The Youthful Spirit

3In spite of his early vocation for film at the age of 19, when he produced his first short-length humorous films : Little Red Riding Hood and The Fakir (both filmed with an 8 mm camera), he registered at the University of Havana where he studied law. Within the convulsed student panorama at the university at that time, he also tried a documentary when he started to film in 16 mm a short-length film about the peace movement that he would never finish. He also published his poems under the title of Reflejos (Reflexes), a book that was illustrated by his friend, the painter Servando Cabrera Moreno.

4Titón got into the poetry of cinema between his law studies and the student struggle against Republican misgovernment. Along with one of his friends, Néstor Almendros – who later would become known as a teacher of cinema –, he directed his first work of fiction with actors in 8 mm. It was a short-length film that he would call Una confusión cotidiana (A Daily Mix-up), inspired by one of Franz Kafka’s short stories whose absurdity would be translated by the young Tomás Gutiérrez Alea into Mack Sennett’s comedy style.

5He also contributed to the student magazine Saeta and headed the Committee for Peace at the Law Faculty, drawing up a manifest against the dispatch of Cuban soldiers to the war in Korea. He graduated as a lawyer but did not practice, instead founding with his friends the Nuestro Tiempo (Our Time) Cultural Society, where leftist intellectuals and those with progressive ideas in Cuba met in those difficult years of the 1950’s, in the middle of Fulgencio Batista’s anti-constitutional dictatorship.

6A decision that could not wait any longer was added to this civic action : go to Rome, the capital of Italy, to study film direction at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, while searching deeper into the poetry of neo-realism and nurturing himself with the example set by Cesare Zavattini.

7There was no hope for cinema in his country, which languished in spite of the efforts of many artists. However, Alea’s youthful spirit was unstoppable and, along with his friend Julio Garcia Espinosa and José Massip, Alfredo Guevara and Jorge Haydú, he filmed in 1955 a documentary that is considered to be the precursor of new Cuban cinema, which came to the fore four years later. Thus, El Mégano appeared in black and white 16 mm, and was strongly marked by the neo-realist aspect always present in his first cinematographic pieces.

8The film dealt with the poverty and famine of Cuba’s campesinos and this caused Military Intelligence Service agents to seize the film after it was shown for the first time at the University of Havana. However, the film was rescued in 1959 with the victory of the Cuban Revolution, when Commander Ernesto Ché Guevara returned the seized copy that was found in the archives of the brutal Bureau for the Repression of Communist Activities.

9Until January 1959, Titón had worked on audiovisuals as well as at an advertising agency, Cine Revista, financed by a friend, the Mexican producer Manuel Barbachano Ponce. He produced humorous and advertising short-length films, as well as 10-minute documentaries, filmed in 35 mm, which were exhibited in the country’s cinemas every week. The way in which Titón handled humour became evident, as well as his playing with the absurd to translate it into images that he afterwards showed in his personal work.

The New Cuban Cinema

10With the triumph of the Revolution, the Rebel Army Directorate of Culture was created and Commander Camilo Cienfuegos called Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Julio Garcia Espinosa to ask them to start creating actual Cuban cinema. Their first work was the documentary Esta tierra nuestra (This Land of Ours) made by Titón about the campesinos and the new Agrarian Reform Law.

11From the outset of the Revolution he would be among those that founded the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC after its initials in Spanish), based on which the essence of eminently artistic cinema was born for the first time as a cultural project sponsored by the State. He then took on an enterprise that was not only art but also an industry and directed his first full-length film Historias de la Revolución (Stories of the Revolution) that comprised three parts : The Wounded Man, Rebels and The Battle of Santa Clara. One of the references for the film was the testimony of the combatants who had accompanied Ché Guevara. Ché was, indeed, the inspirer of those stories and attended the filming in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, becoming a military advisor for the actors.

12Titón continued his experience in documentaries on February 2,1961, with the film National Assembly as a testimony of the proclamation of the First Declaration of Havana. Approximately a year later, he would recall the Bay of Pigs mercenary attack with the emblematic documentary Death to the Invader co-produced with Santiago Alvarez. However, the main projection of the creator is with fictional movies. He attained aesthetic qualities outlined with originality in his second full-length film The Twelve Chairs. During the first years of his apprenticeship he also filmed Cumbite and had a brief role as an actor in Sergio Giral’s short-length fictional film The Jungle.

13But it was with his fourth full-length fictional film that, for the first time, the new Cuban cinema attained mastery when Titón directed a critical piece of black comedy The Death of a Bureaucrat. He would resume the idea of black comedy in the last of his films, Guantanamera. His fifth full-length fictional film : Memories of Underdevelopment brought him fame and recognition of his status in Spain and the world. It is regarded by international critics as a true masterpiece of Cuban and Latin America cinema and considered among the 150 most important films in cinema history over the entire century.

14Led by his liking for experimentation, he would deal in his sixth film with the subject of identity in A Cuban Fight Against the Demons. His seventh full-length fictional film, The Last Supper, was a piece which Titón himself considered the most successful of his movies for its aesthetic and visual relevance. With his eighth fictional film, The Survivors, he approached the new contemporary reality based once more on the use of black comedy, the absurd and the aesthetics of cruelty. His professional experience is to be found in his published essay Dialectics of the Spectator that showed the theoretical side of the great Cuban filmmaker.

15Alea’s ninth full-length fictional film Up to a Point was a parenthesis, always experimental. The leading role was that of a working woman within a strong male chauvinistic environment in the midst of today’s Cuban society. Afterwards, with other filmmakers, he formed part of the series Difficult Loves inspired by Nobel Prize Gabriel García Marquez’s stories, and directed the Cuban episode Letters from the Park, his tenth film.

16At the beginning of the 1990’s he directed in Mexico the short-length fictional film With you in the Distance for the television series You do not Play with Love. Also, in the nineties, while already sick, he directed with the Cuban filmmaker Juan Carlos Tabío his eleventh fulllength fictional film Strawberry and Chocolate, a Cuba-Spain-Mexico co-production. It is his most internationally recognized as well as perhaps the most well-known in all of Cuban cinema.

17Before dying on April 16,1996, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea finished, again with the help of his friend Tabío, what would be his last project : Guantanamera.

First Steps

20Related to the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAlC) since he was eighteen, he started to work as director assistant in 1962 and as Russian translator, doing the same thing at the Superior Pedagogical Institute Makarenko. There were no movie schools then, and it was necessary to improve his educational level. That is why he entered the Arts and Letters School at Havana University, where he got his master’s degree in Hispanic Language and Literature, working also as philosophy teacher.

21Cuban movie pages had his articles where the seventh art led his prose and reflections, essential theoretic allotment also for further execution as images creator. « When I remember Mirta Aguirre talking about thought through images, that’s what happened to me. I always have thoughts by images. That’s related to my passion for movies [...]. I’m always thinking through images. While walking I’m watching movie angles, although movie is not only image... »  [4]. I remember these words from him as the corpus of an interview, some years ago, when he won his last Coral Prize (not the last one as he is still living, creating) for La vida es silbar.

22ln this way, and together with a genius like Titón (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea), he dressed himself to be a production assistant in Una pelea cubana contra los demonios. He did the same work afterwards with Manuel Octavio Gómez, in Ustedes tienen la palabra, partially worked in El otro Francisco until his friend and colleague Orlando Rojas took his place in this work and with Manuel Herrera in Girón.

A Generation of Documentarists

23But Fernando Pérez, like most Cuban movie directors, had a dream of full-length fiction movie. However, his generation (to which Daniel Díaz Torres and Rolando Díaz also belong) had firstly to pass through the ICAIC’s documentary school and Latin American News Program, under Santiago Alvarez’s aegis. It was an epoch when to approach science fiction was like repeating Alá’s story... Before that, it was necessary to gain the mountain showing strength, tenacity, persistence and value to produce, afterwards, the tribulations of fiction. Having as guarantee more than 50 editions for news programs, sorrily-extinct space from ICAIC production along the last decade, to the detriment of our public and culture, Fernando Pérez grew up and gained work strength :

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Firstly, it showed me to quickly answer to reality with a cinematographic thought.
Documentary demands sharpness. To find a solution in the same moment, without previous plans. The News Programs and the documentary exercising got me ready to give a quick answer, this cinematographic viewpoint creating in this way the profession although each film is different and the profession can’t be repetitive or become routine  [5].

25Perhaps, that experience has signed with particular strength, from its reality, the two first fiction films made by Fernando Pérez : Clandestinos and Hello, Hemingway (1990), where we can yet find that sort of improvisation disarray with which documentaRY is facing reality.

26Crónica de la Victoria, Puerto Rico and Cascos Blancos in 1975 were a kind of training for him, but in Cabinda (1977), Fernando Pérez experienced a qualitative change at his looking. « Angola was the first feeling of own work, the former creation was only knowledge », he confessed me some years ago, while we were drinking coffee at his apartment, located at the famous corner of Infanta and Manglar.

27In 1978 he brought Siembro viento en mi ciudad and Sábado Rojo and, afterwards, two materials holding huge interest from his life and work, in 1980 : 4000 nin˜os and Monimbo es Nicaragua, particularly because the Central American struggle would feed his writing for the above mentioned testimony awarded with the Casa de las Americas Prize in 1982. This last year, he would film Camilo.

28In 1983, one of his best documentaries saw the light : Omara, where « I started to create fiction elements, I made re-buildings ». He considers it as an introduction to the cinematographic fables world. This piece gave us by itself Fernando Pérez’s aesthetic projection, running with quiddity and cleverness through the Cuban popular music field recreating Omara Portuondo’s mystic.

29I just want to break the logical sequence of this man’s living and doing.

30I want to enter with him the Movie and TV International School in San Antonio de los Ban˜os, where he worked as professor and head of production staff, developing there workshops of documentaries and production, being also docent director during the period of Brazilian Orlando Senna, labor he assumed, simply because « I like teaching » and more, as he states from the coherence of his image, « It’s an open and creative stage which means more than an academic ground ».

31It would precisely be in the called-by-himself « School of three worlds » where « the idea of Madagascar came up and I started to work with Manolito Rodríguez », because Fernando Pérez always participates in the scripts of his movies’ elaboration.

32After this movie filming and projection – a classic from Cuban cinema and the most solid and moving film which certainly reviewed the 1990s in the island –, the Cuban filmmaker went to Chile to make an eight-chapters serial for TV and also 45-minutes docu-dramas, each one devoted to a parapsychology theme. There, the idea of La vida es silbar was born while working with Humberto Jiménez.

33Another break in these « hard years » but, for Fernando Pérez, his six months scholarship in Germany was equally satisfying and creative, experiencing intense events and reflections which would revert on his filmic project, because art is not only taken from life but also from culture.

Four Cuban Films

34A 43 year old man made his bow at the fiction field with his first full-length movie. It could be a bloomer, a fruitless attempt, a haggard dream... a failure, but it was not. Because his prima opera came up from its phantoms, winning the Coral in this category at the Havana Film Festival of 1988. It was Clandestinos, a work holding a unique language and youthful breath which, once again, showed that there are neither a priori plans nor classifications or ages for the real talent. The epic of the Cuban revolution in its struggle against Batista’s tyranny, the legend of that heroic girl, captured the spectators’attention to shake the country, translating, from its hugely emotive essence, the historical drama, with a load certainly marked by a strong dosage of realism. As Fernando Pérez’s presentation card at fiction movie, he had the sure hand to tell a fable, his correct casting handling and his poetic intensity.

35Later on, at the Havana Film Festival of 1990, Hello, Hemingway won a controversial Coral Prize. Fernando Pérez is one of those artists who hold a strong security at their performances, as he knows how to respect opposed opinions, without diminishing or hurting his self-esteem. Being a coherent man according to his principles, he manages to assimilate the adverse critic, through the sometimes excessive melodramatic emphasis in this film, entwined yet to the previous film but having that human naivety we always perceive in his work. But 1994, when he reached 50 in full artistic and intellectual maturity, opened for this filmmaker to produce his up- to-the-moment major work, taken to the lens by master Raúl Pérez Ureta.

36Penalties, suspense, chaos and crisis substance rebund over the screen in Laura’s speech, that, certainly, it is not a metaphysical entelechy although it is a pathetic metaphor where absurd events and, sometimes, even cruelty are conjugated with the most personal and sensible reflections and experiences of the artist, sincerely close to his people and able to translate, aesthetically, thanks to cinema language, from his images, one of the most complex and hard but luminary periods of Cuban history.

37All of this is incorporated and alive on the sequences of his anthology Madagascar, a middle-length fiction movie (53 minutes) which, for me, in course of time, will find the right value, more transcendent than all Fresas y Chocolates of that epoch, although less recognized, up to these moments, that those flavors of Coppelia. ln the final stage of this creative process and with another film, La vida es silbar, he won again the Coral Prize, becoming the polemic center of the 1998 Havana Film Festival (a decade after Clandestinos), to arise afterwards with the Goya Prize, in Spain.

38This film, for the producer, as he told me in a personal meeting, « is opened in the sense of individual liberty, because happiness is not the same for everybody and the necessity of choosing is permanent in life »  [6].

39Holding a language full of images, signed by the metaphoric body and his already virtual personal poetics, Fernando Pérez offered to the public and the island culture a reflection about our destinies, « where we can live with pain towards happiness ».

40Julia, Mariana, Elpidio..., from the double moral until marginality, ascend to translate the existential corpus of a filmmaker who is, and will always be, an honest Cuban. Here is ending also, as he said, an evolutive process « and although I make metaphoric cinema, it’s not a movie of abstraction »  [7].

41Each film, each theme is a new challenge and, even, is imposing its own language because Fernando Pérez also likes to point that although he makes a reflexive movie, it is a movie that is always telling a story.

42He has the project to assume the challenge of filming outside the country a fiction movie : Amorosa Gilda, inspired by the novel Una sonrisa sin fin, from the Italian writer Anna Assenza whom he met when La vida es silbar was exhibited at the Havana Film Festival. With Raúl Pérez Ureta at the photographic direction, who accompanied him since Madagascar, Fernando would like to film in Sicily the autobiographic history of a woman, victim of polio, who, since she was five and until twenty-five, struggled not only for surviving, but also to lead herself in favor of human beings’ existence, overcoming the vicissitudes of daily life. Humanist by essence, Fernando Pérez has chosen this story, which would need Italian actors and the financial support of Spain, France and Italy, after receiving in Rome the Ennio Flaiano Prize (from the name of Federico Fellini’s script writer) conferred to outstanding personalities as recognition of their work.

43With the accent of Hello, Hemingway, as the director told me, with the same personal language in its images, he is thinking of narrating this story of feminist type, where the woman inspired him and inspired herself to translate hopes and fustrations, as appealing to feelings.

44Some years ago, Fernando Pérez stated that the cinematographic works he admires the most are Vertigo by Alfred Hitchcock, Bonnie and Clyde by Arthur Penn, Novecento by Bernardo Bertolucci, Ashes and diamonds and The promised land from Poland’s Andrzej Wajda, plus the work of three masters, founders of the new Cuban cinematography : Santiago Alvarez, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Humberto Solás.

45Without imitative solutions, Fernando could make his movie with the subjective attitude of his heart, with his anguishly critical glance and with his passion, in addition to their intrinsic tenderness and strength, in the middle of searching and experiments demonstrating his natural and authentic creative dissatisfaction.

Two Fetish Actresses

46Nevertheless, it would not be fair to continue this short sketch about Fernando Pérez if we do not talk about two fetish actresses who appear and disappear in his films : Isabel Santos and Laura de la Uz. Having a particular expressive capability, both have moved through the celluloid, TV and theater to give thousand faces and epoch of the Cuban woman, since the most recent past until our days.

47Why this repetition from the director could be an interesting question, why he privileged these presences in his cinema, Isabel in Clandestinos, as protagonist that won a Coral Prize and in an opposed character from Elpidio short story in La vida es silbar and Laura as protagonist in Hello, Hemingway, who also received a Coral for her performance and then in her best work in Cuba, her central-problem role in Madagascar where she also deserved the Prize. « I can’t say I lead Isabel’s performance [...] because, when I face her, she is a strength... She has an automatic detector inside, she feels her character, always knows what to do [...]. What I am always looking for is seeing her performing. She is a great actress, as the best of any country, any epoch ». And this unpublished viewpoint is delivered by Fernando Pérez with a singular brightness in his pupils revealing his own emotions to validate his author selection.

48And Laura ?, I asked. He smiled and showed also an infinite mix of tenderness and respect for this young interpreter who has matured under his direction and has grown during her performances in his films.

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When I met her she was only nineteen, and that was a problem, because I saw her as a teenager and she wanted to make older characters. She is also a brilliant actress, but with her, I feel I have the possibility of leading her. We are so proudly identified that we have only to talk to achieve the mood of the character we are building. She is a very creative actress, supporting her performances with her feelings.

50You can trust both. They are capable of feeling, knowing whether they are right or wrong.

51We hope Fernando Pérez will find financial support to translate to the language of images those projects full of love, in the Havana of the 21st century and about a popular character that is already a legend, Andarín Carvajal, because this artist, this name not only have an intense and penetrating looking, a critical retina, but also that special sense of humour, very incisive, due to his subtle irony always present in his films, permeated of Cubanness.

The Two Recent Films

52In 2003 Fernando Pérez returned to the documentary with Suite Habana. This film of 80 minutes shows a dozen of inhabitants of Havana during 24 hours. No word is spoken. Focusing on a medium-size city struggling against the rigors of poverty, it is an anguished and lucid reflection on the diversity of experiences within the same space and time. The capital of Cuba becomes a metaphor for a country and a history. This film won many prizes.

53In 2007 Fernando Pérez has just realized a fiction film thanks to which his artistic stature acquires an extreme intensity : Madrigal. Dedicated to the French director rené Clair, it rescues the ending of the 1955 film Les grandes manœuvres that he did not shoot because the producers considered it too tragic, to close a love story in Havana. Javier, a young actor, unleashes all his fantasy to win the heart of Luisita, a girl full of secrets. But does he lie or is he honest ? Javier ends up as the victim of his own game. In this clever film Fernando Pérez uses several levels of narrative. This is in keeping with the theme of the movie. In Fernado Pérez’s words, « what is apparent and what is real are topics at the core of all human relations ».

54The images and themes of these two films of the 2000’s have enriched the universel appeal of his films, both in documentary and in fiction.