“Tracefossilim” of Melodramatic Cuba
There has been a resurgence of melodrama in Cuban film since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, two of Cuba’s most prominent and historically significant filmmakers, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Humberto Solás, have produced highly melodramatic films in the almost two decades since the Soviet collapse, a time known in Cuba as the special period. 1 While there are certainly melodramatic tendencies in other post-revolutionary Cuban films, melodrama has generally been derided on account of its supposed complicity with the ideology of American capitalism. 2 It is thus notable that the films made by Cuba’s two leading, and arguably most politically-committed filmmakers within the special period have been overtly …show more content…
16 In Babel and Babylon, Hansen argues that it is against the back-drop of the mass upheaval in the spheres of American culture, technology, and labor that cinema emerged as both literal and symbolic refuge from the “traumatic” effects of industrial modernity. Although the cinema for Hansen no doubt participated in the “historical upheaval of traditional coordinates of space and time” marked by the experience of modernity, “it also offered a refuge in which the violence of the transition could be negotiated in a less threatening, playful, and intersubjective manner.” 17 Hansen’s observations are important, as they point to the fact that it was the traumatic context of industrial modernity that enabled cinema to take on a significant role—as refuge—in the negotiation of these massive changes. Cinema plays a similar role during Cuba’s special period, where it is against (and because of) the instability of a political context marked by radical upheavals and readjustments that cinema has in part served as a space where Cubans can retreat in order to negotiate their collective future amid the volatility of the …show more content…
29 This problem was made starkly visible in the years leading up to and during the filming of Honey for Ochún, as images of Cuban “raft people”—those who fled to Florida in precarious rafts—began to circulate widely in North American media and which culminated in the tense political dispute surrounding Elian Gonzales. This ideological and allegorical aim is punctuated by the film’s most intensely melodramatic scene, which features a near extradiegetic monologue by the protagonist Roberto that seems to directly address the Cuban viewer. Exhausted from what has thus far been a fruitless pursuit of his mother, Roberto is driven over the edge by an act of petty thievery when his bike is stolen in a small Cuban village. Roberto chases the thief in vain and in the process draws many town villagers out of their houses and into the town square. In front of this large crowd of onlookers and his two travel companions, Roberto confesses that his life has been filled with immense sorrow and pain. This suffering is a result, as he laments, of his fractured connection with his Cuban homeland and his indeterminate ethnic status in the United States, where he is “neither Cuban nor American.” Roberto describes how he is constantly reminded of this indeterminacy by being encouraged to renounce his Cuban identity, to
There has been a resurgence of melodrama in Cuban film since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Indeed, two of Cuba’s most prominent and historically significant filmmakers, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Humberto Solás, have produced highly melodramatic films in the almost two decades since the Soviet collapse, a time known in Cuba as the special period. 1 While there are certainly melodramatic tendencies in other post-revolutionary Cuban films, melodrama has generally been derided on account of its supposed complicity with the ideology of American capitalism. 2 It is thus notable that the films made by Cuba’s two leading, and arguably most politically-committed filmmakers within the special period have been overtly …show more content…
16 In Babel and Babylon, Hansen argues that it is against the back-drop of the mass upheaval in the spheres of American culture, technology, and labor that cinema emerged as both literal and symbolic refuge from the “traumatic” effects of industrial modernity. Although the cinema for Hansen no doubt participated in the “historical upheaval of traditional coordinates of space and time” marked by the experience of modernity, “it also offered a refuge in which the violence of the transition could be negotiated in a less threatening, playful, and intersubjective manner.” 17 Hansen’s observations are important, as they point to the fact that it was the traumatic context of industrial modernity that enabled cinema to take on a significant role—as refuge—in the negotiation of these massive changes. Cinema plays a similar role during Cuba’s special period, where it is against (and because of) the instability of a political context marked by radical upheavals and readjustments that cinema has in part served as a space where Cubans can retreat in order to negotiate their collective future amid the volatility of the …show more content…
29 This problem was made starkly visible in the years leading up to and during the filming of Honey for Ochún, as images of Cuban “raft people”—those who fled to Florida in precarious rafts—began to circulate widely in North American media and which culminated in the tense political dispute surrounding Elian Gonzales. This ideological and allegorical aim is punctuated by the film’s most intensely melodramatic scene, which features a near extradiegetic monologue by the protagonist Roberto that seems to directly address the Cuban viewer. Exhausted from what has thus far been a fruitless pursuit of his mother, Roberto is driven over the edge by an act of petty thievery when his bike is stolen in a small Cuban village. Roberto chases the thief in vain and in the process draws many town villagers out of their houses and into the town square. In front of this large crowd of onlookers and his two travel companions, Roberto confesses that his life has been filled with immense sorrow and pain. This suffering is a result, as he laments, of his fractured connection with his Cuban homeland and his indeterminate ethnic status in the United States, where he is “neither Cuban nor American.” Roberto describes how he is constantly reminded of this indeterminacy by being encouraged to renounce his Cuban identity, to