CULTURE-CUBA: Santiago Alvarez, the Poet of the Image, is Dead

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, May 20 1998 (IPS) - Cuban documentary film-maker Santiago Alvarez, died Wednesday, suffering an advanced case of Parkinson’s disease, but without having lost his ability to make poetry out of images.

Master of masters, chronicler of the most important events in Cuba and the world, forerunner of the “videoclip,” Alvarez was considered “the sensitive, characteristic and temperamental poet of Cuban cinema.”

“My supposed style is life. It is life which dictates my work,” said Alvarez in his book “Santiago Alvarez, cronista del Tercer Mundo” (Santiago Alvarez, chronicler of the Third World).

Lover of cinema journalism, this director left behind him 600 new programmes for the cinema and more than 150 documentaries, including key works of Latin American film like Now (1965) and Hanoi Martes 13 (Hanoi Friday 13) (1967).

Born in Havana on March 8, 1919, Alvarez died early Wednesday morning from a lung infection, and sources within the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), said he will be buried Friday.

Alvarez received a special prize at the 19th International Festival of New Latin American Cinema in Havana in December, for his latest works, “Concierto mayor” (Major concert) and “La isla de la musica” (The Isle of Music) made in 1997.

At the time of his death he was working on two books, one of his memoirs, and another under the title “The Men I Knew,” a collection of reports on his meetings with people like Salvador Allende and Ho Chi Minh.

His debut as a cinema director came relatively late in life, when at the age of 40 he joined the group of artists who founded the ICAIC, the first cultural institution created after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959.

Before ICAIC, he had been a medical student, music arranger for radio and television programmes, plate washer, miner in Pennsylvania, radio script writer on youth, science, sport and sexual issues and a communist militant.

In the sixties, Alvarez brought the documentary to the heart of Cuban cinematography and in fact made himself the cinematographic biographer of President Castro, whom he accompanied on the majority of his international tours.

He also created and directed the “Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano,” (the ICAIC Latin American News Bulletin) which came out weekly until early 1990, when it disappeared as a result of the economic crisis in Cuba.

“Santiago Alvarez is a poet,” and therefore “his formal irreverence, the freedom with which he tackles the ‘laws’ of montage and even the so called rule of ‘good taste,’ is so excessive,” said ICAIC director, Alfredo Guevara, classing him as an “anti-routine” master.

His passion was “to seek something extraordinary, in the most ordinary events, observing what others look at but don’t see, trying to transmit the essence of the event and not only describe it.

And montage was the part of the work he enjoyed most. He filmed with no prepared screenplay, saying half the value of a film was in the music, avoiding verbal narration and considering silence a form of expression.

He used surrealism, expressionism, naturalism, “all the styles of isms possible,” in order to make a final product that was always different and which responded to his adventurers insticts of “living the reality” with which he worked.

“I am a professional agitator. I see myself as a pampleteer who, above all, has a political conception of everything he does,” said Alvarez, a firm defender of the documentary because it allowed him to be “protagonist of the events.”

As well as “Now,” considered in the United States to be the precursor of the videoclip, he filmed “Escambray” (1961, on anti- Castro uprisings), “Muerte al invasor” (Death to the Invader) (1961, on the US invasion of Giron beach, Bay of Pigs) and “Ciclon” (Cyclone) (1963, on cyclone Flora), amongst others.

His work also included “79 primaveras” (79 springs) (1969, a biography of Ho Chi Minh), “El tigre salto y mato, pero morira” (The Tiger Pounced and Killed, but will Die) (1974, on the coup d’etat in Chile), and “El cielo fue tomado por asalto” (The Sky was Taken by Storm) (1973, on Castro’s tour of Algeria and Eastern Europe).

Alvarez’s last two documentaries were linked to the world of music.

“A Major Concert,” was an account of a concert including Cuba’s Pablo Milanes, Spain’s Joaquin Sabina and the Argentine, Fito Paez, held in 1997 in aid of Cuba’s AIDS sufferers.

The second, “The Isle of music,” was a report on the old troubadours and kings of son, some of whom worked on the records “Buena Vista Social Club” and “A toda Cuba le gusta,” winners of this year’s Grammy Prize, the most prestigious award of the US record industry.

In 1981, the director had received the Felix Varela award, the highest cultural prize on the island, and he had an honorary doctorate in the Cuban Higher Institute of Art.

When he was asked in 1995 what should be the profile of the “ICAIC Latin American News Bulletin” were it to return to the air in Cuba, he hit the nail on the head, saying the “critical aspects” would be the key.

For Alvarez, a poet who always supported the revolution as led by Castro, irrespective of the crisis which struck Cuba, the issue to be constantly at the fore in cinematographic journalism was “principally criticism.”