As a reference and essential figure of Cuban culture, he contributed ideas, thoughts, values, and a committed documentary work of remarkable formative and aesthetic excellence, which the majority should know and interpret.
These images and their speaking silence revitalize the memory of a task that transcended other continents. Today they are part of that legacy that is always present when the story of the Noticiero ICAIC Latinoamericano is told and of a diverse filmography due to its contents and points of view, exquisite in the aesthetic aspect due to the originality of its poetics.
Such contributions belong to the teacher Santiago Álvarez (1919-1998), an active reference, since he dialogues with audiences of different ages; It is not by chance that he deserved the name of third world chronicler. He demonstrated how the Cuban Revolution, from the beginning, has been part of an important movement of emancipatory struggles. His work made dissimilar events visible, including the heroic battles of the Vietnamese people, the actions of the guerrillas in the Congo and the abuses once morest blacks in the United States.
A few hours ago, the 20th edition of the International Documentary Festival concluded in Santiago de Cuba, which privileges its everlasting imprint and motivated these reflections on the ideas, thoughts, and experiences of who knew how to be an extraordinary filmmaker.
Revisiting your newscasts produces joyous enjoyments. The intentionality in the use of the image captivates, the suggestive dynamics of the assembly, the photographic concept, the well thought out design of the soundtrack.
Santiago created a revolutionary message with art in the structure of his stories and, at the same time, he knew how to confront the enemy propaganda dominated by the great American media and its cultural industry. In a wise, intelligent, sensitive way, he contributed to the training process of a new type of viewer; He nurtured the conception and treatment of the news with values and ideals, which sustained a solid informative and cultural counterpart to the stereotypes and social prejudices imposed by North American models in the media universe.
He considered that cinema, as image and sound, offers multiple possibilities of extraverbal expression. For him, the use of dramatic silence at crucial moments in the stories or as a starting point when recreating a wide sound universe was essential. Both dramaturgical conceptions are present in contemporary productions, but, without a doubt, the particular syntax that he deployed in newsreels and documentaries favors the image-sound relationship with a strong symbolic value. Materials of remarkable value attest to this wealth, for example, Cyclone y the bennyboth from 1963, Now (1965), Ever onward to victory (1967).
Impossible to forget the reflections that Santiago Álvarez made to BOHEMIA in the mid-1990s. He explained simply and convincingly why he chose documentary as his film medium and style: “I have something of the adventurer inside me, I am passionate regarding living the reality with which I work. To make a documentary film, it is necessary to go to the place where the event occurs at the precise moment and there collect elements that help me to structure the story. None of my work is alike, I always look for a style, a different way of saying, I combine politics and art in a communicative way, I use all the imaginative possibilities, I look for something extraordinary within the most ordinary”.
In his battle he defended the conquest of a profile of notable discursive expressiveness. A true Cuban and tireless reader of Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén and José Martí, he took advantage of each lesson naturally. He needed to be informed and discover for himself the immensity of the depths in the human being. He liked to give new light to what people looked at and might barely perceive the humanistic magnitude of him.
Once once more, one must follow in the footsteps of Santiago Álvarez to understand and interpret the particularities of his documentary, identified with well-defined precepts and projections since the creation of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry on March 24, 1959. The collapse of old paradigms and the re-foundation of the national culture gained ground within the new Cuban creative context and profoundly revolutionized it. He patented it as the inspiring teacher of this evocation that invites us to continue studying the being and the work of an extraordinary filmmaker.
CREDITS
Photos Courtesy of ICAIC
