Tagged: Julio Garcia Espinosa

Roots of an “Imperfect Cinema”

About a week ago, film professor and documentarian Michael Chanan posted an excerpt from his documentary film The New Cinema of Latin America (1983). The excerpt includes an enlightening interview with Cuban filmmaker Julio Garcia Espinosa. At the time, he was the head of ICAIC, the Cuban Film Institute founded by the Castro regime after the 1959 Revolution, but he is perhaps best remembered for writing the essay “For an Imperfect Cinema” in 1969.

Espinosa’s interview highlights two very compelling issues of the post-1959 period of filmmaking and, apparently, his own thinking about “imperfect cinema”:

  1. The filmmakers were influenced by the European New Waves and documentary. Espinosa describes how Italian Neorealism was a model for quality filmmaking and recalls how someone criticized his early film work for ignoring this important movement. He also notes the influence of Michaelangelo Antonioni and Ingmar Bergman, as well as generally referring to the documentary work that grew in the decades after World War II.
  2. The filmmakers were determined to create their own cinema. Espinosa discusses how filmmakers had adopted many tricks to mask the racial markers of Afro-Cubans, but they were determined to forgo that practice in favor of representing the Cuban people in their truest light.

The New Cinema of Latin America (1983) is hard to find. It is available on DVD for institutional purchase and on VHS, for the rest of us, at a library near you.