Sunday, January 9, 2011

How To Ask For Money On An Invite

'True' Castro

Youtube is a huge archive and continuously expanding. In 2006, when I became Users of the site, contained about 16 000 million videos. However, in this vast galaxy, the number of films about Cuba in the sixties is quite low. Some musical groups and soloists of the time, scenes from the comedy show Peladero Saint Nicholas, a few fragments of speeches by Che Guevara. No more. In the largest film library ever known to humankind of film evidence with which to build a documentary history of the Cuban Revolution are absent. Soon, very little can be found in the vast and daily speeches by Fidel Castro or his interviews and meetings with Cuban and world intellectuals. History of the Revolution seems to have made a tiny film memory. The prolific work of the internationally renowned filmmaker Santiago Alvarez is only in youtube five or six documentaries. It seems as if all such materials have not been preserved, are hidden or the publication had been carelessly neglected by officials of the Department of Revolutionary Orientation (DOR) of the offices of the Cuban Communist Party .

youtube The arrival of ' Faithful' Castro, Cuban documentary filmmaker Ricardo Vega contributes a cover, but still in a very precarious gap. ' Faithful' Castro is entirely realized with archive footage and in most cases with news propaganda made by the government. It is rarely possible to find such a devastating critique of the evolution of the Cuban Revolution. The images of socialist realism, the songs pamphleteering, absurd economic projects (worthy of any story of Magical Realism), demagogic speeches, decisions that affect the future of the nation irresponsibly approved by the crowd attending to hear the leader of the Revolution. The very enthusiasm of the crowds has a monstrous character (as at the time knew the painter Antonia represent Eiríz).

In the documentary, 51 minutes, the director Ricardo Vega barely involved. His comments are limited to some changes of the soundtrack and the inclusion of a few texts that seem to divide the film into several segments. The rest is an editing cleverly made, letting the images speak for themselves, engage in dialogue with each other, that contradict, so that the viewer who make their own interpretations. And above all, making the alleged criticism that the film is a 'propaganda enemy 'with which the Cuban government often hide behind so successfully.

Previously the writer Reinaldo Arenas had tried something similar. He used the Cuban publications, especially the Granma newspaper publishers, to denounce what was happening in Cuba. It was branded as reactionary and in general their work was not very successful. The written word is usually not entirely convincing. The visual memory is much more powerful, largely due to that famous statement that, according to Barthes, was the foundation that differentiated picture of the painting or text: this has happened. In the photograph; but surely with much more force in materials to cinametogr Ficosa reality, as Barthes said, overlaps the last. In ' Faithful' Castro , by Vega's decision to avoid the possible inclusion of their own criteria, the revolutionary propaganda that reality is revealed as juxtaposed to the past. And not just the images themselves, but also by artificially enthusiastic, and apologetic language of the chosen fragments. Vega's documentary, in turn, allows us to confirm what is suspected: whether the evidence on film the Cuban Revolution are very short on youtube , is because they are often subversive. Those responsible for the propaganda of the Cuban government to restrain the past, provided another version of the famous statement "the revolution, like Saturn devouring his own ends children." Here the son devoured the story, so virtually absolute deleted, reduced to some iconic representations-like the photo of Che, Korda, which have become mere media images and symbols of rebellion for teenagers and clueless.

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