If you are inclined to
think that Third World Cinema is simplistic and one-dimensional, I invite
you see Tomas Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment,
selected by the New York Times in 1974 as one of the year's ten best movies.
Based on the novel Inconsolable Memories by Edmundo Desnoës,
a Cuban writer who lived in the United States, Memories is a complex
and probing film about the dilemma faced by intellectuals in Cuba following
the revolution. Although directed by a Cuban who supported the revolution
and remained in Cuba until his death, the film has a European sensibility,
interlacing fiction and documentary footage and using poetic images, literary
narration, flashbacks, and newsreel footage reminiscent of Alain Resnais'
Hiroshima Mon Amour.
Sergio (Sergio Corrieri)
is a frustrated writer who chooses to remain in Cuba rather than follow
his family to Miami just "to see how it all turns out". Though he has strong
feelings for his people, he is indifferent towards politics an observer
rather than a participant. Alea shows the artist as anti-hero, a man who
undergoes an identity crisis, is sapped of all his vitality, feels old
in his thirties, and drifts along without meaning and purpose. Unable to
write the novel he wants, Sergio survives on rental income from apartments
and lives in middle class luxury while around him housing is deteriorating
and there are serious gas and oil shortages. He spends his days smoking
in bed, looking out of a telescope through his bedroom window, taking walks,
watching television, and meeting young women. He makes no pretense of his
being an outsider but complains that "everything happens to me too early
or too late". Hanna, the woman he says he truly loved urged him to move
to New York with her and become a writer but he chose to remain in Cuba
to go into the furniture business.
When Sergio makes the
acquaintance of Elena (Daisy Granados), a sixteen- year-old girl who wants
to be an actress, his life takes on new meaning but it is temporary and
the affair ends badly. Persuading her that he knows important people in
the theatrical world, he brings her to his apartment and they begin a relationship
in which he tries to model her to fit his ideal of the bourgeois Cuban
woman. He takes her to modern art galleries and the home of writer Ernest
Hemingway to expose her to culture but it doesn't work and he complains
when she doesn't fit into his mold. "She doesn't relate to things," he
tells himself. "It's one of the signs of underdevelopment." Elena, like
other Cuban women", he says, has an "inability to relate to things, to
accumulate experience, to develop", but the stricture can just as easily
refer to himself and he pays the price of this experience when the girl's
parents bring a lawsuit against him for rape. Although he escapes the fate
of a criminal, little by little the outside world, the world of guns, slogans,
and rallies closes in on him and he feels trapped.
There are several documentary
sequences interspersed throughout the film that have no apparent connection
to the narrative but convey the sense that no one living in revolutionary
Cuba is able to escape the presence of history. The opening sequence shows
a public dance in which all the participants are black with the exception
of Sergio who is white. In this sequence continued later in the film, an
unnamed political leader is assassinated. In other footage, we see excerpts
from the trial of counterrevolutionaries captured at Playa Giron, the site
of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and a third in which we hear the voices
of Castro and Kennedy during the Cuban Missile crisis.
Though Alea apparently
wants us to see the fate that befalls someone who does not directly endorse
revolutionary activities, he makes his character so appealing and sympathetic
that, to me, the film had mixed messages. I was torn between my support
of the aims of the revolution and empathizing with Sergio's disdain for
the emptiness of both the Cuban bourgeois and the revolutionary leadership.
An event that took place only three years after Memories of Underdevlopment
was released, however, underscored the point that Sergio was making.
At that time, Castro, at the First National Congress on Education and Culture,
said that artists and writers must reject "all manifestations of a decadent
culture, the fruit of societies that are rent by contradictions". Not surprisingly,
although due to receive a special prize for the film from the U.S. National
Society of Film Critics in 1973, Gutiérrez Alea was denied a visa
to attend the ceremony.
GRADE: A-
Howard
Schumann