Reflections on Cuban cinema, in answer to questions from the Havana Glasgow Film Festival, ahead of this year’s festival which opens on November 10th with ‘Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes’.
https://hgfilmfest.com/2020/10/19/extraordinary-cuba-an-interview-with-michael-chanan/
Walter Benjamin wrote his delightful talk ‘Unpacking my library’ when he recovered his books after two years in storage. I turn to re-read it as I prepare to pack up my own far less impressive library in readiness to move house. The reason for the move is that I’ve given up my job as a part-time professor, and the reason for that arises from the calamity of coronavirus, not directly on myself but on the university. Read more
Jean Stubbs writes about virtual screenings of ‘Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes’ during the pandemic. Read it here:
www.livingbetweenhurricanes.org/reflections-on-screening-the-documentary-during-covid-19/
Coronavirus brings globalisation into focus by forcing attention onto the different layers of interconnectedness in our twenty-first century world. As the virus spreads around the planet in waves, the pandemic impinges on different social and economic sectors each according to its own rhythm, throwing them out of joint one by one. The synchronisation which normally keeps the whole system running harmoniously breaks down. It is precisely at the moment the system breaks down that we realise how interconnected it is. What is normally hidden because, as we used to say, it functions like clockwork, is exposed. We discover that while our clocks are nowadays calibrated atomically, public time is not at all uniform but constituted by the superposition of many different tempos.
Free Associations 78, 2020
Read it here:
In the face of coronavirus, Cuba is proving to be thoroughly humane, in stark and vivid contrast to the stance taken by the impeached president in the White House. Coronavirus was late reaching Cuba, where it arrived with Italian tourists, but, soon after it did so, Cuba nevertheless gave safe haven to a British cruise ship which other countries (including the US) had refused permission to dock because it was carrying several confirmed cases and numerous other passengers showing symptoms. (Those who could travel were quickly flown home, the others being treated in Cuba.)
A few days later, a group of 37 Cuban doctors and 15 nurses arrived in Italy to lend support to the crisis of care, a moment caught in a strangely moving piece of video of the medics descending the aircraft steps and one by one elbow-touching the official who greets them. It almost looks like a scene from a sci-fi movie where social customs are subtly different; you start by smiling but then, as they also greet the camera with an elbow, a wave or just a look, it brings you back down to earth. (A single shot lasting a full two-and-a-half minutes, the effect is cumulative.)
[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/402544603[/vimeo]
Remember six degrees of separation – the theory that everyone in the world is connected to everyone else by a maximum of six steps? Also known as the six handshakes rule. Welcome to the world of coronavirus. This morning a healthy young friend who was due to come round this week emailed to say he won’t. He is self-quarantining because a friend of his who stayed overnight had begun to show symptoms.
On Friday I attended a workshop at the University of Leicester, where numbers were slightly depleted by two or three non-arrivals due to understandable reluctance to travel from abroad; two of them gave their contributions via internet – is this how things will now shape up?
We are living in an accelerated world of multiple forms of connectedness, which feed off each other and borrow each other’s imaginaries. Computers become infected with viruses too.
Phone conversations with fellow members of the elderly-at-risk category. We agree that travel on the tube is to be avoided.
The media are busy generating a whole series of imaginary scenarios, stretching from the scientific to the fictitious. There are plenty of models to draw from. It seems that in France, sales of Camus’ The Plague have risen sharply. Perhaps we should all be reading Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. But as Covid-19 gets closer, the feeling I have is of an impending disaster movie which is still in script stage, and with various options under consideration. Meanwhile the globalised world economy is already in serious trouble, and our idiot politicians don’t know which way to turn.
A small but fascinating interdisciplinary workshop at the University of Leicester on March 6th, on the theme of environmental justice in Latin America, convened by Paula Serafini, proved a congenial occasion for a screening of ‘Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes’. The event, which focussed on cultural production in response to environmental injustice, was slightly depleted by two or three non-arrivals due to understandable reluctance to travel from abroad; two of them gave their contributions via internet – is this how things will shape up in the foreseeable future?
What made it so engaging was the variety of presentations about a diverse range of cultural manifestations – street theatre, performance, music, textiles, video – and of phenomena susceptible to cultural intervention – conservation in the Colombian paramo, potato cultivation in the Peruvian Andes, conflict over pulp mills on the Uruguay river, shareholder meetings in London. Read more
What happens when the independent filmmaker finishes a film and begins the business of getting it out, hustling for screenings and posting on social media to reach the audience you’ve made it for? You start to have to think about the conditions for its reception, or what marketing people reductively call targeting – only you don’t have a marketing budget. The problem is the law of the internet: the network you want to reach is always further away than the network you’re able to reach from the network where you start off. This is where we’re at with our new documentary, Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes, about ecology and the prospects for sustainable development in this Communist Caribbean island. Read more
The Cuba we left behind when we finished shooting Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes in July came under renewed pressure from the North in September. Fresh sanctions by Washington on oil shipments from Venezuela plunged Cuba into a fuel crisis. There wasn’t enough petrol in the pumps. Friends in Havana told us that people were instructed to stay home if they live too far to walk in to work. There has been huge pressure on public transport. Priority was given to hospitals and food distribution. Now, as we finish editing, we are due for a short return trip to Cuba to screen a preview for our collaborators and obtain their feedback. It looks like getting around Havana will be even more difficult than usual, and whether we’ll be able to make it to the province, some five hours drive, is open to doubt, although other reports say things should improve during October.
Cuba: Living Between Hurricanes is a film is about the elements – hurricanes and rain, the sea and the earth. About a fishing port on the north coast of Cuba which has seen better days: Caibarién, where Hurricane Irma – one of the most powerful ever to sweep the Caribbean – made landfall on 17th September 2017.
