One of the greatest cultural achievements of the 1959 Cuban revolution has been its remarkable cinema.
Prior to the revolution, Cuba possessed no national film industry. The first cultural decree of the revolutionary government was the founding of the Cuban Film Institute, known as ICAIC. Within a single decade, this bold initiative was producing impressive results.
 Santiago Alvarez, revolutionary Cuban filmmaker |
Directors such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Umberto Solas were producing dynamic works of fiction, to considerable international acclaim. A battery of younger directors was likewise preparing to make its mark.
The key figure of the first phase of the Cuban cinema, Santiago Alvarez, is virtually unknown in the United States.
Alvarez’s documentary films are inextricably linked to the United States. Nearly all of his key works concern some matter of U.S. history: the Civil Rights movement, the wars in Southeast Asia, U.S. interventions in the Americas. They exist as a kind of fractured mirror to the last 40 years of U.S. history. It is the true history of U.S. imperialism, compared to what is propagated by U.S. cinema in popular films like Forrest Gump, which makes caricatures of the revolutionary Black Panther Party and the heroic fighters of Vietnam.
Documenting people’s struggles
Alvarez’s first exposure to radical politics came while he worked briefly as an immigrant coal miner in Pennsylvania in the 1940s. He returned to Cuba after the outbreak of World War II.
Although he didn’t produce his first film until he was in his forties, he more than compensated for lost time. In a film career that began with the triumph of the Cuban revolution in 1959 and continued until his death in 1998 at the age of 79, he directed nearly 700 films.
Lacking formal training, Alvarez was tapped to direct ICAIC’s newsreel division, Noticiero ICAIC. The choice was one of political utility; little artistic ability was expected from the novice director. Yet over the next 30 years, Alvarez supervised the production of nearly 1,500 weekly newsreels. In the process, he transformed a banal and wholly utilitarian genre into a veritable laboratory of radical innovation.
Work on the newsreels was highly collective. The prolific output would have been impossible without such an approach. Prominent members of Alvarez’s collective included cameraman Ivan Napoles, composer Leo Brouwer and film editor Norma Torrado. Torrado worked especially close with Alvarez and played an extremely important role in developing the bold approach to film editing we now associate with Alvarez’s films.
Work on the newsreels eventually led Alvarez to work on longer, self-contained documentaries. These films afforded him the opportunity to broaden and amplify the lessons learned from the earlier newsreels.
“Cyclone” (1963) was the first such longer film to manifest examples of nearly all of his key cinematic signatures. The film documented the devastation wrought by Hurricane Flora upon the eastern provinces of Cuba and the vigorously coordinated response by the socialist government.
The film is informative and poetic. It displays a bold graphic style. It matches sound to image in provocative pairings. Some sequences are joined by nothing but silence. It fuses new live footage with found materials in an effective harmony. It begins with a traditional voiceover, delivered with typical authority. This voiceover soon gives way to an altogether different form of narration, conveyed through the sharp interplay of inter-titles, images, music and silence. As “Cyclone” unfolds before our eyes, it’s as if Alvarez is uncovering, for himself most of all, his eventual style.
The films that followed would confirm this subsequent reading. Within two years he had created the first of his masterpieces, the stunning and very brief “Now” (1965). “Cerro Pelado” (1966) would follow closely on its heels. A handful of months passed before the appearance of a film that would indisputably confirm his position within the history of cinema: “Hanoi, Tuesday the 13th” (1967).
Telling the story of Vietnam
“Hanoi, Tuesday the 13th” was a film that was defined by its challenges. Alvarez would travel with a single cameraman, Ivan Napoles. Each would carry his own hand-wind camera. They had only fragments of film, leftovers from U.S. news crews from before the revolution. They had no sound recording equipment whatsoever.
The two had come to document the growing war drive. But they couldn’t imagine that the Pentagon would dare target Hanoi itself, an open city crowded with several million civilian residents. They quickly saw that B-52 bombers possessed no capacity to distinguish the visiting Cubans from their Vietnamese targets.
Moreover, the Vietnamese themselves sought to limit the movements of the tiny film crew. They despised being framed as victims.
 A still from the Alvarez film “LBJ” |
But the result was unflinching, powerful and astonishing. The film remains one of the greatest ever produced on the Vietnam War and one of only a handful to articulate the Vietnamese perspective on the war.
As the director of the Cuban newsreel, Santiago Alvarez was later asked to visit Vietnam to document the funeral of revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh. By the time Alvarez completed “79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh,” his shock at the savagery of the U.S. imperialists had converted fully to rage. He said, “My style is the style of hatred for imperialism,” and for a dozen astonishing minutes he illustrates in precise cinematic language the full expressive dimensions of this style.
“79 Springtimes of Ho Chi Minh” resides at the very epicenter of Alvarez’s creative achievements. It was the single most revolutionary document of the cinematographer’s most revolutionary period. Even now, one is stunned by the ferocity of its visual onslaught, as well as the absolute freedom of its narrative organization. Deploying a battery of highly experimental tactics, it endures as a masterpiece of personal cinema. It also represents an official state response to the death of Ho Chi Minh.
Although he would eventually produce works of nearly every conceivable length, it is surely in short films that his vision and talent are most evident. His mastery of the short form is a product of the unique circumstances of his film education at ICAIC.
Working under extremely tight time and material constraints, Alvarez became a master of improvisation. He combined the use of limited found materials—archival footage and photographs—with a dynamic graphic sensibility, bold and unexpected music-image pairings, and a highly contemporary use of rapidly paced editing. Fusing the avant-garde with popular culture, he sought to synthesize a film style that was as revolutionary as the changes then sweeping his society.
The resulting films were always political and often didactic. They could be playful or deadly serious. They were borne of rage, bitter irony and an almost limitless solidarity. They could be raucous or silent, brief or monumental, laconic or verbose. They were prone to tangents, but could be as eloquent as poetry. They never sought perfection. They were never made with posterity in mind. They were made for the here and the now. They showed the world to be forever changing and changeable.
Santiago Alvarez was the pioneer of Cuba’s revolutionary cinema: the first to produce works of inarguable importance, and the first to exhibit them widely abroad. The early films of Santiago Alvarez alerted the world to something vital gestating in the corridors of Cuba’s ICAIC film institute.
But they alerted the world to something else as well—something far more important. They signaled the dynamic breadth of the revolution itself and the kind of beauty it is capable of creating. As Alvarez himself always insisted, “The revolution made me a filmmaker.”
That statement was not merely rhetoric. Without the Cuban revolution, there would be no Cuban Cinema at all. Alvarez’s loyalty to that revolution accounts, in large part, to his near absence from official, U.S.-dominated cinema history
Articles may be reprinted with credit to Socialism and Liberation magazine.
