In last week’s film I was captivated by Candomblé. The religion seems to need women to lead it. While women are not the focus of this film the incorporation of the Candomblé ceremonies does place them in an important role as they seem to oversee carrying out the rituals. Women in this religion seem to hold a sort of power because of it and because the god of the ocean is spoken about as a feminine woman figure. “She” gets angry when other women are involved with Aruã and thus giving other women the power to make her angry. However, these qualities are not at the forefront of the film. They are ones you must look for. Women are not empowered in this film as one may have hoped.

Evie Rosheger

After watching De Cierta Manera by Sara Gomez, I felt enlightened. The fiction/ nonfiction hybrid aspect to the film allowed me to further immerse myself into the realism portrayed in the film. Every character was allowed the space for complexity. I think something Sara was doing with this film was expressing her knowledge that the revolution was not done. It was not complete. She brings forth so many nuances that come with something like a revolution. The complexity of gender and culture, dancing on the line of erasing that culture for the sake of gender. The work here is not finished, is what I think Gomez is telling us. A relationship like Yolanda and Mario’s is a product of this half-baked revolution. A young woman, from an upper-class background involving herself in communism and teaching students while also dating a working-class man. I don’t see this as preformism on Yoland’s behalf, yet it does feel as though she is checking off boxes in terms of what a young revolutionary should do. And that is where we see the complexity of the characters shine through. The film reads overall as an encouragement for Cuba to strive for more. 

Reading about Imperfect cinema really resonated with me. I was introduced to the concept of third cinema a couple months ago in a documentary analysis class and now having read about imperfect cinema I am left with the question: are these two terms/classifications interchangeable? Regardless of if they are or aren’t, both third cinema and imperfect cinema share a common goal, and it is to explore untold and forgotten cultural histories and traumas of a collective who are not represented in mainstream media. The thing I appreciate the most about this type of cinema is its rejection of mainstream conventions. I like that its goal is to tell a story without trying to captivate audiences who respond to these conventions and instead capture the attention of a broader, less tended to, audience. An audience who will feel seen with these stories. Through doing this, cinema arguably becomes more accessible. One does not have to be of a “cultured elite”, as Julio Garcia Espinosa puts it, to appreciate this cinema. Imperfect cinema strives to reject a form which results from trying to please this mainstream audience.

This week in class we watched excerpts from Octavio Getino and Fernando Solana’s La Hora de los Hornos, as well as excerpts from some of Santiago Alvarez’s documentaries. I was really surprised by the use of stop-motion like editing, specifically in one of Alvarez’s documentaries of the local women dancing to music. I’m not sure if it is just different pictures edited together or if the stop-motion effect was just done when editing film footage. Like Alvarez’s documentary, La Hora de los Hornos also uses stop-motion like editing to direct the attention of the viewer. We can see this in the sequence of the slaughterhouse, edited with the bold statements stating Argentina’s economic corruption, as well as the heavily stylized imagery of western consumption through popular advertisements of the time. These different pictures edited together create a sort of Kuleshov effect for the audience; they derive their own meaning of this segment of the documentary as the edited clips and images create their own meaning together instead of outwardly telling the audience what the conflict is. The audience can almost immediately make the connection between the rise of consumption under a growing capitalist economy and the oppression of the Argentinean working class because of the editing. I was surprised that both of these documentaries used these editing techniques since they were made over 50 years ago, and the films I have seen using these techniques are fairly more recent. 

By Tea del Valle

As we read in Julio García Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema,” a subversive cinema was already happening throughout the American continent in the 60s. This type of cinema was a response to all the contemporary liberation movements. Cuba’s Film Institute (ICAIC) was created with the twofold purpose of supporting revolutionary films within the island, which would contribute to expand the ideas of the Cuban revolution, but also to establish a dialogue with other new cinemas and filmmakers working along the same lines in the Americas or elsewhere. For this week film journal entry you can focus on any of the things that we watched or read in class: Solanas and Getino’s The Hour of Furnaces, Santiago Álvarez’s LBJ, Agnès Varda’s Salut les Cubains, Alessandra Müller’s Sara Gómez: An Afro-Cuban Filmmaker and Julio García Espinosa’s “For an Imperfect Cinema.” Some of the things we discussed that you can use as starting points for your responses were: dialectics, montage, moving the archive, being didactic, intertitles, narration, extractivism in the American continent, neocolonialism, the connection between the Civil Rights Movement and the Cuban Revolution, and Afro-Cuban culture and religion.

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