Eduardo Coutinho In Memoriam

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Poetic injustice. The terrible irony of it. On the same day, the news that the US actor Philip Seymour Hoffman has died from a heroine overdose, and the veteran Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho, has been stabbed to death by his son, who is reported to suffer from schizophrenia. (According to a BBC report, the police told a press conference that the son ‘knocked on a neighbour’s door after the attack saying he had “liberated his father”.’) I learn about the first from the mass media, the second from Facebook, in posts from Latin American friends and colleagues, who over the next few hours register a huge outpouring of shock and grief, for Coutinho was well known and much loved. In Latin America, that is, because Coutinho was a documentarist. Still active at the age of 80, his work was little known elsewhere. The more’s the pity, because he was one of the most original of contemporary filmmakers in any field. Read more

An Encounter with Miklós Jancsó

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The Round-Up (1965), The Red and the White (1967), The Confrontation (1969), Red Psalm (1972): the films of Miklós Jancsó were one of the most exciting discoveries of radical cinema in Europe in the late 1960s, but hearing of his death last Friday at the age of 92 brings back a personal memory, for at the very beginning of my career as a film maker, I had a brief but hugely positive encounter with him. I interviewed him when he came to London for the opening of The Confrontation in 1969, and me a young film and music critic just then finishing my first short documentary for the BBC. Read more

Havana 35

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The Cuban dissenting blogger Yoani Sanchez has written a somewhat cynical blog about Havana’s Film Festival, or to give its full title, the International Festival of the New Latin American Cinema, whose 35th edition closed on Sunday, in which she comments that

“The Festival” (period… as we call it), had a clear ideological focus from the beginning to promote creations filled with social criticism, a reflection of regional problems or the historic memory of the dictatorships that plagued Latin America.

I laughed when I read this because the last of those — well, that’s me, folks, in the shape of my new documentary, Interrupted Memory, which premiered at the Festival. OK, it wasn’t the only film on the subject. All I can say is that I’m very happy to have been screened in such company, even if Yoani didn’t bother to come to the screening. Read more

Putney Debater in Havana

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Some reports on my activities at the Havana Film Festival, for readers of Spanish:

There are several reports on the Seminar, ¿Nuevo? ¿Cine? ¿Latinoamericano?

The fullest is Hacia un nuevo concepto de Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano,
but also see

 

No small beer at Cuba’s Film School

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This is a revised version, incorporating feedback received.

At the beginning of July, the EICTV, Cuba’s world renowned film school at San Antonio de los Baños was hit by a bombshell when the current director, the Guatemalan Rafael Rosal, announced his resignation, following revelations about corruption involving illicit sales of beer.  Three members of the school’s workforce were arrested, but there’s no evidence that Rosal personally benefitted. According to Rosal himself, speaking to me in Havana before leaving for England with his English wife and children, he had been obliged to resign as a scapegoat for a practice that had been going on for at least fifteen years, and which had reached the point where it was heavily subsidising the school’s operation, which costs US$1.4m a year. No small beer. He didn’t mention to me that he was asked to resign by the student body.

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Alfredo Guevara (1925-2013)

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Here is a photograph of two Guevaras. With the death of Alfredo Guevara, the one on the right, at the age of 87, who was no relation to the Guevara on the left, Cuban cinema has lost its great champion. Alfredo was the founder of the Cuban film institute, the ICAIC, which was set up in 1959 just three months after the overthrow of the dictator Batista by the rebels led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara. A kind of Cuban John Grierson, Alfredo similarly had no difficulty in combining cinema and political commitment, but he had the advantage over the Scots pioneer of documentary that his backer was not a senior civil servant in a bourgeois democracy, but the leader of a popular revolution who had been his friend since student days.  Read more

Cuba in Aberystwyth

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Welsh hills covered in snow as the train snakes across country on the way back from Aberystwyth. Went there for a symposium on Cuban cinema, with scholars and filmmakers over from Havana, and other participants mainly based in UK universities; although these were not necessarily Brits, because after all, the academic world is thoroughly international. Indeed our intellectual culture (such as it is) benefits enormously from the attraction that Britain seems to have for scholars from all over the world (which becomes a problem when a Government starts playing political games with student visas). Read more

Remembering Stanley Forman

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For left film culture in Britain, Stanley Forman, who has died at the age of 91, was the archive man. His company, ETV, held a unique library of  left-wing documentaries which amounted to the history of the twentieth century from a socialist perspective. Established in 1950 as Plato Films, the outfit was what would be called in Cold War ideology a front organisation, set up by members of the Communist Party to distribute films from behind the Iron Curtain. There was nothing nefarious about it, however. Read more

Transnational in Brussels

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We convened in Brussels, for a colloquium on transnationalism in Hispanic cinema, on the eve of the latest European summit. The juxtaposition was ironic and not irrelevant. On one side of town, the leaders of European transnationalism grappling with the crisis of the day. On the other, a small gathering of scholars from several European countries and the Americas, north and south, interrogating the transnationalism of Spanish-speaking cinema. Different takes on the same process of globalisation that shapes the modern world twenty years after the end of the Cold War

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A double loss

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The death in Buenos Aires of Argentine filmmaker and theorist Octavio Getino was reported on the same day as that of the historian Eric Hobsbawm in London. Worlds apart and different spheres of activity, perhaps, but both contributed in major ways to the broad current of independent and international critical culture that grew up after 1968, even though Hobsbawm remained a Communist and Getino was always a Peronist.

For myself, I was lucky to have interviewed both of them on camera, Getino in 1982, and Hobsbawm more recently, in 2007. Hobsbawm was generous in contributing to a film I made about a relative of mine, whom he’d known (The American Who Electrified Russia)—which makes it difficult to extract. Getino we filmed in Mexico, for a documentary on the New Latin American Cinema for Channel Four (in its early days, when it was really innovatory and progressive). He explained for us the concept of Third Cinema, which he launched with Fernando Solanas in 1969, in an essay based on their experience making the extraordinary piece of political cinema that goes under the name La hora de los hornos – Hour of the Furnaces. Here by way of tribute is that interview.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CVohdIUNuGk[/youtube]