Translation by Susannah Rodríguez Drissi and Ariana Hernández-Reguant
For me, Guantánamo has been the most decisive experience of my career as a professional film director –a career, more or less, as long as the triumphant revolution. This is a film, by the way, that will have been completed twice before its release. This is a fact as extraordinary as having been born twice, and therefore its story deserves to be told.
Everything began in 1959, when I became interested in Guantánamo as the topic of a novel. A novel? Don’t be surprised anyone. Before 1959 I made films without being a filmmaker, and literature, without being a literary author. After that, I managed to become a filmmaker who wrote his own scripts. At the same time, I have not stopped writing literature, among other things because beginning in 1959, so many people in this country have taken to writing, that it is almost a shame not to do it. Yes, I was attracted to Guantánamo because it was like an Achilles’ heel. It was so, not only because of the false progress and false freedom’s idyllic appearance that hides North American imperialism. Uncovering the veil that hides reality’s locus—that is an enterprise that has always fascinated me. I think that if, for instance, Goya would have lived in Guantánamo, say in the years around World War II, his work would have offended the sensibility of the philistines of our time, just like his “The Disasters of War,” “Caprichos,” and “Los Disparates” offended that of his time. I was also attracted to Guantánamo because it represented the dramatic upsurge of revolutionary consciousness in the most adverse of circumstances.
Since that year, I have had several opportunities to stay, for some time, in Guantánamo and Caimanera. In both places I met many and diverse people: revolutionaries, grassroots workers, base employees, prostitutes and pimps –all of whom were either active or retired. Directly from them I got countless stories, anecdotes and information. Over the course of several months in 1960, I painstakingly reviewed, in a carrel at the National Library, one by one, each and every issue of the newspapers published in Guantánamo from the early 20th century till the present. And believe me: Guantánamo’s periodical collections constitute a precious and essential source for a sociological or historical study –still to be done- of 20th century Guantánamo.
In 1961, I was already a professional filmmaker, although more so from an economic than a technical standpoint, so I was not yet in conditions to make a feature length film. Nonetheless, I wrote a storyboard of about fifty pages for a fiction film. Today I find that job as insufficient and not satisfactory, perhaps because I am more intolerant now. I was still enthusiastic about my literary project, however. Then, when in 1964 I needed to make my second feature, I returned to my old film project, which although imperfect, could still serve as the departure point for a new treatment. That is why I returned to Guantánamo one more time. This time, however, with my feet firmly planted on the urban concrete, I experienced what Christian theology has denominated, many centuries after Archimedes’ famous “eureka” (I found it), as a revelation. I recall that this type of psychological phenomenon related to the creative process was usually called by Zavattini as “lampo” (lightning, illumination). The point being that I realized that the best film that I could make about Guantánamo was one that would start with the contemporary elements that constituted the city’s daily life. Recently I read this citation by Artaud, which explains and encapsulates that revelation with a precision that amazes me: “… reality is terribly superior to all history, to all fable, to all divinity, to all surreality.”
In any case, “illuminations” of this sort are not unheard of for those whose line of work—be it politics or chess—involves the imagination. It was the Romantics who popularized the term “inspiration” and described it as a personality trait, typical of an artist. That, in addition to being a good definition, is a nice metaphor. It is true that inspiration alone is no guarantee of success, but it would be a mistake not to see in it a mark of intelligence. The suddenness of the act of inspiration is more an impression than a real thing. It creates a feeling of spontaneity, of an absence of a rational thought process. However, this phenomenon is the net product of a quantitative accumulation of experiences. Experiences are intertwined at the subconscious level until they emerge in consciousness as a well-defined and clear idea that appears as unexpected.
As for me, what were in that moment three of my main accumulated experiences? The main one is to have taken a critical position toward the fiction cinema that we have made since 1963 (about which I would like to write an article). That is an experience that is basically negative.
Then, the second is to have reflected on the quality of our newsreels, on their public reputation and the admiration they raised in men such as Regis Debray and Chris Marker, for whom I profess great intellectual respect. Both Debray and Marker agree, affirming our newsreels constitute the best of our cinema. Why are the newsreels so successful? Well, for the same reasons that some of our documentary films have obtained high marks at important international festivals. In the documentary films appear an incomparable central figure, somewhat diminished in our feature films, and that is the fascinating reality that emerges straight from our revolutionary process. This reality is “terribly superior to all our history, to all fables, etc.” Such is the experience that results from our little domestic realist tradition.
Finally, the existence of a realist tradition in cinema that spans from the primitive actualities of the Lumière Brothers to the Leacok and Drew’s direct cinema experiments, and that constitute the third experience. This is an experience that comes from the history of cinema as art.
Taking that inspiration of mine as a point of departure, together with all the information gathered on Guantánamo, I had to write a script that rejected the conventional treatment of narrative cinema and structured the future film with the following elements: (a) interviews; (b) documentary-style footage; (c) archival footage; (d) still photographs (for instance, of North American marines in the brothels); (e) reenactment of important and complex events (for instance, the North American marines’ “francos”) in the historical style of Rossi in Salvatore Giuliano; and (f) reenactments that are more intimate and simple –although not necessarily from a psychological standpoint, like the last stare, filled with tragic premonitions, of a woman to her husband, worker Rubén López Sabariego, before he was assassinated at the Base; a reenactment that she herself did.
It is obvious that all these elements, because of their very nature, promised a very intense connection with reality that was going to be hard to get in any fiction film. My script, however, did not renounce a plot. The proof is that I, a not-so-good disciple of Stanislavsky –like Vicente Revuelta knows well– could express the plot’s “superproblem” with these few words: “Over half a century ago, the United States built a gigantic naval base near a small Cuban town named Guantánamo. After that, there was no peace for the city. Today, for the first time, the city was won, but it still knows that the struggle continues.” There was a plot, because there was a conflict that developed between the two main characters, the city and the Base.
As a strategy to bring together the various elements of the plot, I created two characters, A and B, who although invisible, would carry out what Ivens refers to as “a commentary about the film.” Most of the script’s complicated reenactments will take place in Caimanera, a small village that according to one of those characters, “contained the immense history of Guantánamo within.” Finally, to end I included a short rudimentary fiction, “Caimanera’s Last Prostitute.” That is to say, the script was heterogeneous although not eclectic, despite what one could think at first sight. In writing it, I stayed faithful to the principle of appealing to all available means of expression in order to obtain a new realism about a capital issue.
The pre-production was the work of a whole team, and that facilitated an intense investigation about Guantánamo’s reality, as evidenced by the many and varied interviews, recorded in about sixty reels. I am no Oscar Lewis, but I am no stranger to Social Anthropology. I took courses at Harvard with Hooton, Kluckhohn and Zimmerman, and maybe that is why this recorded material was not obtained through arbitrary and anarchic methods. Rather, it can be considered first-hand sociological data.
Once pre-production was completed, my initial idea about what the film should be had changed. I decided to focus on Guantánamo, where our latest exploration had yielded a vast and rich world. At that point, we had to leave Caimanera aside, as a topic for another movie, and along with Caimanera, the complex reenactments and the little story about the prostitute. In this way, I stayed with what had a more documentary and direct feel. It was then that I decided to eliminate A and B, whose text was beginning to seem to me as a survival of the literary and philosophical ambitions that had burdened my first feature film. The plot stayed exactly as I had outlined it.
Of course, what prevailed at the time of filming was improvisation and, above all, the unexpected. Were one to chronicle the filming of Guantánamo perhaps the anecdotal wouldn’t matter. At some point, however, it would be worth telling how such process made for a real adventure, full of tensions that rattled the filming crew’s nerves (at a certain point, the camera was at the front door of the base—the marines were unsettled at first, and threatening thereafter; in another, the camera is hidden, but in danger of being discovered and causing a great scandal).
When finally I sat in front of the Moviola, I understood that I had to atone for the crime of having done away with “A” and “B,” connecting agents designed a priori, and in whose absence everything had been filmed. Although I counted on material that could hardly be deemed sensational, a difficult task awaited me, without whose satisfactory completion all would fall apart. Ultimately, it was a task that I can sum up in two terms: cohesion and organic structure.
However, only part of the film’s strengths and weaknesses rests in the film’s difficult internal coherence. The other part has always depended on the degree of development of a more mature awareness of how to achieve another kind of coherence: that which must be established with reality as the basis for a complex artistic form, especially once the complex nature of reality itself has been revealed. It was about overcoming our cinema’s early realism (This Land of Ours, The Young Rebel, etc.). It was about dealing with a more profound realism, with images that were both effectively aesthetic, and also politically lucid—reality’s inherent contradictions. Nonetheless, today I am convinced that I was moving toward a return to the realistic path of our initial cinema; although not, of course, toward its romantic and often academic point of departure (but also often poetic), but toward a much more advanced destination.
If for me Guantánamo is a turning point, however, it is, above all, because its completion succeeded at reactivating in me dormant concerns. In particular, concerns about that essential question surrounding a Marxist aesthetic: the dialectical relationship between objective reality and the reality reconstructed in art—that is to say, realism. On this matter, today, and over a year later, I am certain of possessing a more sophisticated theoretical ability that should manifest itself as a more sophisticated creative ability. A year ago, I wouldn’t have been capable of writing this article. Perhaps a year later I would have been able to produce Guantánamo without many of its most important shortcomings.
I know that the word “realism” is, for some, cause for suspicion; and if we’re dealing with “socialist realism,” then it is cause for irritation or horror. Those who react in such a manner yield to dogmatic thought, concepts and ideas that must be recovered for creative Marxist thought. Paradoxically, those who react in such a manner are also victims of bias akin to dogmatic thought. On the other hand, the rebirth of an interest in the question reality-realism is not a single isolated event, but a reflection of the vigorous revival of the Marxist aesthetic—one of whose symptoms is the debate. Who in Cuba doesn’t know “realisme sans rivages“? Who hasn’t read Gramsci, Lukacs, Garaudy, Fischer? Who doesn’t remember “Words to the Intellectuals?” Who’s forgotten more or less fortunate polemics?
Were I required to define my current position toward realism, I would do it through the following points, but not without previously clarifying that I limit my discussion to this art we call cinema:
- Loyalty to authenticity, after investigating the reality that has given rise to the topic. In this regard, I give in to the temptation to transcribe Isaac Babel’s quote once more: “I have to know everything, down to the last vein, otherwise I can’t write a thing. My motto is authenticity.”
- The selection of those psychocultural traits that synthesize reality’s historical and individual instances—that is to say, the traits that characterize reality. I don’t conceal the fact that the genesis of 1 and 2 is Engels’s known formulation in his letter to Margaret Harkness: “[…] Realism implies, besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances.”
- The form’s enrichment through the incorporation of the formal accomplishments of non-realistic art.
- A militant anti-schematism and anti-Manichaeism that stem from the idea that schematism and Manichaeism are not attributions inherent to reality, to thematics, but attributes that have been imposed on the work’s content through its form.
- Content that corresponds with the content of the Revolution’s general goals, and with the strategic and tactical needs of those goals.
- The critical presentation of contradictions between present and past, and between present and future. In specific cases and, as a result of the tactical use of historical development, give priority to the presentation of the contradictions between the enemy and the Revolution over the Revolution’s own internal contradictions.
Are 5 and 6 jarring? They both stem from a singular conviction: absolute freedom is impossible now, which is not to say that this impossibility is an objective law detached from societal development. When will this impossibility disappear? In a communist society developed in a world wherein the exploitation of men by men constitutes an archeological problem? For now, I think that Engels’s definition of freedom is particularly relevant: “Freedom does not consist in the dream of independence from natural and societal laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility of their practical, everyday use. Natural necessity is primary, and man’s will and consciousness are secondary. Freedom is only possible on the basis of having an awareness of necessity.” With this in mind, I hope that no one will be surprised if, likewise, I don’t believe in absolute objectivity as a possible category of a work of art’s content. In any case, such objectivity is possible only as a category of form, in the sense of a stylistic device or method—as in Brecht, for example, in which case it would no longer be absolute. However, there are few individuals who, as Mario Ruspoli, probably the most important theorist of direct cinema, ignored the difference between absolute objectivity and relative objectivity. This does not mean that Guantánamo could not be considered an example of direct cinema based on certain stylistic characteristics and, above all, on a looser and broader interpretation of Ruspoli’s definition of direct cinema.
To recap: First I have referred to several aspects of Guantánamo’s creative process, in an effort to show the extent to which this movie has represented an attempt to make a film conceived in the terms of an advanced realism (yet, still, insufficient). Then I have referred to several theoretical principles concerning the issue of a true advanced realism in cinema, derived from my experience in the making of Guantánamo (as well as from many other previous experiences). Of course, one may infer from all of this a belief that, as far as our cinema is concerned, advanced realism is the most appropriate path—an affirmation whose validity goes beyond Guantánamo’s validity as a film. In this regard, I don’t deny that a critical analysis of Guantánamo that focuses on the principles outlined here is inescapable. But, we must wait for the film’s release. For now, we return to this article’s starting point: Guantánamo’s two births.
The first consisted of a film of both considerable strengths and weaknesses. I showed this first version to a number of individuals, the majority of possessed a high capacity for aesthetic appreciation. Still today, I am surprised by the range of opinions that, were we to plot into an imaginary arc, would set off from a single “Formidable!” and conclude in a single “Outrageous!” The fact that the majority of these reactions were to be found at the center of the arc, and closer to “Formidable!” than to “Outrageous!” left me feeling utterly dissatisfied with my work. The confrontation with negative opinions helped me attain for the first time ever a lucid self-criticism. I started to talk about how great it would be to be able to edit again: change, delete, add (even film a new interview). As luck would have it, I’ve been granted the opportunity to do just that, given the importance of the topic, among other reasons. Another birth, then, will be possible, and I am confident that the outcome of the same will surpass its previous iteration. However, I am not a magician, and this film might not be “Formidable!” for all, while it may remain “Outrageous!” for some. I do guarantee that, after some minor flaws are dimmed and others eliminated, and after one or two virtues are added, Guantánamo will be above all an honest and politically-engaged film. I fear, however, that it will be a challenging film for the common viewer, given its use of cinematographic language to bluntly address bitter truths. This is something tolerated in literature, but not in cinema.
[Translated from Massip, José. 1966. “Dos veces, Guantánamo.” Cine Cubano, no. 38, año 6, pp. 27-34.]****
Here is the film Guantánamo, by José Massip: