Tomás Gutiérrez Alea – Memorias del subdesarrollo AKA Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

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Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968)

Quote:
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s gutsy Memorias del Subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment) is a difficult work of political activism. This stirring blend of narrative fiction, still photography and rare documentary footage catalogs the many intricacies and contradictions of a bourgeois Cuban intellectual’s loyalty to Castro’s revolution. Though Alea himself was devoted to the cause, his films forever scrutinized the self-devouring nature of Castro’s Cuba. (Alea died in 1996 shortly after the one-two success of the Oscar-nominated Strawberry and Chocolate and Guantanamera.) If Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba championed the need for revolution in the country, Memories contemplates the failure of the new government to recognize and negotiate the lingering bourgeois threat left in the wake of Fulgencio Batista’s fall.

When his wife and parents leave for the United States shortly after the Bay of Pigs invasion, 38-year-old playboy Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) resigns himself to a ritual of neurotic self-analysis. From his apartment, he observes the threat of foreign invasion that haunts the hazy, not-so-distant horizon. Bored and unemployed (he owns the apartment building he lives in), he chases after women all over Havana before finally meeting and bedding 16-year-old Elena (Daisy Granados), who he seemingly attempts to mold after his ex-wife by giving the young girl the woman’s hand-me-downs. If Alea deliberately likens the virginal Elena to a country that welcomes its own defilement, Sergio’s acquittal by the courts (he’s accused to raping the girl by her parents) is no doubt indicative of the man’s obsession with Cuba’s own defilement of its Marxist loyalties.

Underdevelopment refers both to Cuba’s political stagnation and Sergio’s own sense of false enlightenment. The way Alea pieces together the film must count as its own act of political resistance: documentary footage calls attention to a complex individual-group dialectic tearing up the country from the inside while a series of self-referential, surrealist interruptions are alive with better-than-here hopefulness. “She makes me feel underdevelopment everywhere,” says Sergio of Elena before visiting the home of Ernest Hemingway, who according to Sergio killed animals and mounted them on his walls so he wouldn’t have to kill himself. One of Alea’s most jarring framing devices situates Elena as an exotic specimen (“a beautiful Cuban señorita”) trapped beneath the lens of American imperialism. Like Hemingway and Elena herself, it’s only a matter of time before Cuba itself would self-destruct.

The film is haunted by one particular image that appears early on: poet and revolutionary José Martí’s face withering to near obscurity on the wall of a building. Hiroshima Mon Amour is a major point of reference for Alea. In both Resnais’ Hiroshima and Alea’s Havana, human ghosts come to grips with the implications of their past and grapple with the weight of building a new present for themselves. Like Elena, Cuba struggles to “establish links” between its war-torn past and disenchanted present. Memories of Underdevelopment remains a difficult and enigmatic work precisely because Cuba has yet to emerge from a kind of historical and cultural vacuum created by the vise of foreign threats, invasions and embargoes. And like Sergio, the country and its people can only wallow in the unfulfilled promise of its revolutionary consciousness.

Tomas Gutierrez Alea - (1968) Memories of Underdevelopment.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 38 min
Size: 	2.45 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	960x576 
Aspect ratio:  	5:3
Frame rate: 	24.000 fps
Bit rate: 	3 339 kb/s
BPP: 	0.252
Audio
#1:  	Italian 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/E293ED9FE3A7E95/Tomas_Gutierrez_Alea_-_(1968)_Memories_of_Underdevelopment.mkv

Language(s):Spanish, English
Subtitles:English

The post Tomás Gutiérrez Alea – Memorias del subdesarrollo AKA Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Sergio Corrieri – Cinema of the World

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea – Memorias del subdesarrollo AKA Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

Mikhail Kalatozov – Soy Cuba aka I am Cuba [+Extras] (1964)