Memories of Underdevelopment

"Memories of Underdevelopment" (Cuban, 1968): Made in 1968, set and shot (b/w) in 1961-62 Cuba, using a frighteningly smooth blend of documentary footage, and flash-backs, with new sets, locations, and actors in present-time, we watch a man at an airport say goodbye to most everyone he's ever known. THEY are escaping the new Castro Cuba, to start over in Miami, USA. HE has decided to remain (although we're never given much of an explanation why), and use (what must be) his independent wealth. Now living in the big city with only strangers, he wanders about looking for relationships. Instant closeness. Replacements. Although carrying the demeanor of a suave, patient, aging bachelor, he has the desperation of a teenage boy, driven by appearances and hormones. As archival footage is used to expand the vision of Castro's Cuba, it is clear the lonely man is the one making the bigger mistake. I thought of this "story" as Emotionally Existential.

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.

There is much that is wonderful about this film, the first Cuban film to be released in the U.S. after the Revolution. I found the ending rather abrupt and unsatisfying and some of the political discussions were long-winded (the fast disappearing subtitles on the video didn't help), but overall "Memories" was vibrant and surprising. The film is made with a lot of the spirit of the French New Wave, lots of flashy film techniques. It felt surprisingly open and honest to me, to have come out of Cuba at the time it did. It depicts an intellectual who has opted to remain in Cuba despite his well-off family and his wife having taken off for the U.S. He stays, wanting to see "how everything turns out". Afflicted with a rather massive case of both ennui and horniness, the film captures his musings on the state of Cuban society, at times satirical and sensual, but always cut through with a pervading sense of melancholy. It makes me want to hunt down more works by its late director, Tomas Gutierrez Alea.

"Memorias del Subdesarrollo" (1968) is an extremely interesting Cuban film about an aspiring bourgeois writer named Sergio. His wife leaves him for a more secure life in the States, as do many of his friends and neighbors. But Sergio remains in Cuba, all the while detesting his "underdeveloped" countrymen. His interior monologue throughout the film details the numerous ways in which the people who surround him, and his new girlfriend, are all underdeveloped mentally, emotionally, and spiritually, but we soon realize that it is the smooth-talking Sergio who is guilty of underdevelopment. Perhaps his inability to leave the mediocrity of Cuba is rooted in his need to have others to look down upon. Intermixed with his observations is a visit he takes to Hemingway's retreat in which he contemplates the novelist's colonialism--yet we can't but wonder if his observations are tainted by his underdevelopment. Further, the Cuban missile crisis happens at this time, and Sergio must also deal with a rape charge. A challenging film.

This isn't just a film of historical value; far from it. It is one of the greatest films ever made by anyone. The balance of elements that went into this venture came out magnificently poetic and real. The semi-documentary style is deeply influenced by 'Hiroshima Mon Amor' and other New Wave classics, but the sensibility is Alea's own and distinctly 'Latin American Intellectual.' There are very few films that can make me cry, this is one of them. Not because of the story, but simply because of the way it is made, the beautifully subtle way it is expressed. The leading character's central tragedy of not being able to reconcile his own deep feeling for his people with his intellectual standards because of their 'underdevelopment' and subsequent alienated existence or more precisely their inability to transcend their alienation to reach a more fulfilled state is one of the most touching and relevant themes I've ever seen in a film. It is more relevant more today, 30 years later than it was then, everywhere, not just in the island of Cuba with its mere 7 million inhabitants. A great performance by Sergio Corrieri (I Am Cuba) provides the required erotic undertone and comedic rhythms to convey the true feel of an intellectual 'playboy' existence in early '60s Cuba. The effect of this film is visceral and must be seen to be appreciated, words can hardly describe it. Suffice it to say that it uses all the resources of cinema and then some, but subtly and with maximum poetic control, and is a thousand times more valuable than most of the pretentious art films of today. If only one tenth of one percent of the audience that will see a piece of garbage like 'Mission Impossible 2' (which I sat and puked through I regret to say, because of all the hype about the 'action sequences' of John Woo, to kill a couple of hours which I'll never again be able to recover) this summer could somehow miraculously be forced to watch and understand this film and see its parallels within their own society of computerized complacent banality, the intellectual level of this country would shoot up overnight.