Tomás Gutiérrez Alea(1928-1996)
- Director
- Writer
- Editor
Cuba's greatest and best-known director, Tomas Gutierrez Alea fell in
love with cinema at an early age, began as a documentarian much
influenced by Italian neorealism and came into his own as an artist
during Fidel Castro's regime. Over
the years he has evinced a fondness for both historical and
contemporary fables, invariably politically pointed and satirical,
their flights into absurdity showing the influence of
Luis Buñuel. An ardent supporter of the
revolution that rid the country of the despotic
Fulgencio Batista and brought Castro
to power, Alea has painted a more complex portrait of Cuba in his
cinema than the rest of the world has generally been willing to
conceive. The documentary impulse has remained, yet it is used to
constantly scrutinize contemporary Cuba. Indeed, Alea has made some
gutsy critiques of the socioeconomic and political realities of his
land, as he ponders the persistence of a petty-bourgeois mentality in a
society supposedly dedicated to the plight of the working poor.
Born to a fairly well-off family, Alea was sent to college in Havana to
follow in his father's footsteps and become a lawyer. At about the same
time he entered school, though, he acquired an 8mm camera and made two
short films, El faquir (1947) and
La caperucita roja (1947).
Several years later he collaborated with fellow student (and future
film great) Néstor Almendros on a short
adaptation of a Franz Kafka story they named
Una confusión cotidiana (1950).
Upon graduation, Alea journeyed to Italy to study film directing for
two years during the crest of neorealism at the famed Centro
Sperimentale de Cinematografia. He returned to Cuba in 1953 and joined
the radical "Nuestro Tiempo" cultural society, becoming active in the
film section, working as a publicist and aligning himself with Castro's
fight against the Batista regime. In 1955 Alea co-directed, with fellow
society member
'Julio Garcia Espinosa', the 16mm
short El mégano (1955), a
semi-documentary about exploited workers, acted by nonprofessionals
from the locales in which it was shot. The film was seized by Batista's
secret police because of its political content.
Soon after the Cuban revolution in 1959, Alea co-founded (with
Santiago Álvarez) the national
revolutionary film institute ICAIC ("Instituto del Arte y Industria
Cinematografica"). He promptly made a documentary,
Esta tierra nuestra (1959),
full of hope for the new government's plan to help the poor through
agrarian reform, and has remained a pillar of the organization ever
since. Alea's diverse creative personality has led him to experiment
with a broad range of styles and themes. His first feature,
Stories of the Revolution (1960),
employs a neorealist style to present three dramatic sketches depicting
the armed insurrection against Batista. Alea's relatively
straightforward approach to film style, however, would change, altered
not only through his appropriation of Hollywood and art cinema
stylistics but also by his increasingly personal attempts at
self-expression.
A Cuban Fight Against Demons (1972),
the film on which he first worked with regular cinematographer
Mario García Joya, comes across as the
prelude to a period Alea has described as full of personal and artistic
instability as much as it does an aggressive allegorical portrait of
church and state corruption. The director's later
Cartas del parque (1988) is
more of a twilight work, exploring the romantic period piece as a
scribe meets a diverse cross-section of society via his talents at
letter writing.
The finest of Alea's historical films,
The Last Supper (1976), continued
to highlight his versatility, drawing on Afro-Cuban musical motifs and
the literary style of magic realism to recreate an 18th-century slave
revolt. Alea has also made several satiric comedies that explore the
legacy of bourgeois society in post-revolutionary Cuba. The madcap
adventure The Twelve Chairs (1962),
a tale also told by Russian filmmakers and by
Mel Brooks, satirizes greed and
bureaucracy as a lingering post-revolutionary bourgeois, his roguish
manservant and a corrupt priest hunt for a chair concealing priceless
diamonds. The Hollywoodian black comedy
Death of a Bureaucrat (1966)
cites not only Buñuel but also Mack Sennett
and Stan Laurel and
Oliver Hardy as it criticizes, at an early
point in the Castro regime, the administrative muck of the political
system (Alea reused the gallows humor of the bureaucracy connected with
burying a corpse for his road picture
Guantanamera (1995), which began to
appear at festivals in 1995 and 1996). In
Los sobrevivientes (1979) an
aristocratic family devolves from civilization to savagery; using a
metaphor found in many films from poor countries, the family resorts to
cannibalism in trying to remain isolated from the Revolution. The
stresses and strains of a revolutionary society were explored in
several dramatic works set in contemporary Cuba, among them
Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
and Hasta cierto punto (1983).
"Memories", Alea's masterpiece and arguably the best-known Cuban film
ever made, brilliantly blends documentary and drama to create an
extremely witty yet sensitive portrait of a restless, oversexed,
politically uncommitted intellectual as he meanders through the early
days of the Revolution. The latter film is, in some ways, a
continuation of the former, as documentary filmmakers attempt to
examine lingering machismo among dockworkers, eventually discovering
that the Revolution's goals for changes in consciousness have succeeded
only "up to a certain point."
Alea returned yet again to the nexus between the sexual and the
political with the best-known Cuban film of the 1990s,
Strawberry & Chocolate (1993). The
story of the unusual friendship that develops between a naive believer
in Castro's contemporary version of communism and a more experienced,
gay critic of the regime was widely praised and just as widely
attacked. Some found it atypically gentle for Alea and read its gay
lead as a cover-up of Castro's horrifying treatment of homosexuals,
while others thought it needlessly provocative in its
characterizations; such divergent responses only testify to the
complexity typical of Alea's tapestries. In 1994, "Strawberry and
Chocolate" became the first Cuban film to receive an Oscar nomination
as Best Foreign Film. Alea has written or co-scripted all his features
and, in accordance with ICAIC's collective approach to filmmaking, has
served as advisor on two of the institute's most stylistically
innovative films:
El otro Francisco (1974),
directed by Sergio Giral, and
One Way or Another (1977),
directed by Sara Gomez.
Alea has been less active in filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s, and
Juan Carlos Tabío has co-directed
several of the aging master's recent films. He has, though, written a
book of film theory, "Dialectica del espectador (1982)", and continued
to inspire a new generation of sophisticated and politically committed
artists.
love with cinema at an early age, began as a documentarian much
influenced by Italian neorealism and came into his own as an artist
during Fidel Castro's regime. Over
the years he has evinced a fondness for both historical and
contemporary fables, invariably politically pointed and satirical,
their flights into absurdity showing the influence of
Luis Buñuel. An ardent supporter of the
revolution that rid the country of the despotic
Fulgencio Batista and brought Castro
to power, Alea has painted a more complex portrait of Cuba in his
cinema than the rest of the world has generally been willing to
conceive. The documentary impulse has remained, yet it is used to
constantly scrutinize contemporary Cuba. Indeed, Alea has made some
gutsy critiques of the socioeconomic and political realities of his
land, as he ponders the persistence of a petty-bourgeois mentality in a
society supposedly dedicated to the plight of the working poor.
Born to a fairly well-off family, Alea was sent to college in Havana to
follow in his father's footsteps and become a lawyer. At about the same
time he entered school, though, he acquired an 8mm camera and made two
short films, El faquir (1947) and
La caperucita roja (1947).
Several years later he collaborated with fellow student (and future
film great) Néstor Almendros on a short
adaptation of a Franz Kafka story they named
Una confusión cotidiana (1950).
Upon graduation, Alea journeyed to Italy to study film directing for
two years during the crest of neorealism at the famed Centro
Sperimentale de Cinematografia. He returned to Cuba in 1953 and joined
the radical "Nuestro Tiempo" cultural society, becoming active in the
film section, working as a publicist and aligning himself with Castro's
fight against the Batista regime. In 1955 Alea co-directed, with fellow
society member
'Julio Garcia Espinosa', the 16mm
short El mégano (1955), a
semi-documentary about exploited workers, acted by nonprofessionals
from the locales in which it was shot. The film was seized by Batista's
secret police because of its political content.
Soon after the Cuban revolution in 1959, Alea co-founded (with
Santiago Álvarez) the national
revolutionary film institute ICAIC ("Instituto del Arte y Industria
Cinematografica"). He promptly made a documentary,
Esta tierra nuestra (1959),
full of hope for the new government's plan to help the poor through
agrarian reform, and has remained a pillar of the organization ever
since. Alea's diverse creative personality has led him to experiment
with a broad range of styles and themes. His first feature,
Stories of the Revolution (1960),
employs a neorealist style to present three dramatic sketches depicting
the armed insurrection against Batista. Alea's relatively
straightforward approach to film style, however, would change, altered
not only through his appropriation of Hollywood and art cinema
stylistics but also by his increasingly personal attempts at
self-expression.
A Cuban Fight Against Demons (1972),
the film on which he first worked with regular cinematographer
Mario García Joya, comes across as the
prelude to a period Alea has described as full of personal and artistic
instability as much as it does an aggressive allegorical portrait of
church and state corruption. The director's later
Cartas del parque (1988) is
more of a twilight work, exploring the romantic period piece as a
scribe meets a diverse cross-section of society via his talents at
letter writing.
The finest of Alea's historical films,
The Last Supper (1976), continued
to highlight his versatility, drawing on Afro-Cuban musical motifs and
the literary style of magic realism to recreate an 18th-century slave
revolt. Alea has also made several satiric comedies that explore the
legacy of bourgeois society in post-revolutionary Cuba. The madcap
adventure The Twelve Chairs (1962),
a tale also told by Russian filmmakers and by
Mel Brooks, satirizes greed and
bureaucracy as a lingering post-revolutionary bourgeois, his roguish
manservant and a corrupt priest hunt for a chair concealing priceless
diamonds. The Hollywoodian black comedy
Death of a Bureaucrat (1966)
cites not only Buñuel but also Mack Sennett
and Stan Laurel and
Oliver Hardy as it criticizes, at an early
point in the Castro regime, the administrative muck of the political
system (Alea reused the gallows humor of the bureaucracy connected with
burying a corpse for his road picture
Guantanamera (1995), which began to
appear at festivals in 1995 and 1996). In
Los sobrevivientes (1979) an
aristocratic family devolves from civilization to savagery; using a
metaphor found in many films from poor countries, the family resorts to
cannibalism in trying to remain isolated from the Revolution. The
stresses and strains of a revolutionary society were explored in
several dramatic works set in contemporary Cuba, among them
Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
and Hasta cierto punto (1983).
"Memories", Alea's masterpiece and arguably the best-known Cuban film
ever made, brilliantly blends documentary and drama to create an
extremely witty yet sensitive portrait of a restless, oversexed,
politically uncommitted intellectual as he meanders through the early
days of the Revolution. The latter film is, in some ways, a
continuation of the former, as documentary filmmakers attempt to
examine lingering machismo among dockworkers, eventually discovering
that the Revolution's goals for changes in consciousness have succeeded
only "up to a certain point."
Alea returned yet again to the nexus between the sexual and the
political with the best-known Cuban film of the 1990s,
Strawberry & Chocolate (1993). The
story of the unusual friendship that develops between a naive believer
in Castro's contemporary version of communism and a more experienced,
gay critic of the regime was widely praised and just as widely
attacked. Some found it atypically gentle for Alea and read its gay
lead as a cover-up of Castro's horrifying treatment of homosexuals,
while others thought it needlessly provocative in its
characterizations; such divergent responses only testify to the
complexity typical of Alea's tapestries. In 1994, "Strawberry and
Chocolate" became the first Cuban film to receive an Oscar nomination
as Best Foreign Film. Alea has written or co-scripted all his features
and, in accordance with ICAIC's collective approach to filmmaking, has
served as advisor on two of the institute's most stylistically
innovative films:
El otro Francisco (1974),
directed by Sergio Giral, and
One Way or Another (1977),
directed by Sara Gomez.
Alea has been less active in filmmaking in the 1980s and 1990s, and
Juan Carlos Tabío has co-directed
several of the aging master's recent films. He has, though, written a
book of film theory, "Dialectica del espectador (1982)", and continued
to inspire a new generation of sophisticated and politically committed
artists.