[Marxism] "Memories of Underdevelopment" coming to DVD December 13

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Those who haven't seen this movie wouldn't learn from this favorable
review that the movie is also about a man who doesn't support the
Cuban Revolution, but who decides to remain in Cuba, having had his
property NOT taken away from him, and when he finds himself later
accused of a crime he did not commit, revolutionary justice finds
him innocent. Cuba's revolution always kept its promise not to take
the homes of those who continues to reside on the island, a promise
which remains in effect all these years later. Those intereested in
this topic might enjoy reading Adrienne Hunter and Marjorie Moore's
SEVEN WOMEN AND THE CUBAN REVOLUTION.

While the director, Gutierrez Alea has died, the actress Daysi Granados
remains active as a performer, and the actor Sergio Corrieri is today
the head of the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP)
a key vehicle through which international communications and solidarity
efforts have been maintained for many decades. The author of the book
on which the film was based, Edmundo Desnoes, who left Cuba many years 
ago to reside in the United States, has since begun to return to the 
island where he's enthusiastically feted. 

For another viewpoint, focusing more on cinematic sides of the picture
Memories of a Revolutionary Cinema by Allison Arnold Helminski:
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/00/2/memories.html
==================================================================

And Dec. 13 brings the DVD debut of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's fiercely
intelligent "Memories of Underdevelopment," which landed the director
in hot water in his native Cuba, and the National Society of Film
Critics in hot water with our own government when it tried to honor
him.

MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT
By VINCENT CANBY
Published: May 18, 1973
<http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=EE05E7DF173AE56EBC4052DFB366
8388669EDE>

The time is 1961, not long after the Bay of Pigs, and Sergio (Sergio
Corrieri), the hero of Tomás Gutierrez Alea's superb Cuban film,
Memories of Underdevelopment, moves through Havana as if he were a
scuba diver exploring the ruins of a civilization he abhors but
cannot bear to leave. The world he sees is startlingly clear. It is
also remote. The sounds he hears are his own thoughts.

"Everything happens to me too early or too late," says Sergio, an
intellectual in his late thirties whose critical faculties have
effectively rendered him incapable of any action whatsoever. After
his estranged wife and his mother and father have fled to Miami, with
the other bourgeoisie, he thinks he will write the novel he has
always thought about, but then Sergio's standards are too high to
allow him to add to the sum total of civilization's second-rateness.
He finds himself blocked.

Perhaps if the revolution had happened earlier, he tells himself, he
might have understood.

Sergio makes half-hearted little efforts to maintain his old ways. 
He picks up Elena (Daisy Granados), a pretty, bird-brained girl who
wants to be an actress, and he tries to educate (he says
"Europeanize") her. He takes her to art galleries and buys her books
but her brain remains unreconstructed and birdlike. "She doesn't
relate to things," he tells himself. "It's one of the signs of
underdevelopment."

He takes Elena on a sightseeing tour of Hemingway's house. "He said
he killed so as not to kill himself," Sergio remembers, looking at
some mounted antlers. "In the end he could not resist the
temptation."

Even suicide is beyond Sergio. All he can do is observe, much of the
time through the telescope on the terrace of a penthouse apartment he
must give up, sooner or later.

Memories of Underdevelopment is a fascinating achievement. Here is a
film about alienation that is wise, sad, and often funny, and that
never slips into the bored and boring attitudes that wreck
Antonioni's later films. Sergio is detached and wary, but around him
is a hurricane of life.

Gutierrez Alea was forty when he made Memories (in 1968), and he is
clearly a man, like Sergio, whose sensibilities are European. Yet
unlike Sergio, and unlike the director of Eclipse and Red Desert, he
is so full of passion and political commitment that he has even been
able to make an essentially pro-revolutionary film in which Castro's
revolution is observed through eyes dim with bafflement.

The result is hugely effective and moving, and it is complete in the
way that very few movies ever are. I haven't read Edmundo Desnoes's
original novel (published here in 1967 as Inconsolable Memories), but
I like the fact that Desnoes apparently likes the film that, in his
words, had to be "a betrayal" of the book to be a good film.
Gutierrez Alea, says the author, in the film's program notes,
"objectivized a world that was shapeless in my mind and still
abstract in the book. He added social density...."

Memories of Underdevelopment was one of the films scheduled to be
shown here last year at the aborted Cuban Film Festival. It finally
opened yesterday at the First Avenue Screening Room where it will
play one week and then, I hope, it will move to another theater for
the long run it deserves.

MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT (MOVIE)

Written (in Spanish, with English subtitles) and directed by Tomás
Gutierrez Alea; based on the novel Memorias del Subdesarrollo by
Edmundo Desnoes; director of photography, Ramon Suarez; edited by
Nelson Rodriguez; music by Leo Brower; produced by the Instituto
Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematograficos; released by
Transcontinental Films. Running time: 104 minutes.

With: Sergio Corrieri (Sergio), Daisy Granados (Elena), Eslinda Nunez
(Noemi), and Beatriz Ponchara (Laura).





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