Guest post by Jon Vickers.
“One of the signs of underdevelopment is an inability to establish links, to gather experience and grow,” states Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s bourgeois intellectual protagonist who idly roams the streets of Havana on his existential odyssey through much of Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). Set in 1961 between the Bay of Pigs Invasion and the Cuban Missile Crisis, Sergio is a man abandoned by his family, or so he chooses to be. As his family seeks the promise of security by moving to the U.S., he decides to stay in Cuba as the revolution is mounting, though seemingly ambivalent to politics or “the people.”
Alone, free, and with means, Sergio passes his days wandering Havana’s streets, bookstores, and promenades observing and daydreaming the time away, often of past or future flings with beautiful women. He aspires to be a writer, but he is unable to reconcile his past and is more interested in the glances of young women than he is in his country’s uncertain future. Though critical of politics, his country, and his people’s development, Sergio is the one who lacks self-awareness of what being developed — personally and politically — really means. His social impotency and inability to establish meaningful links, engage in the world around him, and gain genuine experiences keep him from growing and eventually leave him alienated.
Memories of Underdevelopment is considered by many the most widely renowned work in the history of Cuban cinema. The collage-of-a-film still feels very modern, even experimental today, with its self-reflexive moments; guerrilla-style street footage, sometimes unintentionally breaking the fourth wall by passers-by; innovative editing techniques reminiscent of early Soviet films; use of newsreels, archival footage, still photos and speeches, giving authenticity and blurring the lines of fiction and non-fiction; and its cool, quiet, well-dressed, intellectual characters who look like they just walked out of a Jean-Pierre Melville film.
While the film may bear some resemblance to those of the French New Wave or even an Italian neorealism, the film also recalls the work of Nelson Pereira dos Santos or Glauber Rocha. Film critic Manuel Betancourt wrote, “Memories’ restless experimentation aligns it more closely with Brazil’s Cinema Novo or Cuba’s own notion of ‘imperfect cinema.’ Gutiérrez Alea has subverted this archetype in order to push the limits of what a politically engaged cinema can and should look like.”
The film is based on the innovative 1967 novel entitled Inconsolable Memories (Memorias del Subdesarrollo in Spanish, which was also the Cuban title of the film) by cultural critic and author Edmundo Desnoes. Desnoes and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea adapted the novel for the film’s screenplay, in which they wrote self-reflective moments for each of them to appear in the film — Gutiérrez Alea ironically plays a representative of the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, or ICAIC (which he helped create), and Desnoes appears as a panelist at an event attended by Sergio.
Upon completion of the film, Desnoes realized Gutiérrez Alea had cinematically interpreted the personal and political chaos and conflict within the novel beyond what he had written, capturing the “the struggle between the best products of the bourgeois life — education, travel, and money — and an authentic revolution.” Desnoes was so pleased with the film’s interpretation of his work that he subsequently rewrote his novel to more closely reflect the film. He believed the film further developed “a world that was shapeless in the book by adding social density.”
My personal introduction to Memories of Underdevelopment was at IU Cinema in March of 2012 when we helped host Edmundo Desnoes and his partner Felicia Rosshandler, who were guests of Indiana University’s first Latino Film Festival and Conference. Coincidentally, Felicia Rosshandler is fictionalized in the novel and film as a character named Hanna, a young woman of European descent with whom a teenage Sergio has a relationship with in Havana. The segment is based on a real incident in their lives. The two reconnected 35 years later in the U.S. after losing contact with each other for decades and remain partners today.
During that 2012 festival, Memories of Underdevelopment and Memories of Overdevelopment (a 2010 film that Desnoes wrote with filmmaker Miguel Coyula) were shown as a double feature in IU Cinema, which included a conversation with the writer. I had read about the film for years but not seen it. I remember being stunned by the immediacy and modernity of the film. I also remember being a bit confounded by what I had just seen, blaming my limited knowledge of the politics of that moment. I later realized that this type of reaction was not uncommon.
Gutiérrez Alea’s use of archival materials and black-and-white photography bring the viewer into the immediacy, authenticity, and reality of the revolution. The jarring nature of the film’s collage (and montage) disrupt the viewing experience, forcing one to think about and question what is happening on screen.
Coincidentally, my introduction to Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s work was in 1997 at the Vickers Theatre, a modest arthouse cinema my wife and I opened in Three Oaks, MI. Knowing little about Cuban cinema other than the names of films like Memories of Underdevelopment, I Am Cuba, and more recently Strawberry and Chocolate, we programmed Gutiérrez Alea’s final film Guantanamera — co-directed with Juan Carlos Tabío — in the summer of 1997. The film was completed in Cuba in 1995, but not released in the U.S. until 1997 by Lionsgate, back when they were champions of international arthouse films. Needless to say, this colorful, cheeky road movie was far from representative of Gutiérrez Alea’s political cinema of the 1960s.
Memories of Underdevelopment had its world premiere at the Pesaro Film Festival in Italy on June 1, 1968, and screened at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival later that year, where it won the FIPRESCI Prize awarded by a jury of international film journalists. The film also opened in Cuba to lukewarm reception by critics. The immediacy of the film was lost, playing more as a dated document of the past, despite being set less than a decade earlier. Or perhaps the film asked too many questions. Up until this film, ICAIC films were considered propaganda. Gutiérrez Alea believed, however, that the film hit home with the Cuban public, stating that “it achieved its goal in a sense that it disturbed and unsettled its audience; it forced people to think,” adding, “Many people went to see Memories more than once.”
The film’s U.S. premiere was slated for the Cuban Film Festival in New York City in March of 1972, but was canceled due to the political unrest between Cuba and the U.S. It finally screened in New York later that year at the New Directors, New Films series at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, becoming the first Cuban film screened in the United States after the revolution. The film was distributed in the U.S. in 1973 by a small newsreel collective which started in 1967 and changed its name to Third World Newsreel in 1971 before becoming the Tricontinental Film Center. Their mission was to distribute militant films which criticized problematic Latin American governments and challenged the blockade of films from Cuba.
Overall reception by American critics was positive for the film’s immediacy, boldness, complexity, and stylistic prowess. In an interview in the summer of 1977 issue of Cinéaste, Gutiérrez Alea stated, “Memories was in general much better understood and evaluated in the US because people perceived the attempt to criticize the bourgeois mentality.” He also went on to state that U.S. critics grasped the the film’s subtle critique, not interpreting the film as a subversive act, as it was in other countries.
The film was ranked by the New York Times as one of the 10 best films of 1968. After its first year in distribution in the U.S., the National Society of Film Critics awarded the film a special prize in 1974, where critic Andrew Sarris declared the film a “very personal and very courageous confrontation of the artist’s doubts and ambivalence regarding the Cuban Revolution.”
Tomás Gutiérrez Alea studied filmmaking at Italy’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in the early 1950s, returning to Cuba just before the revolution. In 1959, he helped found the now-renowned ICAIC, funded by the Cuban government and dedicated to revolutionary cinema. Gutiérrez Alea’s first feature-length film, Stories of the Revolution (1960), was also the first film funded and produced by ICAIC. Having been exposed to the masters of European cinema in film school, he could borrow the nuance, experimentation, and lyricism of Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and Bernardo Bertolucci to explore the political and personal realities of Cuba and its people.
By the time he made Memories of Underdevelopment as his fifth feature film, Gutiérrez Alea knew his audience and had the confidence to boldly critique bourgeois disengagement and cinematically question what it meant to be an artist or intellectual after the revolution. Though the film is intentionally uneven with its “mashing” or “collaging” of narrative and archival pieces, it drives us to question its inconsistencies and chaos, in turn reflecting on Cuba’s own issues. When Sergio visits ICAIC, his filmmaker friend shows him a film of disjointed outtakes from other films that he plans to use in a new picture. The filmmaker (played by the director himself) tells Sergio the new film will be “like a collage, where everything goes,” surely referencing the film we are watching. By this point in his career, Gutiérrez Alea was confidently prepared to provoke, disturb, and jar his audience thematically and stylistically. Memories was the kind of radical, revolutionary cinema ICAIC prided itself on making, and more.
Gutiérrez Alea continued to make films for decades after Memories, including the international art-house hit Strawberry and Chocolate (1993), one of the first Cuban films to challenge Fidel Castro’s strict anti-LGBTQ policies, and his final film, Guantanamera (1995). Tomás Gutiérrez Alea passed away at the young age of 67 in 1996.
In the end, Memories of Underdevelopment is a very personal and complex character study of an intelligent, entitled, apathetic playboy at the brink of social change. As an entire society is being reborn, his inaction leads to alienation, which devours him. The world he will not let go of no longer exists. Desnoes stated that Sergio’s “irony, his intelligence, is a defense mechanism which prevents him from being involved in the reality.” The film is a biting critique of politics and class via Sergio, a privileged social critic, uninterested in change and, using his own words, underdeveloped.
Memories of Underdevelopment was restored by Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with ICAIC. The restoration was funded by the George Lucas Family Foundation and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project.
The new 4K restoration of the film screens at Indiana University Cinema on April 8 at 7 pm. The screening will be followed by a brief conversation between IU Cinema Director Alicia Kozma and Darlene J. Sadlier, author of BFI Film Classics: Memories of Underdevelopment (available April 20). Along with being a good friend, Darlene is a professor emerita in Spanish and Portuguese who taught for 36 years at Indiana University and directed the Spanish and Portuguese Program for many of those years. She is an expert in Portuguese, Brazilian, and Latin American culture, with several books in publication and since 2019 she has been a socia-correspondente with the Brazilian Academy of Letters, the only U.S. citizen and woman currently holding this lifetime position.
This screening is part of an annual series called Jon Vickers Pics, which is endowed by Darlene J. Sadlier and James O. Naremore, two immensely important figures in the development of IU Cinema. Thanks to them both for their many contributions to IU Cinema, including the endowment of this series.
Jon Vickers is the founding director emeritus of IU Cinema. His tenure included ‘building community’ through film experiences since the early 1990s, having opened and built programs for three thriving art cinemas in the Midwest. Favorite film: Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995).