seemed not to be a country for the old before.
In his essay Arde la imagen, Georges Didi-Huberman writes:
“It is not possible to continue speaking about images without speaking about ashes.” (Didi-Huberman, 2012)
As a paraphrase, we could say:
It is not possible to speak about Cuban cinema without speaking about its denied or lost films.
“If, for example, we wanted to write the history of portraiture in the Renaissance”, clarifies Didi-Huberman, “(…) it would not be possible to understand anything about this major art if we do not take into account the nothing left by the mass destruction, in the time of the Counter-Reformation, of the entirety of the Florentine production of votive wax effigies, burned in the cloister of the Santissima Annunziata (…)” (Didi-Huberman, 2012)
The Cuban film archive, hegemonically governed by official institutions since 1959, is a compendium of censorship and omissions. The result of endless purges and persistent bonfires. If we wanted to write its history, it would not be possible to understand anything without taking into account its absences.
Not to mention films like El parque, In the park, or P.M.
Just three examples.
Three sharp splinters of a broken image.
According to Cuban creator and theorist Julio García Espinosa: "a country without an image is a country that does not exist" (García Espinosa, 2006). A paranoid reading of his words would support the attempt to annul certain ideas or versions of the nation through the control and kidnapping of a significant portion of its imagery.
A country that does not film is a country that does not exist.
Not by chance, García Espinosa, a filmmaker as well as a functionary, was responsible for some of the most traumatic cases of censorship in the history of Cuban cinema. Ironically, his dual role as an artist and censor did not keep him safe from prohibitions or from being removed from his position as president of the ICAIC after defending a cursed film.
(Cuban intellectuals, according to Che Guevara in El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba, committed the original sin: for not having participated in the struggle, "they are not authentically revolutionary" (Guevara, 2011). This guilt is carried by some artists, leading them to contradiction and ridicule.)
The Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC) was the first cultural institution founded by the Revolution, just a few months after its triumph. Fidel Castro, like Lenin and Hitler, considered cinema the most important of the arts; art as the most efficient propaganda.
Alfredo Guevara, a Jacobin dandy, officiated as his tropical Goebbels.
This czar of sugarcane cinema, a passé neo-realist, promoted a cinematic model with a strong orientation towards socialist realism: a tendency that quickly became rigid, schematic, like the cultural policy it represented. The demand for discourse transformed into aesthetic hegemony. Any difference was an immediate reason for censorship and marginalization.
The perfect revolutionary cinema is pure formula, programmatic.
Everything that is not complacent is outside its visual field.
Both film genres and the cinema of dreamy and existentialist breath of European avant-gardes were considered harmful influences for new filmmakers, as they originated from a bourgeois or capitalist conception of culture. Even styles that worked directly with reality, such as cinéma vérité and free cinema, were condemned for offering a spontaneous, i.e., uncontrolled view of the real.
Official Cuban cinema fluctuates between comedy, social melodrama, and historical-didactic pamphlet. Any attempt at exploration or experimentation must be confined within the limits of a popular and naturalistic discourse, easily accessible to an indoctrinated audience. "Inconvenient" official cinema negotiates with power: it avoids the essence, the real cause of conflicts.
The "inconvenient" in it is appearance.
A truly critical gesture must be neutralized.
For long decades, the almost absolute monopoly on means of production and the successive stifling of dissent allowed the ICAIC to produce a distorted image of the island. Every divergent or anomalous vision was purged. Each heresy found its punishment. In a cyclical process of self-cannibalism, filmmakers who do not conform to the norm are condemned to prison, ostracism, or exile.
Their films, those that survive, become fodder for neglect and oblivion.
The gap, although proscribed and precarious, is in independent cinema.
A movement that they try to break systematically but always finds ways to survive and reorganize. It often operates outside the law, under pressure, in absolute exposure. Its consolidation from the '90s of the last century and, above all, in the 2000s, is one of the most notable acts of resistance in contemporary Cuban culture.
"The archive," to return to Didi-Huberman, "is almost always gray not only because of the time elapsed but also because of the ashes of everything that surrounded it and burned in flames. When we discover the memory of fire in each leaf that did not burn, we manage to relive the experience of a barbarism documented in every document of culture (…)" (Didi-Huberman, 2012)
Tierra sin imágenes explores "the memory of fire" (Didi-Huberman, 2012).
In the manner of Michel Foucault, it proposes a kind of archaeology.
It wants to look at the hidden areas of Cuban audiovisuals in the last sixty years: what we could define as its repressed unconscious, its catacombs. Not only those uncomfortable films that barely escaped totalitarian inquisition but also the vestiges of those aborted, forcibly lost works.
Works like El mar (1965), by Fernando and Miñuca Villaverde, torn from its authors in the editing process, mutilated, and disappeared. A melancholic film about two young lovers discussing their future (leave or stay) while wandering the beach of a ruined town.
Like Buena gente, that script by Nicolás Guillén Landrián, about a man whose only flaw was the desire to kill a political leader. Nicolasito, who had already undergone electroshocks and internments, had that project taken away from him in a trial. Any script in Cuba, before being cinema, could become incriminating evidence.
Like Un día cualquiera (1991), the performative piece by Marco Antonio Abad and the Ar-De group, which served for a prosecutor to request a fifteen-year sentence for their "defamatory and offensive qualifiers about President Fidel Castro" (El tiempo, 1992). A seized film, perhaps unfinished, which remains inaccessible in the archives of State Security.
(In Cuba, Counterintelligence archives better than the Cinematheque.)
What would have become of Cuban cinema if it had managed to give birth to these films?
If censorship had not intervened to thwart, distort so many others?
What would have become of our imagination if we had had exile cinema?
If Strawberry and Chocolate (1993, dir. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea & Juan Carlos Tabío) and Improper Conduct (1984, dir. Orlando Jiménez Leal & Néstor Almendros) had coexisted in our cinemas?
Tierra sin imágenes tries to answer these questions, but not from lament or speculation, but from the praxis of a restorative experience.
It is not a complaint about what was not done or what is still to be done.
It is the act of doing it.
To gather all these films in the same space.
To make them dialogue, to look at each other, like in a game of mirrors.
Also, to think about their gaps, about the empty spaces.
If we were to think about the face of the island, in a kind of aleph, a total or definitive vision, we would have to include these veiled images, these mutilated or lost icons.
We invite you to a cinéma séance.
To cinema as a spiritual session.
To trace the country from its absence, its ghostly dimension, its negative.
