“We Cubans are victims of the vision that others have of us, which means we often lose our perspective and we misrepresent ourselves”, wrote Edmundo Desnoes, author of the novel Memories of Underdevelopment, “we see ourselves the way industrialized countries do, or how they would like to see us”.
Widely used to describe at first ‘non American’ and then ‘non Western’ cinema, the sometimes ambiguous discourse on world cinema has often ended up reinforcing a western and culturally hegemonic point of view of the world. This has led to neglet the great diversity, uniqueness and wealth of the films called into question, which have often been relegated to a position of marginality and resistance. Conceived of in this way, world cinema is not dissimilar to the concept of ‘Third Cinema’ proposed by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino in the legendary manifesto Hacia un tercer cine (1969). “Third Cinema [in contrast to First Cinema, the Hollywood model, and Second Cinema, art films] is a revolutionary, political and artistic project and militant by origin, nature and end”. The binary division ‘center vs. periphery’ does not sufficiently describe reality today: the reconfiguration of world geographies due to migration flows and the growing digital democratization of cinema (transnational ever since its inception) demand applying a new critical paradigm to aesthetic paths and cultural and political perspectives that is hybrid, inclusive and wide-ranging.
It should not be a surprise then that this year’s restored films include two acclaimed artists like Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. With two seminal works (bound together by their reciprocal artistic influence), each indebted to European film, especially Neorealism, they expressed themselves in an innovative, lucid language that successfully communicates the complexities and paradoxes of a stateless country. A new field of inquiry, according to Rosenbaum, which includes a “remapping of physical space – [that] must negotiate the coexistence of colonizer with colonized; Confucianism with capitalism, democracy, and socialism; China with Japan and America; and personal identity with corporate and national identities”.
Just as lucid and honest is the work of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, who nine years after the overthrow of Batista had enough distance to make a truly free film within the limits imposed by Castro’s regime. The protagonist’s subjective point of view (midway between Antonioni and Dostoevskij), his memories and internal monologue alternate with historical documents – archive materials, newsreels and real-life footage. The shift between these two levels creates the critical tension of Memories of Underdevelopment, an honest, anti-Manichean and critical ‘conversation about the Revolution’. Perhaps it is the film that has succeeded the most in capturing and interpreting the particularities of Cuba’s history and culture through a ‘Cuban’ perspective.
Sincere thanks to Margaret Bodde, Jennifer Ahn, Kristen Merola and Maria Paleologos.

Cecilia Cenciarelli

Programme curated by Cecilia Cenciarelli

“A director can survive in a museum, in a field or in the jungle – writes Serge Daney – of the first, second or third world. In the jungle of the third world he will be judged on his ability to survive, on the obstinacy with which he continues to propose committed films and believe in the power of cinema, even if no one has asked him to”.
Shot with lucidity and an admirable economy of means, the three films restored this year by the World Cinema Project are free, imperfect, generous, and for different reasons, revolutionary works.
Far removed from one another in geography, vocation and style, La Noire de…, Insiang and Alyam Alyam (respectively, the first Senegalese, Filipino and Moroccan films presented at the Cannes Festival), are driven by the same urgency to give voice to a language of their own, free from any form of cultural imperialism.
In his slow, almost timeless evocation of a rural Moroccan life coming to terms with the passing of its ancestral laws and the mirage of prosperity, Ahmed El Maanouni, in his first work, finds the perfect balance between a never-detached investigative work and an ‘affectionate’ homage to a community and its collective memory. The violence of the exodus that strips the countryside, told through Abdelwahad’s tale, is just one of the possible variations of the, painfully present, story of migration. The disconnection between the expectations of the protagonist in La Noire de… for her new life in France (initially shot in colour by Sembène) and a claustrophobic and gelid reality in which she is denied every desire and human contact, will bring the woman towards a slow and inescapable alienation. Her loss of identity mirrors the drama of Senegal, newly independent yet still ravaged by unconscious and racist neo-colonialism.
In contrast to the production and distribution conditions of North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa in the 60s and 70s, Lino Brocka worked in a bulimic film industry that tried to impose on him only films of pure entertainment. Challenging commercial laws and political censorship, Insiang displays the bright colours of the hot-blooded melodrama which Brocka uses to “denounce the violence caused by the overpopulation of the urban environment and the destruction of a human being”.
Without wanting to stretch the similarities too far, these three works definitely seem to share a moral significance that transcends any one particular narrative. The choice of placing at the centre of the story the loss of human dignity and the absence of a thought for the future makes their value as works of political protest and cultural resistance universal and timeless.

Cecilia Cenciarelli