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17 out of 18 people found the following comment useful :- Complex and probing, 1 August 2005 Author: Howard Schumann from Vancouver, B.C.
If you are inclined to think that Third World Cinema is simplistic and one-dimensional, I invite you see Tomas Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment, selected by the New York Times in 1974 as one of the year's ten best movies. Based on the novel Inconsolable Memories by Edmundo Desnoës, a Cuban writer who lived in the United States, Memories is a complex and probing film about the dilemma faced by intellectuals in Cuba following the revolution. Although directed by a Cuban who supported the revolution and remained in Cuba until his death, the film has a European sensibility, interlacing fiction and documentary footage and using poetic images, literary narration, flashbacks, and newsreel footage reminiscent of Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour.Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) is a frustrated writer who chooses to remain in Cuba rather than follow his family to Miami just "to see how it all turns out". Though he has strong feelings for his people, he is indifferent towards politics an observer rather than a participant. Alea shows the artist as anti-hero, a man who undergoes an identity crisis, is sapped of all his vitality, feels old in his thirties, and drifts along without meaning and purpose. Unable to write the novel he wants, Sergio survives on rental income from apartments and lives in middle class luxury while around him housing is deteriorating and there are serious gas and oil shortages. He spends his days smoking in bed, looking out of a telescope through his bedroom window, taking walks, watching television, and meeting young women. He makes no pretense of his being an outsider but complains that "everything happens to me too early or too late". Hanna, the woman he says he truly loved urged him to move to New York with her and become a writer but he chose to remain in Cuba to go into the furniture business.When Sergio makes the acquaintance of Elena (Daisy Granados), a sixteen- year-old girl who wants to be an actress, his life takes on new meaning but it is temporary and the affair ends badly. Persuading her that he knows important people in the theatrical world, he brings her to his apartment and they begin a relationship in which he tries to model her to fit his ideal of the bourgeois Cuban woman. He takes her to modern art galleries and the home of writer Ernest Hemingway to expose her to culture but it doesn't work and he complains when she doesn't fit into his mold. "She doesn't relate to things," he tells himself. "It's one of the signs of underdevelopment." Elena, like other Cuban women", he says, has an "inability to relate to things, to accumulate experience, to develop", but the stricture can just as easily refer to himself and he pays the price of this experience when the girl's parents bring a lawsuit against him for rape. Although he escapes the fate of a criminal, little by little the outside world, the world of guns, slogans, and rallies closes in on him and he feels trapped.There are several documentary sequences interspersed throughout the film that have no apparent connection to the narrative but convey the sense that no one living in revolutionary Cuba is able to escape the presence of history. The opening sequence shows a public dance in which all the participants are black with the exception of Sergio who is white. In this sequence continued later in the film, an unnamed political leader is assassinated. In other footage, we see excerpts from the trial of counterrevolutionaries captured at Playa Giron, the site of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and a third in which we hear the voices of Castro and Kennedy during the Cuban Missile crisis.Though Alea apparently wants us to see the fate that befalls someone who does not directly endorse revolutionary activities, he makes his character so appealing and sympathetic that, to me, the film had mixed messages. I was torn between my support of the aims of the revolution and empathizing with Sergio's disdain for the emptiness of both the Cuban bourgeois and the revolutionary leadership. An event that took place only three years after Memories of Underdevlopment was released, however, underscored the point that Sergio was making. At that time, Castro, at the First National Congress on Education and Culture, said that artists and writers must reject "all manifestations of a decadent culture, the fruit of societies that are rent by contradictions". Not surprisingly, although due to receive a special prize for the film from the U.S. National Society of Film Critics in 1973, Gutiérrez Alea was denied a visa to attend the ceremony.
16 out of 21 people found the following comment useful :- One of the greatest films ever made, 16 June 2000 Author: Aw-komon from Studio City, CA
This isn't just a film of historical value; far from it. It is one of the greatest films ever made by anyone. The balance of elements that went into this venture came out magnificently poetic and real. The semi-documentary style is deeply influenced by 'Hiroshima Mon Amor' and other New Wave classics, but the sensibility is Alea's own and distinctly 'Latin American Intellectual.' There are very few films that can make me cry, this is one of them. Not because of the story, but simply because of the way it is made, the beautifully subtle way it is expressed. The leading character's central tragedy of not being able to reconcile his own deep feeling for his people with his intellectual standards because of their 'underdevelopment' and subsequent alienated existence or more precisely their inability to transcend their alienation to reach a more fulfilled state is one of the most touching and relevant themes I've ever seen in a film. It is more relevant more today, 30 years later than it was then, everywhere, not just in the island of Cuba with its mere 7 million inhabitants. A great performance by Sergio Corrieri (I Am Cuba) provides the required erotic undertone and comedic rhythms to convey the true feel of an intellectual 'playboy' existence in early '60s Cuba. The effect of this film is visceral and must be seen to be appreciated, words can hardly describe it. Suffice it to say that it uses all the resources of cinema and then some, but subtly and with maximum poetic control, and is a thousand times more valuable than most of the pretentious art films of today. If only one tenth of one percent of the audience that will see a piece of garbage like 'Mission Impossible 2' (which I sat and puked through I regret to say, because of all the hype about the 'action sequences' of John Woo, to kill a couple of hours which I'll never again be able to recover) this summer could somehow miraculously be forced to watch and understand this film and see its parallels within their own society of computerized complacent banality, the intellectual level of this country would shoot up overnight.
7 out of 7 people found the following comment useful :- A classic from a very troubled year, 11 February 2007 Author: kinaidos from Seattle, WA
Sergio, a bourgeois intellectual living off of (seemingly tenuous) rental income as a property holder, decides to stay in Cuba. The conflict set up between his intellectual convictions and the reality of Cuban life in the wake of the revolution makes up the central problem of the film. The film presents a year in the life of the protagonist, a year culminating in the missile crises of 1962. What makes the film is the candid nature of it's reflections on the role of the intellectual in political life - certainly THE hot topic during the summer of 1968. The film is also a stylistic tour de force, welding together neorealistic drama, newsreel footage, montages of life in contemporary Havana as seen from Sergio's flat (through a telescope), and some filmed Shavian-styled debates amid the action. Far from being a typical propaganda piece, the films treatment of the future of the revolution was very open ended, candid, and thoughtful. It's a film that emerges from the debates about the future and which stages it's own participation in that debate. The film features two significant cameos: Edmundo Desnoes - the author of the novel on which the film is based, and Gutierez Alea himself. Both cameos occur in diegetic reflections about art: a debate about literature in the case of Desnoes, and a talk with a young director in the case of Alea. This film is almost impossible to find in the US thanks to the Cuban expatriate zealot nonsense. It's available in Mexico though - on a fairly well mastered DVD. It's worth seeking out. It's one of the best Cuban films ever and one of the greatest films of the new wave era.
8 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :- Memoiras del subdesarrollo is a stunning look into post Revolutionary Cuba., 25 November 1999 Author: Tim Radar (radar-17) from Olympia Wa
Memorias del subdesarrolo (memories of the underdeveloped) is a look into the life of a bourgeois young writer who decides to stay in his native Cuba following the Cuban revolution, and enters himself into a life of detachment, seclusion, and avoidance. Sergio (the writer) is juxtaposed with Elna (a young woman following the trends that are dictated to her) to show a clash in idealism, values, and moral that leads to dramatic court scene that ultimately puts in question the current state of Cuba opposed to the past. Alea's use of Sergio, Elena, Pablo (a petty bourgeois that flees to Miami), and the court shows Alea's insight into the great social change that followed the revolution. Through the course of the film you see the change in society that spurns it's, once, culturally elite to become detached from there surroundings and society, leaving only two options: flight, and seclusion. This film is a great look into a society, and a man trying to escape from it. .
3 out of 3 people found the following comment useful :- Not underdeveloped as a Film!, 19 October 2006 Author: FANatic-10 from Las Vegas, NV
There is much that is wonderful about this film, the first Cuban film to be released in the U.S. after the Revolution. I found the ending rather abrupt and unsatisfying and some of the political discussions were long-winded (the fast disappearing subtitles on the video didn't help), but overall "Memories" was vibrant and surprising. The film is made with a lot of the spirit of the French New Wave, lots of flashy film techniques. It felt surprisingly open and honest to me, to have come out of Cuba at the time it did. It depicts an intellectual who has opted to remain in Cuba despite his well-off family and his wife having taken off for the U.S. He stays, wanting to see "how everything turns out". Afflicted with a rather massive case of both ennui and horniness, the film captures his musings on the state of Cuban society, at times satirical and sensual, but always cut through with a pervading sense of melancholy. It makes me want to hunt down more works by its late director, Tomas Gutierrez Alea.
6 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :- An excellent, telling perspective of post-revolutionary Cuba, 11 December 1998 Author: anonymous from Tufts University
In this excellent perspective of post-revolutionary Cuba, we see how Sergio has decided to ignore the changes in the world around him even after his parents and wife leave for Miami. Instead he stays in his home and lives off past rent money while focusing on women who attract him and the way the world seems not to have actually changed as he looks out his window with a small telescope. "All of a sudden," he claims,"it looks like a set, a city of card board." The movie is interesting and telling of this world and one man's desire to avoid it. Sergio visits the home of Hemmingway in Cuba and comments on his reasons for living there. The movie ends with an outside view of Cuba by President Kennedy's warnings to the new communist state.The movie is quick-paced and packed with information, as well as interesting and enjoyable.
should I stay or should I go, 3 May 2007 Author: mgrindberg from Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico
A Cuban intellectual who is from the bourgeois class, though educated and perceptive enough not to fall hook line and sinker for whatever bourgeois mentality may prevail, watches as nearly everyone who can, abandons Cuba in the wake of Castro's triumphant overthrow of Batista. Why he doesn't join them is one of the film's burning questions. Utilizing newsreel footage, the film superimposes the main character into or onto the setting of revolutionary Cuba in a very successful way, capturing the drama of those times and his own dilemmas. That the Revolution itself was started by and led by the disaffected sons and daughters of the upper class, the question to stay and try to transform the country, also meant getting on their wagon, while leaving had its own implications. Caught in the middle, and abandoned by his wife, who left for Miami, he becomes infatuated with his housekeeper, a Baptist convert, giving the film an interesting erotic spirituality, in one beautiful scene imagining her baptism, and later picking up on a young woman and having a relationship that nearly lands him in jail, discovering underdevelopment and social conservatism in relation to his own loose morality. In the end, he's tolerated by the Revolution, probably much to the dislike of the anti-Castro crowd.
5 out of 10 people found the following comment useful :- Emotional Existentialism, 26 December 2005 Author: (futures@exis.net) from Ronn Ives/FUTURES Antiques, Norfolk, VA.
"Memories of Underdevelopment" (Cuban, 1968): Made in 1968, set and shot (b/w) in 1961-62 Cuba, using a frighteningly smooth blend of documentary footage, and flash-backs, with new sets, locations, and actors in present-time, we watch a man at an airport say goodbye to most everyone he's ever known. THEY are escaping the new Castro Cuba, to start over in Miami, USA. HE has decided to remain (although we're never given much of an explanation why), and use (what must be) his independent wealth. Now living in the big city with only strangers, he wanders about looking for relationships. Instant closeness. Replacements. Although carrying the demeanor of a suave, patient, aging bachelor, he has the desperation of a teenage boy, driven by appearances and hormones. As archival footage is used to expand the vision of Castro's Cuba, it is clear the lonely man is the one making the bigger mistake. I thought of this "story" as Emotionally Existential.
2 out of 11 people found the following comment useful :- make sure you're awake to watch this one, 25 April 2006 Author: MisterWhiplash from United States
I saw this film in a film class, where we were looking at the mix of elements of documentary footage as well as fictional footage (including the use of archives, stills, voice-over), in relation to Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour. All I can say is that I was interested in the film, and at times my interest really peaked up with the style, but it's not for everyone, that's for sure. The director is very talented with mixing the elements of making narrative out of seemingly non-narrative. Here and there I was even reminded of Bertolucci's Before the Revolution. But here and there I wondered 'would this be just better as a straight documentary on the post Cuban revolutionary world?' The questions raised by its main character Sergio are intelligent, but there are so many of them thrown at a viewer, or just in observations. And you may need to be completely up on your Cuban history circa late 50's-early 60's to catch some of the stuff inside.The storyline itself is actually just as involving, if not more so, than the documentary side to the film, as Sergio's viewpoint of the Cuban's (misguided) revolutionary stances and problems with the bourgeoisie is a parallel to his relationships with women. The story with the young girl he seduces, and gets in trouble with, are some of my favorite scenes from the lot (and when I most woke up to watch). It's a little more tedious at times than 'Hiroshima' was as a hybrid-style film, and even with its gritty style that even in fictional form is very documentary-like, it didn't blow me away as much as it has for others who have commented here. However, I would say if you're into the history and hows and whys of the Cuban revolution and Castro and the Bay of Pigs, AND want a character to guide you through it all, this is quite the view.
4 out of 33 people found the following comment useful :- Worth seeing for historical interest, 4 June 2000 Author: William J. Fickling (wjfickling@earthlink.net) from Columbia, South Carolina, USA
Although this isn't a particularly good film, it provides a fascinating look into life in Cuba during the first few years after Castro's revolution. Although released in 1968, it is set in 1961-1962. While it was no doubt censored by the Cuban government, and you would have no idea from watching this film that what is being depicted is a police state, the film is in many ways surprisingly honest about several aspects of post-revolutionary life, i.e., the mass exodus from the country in 1961, the shortages, etc. So it's worth a look if you can catch it.
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