The re-making of the 1958 Travelogue Tempo of Tomorrow.
In 2014 my brother, Joshua Gibson, discovered a 35mm CinemaScope travelogue called Tempo of Tomorrow, an 8-minute film produced in 1958, encouraging Americans to tour and invest in what was then modern Cuba. Josh and I had always wanted to work on a project together, and, after watching the film, we decided that working on a remake of this travelogue would be a way to unite our interests: my specialization in Cuba and his in 35-mm film production and experimental documentary travelogues.
When we began the project, the rough concept for the film involved remaking the film in Cuba, shot-by-shot, 56 years after its creation. The December 17, 2014 announcement of the normalizing of diplomatic relations between Cuba and the US made the comparison of 1958 (the year prior to the Cuban Revolution) and 2014 suddenly all the more significant. In our remake we wanted to explore how images of Cuba are produced for and consumed by a foreign audience since this is what struck us both about the original travelogue.
The original Tempo of Tomorrow (1958) is heavily marked by the political and financial gains of the post-World War II years. The film thus reflects much more about American consumption of images of Cuba than it does about Cuba itself. In our remake of the film, then, we deliberately wanted to maintain an outside view of Cuba, remaining aware of ourselves as foreigners and as Americans. The film asks viewers to contemplate the role that Americans (producers and viewers) inevitably play in representing a nation that has been constructed vis-à-vis the presence (and the absence) of the American gaze. What are the ways in which the gaze remains the same 56 years after the original film? In what important ways has it changed? Our film is a statement about imagined nostalgic images of the past. The same images that were once appealing icons of Cuba’s modernity are now nostalgic with loss, even though the travelogue film footage—then and now—only skims the surface of a living Cuba.
My colleagues and I who work in Cuba like to say that Cuba is a country where nothing is permitted yet everything is possible. This definitely proved to be the case in making this film. The original plan for Tempo of Tomorrow Revisited was to shoot the same locations shot-for-shot and then juxtapose the old and new footage, switching the audio (2014 audio on 1958 film, and vice versa). Doing this, we hoped, would allow us to play with the idea of tourist nostalgia, as well as force the understanding of the cyclical nature of tourism. The audience has to work to discover what is old and what is new footage.
We had also hoped to shoot using 35mm CinemaScope film in order to force these comparisons and to enable similar practical approaches to landscape, architecture, and subject enabled by that technology. However, it is nearly impossible for Americans to film legally in Cuba without a special license from the Office of Foreign Assets Control. At first, we had intended to get these permissions, but the fees quoted by ICAIC were too hefty for two academic experimental filmmakers to even consider. Given our academic affiliations, our film fell under the category of “academic research,” allowing us to by-pass the official filming license. But, without an official license for filming, I knew that there would be no way that Josh could bring a CinemaScope camera into the country, much less set up such a conspicuous camera to film, without someone asking us for a permit. We decided instead that he would bring a Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera, which looks much like a tourist camera. All shots were created outside in public space, so we didn’t have to negotiate with any Cuban entities to film.
I think that, ultimately, our need to use modern digital filmmaking had an interesting impact on our overall project goals. The very modern camera is capable of replicating the aspect ratio and textures of 35mm cinemascope. In doing so, the film itself is able to recreate a nostalgic image with new technology. We were also seen as tourists rather than filmmakers throughout the filming process, which added another layer of complexity to the images that we produced. We, ourselves, were outsiders following in the footsteps of those old filmmakers. Finally, since the original film stock had faded over time, our new digital footage inevitably reintroduced the vibrant colors that would have once existed in the original scenes.
The second obstacle we faced was finding the original locations. In some cases, this was easy because they were emblematic locations around Havana: the José Martí statue, FOCSA, Plaza de la Catedral. With other locations, it was fairly easy to locate the general neighborhood, even if the exact camera angle was difficult to figure out. Although I was always within about 100 yards of the site, the exact location of the shot from the malecón took me a long time to find, as many of the buildings from the original footage have since collapsed. The Batista Statue was also difficult because public knowledge seems to have forgotten that the statue ever existed. That being said, there are only a few fields in Havana where there would have been a military procession in the 1950s, so we found the empty statue platform eventually in Ciudad Libertad. Overall, the street scenes were the most difficult. Many of the stores located in the 1958 film don’t exist anymore. By the width of the streets and the types of storefronts in the original footage, I could get a general idea of the neighborhood where the shots were taken. Then I spent a lot of time walking, driving, and asking older residents of the area, until I came across some piece of building, or brick, or fence that I recognized from the original footage.
In all our shots, we took care to shoot quickly and without much equipment. Observers assumed that we were tourists and hardly gave us a second glance. The most problematic shot may have been the triangular apartment building located at the corner of M and Calzada. This apartment building is right across the street from the US Interest Section (now US Embassy) where you aren’t allowed to linger, much less pull out a film camera and a tripod. We had hired a car for that day and, when the driver realized where we wanted to film, he drove off and left us on the corner. We were able to pull the shot off without raising suspicion because I posed for a picture quickly and Josh, without a tripod, pretended to be taking a picture of me, while filming the apartment building instead. Having captured the image, we then continued to walk along the malecón, as if we were just two tourists out sightseeing.
The third hurdle was finding the right narrator for 2014. Juxtaposing the footage from 2014 with 1958 seemed to be telling a story of Cuba’s transition from tropical paradise to socialist austerity; most of the buildings looked very much the same, though in obvious disrepair. This was not the story we hoped to tell. Somehow, despite all the 1950’s cars still on the streets, the new film needed to challenge the original film in unexpected ways and also provide some sort of context to question the first narrative voice. The decision about a narrator became critical. We needed a narrator that would somehow be a contemporary transformation of the omniscient newsreel voice of the 1958 narrator, as well as raise new questions about narrative point of view. My voice was actually recorded as the first narrator voice. That narrator was someone like me, an American academic working in Cuba despite the embargo; someone who was self-consciously reflecting on the paradox of her own tourist gaze, at the same time that she was making a film that she hoped would offer a critique of tourism’s consumption of Cuba. This voice never really worked for us. I was too conflicted about my presence on the island to function as the narrator we needed. So we put the robotic voice of Siri in as a placeholder while we thought about who the new narrator might be. Then, as we listened to Siri, we began to hear her as the appropriate contemporary counterpoint to the canned 1950s travelogue narrator; she is a familiar yet utterly impersonal presence who mouths a script without any personal investment whatsoever in Cuba.
Siri also became part of our reflection about what modernity means in the context of 2014 Cuba. Like Cuba itself, Siri as a narrator is bound by her technological limitations. Internet and access to communication are at the forefront of rapid change in Cuba, but, for now, lack of access to technology marks the nation as being outside of common understandings of modernity. Siri, the ubiquitious smart phone’s built-in personal assistant, simply doesn’t function there. She is, thus, both the voice of the tool that tourists routinely use to mediate their experience and also the absent presence; she is relevant to Cuban tourists only when they are working offline with downloaded apps or when they are not actually in the country. Siri, thus, became an important part of the way that Tempo of Tomorrow Revisited reflects our role as Americans producing outsider representation of the island—in the 1950s and today as we, as a nation, stand on the cusp of redefining our relationship with Cuba.