An ode to people’s cinema: Humberto Solas

By Vidyarthy Chatterjee • Nov 19th, 2008 • Filed under: Great Director, Movies, featured, people

December 4, 1941-September 17, 2008

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.