Hunger for useless art in Cuba
translated by Cristina Venegas
The war with Ukraine had not yet begun.[1][open endnotes in new window] During the press conference at the Moscow International Film Festival, program director Kiril Razgolov described my film Blue Heart (Corazón Azul, 2021) as “the most transgressive and irreverent” of the event.[2] Two reviews were published after the film's screening. Olga Artemyeva emphasized the influence of Soviet director Sergei Eisenstein,[3] and Marina Kopylova that of Andrei Tarkovsky.[4] Was it possible to have two antagonistic styles combined in the same work?
Blue Heart takes place in a uchronia where Fidel Castro tries to build the new man through genetic engineering. These individuals are born with uncontrollable mutations and are united by performing acts of terrorism to destroy not only the system that created them, but seemingly any kind of pre-established structure.
Tarkovsky and Eisenstein represent almost opposite universes, many might say incompatible. Both share a care for the image, but with different objectives. A reductionist impression could define them in this way: one is a poet, the other a brilliant scientist in the service of an ideology. Tarkovsky opts for sensoriality; Eisenstein for rationality. Both are virtuosos with different poetics. In Tarkovsky’s timeless spirituality the individual prevails over the masses. There is nothing definitive. His mysticism is born of human irresolution itself.
While Eisenstein’s symbolic rationality always aimed for a concrete goal, his montage of attractions was ultimately the precursor of an important strategy in agitprop: cinema as an element to transform reality. This was common practice in the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, and though he had creative clashes with the cultural authorities, this essence is part of most of his finished work. Although in Alexander Nevsky (1938), he shifts the leading role of the masses to a heroic individual, Nevsky’s essential narrative, stripped of formal scaffolding, responds to that of the most impersonal Hollywood epic. It is not until the second part of Ivan the Terrible (1958), that Eisenstein begins to delve into contradictions never before explored in his cinema. Here Ivan is no longer presented as the untainted hero, but as a glorified tyrant full of contradictions. The tragic interruption of the trilogy by the Stalinist authorities may have played a part in bringing about his premature death shortly before his half-century birthday. We will never know how Eisenstein would have evolved in his twilight.
Tarkovsky did not live much longer. “The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long,” says Tyrell in Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982). Tarkovsky was not interested in Eisenstein’s cinema, he considered that the imposition of a planned montage as an emotional-symbolic shock to produce a psycho-ideological effect, had little to do with poetry. He relied on an experience dictated by the senses where man and his relationship with nature prevailed.
In Eisenstein’s defense, it must be recognized that while his contributions to cinematic language could have been used to generate greater contradiction in the content, they laid the groundwork for others to do so. It is difficult to encompass the extent of his mark on cinema.
I mention these two great masters that I admire, to arrive at how I assimilate their work. When it comes to a cinema with strong political content, many critics demand balance or neutrality in the treatment of conflicting sides. My approach is to look in the darkest areas to show what is not mentioned, even if it means deliberately going against all flags. The mistake would be to assume this strategy from the political, when it should always begin with human contradictions. The political will inevitably emerge.
Inspiration begins with an intuitive impulse, rationalization arrives later. I have always thought that the most effective way to deal with the political is to look at it from the future. Imagine that half a century has passed, and then you are able to strip away any attempt at sacralization.
Let’s say that one could inject Godardian strategies into an Antonioni film. Apparently, they share very distant poetics. Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) is notable for hybridizing European authorial voices of the 1960s: French new wave, English free cinema, Antonioni’s bourgeois alienation, Godardian breaking of the fourth wall, even the by then outmoded Italian neorealism makes some intervention. Everything works because each element represents worlds that are alien to the protagonist, as representative effects of different realities. The multiple voices also serve as a dynamic window into the complexity of the world surrounding an essentially passive character.
Cuban documentary filmmaker Santiago Álvarez’s montage in Now (1965) responds to Eisensteinian strategies, although its author might have arrived at them regardless, without direct influence. Distances aside, Álvarez had something in common with Eisenstein: both had a communist background, wanted to transform reality and had the relative support of their respective institutions. Nicolás Guillén Landrián took Santiago Álvarez’s agitprop and reversed its meaning. His irreverence--in analogical times--cost him the ability to film in Cuba.[5] Normally, irreverence is understood in the face of governmental, religious or institutional power. But what if we were to launch irreverence equally against all sectors involved in a conflict, be it political, religious or human? This would generate greater complexity, which could result in barely tolerable discomfort. When it comes to political cinema, it is well known that audiences generally come to a film to reinforce a pre-existing view on the subject.
How are intuition and science combined? There is no ideal form of filmmaking, and in any case, it should not start from a predetermined model. I feel that narrative unpredictability can be enhanced by changing editing techniques within the same work.
In my film Memories of Overdevelopment (2010) and even more so in Blue Heart, I worked with an eclectic polyphony that leans towards the baroque, both in the composition of image and sound, as well as in a montage based on changes in format, genres, styles and perspectives.
I have always considered it dangerous to rely solely on an ability to build atmospheres in order to create the illusion of a stable narrative for the viewer through an audiovisual seduction. This can end up being a conservative device when it numbs the viewer's senses and conspires against a vision of the cinema as an uncomfortable art, both in content and in narrative form. I think that’s why my first film, Red Cockroaches (2003), ended up being much more conventional despite the incest story.
It is not for nothing that it is the only one of my films that has had commercial distribution. When faced with a lack of creative control, I declined to make a Hollywood horror film for Ghost House Pictures and producer Robert Tapert could not understand my lack of interest. He asked if I had other offers. That was the only time the industry came around. At the time, I was preparing Memories of Overdevelopment, a film with a more fragmented structure. I decided that narrative subjectivity must be sabotaged when you barely settle into a rhythm or style. We live in an age of multitasking, media bombardment, post-truth and fragmentation. Here past and present take turns with the impossibility of creating a truly new future. Far from smoothing over these rough edges, the film’s language must reflect the dynamics and contradictions in a cognitive spiral where symbols and subsequent rationality can also emerge and be processed by the viewer.
Different narrative voices have always been a concern of mine. More than two decades ago, I wrote my first novel titled Red Sea, Blue Evil. Almost the entire narrative is constructed from my friend's experiences and extrapolated to a science fiction universe with fabricated situations, while keeping intact their psychologies and speaking style. I wrote it under the precept that each sentence was equivalent to a cinematographic shot. I also translate this practice to an audiovisual language by never repeating a frame in the editing. This is based on the fact that my first short film was made on a VHS camera. I had to film in chronological order because I didn't have a computer to edit. This artistic discipline was a strategy born from an obstacle. After each cut, I looked for more expressive framing that would enhance the sensorial nature of each sequence. Each moment of life is unrepeatable and each image concatenated in a film must also possess that unique quality.
I feel that I have made an aesthetic cocktail from the anime of my childhood and the classic film sequences that film critic Enrique Colina deconstructed in his Cuban television show 24xSegundo. During my adolescence, I discovered the cinematheque with Tarkovsky, Michelangelo Antonioni, Orson Welles, David Lynch, David Cronenberg, Jean-Luc Godard and the photo-animation of Santiago Álvarez, while simultaneously reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Albert Camus, Ray Bradbury and the Strugatsky brothers. I also discovered the expressionist visual artist, Antonia Eiriz.
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| Rafael Alcides inside a painting by Antonia Eiriz in Nadie / Nobody (Miguel Coyula, 2017) | David's (Carlos Gronlier) painting watches over him in Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula, 2021) |
How can anyone of these strands reach a rhizomatic coherence to integrate the apparent chaos? If you are going to achieve any originality today, it is from cooking up a gigantic hybridity out of your own blood in order to have an unfiltered dialogue with your subconscious. Only in this way can a voice of your own be born to liberate the content of your genetic storm. Even when you maintain the power of association, sometimes it is necessary to suppress rationality until the later stages of the creative process.
In Memories of Overdevelopment, which is also based on the novel of the same name by Edmundo Desnoes, subjectivity is positioned from the perspective of a protagonist who is a writer and photographer who makes collages and records his voice. The film that we watch could be seen as a construction of the protagonist. But in Blue Heart, I wanted to go further. The multiplicity of characters and points of view, television channels with diverse editorial policies, constant ellipses, point to a rhizomatic polyphony, a territory of shifting sands where it will be more difficult for the viewer to predict how the narrative evolves, and from which perspective. Gone is the unifying effect of the voice-over of the sole protagonist in Memories of Overdevelopment. The fragments of the nation today are also the result of the disintegration of the Soviet Union. The Special Period was also the beginning of my adolescence. I feel that somehow, I am still trying to collect the fragments of the chaos in order to recombine them.[6]
Making films outside of institutions has led me to shoot guerrilla style and without permits. In this scenario it is necessary to remain alert for any documentary event which could be imbricated in the fictional narrative. This instrumentalization of reality was part of Memories of Overdevelopment and Blue Heart. In the latter, I used the Occupy Wall Street protests as background, inserting actors in strictly documentary shots. Then using digital effects, I transformed some of the elements of the environment.
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| Occupy Wall Street original footage. | Footage after digital surgery in Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula, 2021) |
I also edited speeches by political figures to construct new sentences using their own words, thus turning them into actors within the plot. In one sequence, the mutants storm a television studio and their leader delivers a controversial live speech. After shooting this scene, I showed it to natural actors and asked them to react to it in their own words in order to get a variety of genuine voices. I drew anime on paper to emulate the analog Japanese aesthetic, created commercials and newsreels.
The fictional story itself gradually permeated the real world, but I always maintained a distance from the strictest manifestations of realism.
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| Havana skyline before digital surgery. | Havana skyline in Blue Heart (Miguel Coyula, 2021 |
It took me 10 years to shoot Blue Heart in Cuba. There were some extra-artistic events of that period that were important to me before I started working on the new film. In January 2017, I finished the documentary Nadie / Nobody (2017), which coincided with the death of Fidel Castro. I like to describe Nadie as a duel between Cuban poet Rafael Alcides and the politician Fidel Castro over of a woman: the Cuban revolution.
The film is built around Alcides’ honesty and the torrent of his thoughts, emotions and contradictions, where humor, lyricism, anger and sadness take turns. The aesthetic of the film itself moves through these registers. Aware of the impossibility of screening the film in a state-owned Cuban movie theater, we tried to show it in a private gallery. We were met with a police raid. In the history of Cuban cinema there are countless episodes of censorship taking place within institutions, but this time it occurred in a private house. We denounced the attack. Colleagues turned away and the critics remained silent. Except for a handful of timid exceptions, the institutionalized island intelligentsia buried the event. Curiously, the Miami Film Festival also did not want to program the film. When Nadie was finally shown in that city as part of the exhibition “The Forbidden Fruit,” I understood that the political honesty of its protagonist, Rafael Alcides, who still considered himself a socialist, did not allow any side to assume the film as their respective banner.
I was criticized by the most reactionary sectors of the left and right. This has been a typical response to my work that has political content. So, the only way to materialize these works has been outside of Cuba or through foreign institutions.
Alcides was an orphan born in the extreme poverty of Barrancas, Cuba. In the film, he did not want to promote his books out of fear of self-praise. He believed in building a better world, and his honesty led him to fall into disgrace. He turned to the monastic construction of his pages on a typewriter with homemade ink, renouncing compromise and/or opportunism. He never knocked on publisher's doors, inside or outside the island. Utopia had taken hold of him. Nor was he one of those writers who blurred his own history with demagogies. He had nightmares because he also knew how to have big dreams. His open-hearted contradictions made him a being of peculiar transparency. The poet remained in Cuba until his death.
A filmmaker friend once told me: “I want to continue making independent films, but I don't want to spend ten years making a film. I also want to be able to go to a restaurant, to a bar, to have money to travel.” In Cuba, we can only choose one of the two variants. He decided to emigrate. It is true that living in Cuba limits your freedom of movement. Not having a credit card narrows your travel possibilities to those made possible by scholarships, film festivals or academic events. My camera and computer models are obsolete under any industrial parameters. But cinematic language is not determined by the number of pixels. For me, technological obsolescence is breakage beyond any possible repair. We are on the earth for a very short time. I chose to exist with austerity, in order to create freely.[7]
Years later, when the political-cultural situation of the country worsened, I understood the phenomenon better. At that time, I met a visual artist who felt uncomfortable showing his work in state-run spaces. He was considering emigrating. Without understanding his point of view, I told him that I did not discriminate between spaces, that the work speaks for itself. He explained with exemplary sincerity: “But my work is not as political as yours. How can I justify myself morally while using state institutions and still call myself independent?”
In 2019, the Cuban Institute of Art and Film Industry (ICAIC) implemented Decree Law 373 for cinema, which intended to bring together independent filmmakers who were operating in a legal limbo.[8] The document contained pragmatic advantages for producing, but it also straitjacketed filmmakers by framing the content of each work within “the objectives of the Revolution that makes it possible...” Even so, almost all filmmakers signed on to obtain their independent audiovisual creator's card, granted by a state industry with a long list of censored films.[9]
The definition of independent cinema in Cuba has been controversial. Most of the works that define themselves as independent are approved by the ICAIC and are made possible by international funding that is inscribed in a predetermined socio-political aesthetic that circulates in mainstream independent markets. As with much mainstream-independent films, they do not cross the thresholds of discomfort. Here I am referring to the limits imposed by both the Cuban government and the profile of the relevant international institutions that decide what Latin American art cinema should be.
The cultural situation after Fidel Castro's death became more complex as more artists were censored. Activism increased on the island, heightened by the pandemic. An eclectic group of people led by the artivist Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara of the San Isidro Movement, went on a hunger strike during a collective confinement in the neighborhood and demanded, among other things, freedom for Cuba. The official news source of the regime disqualified the veracity of the hunger strike. But, does anyone pay attention to vertical newscasts anymore? The state security raided the house and evicted everyone, leading to the largest spontaneous protest of artists in front of the Ministry of Culture on November 27, 2020, which created the 27N movement. Finally, on November 29, Luis Manuel Otero Alcántara announced the deposition of the strike from prison, which he said he had started on November 18.
On July 11, 2021, popular protests erupted throughout the island as a response to the lack of food and medicine. They also demanded freedom and used the title of the song “Patria y Vida” (Homeland and Life) as their anthem. President Miguel Díaz-Canel told the authorities that “The order for combat has been given.” A wave of repression was unleashed that included mass imprisonments with arbitrary sentences. What was previously practiced against a small sector of the opposition, became a general practice.
The subsequent exodus was massive. Many important artists left the island. Others returned to the institutional fold and lowered their voices. At the same time, artists and intellectuals began to be censored not for the political radicalism of their work, but for taking an active role and demanding changes from the standpoint of civil society. The playwright Yunior García Aguilera also emerged along this line with his platform Archipiélago. Garcia Aguilera's theatrical work, had circulated within institutional channels. His activism combined with his eloquent discourse garnered the sympathy of many intellectuals across generations, achieving a remarkable synergy. On November 15, 2021, he called for a “peaceful march for change.” But on that date, his followers would be disconcerted when they discovered that their leader was no longer on the island. Garcia Aguilera had negotiated his departure quietly under pressure from Cuban state security.
