Memories Of Underdevelopment Analysis

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea employs many different styles that pull from film genres such as documentary, diary, and melodrama within the film Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), which is the film adaptation of the novel Inconsolable Memories by Edmundo Desnoes. This multitude of styles helps to produce a film that takes on the task creating tension not only among the characters, but among the different film elements and the viewers as well. The creation of this tension brings into question the notion of spectator vs. participator. This question can be readily applied to the main character Sergio (Sergio Corrieri), who continuously mulls over this notion, but continually falls into the role of the spectator, as is continually depicted in scenes where …show more content…
This can be seen in the scene where the viewers learn of an instance in which Sergio records his wife Laura, talking without her knowledge or consent to do so. The viewer sees Sergio press play on a recording device and what is played back are a series of questions that he asks her, to her increasing irritation. As the recording plays the viewers watch Sergio rifling through his wife’s belongings. This scene exemplifies the idea of Kaja Silverman in her essay “Suture,” The Subject of Semiotics, in that “she signifies the lack which properly belongs both to the male and the female viewers, who are spoken, not speaking, and whose gazes are controlled, not controlling.” (223). This idea is achieved in the way that the viewer is not able to see the woman talking, but only hear her disembodied voice in the background. The viewer is not afforded the chance to see the gaze that Sergio places on his wife, which places her in the role of the exhibitionist. In this scene the viewer is not able to see what happened just as the wife was not given the chance to choose whether she would be recorded. In this moment, both the viewer and Laura are united in their inability to control their gaze, allowing it be dictated by a third-party. As the tension rises between the characters so does this tension with how the shot is created by exploring this somewhat unusual portrayal of power dynamics. The shift in this film technique as compared to the opening scene also creates tension and adds to the film’s notion of participation and spectatorship. Where as in the first scene the viewer can get a sense of participating in the proceedings, this scene relegates the viewer to the position of the spectator as the steadicam gives a sense of sterility and remove from the