In a 2006 documentary titled Como hacer un filme en un pais subdesarollado (How to make a film in an undeveloped country), Cuban director Magdiel Aspillaga interrogates the legacy of Cuban filmmaker and theorist Julio Garcia Espinosa. Through a series of interviews and extended clips from Garcia Espinosa’s films, Aspillaga tries to assess the impact of Garcia Espinosa’s work on contemporary Cuban film and culture. Filmmakers such as Fernando Birri and scholars such as Michael Chanan, as well as Garcia Espinosa himself, speak to his idea of imperfect cinema advanced over 40 years earlier. In one of the interviews, Garcia Espinosa re-articulates the central ideas of his work, namely, the problem of “perfection” as an aesthetic criterion for making art in an underdeveloped or postcolonial country. Linking aesthetic perfection to imported ideas from Europe, Garcia Espinosa argues his manifesto celebrates the imperfect blend of genres and both high and low cultural forms that can reach and communicate with a popular audience. This imperfect assemblage of genre and style is evident in the sample of his films highlighted in the documentary—Son o no son, Juan quin quin, Cuba Baila—and reveal a filmmaker averse to the centrality of the author or auteur (and their consistent body of work) as a guiding concept for film and media makers. The film shows Garcia Espinosa as distinct from conventional auteur directors in film history that can be linked stylistically to the commitment to a particular genre (Hitchcock and suspense) or style (Godard and discontinuity editing). It reveals instead a filmmaker committed to working with the specific realities and requirements of cultural production in Cuba after the revolution.
In his canonical essay on Third Cinema, “For an imperfect cinema,” Garcia Espinosa outlines the primary challenges facing the nascent post-revolution Cuban film industry. He saw the high levels of technological sophistication or “quality” in Hollywood cinema [such as Cinemascope] as yielding a destructive effect on emerging Cuban filmmakers, particularly if they sought to use these as models of production. Cuba simply could not match Hollywood’s advanced budgets and resources. Against this model of refinement, Garcia Espinosa proposed a salvage aesthetics where artists should concentrate not on the aesthetic infrastructure of a work, which cost money, but rather, on ensuring “material conditions are reduced to a minimum…[eliminating] costumes, scenery, make-up and [in the case of theatre] even a stage.” 1 For Garcia Espinosa cultural, and ultimately, national autonomy could be forged through a commitment to working within one’s inherited material conditions. In this way, technological underdevelopment need not be seen as a form of cultural inferiority where filmmakers must instead strive to “catch up” to popular Hollywood or the art cinemas of Europe. Rather, refining one’s available material would be a way of escaping the long cultural shadow cast by dominant western cinemas in Cuba at mid-century.
This book examines film and media practices in Cuba following the collapse of the Soviet Union and the beginning of what was referred to as the “Special Period in Times of Peace.” The Soviet collapse marked a long period of economic and political instability in Cuba that I describe as late socialism. The essays in this book examine how material and economic shortages as well as political and ideological uncertainties are expressed in specific films and media practices of the period through a set of formal and conceptual characteristics that I describe as imperfect aesthetics. Building on Garcia Espinosa’s notion of “imperfect cinema,” imperfect aesthetics describes formal practices of making do with limited economic and material means. Several key ideas famously outlined by Garcia Espinosa continue to have resonance in Cuban film and media practice, both as a framework for cultural practice, but also as a way of reading media and cultural practices within the post-Soviet period. As such I argue that Garcia Espinosa’s ideas have informed the development in Cuban cultural practices of an “imperfect aesthetic” that takes on renewed resonance in the post-Soviet period. Within the book I am specifically interested in highlighting how film and media productions within the contemporary economic and political climate reflect a different kind of making do than the one proposed originally by Garcia Espinosa. Making do in the Post-Soviet period illustrates the ways that Cuban film and media makers confronted the economic and political challenges and general strangeness of a post-Soviet landscape marked by material shortages, political uncertainty, and new kinds of global traffic. At the same time, by drawing on notions of the imperfect in Garcia Espinosa’s work I gesture towards a perceptible continuity between film and media practices in the post-Soviet period and those in the early aftermath of the revolution.
The documentary by Aspillaga is reflective of this shift in notions of making do. On the one hand, Aspillaga shows continued interest in the 1960s as a germinal moment in Cuban film and artistic development, and specifically, in the theory and method of Garcia Espinosa. It draws formally upon earlier Cuban film traditions of self-reflexivity, so central to articulating a national aesthetic framework for art after the Cuban revolution. It shows the importance of this aesthetic framework as a site of investigation by a young and emerging filmmaker like Aspillaga, who revisits this history and legacy as grounds for his own practice. At the same time the production of the documentary itself is a manifestation of a more contemporary imperfect aesthetic process. It is reflective of the specific geo-political landscape of the post-Soviet period in Cuba, as a product of multiple financing agencies representing both Cuban and foreign funding bodies. The film is the result of a co-production between ICAIC (the founding post-revolutionary film body in Cuba) and the Ludwig Foundation, a foreign-financed cultural agency based in Havana. The film includes a range of international interviewees, and while Aspillaga himself is a graduate of ISA, the art institute in Havana, he now resides outside of Cuba in Miami. In these ways the film is very much a transnational entity as much as it is a document about the national Cuban aesthetic tradition. In these forms of hybridity, I would argue the film is reflective of a particular kind of imperfect aesthetics that both works with and reaches beyond the earlier scope of imperfect cinema.
While engaging with a new and unprecedented reality, recent film and media practices are also looking back and re-imagining the ideas, icons, and key film works of the 1960s as a means of engaging the present. This is a significant shared element in a variety of film and media practices in the country over the last 15 years. The imperfect aesthetics found in this more recent period give voice to an important political and cultural dialogue impossible within official public sites of discourse in Cuba and thus represent expressions of an alternative public sphere. Through various manifestations of imperfect aesthetics, the film and media practices examined in this book communicate the experience of late socialism in Cuba, where pressures of economics, globalization, and political change co-exist ambivalently with residual elements of the Cuban revolution and Cuban socialism.
The book contributes to a growing field of research examining Cuba in the wake of the Soviet collapse. These include two major book collections that examine Cuba from a more general perspective, 2 as well as three primary book studies specifically focused on Cuban film in this period: Ann Marie Stock’s On Location in Cuba: Street Filmmaking during Times of Transition (2009), Sujatha Fernandes’s Cuba Represent! Cuban Arts, State Power, and the Making of New Revolutionary Cultures (2006), and Enrique Garcia’s Cuban Cinema after the Cold War: A Critical Analysis of Selected Films (2015). A number of these scholars have argued that within the politically and economically uncertain period of the 1990s, cultural forms have been important sites of political dialogue—serving as an alternative public sphere within Cuba’s officially restrictive political context. Sujatha Fernandes argues that while Cuban films stimulate a great range of conversations of a political nature, the films ultimately work to reinforce the political status quo, thus reconciling and rectifying any potentially meaningful critical dialogue. Ann Marie Stock charts the emergent film practices following the Soviet collapse, arguing that Cubans became entrepreneurial in finding new ways to make and produce films in the decline of national infrastructural bodies. Like Fernandes, Stock argues that filmmaking in this period was a key site for the discussion of national culture and identity, and as such, contributed to the expansion of the civil sphere. Both Stock and Fernandes examine Cuban films and film practices in the post-Soviet period primarily through interview-based, ethnographic, and institutional analyses. In looking primarily at aesthetics, my book extends this existing scholarship by focusing explicitly on the formal connections between film practices in the post-Soviet period and films in the early post-revolutionary period of the 1960s and 1970s. I also look specifically at how formal and aesthetic elements in films and video convey the particular time-space experience—the chronotope—of the late socialist period. My book also differs from the recent book by Enrique Garcia by drawing attention to a range of short, non feature-length films and documentaries produced outside of the central film agency ICAIC, and in some cases, produced by foreign filmmakers inside and outside of the island. In this way, I draw attention to the transnational contributions to Cuban film and media making on the subject of Cuba in this period. In addition, I draw attention to the links between 1960s film theory ideas of imperfect cinema in non-filmic cultural production in my discussion of Ernesto Oroza and imperfect design. By looking at aesthetics in this broad way, I aim to show the expanded effects and legacy of 1960s film theory on cultural production, broadly conceived, in the late socialist period. Similar to all of the noted scholars above, I see aesthetic expression in films, videos, and design objects that I look at as expressive of concerns and questions regarding the legacy of the Cuban revolution, and thus as contributions to the civil or public sphere in Cuba.
In the following chapters, I examine film and media practices as well as institutions that express this experience of imperfection and late socialism—both large-scale film productions produced through the principal film agency (ICAIC) as well as smaller scale alternative film and digital media institutions (EICTV and Televisión Serrana). The case studies in the book range from detailed close readings of feature films, to broader overviews and analysis of short films produced by amateur and emerging filmmakers from Cuba and abroad. I draw attention to the way that specific aesthetic elements within these film and media texts such as melodrama, temporality, and irony, allow for the expression of an ambivalent politics not necessarily in agreement with official public discourse in the country. Taken as a whole, they represent a sample portrait of film and media responses to the late socialist period in Cuba.
Chapter 2, Late Socialism, the Special Period, and Film and Media Practice looks more closely at the specific economic and political conditions that underscore film and media practice in the Special Period and makes a case for drawing a distinction between the first and second decades after the Soviet collapse, a period marked by greater normalization of changes endured in the 1990s. I also examine the experience of temporality in this period and how the contradictory sense of time makes itself manifest in aesthetic expression. Finally, I consider in more detail the tension between the local and the global that I see as a key feature of this period as well as a central tenet of imperfect aesthetics.
In Chapter 3, Mourning the Revolution: Melodrama and Temporality in Late Socialist Narrative Cinema, I examine the resurgence of film melodrama following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Through a close reading of Humberto Solás’ Miel para Oshún (Honey for Oshún; 2001), I argue that melodrama functions as an important aesthetic mode in this period, voicing ambivalence and critique vis-à-vis Cuban revolutionary socialism in the wake of the Soviet collapse. In addition to the argument that melodrama is an optimal mode for expressing critical content in the absence of an official public sphere, I argue that melodrama’s unique temporality (its “too lateness”) gives expression to the temporality of lateness within the trajectory of the Cuban revolution—late socialism.
In Chapter 4, Localizing the Global: Transnational Filmmaking at EICTV, I discuss the Cuban film and TV school EICTV as a case study for examining Cuba’s relationship to globalization, and specifically, Cuba’s emergence into global capitalism in the post-Soviet period. Through interviews with school administrators and close readings of recent film and video productions, I argue that the school embodies some of the creative contradictions in existence in Cuba within the context of late socialism. These contradictions, I argue, are evident both at the institutional and pedagogical level as well as within the aesthetic expression of films produced by Cuban and international filmmakers. On the one hand, the school’s curriculum and productions speak to the waning of explicitly Third Worldist sympathies and a waning antagonism with the capitalist west. On the other hand, the school retains significant points of connection—aesthetic and political—to its socialist, revolutionary roots, particularly in its commitment to rural immersion in eastern Cuba. In this way, the school evidences the political hybridity of the late socialist period, where the global and capitalist present co-exists with residual aspects of the revolutionary past.
Chapter 5, Negotiated Endurance: Rural Film Production and Improvised Cinema at Televisión Serrana, examines rural cinema exhibition in the late socialist period through a discussion of a number of films produced at Televisión Serrana (TVS), ...