Tag Archive for: Film

Ambrosio Fornet RIP

/in , , , /by

Ambrosio Fornet, who has died in Havana at the age of 90, was one of Cuba’s leading revolutionary intellectuals, a literary scholar, essayist and scriptwriter (his best known screenplay was Retrato de Teresa from 1979) who became a dear friend whom I never failed to visit every time I went to Havana, sometimes passing hours in conversation with him. We talked about film, of course, and about Cuba – he explained to me many a puzzle I had about the culture, especially cultural politics – and because he was extremely curious about England, he had me explaining things to him in such a way that I found myself reflecting on my own country in new ways. I got him in front of the camera twice, once in 1985 in Havana Report about the film festival, which I made with Holly Aylett, and once a couple of years earlier in the first of the documentaries on New Latin American Cinema I made for Channel Four.  Here he is.

 

‘Corazon Azul’ by Miguel Coyula

/in , /by

It would be better to think of Corazon Azul (Blue Heart), the new film by Cuban independent Miguel Coyula, as a quirky political satire for the digital age rather than science fiction. As science fiction, the plot could take place anywhere. Genetic experiments have produced human mutants with strange powers who go rogue. But it happens in Cuba, where the aim is to create Che Guevara’s ‘New Man’ and the secret project is called ‘the Guevara experiment’.

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/323473315[/vimeo]

Read more

Raúl Pérez Ureta

/in , , /by

Saddened by the news this morning of the death of the great Cuban cinematographer Raúl Pérez Ureta. Raulito, as we knew him, was the cameraman on Havana Report, the film I made in 1985 with Holly Aylett on the Havana Film Festival for Channel 4. The film was the result of an invitation from Julio García Espinosa, then President of the Cuban film institute, the ICAIC, which ran the festival, and it gave us the chance to work with a Cuban film crew instead of bringing a crew from home, as I’d previously done. From the very first shot, Raúl inspired confidence, taking on board immediately the challenge of working with a pair of directors who themselves were working together for the first time amid the hurly-burly of the festival. I cannot remember it without thinking of a line from a Paul Simon song, ‘it’s four in the morning and the plans have changed’, because we never ended the evening knowing quite what we were going to film the next day. Raúl took it all completely in his stride, of course, having spent almost twenty years as a newsreel cameraman. His renown as a cinematographer would come later when, the year after Havana Report, he turned to fiction, where he began develop a distinctive visual style exemplified in Papeles secundarios (Orlando Rojas, 1989), which became the hallmark of a number of films he then made with Fernando Pérez.  An exquisite sense of composition which never falls into aestheticism, always respects the mise-en-scène, and perhaps above all, his masterly control over the notorious difficulties of photographing in the Cuban light, all of which come together above all in Pérez’s extraordinary documentary, Suite Habana (2003).

In this photo of the crew of Havana Report, Raúl is on the extreme left. In the centre, with Holly and me on either side, is Fernando Birri. The photo was taken by Chuck Kleinhans, who had tagged along with us, immediately after we wrapped the shoot after a final interview with Fernando. Raúl now joins Chuck and Fernando in the photo-album of my memory, where they all still live and breathe.

Paul Leduc In Memoriam

/in , , /by

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/474388099[/vimeo]

Latin American cinema has lost one of the foundational figures of the radical film movement which flourished fifty years ago, when the two avant-gardes, the aesthetic and the political – were conjoined. Paul Leduc, who died in Mexico City on October 21st at the age of 78, was the most maverick of filmmakers, in a continent that’s full of them. His public persona was reserved but in private he was far from austere, always an engaging conversationalist with an irreverent sense of humour. I shall miss our periodic meetings, sometimes over a meal in Mexico City, but I cannot now mourn his passing on a personal level without also lamenting his neglect in English-speaking circles. Even his great masterpiece, Frida, Naturaleza Viva (1984), is little known amongst us, and instead of Ofelia Medina’s magical personation of the painter, the screen image of Frida Kahlo is that of Salma Hayek in Julie Taymor’s far inferior biopic of nearly twenty years later.  Read more

A chance encounter with Kiarostami

/in , , , /by

 

In May 2005 I bought a new pocket-sized video camera. The next day I took it with me to try out when I went to visit Kiarostami’s installation, ‘Forest Without Leaves’, at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and as I was filming, Kiarostami himself appeared. (After I shut off the camera, another figure appeared – Ken Loach. We chatted and then went all together to look at Kiarostami’s photos in another room.)  I didn’t do anything with the footage, since after all, it was only a test, and I hadn’t yet mastered the camera, but I offer it here in modest homage to this most remarkable of filmmakers. The rare kind who keeps you believing in the power of cinema to refashion our perception of the world that the other kind of cinema blocks out.

 

[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/173587645[/vimeo]

 

Julio García Espinosa 1926-2016

/in , , /by

JGE

Very sad to hear of the death in Havana of the pioneer of Cuban cinema, Julio García Espinosa, at the age of 89. One of the founding members of Cuba’s film institute, the ICAIC, of which he was President from 1983-91, he was the author of a key manifesto, ‘For an imperfect cinema’ (1969), where he argued that the imperfections of a low budget cinema of urgency, which  sought to create a dialogue with its audience, were preferable to the sheen of high production values which merely reflected the audience back to itself.

Read more

Salute to Fernando Birri

/in , , , /by

There was something magical about the first time I met Fernando Birri, who celebrated his 90th birthday a few days ago. I had just arrived in Cuba for the first Havana Film Festival in 1979. Checking in to the Hotel Nacional in the late afternoon, I looked for a bar to quench my thirst, where I found this strange but very friendly figure—all the more mysterious in the dim light—with his long straggly beard and wearing the hat which I later discovered he never took off. I found out who he was—happily still is—over the following days. Three years later, he became a key figure in the documentary I made for Channel Four about the New Cinema movement in Latin America, of which Fernando is one of the founding figures. This portrait is drawn from those films (with a snippet—the short sequence with Fidel—taken from the film I made a couple of years later on the Havana Film Festival with Holly Aylett, also for Channel Four.) Enhorabuena, Fernando!

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/122417391[/vimeo]

 

Radical Film in Birmingham

/in , , , /by

One of the notable features at the inaugural conference of the Radical Film Network in Birmingham last weekend was the mix of generations, from new blood to survivors from the days of the IFA (Independent Filmmakers Association) in the 1970s. Speaking as one of the latter, it was pleasing to find that what the comrades did back then has not been entirely forgotten, but more important, that this new initiative has a genuine sense of history, of historical inquiry, and is disposed to look to past experience both in order to commend what was achieved and to mull over its weaknesses.

But of course the political conjuncture of post-crash times is markedly different from those days, and there’s been a signal change in the political modus operandi. Read more