Latin American Cinema (cuban, Strawberry and Chocolate) - Essay Example

Running Head: Latin American Cinema Introduction In order that we critically examine the film Memories of Underdevelopment, we must first look into the attitude and personality of the film’s celebrated director Tomas Gutierrez Alea. Mr. Gutierrez Alea has been a controversial filmmaker, who developed his own film culture in the backdrop of Cuban Revolution. He never collided with the dynamic revolutionary politics of this Caribbean country, but remained inside the sphere of communist developments with is critical voice and viewpoint unchanged.

Is Memories of Underdevelopment Uniquely Cuban? If So, How? After deposing the right wing regime of Batista, the newly founded communist administration of Cuba was taking the country through various ups and downs. Describing those days, the film under discussion qualifies as a Cuban cinema with certain typical traits. Mr. Gutierrez Alea, the maker of this film, has always been sensitive towards “Cubanness”. This Cubanness finds expression through a social commitment, which must also culminate at a social resonance.

People must be able to identify themselves with the characters of the film, and further reflect on the subject and predicate of the presentation. Memories of Underdevelopment effectively portrayed the identity factor of the Cuban society and thus it accomplishes as a typical Cuban film.How Does the Film Address the Cuban Revolution? Mr. Gutierrez Alea was critical to the revolution but not destructive towards it. Hence, Memories of Underdevelopment can be defined as a portrait of the Cuban society created by a critical insider of the Cuban Revolution itself.

The film covers the humanistic aspects of the revolutionary outlook through the heart and mind of a sensitive filmmaker. Hence, it becomes a descriptive monologue of the Cuban Revolution as a whole.What Is This Film Critiquing? The film has a radical expressionist approach towards the Cuban Revolution and the society. It particularly seeks to point out the stringency and confusion in the post revolutionary Cuba during the 1960s. The film is about an intellectual who strives to find out his place in the post-revolutionary social framework of Cuba.

Thus, the director enters a world of inter-contradiction, where we find both revolutionary commitment and humanly hesitations in one go. In the process, the critique becomes pretty innovative.How Does the Film Comment on Machismo? The film does not attack one’s humanly weaknesses. Rather, it portrays this factor of weakness sympathetically. The assertive masterpiece is meshed into the picturing of this sensitive feature of the human mind. The weakness or hesitation actually develops from the internal mind, where subconscious reasoning often takes control of a man’s activities.

Machismo, on the other hand, augmented the guerilla warfare and the revolutionary communist outlook. The film investigates into the possibility of counter-balancing this machismo with a stress on the sensitivity of the human intellectual thinking. In the movie, we come across a middleclass intellectual who is unable to commit and render himself fully to the Revolution. Of course, this attitude of the central character is in direct contradiction with the Cuban perspective of machismo.What Sort of Commentary Is the Film Making about Pre-Revolutionary Cuba and Post-Revolutionary Cuba?

The rebel supreme Fidel Castro took over the power in Cuba in the year 1959. The backdrop of the film Memories of Underdevelopment is thus set in the 1950s and 1960s. The film under discussion has been critical towards both the pre-re4volutionary and post-revolutionary Cuba. The pre-revolutionary right wing rule was respectable and tolerant in regards of Cuban people and politics neither in reality nor from Mr. Gutierrez Alea’s viewpoint. But the history of oppression did not completely come to an end with the founding of a revolutionary communist government.

The hyperactivity of the post-revolutionary regime in regards of pointing out and destroying the counter-revolutionary elements existing in the Cuban society cannot be fully endorsed. The commentary of the film thus becomes self reflective.Conclusion Some of the best films of Tomas Gutierrez Alea are Strawberry and Chocolate, Waiting List, The Death of a Bureaucrat, Guantanamera, etc. However, many film critics have called the film Memories of Underdevelopment a masterpiece, where we find radical expressionism along with sympathy for the Cuban Revolution.

This film not only reflects on a certain period of history but also touches our emotions.