Cinema of Cuba

Today, May 7th, is the 60th anniversary of the historic defeat of a French colonial army by the People’s Liberation Army, the Vietminh, at Dien Bien Phu.  This was a victory bought with the blood and sweat of thousands of Vietnamese patriots. Much credit must go to the skilled military leadership of General Giap. However, praise is most due to the architect and leader of the Vietnamese National Liberation Movement, Ho Chi Minh. So it is an appropriate day to pay tribute to one of the revolutionary Cuban films from the 1960s, a film that is a eulogy to the Vietnamese leader.

The film was made by the Cuban documentary and newsreel filmmaker Santiago Alvarez. Alvarez is not that well known outside of Cuba or of radical film circles. However he was one of the outstanding contributors to the flowering of radical film in liberated Cuba. His films, usually relatively short and in black and white [often on 16 mm], offer exemplary use of montage in the sense that it was developed by the great Soviet filmmaker of the 1920s. Michael Chanan has a chapter devoted to his film output in his excellent The Cuban Image (BFI 1985).

The title of the film relates to the age of Ho Chi Minh when he died. The film only runs for twenty-five minutes but it manages to pack an awful lot of material and political comment in that time. The film is a mixture of biography, history of the Liberation struggle and a critique of the colonial wars waged first by France and then by the USA. It uses a mixture of found footage, title cards and titles, poetry, and process effects. The sound matches this using accompanying sound, accompanying music, singing and protest pop songs. At times the films cut from fairly elegiac titles to shocking film of war and wartime atrocities. The sound equally cuts from sombre music to the discordant noises of battle.

At its climax the film moves beyond this montage to a sequence that appears to attack the film itself: ending with a burning frame. At the same time the rhetoric of the titles moves beyond the tribute to Ho Chi Minh and the accompanying attacks of the US Imperialist to comment on the International Liberation Struggle.

The film offers a bricolage of materials and comment, [but not a post-modern one]. Alongside the tribute to Ho Chi Minh is a scathing criticism of the USA’s war against the Vietnamese people. Of the films of Alvarez that I have managed to see this is my favourite. It is both emotional and powerful, but it is also propaganda in the sense of offering a clear political commentary. I am sure that Franz Fanon would have considered this a fighting film, “a true invitation to thought, to de-mystification and to battle.”