Happy Birthday, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea! Born today in 1928, this Cuban filmmaker wrote and directed more than twenty features, documentaries, and short films, which are known for his sharp insight into post-Revolutionary Cuba. He is regarded as the finest director Cuba has produced.
Born in Havana, Alea was raised in an affluent, politically progressive family.
Years later, after receiving his law degree from the University of Havana in 1951, he studied cinema at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (Experimental Center of Cinematography) in Rome, Italy.
Alea was heavily influenced by Italian Neorealism, and created his first films in Rome with future colleague, Cuban film director and screenwriter Julio García Espinosa.
Alea fell in love with cinema at an early age, began as a documentarian much influenced by Italian neorealism and came into his own as an artist during Fidel Castro's regime.
Following the Cuban Revolution, Alea helped found the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) in 1959.
This filmmaking collective was devoted to making revolutionary films, and Alea was one of the organization's most influential members.
The following year, he made his directorial debut with his neorealist chronicle of the recent revolution. This was with the 1966 Cuban black and white comedy film 'La muerte de un burócrata' ('Death of a Bureaucrat').
Alea's first widely successful feature, it introduced itself as a sort of homage to the history of cinematic comedy. It includes direct allusions to the work of Buster Keaton and Luis Buñuel, among many others.
Alea's next film would be the one of which he is best known for writing and directing. This was the 1968 Cuban black and white drama/political drama film 'Memorias del Subdesarrollo' ('Memories of Underdevelopment').
It was the first Cuban film to be shown in the United States since the Revolution. It was also Alea's fifth film, and probably his most famous worldwide. It later gathered several awards at international film festivals.
Set in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs Invasion, Sergio Carmona Mendoyo (Sergio Corrieri), a wealthy bourgeois intellectual and aspiring writer, chooses to stay behind in Cuba while his wife and family escape to neighboring Miami, Florida.
Pessimistic about the revolution's promise to bring sweeping change to his country, he squanders his days prowling the streets of Havana looking for female companionship.
However, trouble erupts when his fling with chaste teenage Elena (Daisy Granados) nearly ruins him after her family accuses Sergio of rape.
In the film, the protagonist is unwilling to take a political stance one way or another, yet continues to despise the country around him for being backwards and underdeveloped.
Eventually, his life eventually fades into nothingness, as he becomes a personality which has no use in this new Cuba.
Though not shown to Western audiences until 1973, 'Memories' is based off of Cuban writer Edmundo Desnoes' innovative 1965 fiction novel Inconsolable Memories.
In making 'Memories of Underdevelopment' Alea was heavily influenced in his style by Alain Resnais' ('Night and Fog', 'Last Year ar Marienbad') 1959 American black and white war/romance film 'Hiroshima Mon Amour'.
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 post-revolutionary Cuba.
In a self-reflexive cameo appearance, Alea calls the film a “collage…with a little bit of everything”.
He uses a dizzying array of materials and filmic styles in 'Memories', from documentary-style narrative sequences, which use long unbroken shots taken from handheld cameras.
Another style used were the agitational montage sequences, reminiscent of the films of early Soviet filmmakers such Sergei M. Eisenstein.
'Memories' makes use of various types of media including direct documentary footage shot, still photos, archive and newsreel footage, clips of Hollywood films and recorded speeches by Castro and 35th U.S. President John F. Kennedy.
From these, the clips were used to create a seemingly disarticulated film language that is in direct contrast to the straightforward Hollywood style.
Before the release of 'Memories', both Alea and Corrieri were concerned that the film wouldn’t be successful. It was largely inexpensive to produce, as it was made without many technological or economic resources. As a result, Alea feared that his vision wouldn’t translate to the big screen.
Another concern of Alea’s was that Corrieri would seem too young for his part. At the time of shooting in 1968, Corrieri was twenty-eight, yet the character was intended to be one decade older.
Despite this, Alea and Corrieri worked together to capture the "different rhythm" that Corrieri needed to take on to play the part of someone ten years his senior in a number of ways, including by dyeing Corrieri’s hair grey.
Hanna, Sergio’s long-lost love in the film, was intended to be a much larger character, but the actress that ended up being cast was not a professional, so the character’s role was reduced.
Upon release, 'Memories of Underdevelopment' was poorly received by some critics because Corrieri was an unconventional protagonist.
In his novel, Desnoes writes of Corrieri in the Cuban quarterly film magazine Cine Cubano: [...] “that is the tragedy of Sergio. His irony, his intelligence, is a defense mechanism which prevents him from being involved in the reality.”
Because of the political turmoil between the United States and Cuba at the time, the U.S. Government denied Alea a visitor’s visa in 1970 when he attempted to enter America to receive several awards he had won for 'Memories', using the Trading with the Enemy Act as justification.
However, in 1974, 'Memories of Underdevelopment' was selected and ranked by the New York Times as one of the 10 best films of 1968.
In the following decades, Alea divided his time between making his own films and mentoring promising young filmmakers through ICAIC. In addition to writing or co-writing most of his films, Alea also actively worked as an advisor for other filmmakers.
In 1977, in an interview with American quarterly film magazine Cinéaste, Alea explained that at a certain point the novel “was to be betrayed, negated and transformed into something else” for it to be successful as a film.
Alea is also quoted for Cinéaste in saying that “Memories was in general much better understood and evaluated in the US because people perceived the attempt to criticize the bourgeois mentality.”
He was also surprised that many people went to see the film more than once in an effort to further understand its meaning.
Alea also comments that Desnoes was fully conscious of the fact that his book would be changed as it was made into a movie, and therefore he was able to keep a positive attitude. However, Desnoes ended up attending shooting sessions and making valuable suggestions.
Desnoes later commented that the film achieved a level of artistic success that the novel missed because Alea “objectivized a world that was shapeless… and still abstract in the book” by adding “social density.” Desnoes also has a cameo in the film, appearing as himself as a panelist in a round table gathering.
Because many Cubans already had a revolutionary mentality by the time the film was released, 'Memories of Underdevelopment' was regarded more as a representation of an outdated stream of thought.
Many American critics were “suitably impressed by the film as a stylistic tour de force as well as a subtle and complex portrait of an uncommitted intellectual from a bourgeois background swept up in a vortex of revolutionary change and the threat of nuclear extinction at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
The film adaptation for 'Memories' has generally been regarded as an improvement on the novel. In an interview in 1999, Corrieri was quoted stating the following:
“I think that Memories is one of the few cases in which the film is better than the novel, because usually the opposite is the case. Almost always the cinematic version of a novel comes up short, but here the film transcended the novel.”
'Memories of Underdevelopment' was later restored using the original camera and sound negative by Cineteca di Bologna with a vintage duplicate provided by the ICAIC.
The international initiative to save the film from decay was funded by The George Lucas Family Foundation and the Martin Scorsese-chaired World Cinema Project.
Alea had been less active in filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s, and Cuban film director and screenwriter Juan Carlos Tabío has co-directed several of the aging master's recent films.
Alea has, though, written a book of film theory, Dialéctica del espectador (Spectator Dialectic) (1982), and continued to inspire a new generation of sophisticated and politically committed artists.
In 2000, English film critic and historian Derek Malcolm listed 'Memories of Underdevelopment' at number fifty-four on his 100 Greatest Movies list. In The Guardian, he writes:
"Of all the dozens of films produced in Cuba through Castro's insistence on the importance of the cinema, Memories of Underdevelopment is the most sophisticated.
So much so, in fact, that those opposed to the revolution tend to call it a magnificent and unrepeatable fluke, produced as it was by a film institute that was virtually a Marxist ministry.
Those in favour cherish it as a landmark that avoids almost all of the radical cliches."
In a 2012 poll by Sight & Sound, 'Memories of Underdevelopment' was selected the 144th best film of all time.
In May 2016, 'Memories for Underdevelopment' was selected for screening as part of the Cannes Classics section at the 69th Cannes Film Festival.
Among his credits, Alea is also known for directing 'La última cena' ('The Last Supper') (1976), 'Fresa y chocolate' ('Strawberry and Chocolate') (1994) and 'Guantanamera' (1995).
For 'Strawberry and Chocolate' the film was nominated an Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.However, it didn't win. This occurred at the 67th Academy Awards in late March 1995. The film was the first from Cuba to ever be nominated.
Cuba's greatest and best-known director, Alea, over the years, had evinced a fondness for both historical and contemporary fables, invariably politically pointed and satirical, their flights into absurdity showing the influence of Buñuel.
An ardent supporter of the revolution that rid the country of the despotic Cuban military officer and politician Fulgencio Batista and brought Castro to power, Alea has painted a more complex portrait of Cuba in his cinema than the rest of the world has generally been willing to conceive.
However, Alea's documentary impulse has remained, yet it is used to constantly scrutinize contemporary Cuba.
Indeed, Alea has made some gutsy critiques of the socioeconomic and political realities of his land, as he ponders the persistence of a petty-bourgeois mentality in a society supposedly dedicated to the plight of the working poor.
Alea possessed a delicate balance between dedication to the revolution and criticism of the social, economic, and political conditions of the country.
He was considered to be Cuba's greatest director; internationally, he was noted for his versatility and for pointing out the foibles of Cuban society.
Nicknamed Titón, as he was known to his friends, Alea had been active from 1947-1996.
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