CUBA-FILM: Titon and the New Cuban Cinema

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Apr 23 1996 (IPS) - From “El mégano” to “Guantanamera,” by way of “Memories of Underdevelopment” and “Strawberries and Chocolate”, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (Titón) has had a single obsession: to make movies, but not just any movie.

“I suffer from an agonizing sense of responsibility,” he declared in 1988 as he tried to define his efforts to make “honest and authentic” cinema that is both based in reality and changes the world.

The master of Cuban cinema died April 16 never regretting his insistence on the artist’s duty to fulfill his or her responsibilities to society.

For Titón, these social responsibilities implied making uncompromising movies, avoiding sterile technological temptations, gaining independence from Hollywood and developing new audiences by making different kinds of movies.

Born in Havana Dec. 11, 1928, Titón’s filmmaking obsession began at age 20 when he discovered “the meaning of the films” of Russian director Sergei Eisenstein and became cognizant of the role of reflection in the creative process.

At a meeting of the Association of Third World Studies held in Washington in 1993, Titón recalled that this “unforgettable discovery” showed him two things: “that this medium had enormous influence over the viewer and, secondly, that it isn’t neutral — behind the camera that ‘looks’ there is an eye that ‘sees.”‘

Gutiérrez Alea calls film “a carrier of ideas” and “an ideological weapon sui generis because it is only effective as such to the degree that it works as a spectacle.”

In Cuba, Titón was “understood and misunderstood, praised and criticized, with and without justification,” acknowledged Rolando Pérez Betancourt, film critic for the Communist Party’s official newspaper, Granma.

Fighting countervailing winds and currents and periods of censorship in the Caribbean nation, Gutiérrez Alea kept a critical eye on Cuban reality in an effort to strengthen the revolution that he always considered himself part of.

“Someone once told me, and I fully agree, that socialism’s screenplay is excellent but its staging leaves a lot to be desired and hence should be the subject of criticism,” he told La Gaceta de Cuba (journal of the Union of Writers and Artists) while filming “Strawberries and Chocolate.”

If “Memories of Underdevelopment” (1968) is considered one of the 100 best movies ever made, “Strawberries and Chocolate” (1993) brought Titón the popular acclaim he had never compromised to cultivate.