Tomás Gutiérrez Alea - Third Cinema - Cuba

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea 

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea - Third Cinema - Cuba

Third Cinema
Third Cinema describes a political cinema from the underdeveloped nations of
Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere.

Third Cinema offers deals with the effects of neocolonialism and capitalism.

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea - Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
1) Cuban director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea first major work in America,
2) Memories of Underdevelopment (1968),
3) is a portrayal of a bourgeois man,
4)Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) who remains in Cuba after the fall of Batista.
5)Mast and Kawin explain that the film condemns the man's spiritual emptiness and ironically
   sympathizes with his isolation.

Author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro describes the historical significance of Gutiérrez Alea's Memories:

"Gutiérrez Alea was thirty-eight when he decided to adapt a short novel by the Cuban writer Edmundo Desnoes into a film—the same age as the story’s protagonist. That’s not all they shared:

Sergio is, as Gutiérrez Alea was, a bourgeois intellectual and a light-skinned member of Havana’s elite. We watch him, in the film’s opening scene, say goodbye to friends and family and to his wife, whom he can’t wait to put on a plane to Miami.

 His story unfolds in 1961 and 1962, over the pregnant months between the Bay of Pigs invasion and the scary days of what Cubans call the Crisis de Octubre, when their leaders’ confrontation with Washington nearly became a nuclear war.

Memories of Underdevelopment is an exercise in narrating, in cinematic terms, a history that was still ongoing. It examined events from a half decade before:
momentous days and images that continued, in 1968,
to shape the story of a revolution that had left its heady youth behind and was just beginning to deal with the contradictions of adulthood.

Sergio remains in Havana because of inertia and ennui, not conviction.
He is glad to live off the rent collected from his family’s property,
and ambivalent at best about the changes he sees in the streets.

Sergio—played with a permanent sneer by Sergio Corrieri—wants to write a book.
But mostly he fills his days spying on others from his balcony and playing odd games with his wife’s old stockings.

He’s a sophisticate from whose lips the word underdevelopment falls easily: he has no problem tying statistics about child poverty in Latin America to colonial predation.

But when he attends a ponderous public forum about the role of intellectuals in building socialism in Cuba, he’s more bemused than engaged by the earnest men onstage.

He’s more interested in trying, insofar as is possible in this backward place,
"to live like a European.”

Sergio & Cuba & Women
About the only thing that Sergio seems to like about Cuba is that women, as he prowls Havana, return his gaze. By the time he bumps into the one who’ll drive the film’s story, we know he is not to be trusted.

Maybe Elena does, too. But she’s as bored as he is: she’s a simple girl from outside town, loitering on Calle 23 in a pretty skirt, waiting for a break. Or maybe for a well-dressed stranger who has an apartment nearby, on a higher floor than she’s ever been to, that is full of his wife’s fancy clothes, to which he says she’s welcome."

The following clip shows the uncomfortable interaction between Sergio and Elena against the political backdrop of post-revolution era Cuba.

Memories of Underdevelopment (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, 1968)

This is part of the part we saw Click Here

This isn't the clip we saw in class but about this relationship Click Here