LALIFF 2011: CUBAN FILMS

A scene from Chico & Rita.

Cubatopia

By Ed Rampell

The 15^th annual Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival is taking place in Hollywood through July 25, and the Hispanic-oriented film fete is screening a number of Cuban features and documentaries this year. They include: The nonfiction works Los 100 Sones Cubanos (100 Cuban Songs); the nonfiction, hip-hop themed Revolution about El Band Aldo, which, according to LALIFF, is censored in Cuba; the surfing doc, Havana Surf; the animated feature with music, Chico & Rita; and Boleto a Paraiso (Ticket to Paradise).

Director/co-writer Gerardo Chijona’s unforgettable, riveting Ticket to Paradise helps to redefine so-called “socialist realism,” which, under the Stalinists, was often neither “socialist” nor “realist,” but frequently propagandistic in the crudest sense Instead of brawny proletarians and peasants riding shiny tractors in a workers’ paradise, viewers of the ironically named Ticket to Paradise will see images of: AIDS, prostitution, drug use, suicide, sexual abuse/ incest, crime, homosexuality, graphic nudity, sex acts, homelessness, dumpster diving, alienated youth, underground heavy metal concerts, Cuba’s counterculture, etc.

The feature is set during the 1990s’ so-called “Special Period,” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Although Cuba lost its greatest economic supporters, Havana’s U.S.S.R. and Comecon East Bloc allies, the socialist David still had to contend with that Yanqui Goliath only 90 miles away. 

A Spanish-Cuban co-production made with the participation of the official ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográficos), Ticket to Paradise is far more hard hitting than any Hollywood, theatrically released feature dealing with AIDS, teen sexuality, etc., I can think of, including 2003’s powerful Thirteen, starring Holly Hunter as a beleaguered mom of a teen gone wild. 

If there is a propagandistic element to the frank Ticket to Paradise it could be in the depiction of these excellent medical facilities, with their motivated, benevolent doctors and nurses, which reminded me of the New Deal camp the Joad family visited in the 1940 John Ford classic, The Grapes of Wrath. Even during the severe deprivations during the depths of the Special Period revolutionary Cubans somehow provided free healthcare for the least of those amongst them -- something bourgeois America has yet to do.

The ensemble cast delivers powerhouse performances, notably Miriel Cejas as Eunice, the runaway teen sexually molested by her father, and her longhaired boyfriend Alejandro (Hector Medina). Chijona deftly directs them and has created a searing cinematic work reminiscent and in the best tradition of the self critical trend of Cuban cinema, as exemplified by Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s 1968 classic, Memories of Underdevelopment. Like his motion picture predecessor, Chijona has made a most memorable movie, one that further develops, refines and redefines socialist realism.

Hopefully, the senseless 50-year-old blockade and embargoof Cuba will end soon so, among many other reasons, American moviegoers can have the right to buy tickets to see more great films, like Ticket to Paradise.  

  

  

 

FILM REVIEW: MY PERESTROIKA

Olga Durikova in My Perestroika.

Cold war and pieces

By John Esther

During my undergraduate studies as a Russian and Soviet Studies major I had the opportunity to witness the tumultuous transitions of the latter days of that experiment known as the Soviet Union. From the comfort zone of a university campus in Tucson, Arizona to ground zeroes in major Soviet cities, I witnessed the "evil empire" as it openly embraced perestroika (restructuring) and glasnost (openness).

As anger, frustration and hope mounted in the streets of Moscow and Leningrad (St. Petersburg), friends and strangers spoke openly with westerners during those days. Those English-Russian conversations over vodka, bread, butter and caviar were some of the concise I ever took part in. The Russians of that generation often had a gift for being direct and to the point when they spoke (or drank) -- whether it came to the necessary dismantling of the brutal Soviet Union political system, U.S. President Ronald Reagen's doublespeak about the USSR or personal friendship.

After years of failed Party propaganda and populace hardships these Russians could see the inevitable turning of the tyrannical tide and how hard it would be for the President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev to push against entrenched interests in order to create a new Soviet Union. They also viewed the boisterous speeches of Reagen (and subsequent U.S. President George H.W. Bush) at once counterproductive, because it fed the Soviet Union hardliners who wanted the friction that kept the people afraid and them in power, as well as disingenuous brouhaha because the United States government needed the bear in the east as an enemy to justify its military industrial complex (which had given the US a clear superiority in arms) just as much as those right-wingers back here in the USSR.

Regarding friendship, Russians did not play games when it came to camaraderie. It was very serious and very endearing. It was also something Americans needed to mind. If an American said to another American, "We should do lunch sometime," it remained open ended. If you said this to a Russian, it was an invitation to be taken up immediately -- the next day if they knew where you were staying. Accordingly, late sleepers did not dare to casually suggest meeting for breakfast. 

(I occasionally wonder how Russians treat friendship these days. I have not been back for many years and no Russian films I am aware of have really explored the subject.)

It is some of that generation, alive and dwelling today, which is captured quite impressively in Robin Hessman's documentary, My Perestroika.

Today Borya Meyerson and his wife, Lyuba, are now history teachers with a son; single-mom Olga Durikova sells pool tables (and seems to chain smoke); and single-dad Ruslan performs in public places for money. Scraping by to buy into capitalist Russia, none of them would be any poorer under Soviet communism (America, on the other hand…). A little luckier is Andrei Yevgrafov, who owns a successful men's clothing boutique and lives in a nice condominium. These five Muscovites were among the last generation to wear the anti-riotous red scarf of the Pioneers and leave the Komsomol for the stampede into the western promise. Their insights offer a microcosm of a nation that moved from totalitarianism to kleptocracy – sometimes unsure which was or is the bigger evil.

Some of the more precious observations in the documentary are when Durikova laments the hard work for insufficient wages and the fact she will probably work long past the Soviet retirement of 60 or when Borya quite accurately damns the jingoistic rule of Vladimir Putin's Russia. Without effort or consciousness they are honest. They have that gift. On another hand, when Yevgrafov disdains the popular risings of 1991 as a wave of insecurity about food rather than a demand for change, among the other reasons he did not participate in them, is laughably incredulous. 

Engulfed in a bittersweet symphony of getting what one wants and losing what one once had, the documentary's personal conversations manifest themselves into something greater than a few Russians weighing in on current affairs. That My Perestroika takes a view of history from the autobiographical testimony of ordinary people and splices it with greater mass-ive historical events such as a 1977 event saluting the new Chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, Leonid Brezhnev (the first in his position to open up trade with the United States and the one who started the eventually disastrous invasion of Afghanistan in the 1980s), seems to be, albeit less grand in scope, something in the tradition of, perhaps a response to, Leo Tolstoy's War Peace, especially Book III, Part One.

Running a smooth 87 minutes, the interviews of My Perestroika remind me of my perestroika. For others the documentary offers a basic, insightful and sound introduction to life in modern Moscow. And for Americans who lived during the cold war, the similarities between living here and there hits home.

FILM REVIEW: THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (REMASTERED)

A scene from The Battleship Potmekin.

Stills the greatest

By Ed Rampell

At an Oscar party this year, actress Magi Avila asked me if I had a favorite film. Interestingly, I think that the best movie ever was made before the cinema had sound and color (except for that hand tinted red flag, that is!). Nor are there conventional movie stars or a sexy love story in director Sergei Eisenstein’s 1925 masterpiece, The Battleship Potemkin, based on the real life saga of a revolt aboard a ship that spread like wildfire to the port city of Odessa.

When I was a student revolutionary I read Rosa Luxemburg’s stirring 1906 pamphlet The Mass Strike, and never forgot one line that made an indelible impression upon me: “But in the storm of the revolutionary period even the proletarian is transformed from a provident paterfamilias demanding support, into a ‘revolutionary romanticist,’ for whom even the highest good, life itself, to say nothing of material well-being, possesses but little in comparison with the ideals of the struggle.”

Yes, what I am referring to is the romance of revolution, when people are lifted up out of their petty mindsets and ruts and all things suddenly seem possible. Unlike general strikes, which are generally planned and called for by trade union leadership, mass strikes usually spontaneously originate and, in fertile soil, mushroom and go viral. Most recently, a Tunisian vendor who set himself on fire in order to protest the state’s abuses there set off the uprisings now rocking North Africa and the Middle East – and arguably, Wisconsin.

In the case of The Battleship Potemkin, as the title cards -- all 146 have been restored in this remastered edition -- reveal, what instigates 1905 czarist Russian sailors is being forced to eat maggoty meat. This touches off a mutiny, and then a strike by Odessa’s working class, as, literally, a cast of thousands pour across the screen decades before CGI, in support of their mutinous mates. This movie’s “stars,” of course, are the aroused workers and sailors, finally standing up for their rights and breaking the chains of oppression in order to win a new liberated world. What is extremely notable is the mass psychology of the people in the act of defiant solidarity and rebellion -- they are nearly ecstatic. For instance, more recently we saw this elation among the crowds in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as the populace threw off their tyrants.

Of course, the czarist pigs must put the workers back into their place(s) and stamp out this outpouring of mass joy and unity, so they sic their Cossack dogs on the unarmed civilians in what is arguably the silver screen’s most terrifying scene of violence en masse. The Odessa Steps sequence is a tour-de-force of montage, with rapid editing that pops your eyes and tugs your heartstrings. It is to the mass drama what Alfred Hitchcock’s pulsating Psycho shower scene is for slasher/ serial killer flicks and what the shootout at the O.K. Corral is to Western enthusiasts. The throbbing, powerful Odessa Steps’ five or so minutes will make you sit on the edge of your seat, and it has been oft spoofed and referenced in many movies, such as Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables and most recently in the aptly named The Trotsky.

This Cossack carnage, however, never really happened as portrayed onscreen. According to legend, while planning Potemkin Eisenstein stood atop the Odessa Steps chewing cherries, taking in the vista of this Ukrainian port city. When he spit the pits out of his mouth Eisenstein noticed them bounce down the stairs, and the germ of an idea was born. Thus, the stuff of legends. Be that as it may, this spectacle of cinematic slaughter brilliantly shot by Eduard Tisse only “lies” in order to tell the truth about the brutal repression of the czarist regime.

The sailors aboard the battleship boldly respond to the mass killing. Eisenstein symbolically uses stone lions to express the rising of the proletariat (this was rather hilariously spoofed in a sex scene in Woody Allen’s Love and Death). But the rebellious sailors must pay for their mutiny on the Potemkin, and the czarists deploy a squadron to defeat the revolutionaries. Undaunted, the Potemkin courageously steams toward the entire battle fleet, sort of like Gary Cooper almost single-handedly taking on all the bad guys in High Noon. What happens next, Dear Reader, is not only one of the greatest moments in the history of revolutions (yes, it actually happened!), but in film history.

Around 1922, Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin declared: “For us, the cinema is the most important of the arts.” Alas, Lenin never lived long enough to see Eisenstein’s The Battleship Potemkin. This silent film speaks volumes. With its jubilant, triumphant vision of human solidarity it arguably did more to spread the gospel of the revolution more than any book or pamphlet by Karl Marx, Lenin or Leon Trotsky ever did.

I hadn’t seen The Battleship Potemkinon the big screen since my Hunter College cinema professor Joel Zucker screened it for our film history class and I’m happy to report that it remains my favorite movie of all time.