Gabriela rangel
07/17/2021 12:17 PM
Clarín.com
Magazine Ñ
Updated 07/17/2021 12:18 PM
The general alarm sounded, much like the soundtrack to the World War II bombings in London, followed by an announcement over the loudspeakers. The executive director of the San Antonio de Los Baños International Film and Television School was speaking,
calling an extraordinary general assembly
in the conference room. The speakers were next to the dining room, in the long corridor that linked the naves of the two buildings that made up the school's infrastructure. Facing the countryside was the residential sector, with rooms occupied by students. The classrooms, sound, video, photography, and film studios were located in an adjoining building, linked by a corridor with
a massive atrium furnished with brightly colored BKF chairs, tables and tropical plants
, plus a row of elegantly standing palm trees in an adjacent open courtyard. The episode takes place in mid-1989, the year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the custom of censorship and demands for openness were already in the making in San Antonio de los Baños, where the protests began last Sunday.
From those loudspeakers the operators and the assistant principal used to announce the routine long distance telephone calls to the students, the arrival of TELEX and packages from abroad, today unthinkable with the internet and cell phones.
Through an announcement on those loudspeakers,
I learned of the birth of my first nephew on May 1st, "as befits the grandson of a communist
.
"
But the ads were rarely broadcast by the director and when that happened, you had to pay attention to the news brought by the official, wife of the theorist of "imperfect cinema", Julio García Espinoza.
Given the tense tone that morning, the matter of the assembly would undoubtedly be a
matter of State Security.
Luminaries of world cinema, such as Francis Coppola, at the San Antonio de los Baños School.
Almost three years had passed since the founding of the pedagogical institution supported with the will and funds of the writer Gabriel García Márquez and some enthusiastic European partner, such as the engineer Jean Pierre Beauviala, brilliant inventor of the Aaton de Grenoble cameras, who had collaborated with Jean Rouge, Felix Guattari and filmmakers associated with the French Nouvelle Vague.
García Márquez appointed the Argentine Fernando Birri,
founder of the Santa Fé School, already in mature age and eternally exiled in Italy from successive Argentine dictatorships, as artistic director approved by the Committee of Filmmakers who preside over the Foundation for New Latin American Cinema.
Birri spent long periods in Cuba with his partner
, an Italian with a face of the
quattrocento
, who appeared publicly as a teacher's assistant.
Alfredo Bryce Echenique and Eduardo Galeano, also called by the Colombian Nobel laureate to give special writing courses,
swam in Russian vodka in
soirées
evoking the tropical Bacchant rites of
Paradiso,
the novel
by Lezama Lima.
Robert Redford gave a talk on independent initiatives and Brian Eno spoke on music for the movies.
The School was born with a firm footing, sponsored by an international committee of filmmakers from the left close to García Márquez, who in the inaugural year managed to bring together students under 24 years of age from North, Central and South America, Asia and Africa and established professors. in the industries of their countries, with a post-colonial mentality. But shortly after her operations, she was already
picking up rumors that the Commander was not comfortable with her
. There was speculation about the animosity of Alfredo Guevara, Fidel's right-hand man, who was said to incite the leader
against the open and relaxed pedagogical orientation that Birri and the circle of Cubans
close to García Márquez and García Espinosa gave to the
pensum
. The students of the Higher Institute of Art attended
parties that ended in polyamorous entanglements, and marijuana was planted, with monastic discretion, in the rooms
and, as the Rolling Stones would say, it was for exclusive and personal use, like other directly imported substances from the Andean highlands. Anonymous graffiti stained the white walls and early 16mm black and white
films showed affinities with
British
queer
cinema
,
the independent films of young people Leos Carax and Jim Jarmush. One could feel the heteroclite breath of the Chilean shaman poet Alejandro Jodorowsky, the terse dissent of Andrej Tarkovski and the intellectual disquisitions of Jean Luc Godard.
No one seriously disputed the "imperfect cinema" or the theory of socialist realism of Georg Lukács
, except for a scrawny
Stalinist minority
who continually complained of gentrification and the lack of attention to the real problems of Latin America and the suffering third world.
Before #Metoo, molecular activism and escraches in the face of the politically incorrect, many teachers rejoiced in full psycho-socialist enjoyment with our first generation of "telefilm makers", erasing all protocol of authority with their students with whom they lived , even outside of Cuba.
On the same Sunday of the protests, demonstrations in support of President Díaz Canel in San Antonio de los Baños.
The extraordinary assembly summoned the illustrious visits of Armando Hart, Minister of Culture and a historical member of the Party, along with other prominent figures from the Institute of Cinematographic Arts and Industries, ICAIC. Hart opened the afternoon debate with a subdued, tense, and unconvincing speech
warning students of an impending international plot against the Film School
. It was said that Hart had never gotten over the suicide of his partner Haydee Santamaría, a heroine from the Moncada garrison who was speculated to have had a strong ideological break with Fidel and Raúl that precipitated her death. García Espinoza took the floor followed by Birri, who offered
versions of the catastrophic threat forged by the enemies of Cuba
, who, according to them, planned to
bequeathing to the San Antonio facilities from the USA with weapons of war
. Furthermore, García Espinoza and Birri put their prestige at stake before the students by maintaining that the Cuban intelligence organizations had
material evidence of the invasion led by the great film illuminator Néstor Almendros
, dissident and protected by the CIA.
There was a thick silence, and after insisting that we participate, a few incredulous students managed to increase the paranoid register of the speakers with their questions.
With long faces and the excitement produced by the excess of cigarettes and coffee that the management allowed to consume that afternoon inside the premises, there was a long chain of interventions with a question and answer session that lasted just over three hours, a delirious performance , cut to fit a documentary scene from
Memories of Underdevelopment
, the film by Gutiérrez Alea.
Members of the special brigades, through the streets of San Antonio de los Baños this week.
But the discussion ended abruptly when
the kitchen workers, urged on by the last bus to transport
to the town of San Antonio, demanded that we get up to eat and collect in less than an hour.
The exit of the enclosure was done in silence.
Many left without tasting food, others went directly
to the store to buy the reserves of Rum Matusalem
, in preparation for the advent of the 18th Brumaire.
From Karl Marx, it is understood.
Gabriela Rangel, born in Caracas, directed the Americas' Society in New York and until April 2021 the Malba. Today resides in NY