PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
Alfredo Guevara (1925-2013)
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
Pointless Obstacles
If the death of one Margaret Thatcher has served to remind us that the present crisis has its roots back in the 80s on her watch, one of things that Thatcherism was responsible for was the corruption of the value of words. It may seem trivial compared to her other feats, but replacing terms like ‘passenger’ with ‘customer’, or calling Vice-Chancellors ‘Chief Executives’, was an important part of the conquest of the public sphere by neoliberal ideology. I’m reminded of this by having to grapple again with something I’ve written about before: the REF—on which the next round of university research funding depends and for which submissions are being busily prepared—and especially the new ‘impact’ agenda. The very word ‘impact’ has now become an odious one, emptied of its former richness of meaning, reduced to a code word with arcane referents. Read more
Cuba in Aberystwyth
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