Santiago Alvarez - Now (1965)

Cuba’s Santiago Alvarez, Cinematographer and Revolutionary:
One of the greatest cultural achievements of the 1959 Cuban revolution has been its remarkable cinema. Prior to the revolution, Cuba possessed no national film industry. The first cultural decree of the revolutionary government was the founding of the Cuban Film Institute, known as ICAIC. Within a single decade, this bold initiative was producing impressive results.

Directors such as Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Umberto Solas were producing dynamic works of fiction, to considerable international acclaim. A battery of younger directors was likewise preparing to make its mark. The key figure of the first phase of the Cuban cinema, Santiago Alvarez(...)

Working under extremely tight time and material constraints, Alvarez became a master of improvisation. He combined the use of limited found materials—archival footage and photographs—with a dynamic graphic sensibility, bold and unexpected music-image pairings, and a highly contemporary use of rapidly paced editing. Fusing the avant-garde with popular culture, he sought to synthesize a film style that was as revolutionary as the changes then sweeping his society.

The resulting films were always political and often didactic. They could be playful or deadly serious. They were borne of rage, bitter irony and an almost limitless solidarity. They could be raucous or silent, brief or monumental, laconic or verbose. They were prone to tangents, but could be as eloquent as poetry. They never sought perfection. They were never made with posterity in mind. They were made for the here and the now. They showed the world to be forever changing and changeable.

Santiago Alvarez was the pioneer of Cuba’s revolutionary cinema: the first to produce works of inarguable importance, and the first to exhibit them widely abroad. The early films of Santiago Alvarez alerted the world to something vital gestating in the corridors of Cuba’s ICAIC film institute.

But they alerted the world to something else as well—something far more important. They signaled the dynamic breadth of the revolution itself and the kind of beauty it is capable of creating. As Alvarez himself always insisted, “The revolution made me a filmmaker.” [Travis Wilkerson on socialismandliberation.org]

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