An ode to people's cinema: Humberto Solas article

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If Tomas Guiterrez Alea was the most distinguished figure in the  older generation of Cuban film-makers, arguably the most prominent among those who followed the 'old guards' was Humberto Solas, who died of cancer on September 17, 2008 at the age of 66.

But while Alea chose to work on a variety of themes and subjects as seen in Memories of Underdevelopment, Death of a Bureaucrat, The Last Supper, Chocolate and Strawberry, et al, Solas is more prominently identified with what he called 'historical melodramas' enacted in the context of Cuban political, social, artistic and personal realities in the 20^th century.

However, what unites the two -the satirical/polemic Alea and the melodramatic Solas - is a common sense of time and place and events; the urge to play the role of cultural statesman, and a fervent desire to break out of the isolation imposed on Cuban and Latin American artists and intellectuals, and in fact on the entire populace of  the continent, by the market forces of the Western world.

Owing to the peculiar circumstances in which the Cuban revolutionary society came into being, the country's film-makers had to take upon themselves the role of the fledgling nation's conscience-keepers. But, like all true artists, these foremost Cuban filmmakers were profound individuals as well, each sculpting out  his or her own perceptions of history, art and destiny, a body of work distinctive in tone, mood, texture and rhythm while maintaining a life-affirming unity of purpose. In other words, they had to combine their  responsibility to the people with their need for artistic fulfillment through the task of making films.

Humberto Solas was a member of the first generation of directors to mature under the revolution of 1959. Born into a humble Havana family, Solas chose to be an urban guerrilla while still in his teens and abandoned formal education completely. As he was to explain later : "It was a very unstable time to  study. Either Batista, the US pawn and Cuban dictator, closed down the university, or we did."

Prior to the revolution, chances of being a filmmaker "seemed like an unrealizable dream" to Solas. However, he managed to make a short film and was invited to join the Cuban Film Institure (Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematografica - ICAIC) soon after its foundation in 1959. The institution was destined to play a monumental role in the growth of authentic 'people's cinema' throughout the Latin American continent.

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During the same time, ICAIC  gave opportunities to film-makers and students of cinema from Africa and Asia to teach, learn, discuss and grow. Pioneered by the likes of the great Argentine neo-realist Fernando Birri, writer and cineaste Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Cuba's home-grown Julio Garcia Espinosa, famous for his ardent advocacy of an 'imperfect cinema',  ICAIC also invited Indian filmmakers from time to time to participate in its programmes. Notable among the Indian invitees were Mrinal Sen and Anand Patwardhan. If ICAIC no longer wears the austere yet dynamic look it did in its heydays, it is because, thanks to US economic sanctions and a changed global order, there is hardly any money in Cuba these days, be it for film, food, boxing or biotechnology.

Although, it was customary for Cuban directors to serve an extensive apprenticeship in documentaries, which were usually characterized by a certain social perspective and a detailed scrutiny of popular experiences, Solas made some early fictional shorts. But he was conscious that these films carried reflections of cultural inferiority and alienation in underdeveloped nations. These are feelings often seen in the most gifted artists of the three continents, awed by the supposed strengh and superiority of European and Western film styles. About this period in his career, Solas had ruefully observed: "Neither me, nor my generation, nor my country can be seen in any of these films. "

It was this critical realization that caused Solas to approach the Cuban reality with a new consciousness. His choice of historical subjects followed as an inevitable corollary. According to him, the importance attached to historical films in Cuba like Sergio Giral's The Other Francisco, Octavio Gomez's The Charge of the First Machette, his own Lucia, which tells the stories of three women belonging to three different periods in the tumultuous and checkered history of Cuba - the 1890s, the 1930s, and finally the 1960s -- is due to "our history (being) filtered through a bourgeoise lens. We lack a coherent, lucid and dignified appreciation of our national past". It is Solas himself who first called his films 'historical melodramas' in which a Marxist perspective provides a materialistic interpretation to historical events and to individual psychology.

Significantly, Solas frequently identified women as a central metaphor in his films because he believed that as a dominated group, women feel more deeply and reflect more immediately the contradictions in society. For instance, the contradiction of continued existence of the Latin machismo in Cuba. Solas' classic criticism of machismo in the final part of Lucia continues to be used till this day as a reference point in any serious discussion on thr issue of the collective and individual behavior and psychology in Latin societies. In this context, Solas said: "The sad masquerade of limited, archetype and suffocating human relations in defense of private property is most transparent in the case of women - half of humanity. The pathetic carnival of economic exploitation begins here. "

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Needless to emphasize, it does not speak well of the East's capacity to appreciate film art that Solas did not make the grade, so to say in that part of the world till he directed Un hombre de exito (A Successful Man), which was nominated for the best foreign language film at the Oscars. Solas had been a distinguished figure to film aficionados in Asia, Africa and Latin America since the '60s, yet it required him to win an Oscar nomination in the '80s to 'qualify' in the West. So much for Western claims to be arbiters of cinematic excellence!

Be that as it may, A Successful Man rightly gained many supporters worldwide for Solas. Here, the director attended to a characteristically broad canvas covering political history, personal goals and emotional relationships, all the while pursuing an aesthetic of impassioned experimentation. The film's story covers a crowded period of about thirty years and effectively contrasts the private lives and public carers of the two brothers separated by ideology and ambition. A publicity blurb of the day ran thus: "This story of corruption versus innocence and purity of rightful action is blessed with Solas' meticulous attention to detail. Havana, replete with all the trappings of bourgeois opulence, is reconstructed time and again in recreating periods from 1932 to the beginning of the Cuban Revolution."

A Successful Man portrays many of the artistic and ideological concerns with which Solas was commonly identified. His initial training as a documentarist explains his painstaking search for authentic details relating to the characters and events that made for the revolutionary movement in Cuba - the repeated reverses it suffered; its dogged refusal to give in to vastly superior forces in terms of money, arms and outside help; and its epic triumph, seriously threatened every day for the past fifty years, but never so seriously as today in a unipolar world of vanished ideals and diminished humans.

A scathing critique of the political and psychological evolution of men and women in the turbulent times, their methods as much as their morals, A Successful Man carries haunting echoes of a universal experience even as it relates a quintessential story of  saints, thieves, fools, heroes, Madonnas, whores, and successful men and women populating their small masterpiece have their imitations walking the streets, lurking in the shadows, warming unlikely beds, climbing the ladder or taking their own lives in any place on the face of the earth; and, sometimes, as Solas reveals with a chilling clarity, they eke out successful lives of a deathly pallor. By the time the film ends, the viewer had begun to ask along with the director, Who is the successful man - the one who lives and dies with and for his ideals, or the one who survives by betrayal, only to die a little each day?

The revolutionary experience on Cuban cinema, being what it is, is perhaps inevitable that film-makers there should often be visible in the role of political thinkers and ideologues; as critical propagandists and creative pamphleteers. During his 1987 visit to New Delhi when he served head of the jury at the International Film Festival of India (IFFI), Solas was asked for his reaction to the problems that the cinemas of the Three Continents (many inadvisedly call it the "Third World") have to face vis-a-vis the entrenched and dominant interests of Hollywood and European cinemas.

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Solas said, "Although the so-called Third World is heterogeneous, I can talk about the Latin American cinemas, The greatest problem that we face is of distribution. It is incredible that despite producing so many films, we face problems of distribution, precisely because all the distribution channels are manipulated by North American distributors. For example, a Bolivian can have as many problems in seeing an Argentine film as he will have for seeing an Indian film. But now we have the Foundation of New Cinema in Latin America based at Havana which, among other things, has the objective of acquiring as many Latin America movies and also of buying at least one theatre in every Latin American country. It is a fairly dramatic situation because, for example, in Venezuela one sees a Latin American film only if it has won an Oscar or an award ot Cannes. Cuba is the only country where films from all Latin American countries can be seen because we ourselves are in control of the distribution system."

With reference to the notion that one of the major concerns of enlightened film distributors should be "to de-mystify cinema for the entire population and to dismantle all the mechanics of the cinamatic hypnosis". Solas was asked how and in what ways had this idea been operational in the area of experimental cinema in Cuba.

Solas replied, "Today, such a notion forms the very basis of cinematic culture in Cuba, It is an objective rather difficult to attain but we are striving towards it. The cinemas of the advanced capitalist countries tends to generate in the underdeveloped Latin American sentiment of cultural indefinition. Cuba does not have enough cinematic productions nor do the other Latin American counties have it to enable them to counteract this kind of a situation. We have to import a lot of films from Europe and North America because, for example, in Havana we have more than 100 theatres and we must keep them running. However, we try and import only films of great cultural and humanistic value...The population has to be connected to the world of cinema. You can't cut them off. A man has to be aware of  other cultural views as well as his own in order to have a critical viewpoint."

While on the question of whether the people of Cuba had attained that level of maturity which would enable them to withhold themselves from the dangerous effects of the exposure to commercial Western cinema, it was pointed out to Solas that there are any number of countries, especially in the neo-colonized world where after finding a foothold, Western commercial cinema had unleashed vicious forces for lumpenization.

Solas said, "That's true. But we import only those films that are of aesthetic and cultural value, not all kinds of films. We don't import pornographic films nor those that have marginal attitudes. We get to see the very best of Latin American cinema. I would say that we have developed a very high level of critical judgment. We have many television programmers which carry debates within the public on such issues, especially in the teaching centres."

The grains of the revolutionary experiment, impressive as they are, are far from complete. Admissions to that effect from time to time by the Cuban political and intellectual leadership are significant. At the same time, widespread awareness about the areas of weakness impeding the process of nation-building point to a mature and struggling people committed to shaping its destiny along alternative principles. It goes without saying that art and culture in general, and cinema in particular as envisaged and translated into reality after 1959 can play an important role in fashioning that destiny. If contemporary Cuban cinema continues to show signs of both resistance and resilience, it is partly due to a growing realization in the nation's political circles that the current winds of change cannot be altogether ignored.

To understand better, the close connections between politics and cinema in Cuba, one could perhaps go back to what Fidel Castro had told his people many summers ago: "For us, a revolutionary people in a revolutionary process, the value of artistic and cultural creations is determined by their usefulness for the people, by what they contribute to man, by what they contribute to the liberation and happiness of man...Our standards are political. There cannot be aesthetic value without human content or in opposition to man, justice, welfare, liberation and the happiness of man."

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The films of Humberto Solas, T. G. Alea, Julio Espinosa, Santiago Alvares (according to Godard, he is the greatest documentarian of our times), Sergio Giral, Pastor Vega and so many other Cuban artists and visionaries are a vindication of the exalted attempt to connect art with life, and men and women under constant siege with moments of inspired truth.

However, it also needs to be stressed, of course helped by the advantage of hindsight, that the spirit of individualism in the choice of subject, style and language, aesthetic approaches and interpretation of history and contemporary realities must be allowed to flourish if those brave words of the supreme leader of the revolution are not to fade into mere rhetoric. True, in may areas of human endeavor, post-1959 Cuba serves as a shining example to the world. But whether the freedom of expression is included is a matter of debate. Cuban cinema is too rich and too precious to be allowed to be dictated by one man or an oligarchy, once vigorous and idealistic but currently showing tell-tale marks of age, exhaustion, planed exclusivity and unfriendliness to dissent. One can imagine the disconfort faced at times by a free spirit like Solas, but one could count on his genius for creative improvisation.

Humberto Solás, film-maker, born December 4 1941; died September 17 2008