PUTNEY DEBATER
A personal blog
Our Man in Havana
Our Man in Havana « LRB blog
Alan Gross, a 62-year-old US citizen, has been imprisoned in Cuba since December 2009. He fell foul of the authorities while working for USAID, liaising with Cuba’s small Jewish community. The Washington Post earlier this month demanded his release, saying that ‘Cuba’s accusations stem from Mr Gross’s humanitarian work’. When he was convicted for ‘acts to undermine the integrity and independence’ of Cuba and sentenced to 15 years in jail, Hillary Clinton said that ‘he did not commit any crime’ but was ‘assisting the small Jewish community in Havana that feels very cut off from the world’ by improving their internet connection.
The Kodak Shift
It’s one of those symbolic moments: a couple of weeks ago, Kodak filed for bankruptcy because it has failed to keep up with the shift from analogue to digital photography. This is the company that launched the consumer market for amateur photography in 1888, with its famous box camera. A dozen years later, by inventing a process of continuous casting of the celluloid film strip, they created the first monopoly in the new film industry. For decades the company remained at the cutting age of communications technology, from aerial surveillance to microelectronics, but it’s finally been outpaced by digitisation.
I’ve been reminded that I wrote an article back in 1978 called ‘The Kodak Shift’, analysing Kodak’s key position in the culture industry. Here it is: The Kodak Shift
Nostalgia for the Light
Patricio Guzmán’s latest film finally reaches London at a DocHouse screening on 2nd February.
The Atacama desert in the north of Chile—the location for Patricio Guzmán’s Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light)—is one the driest places on earth, where astronomers have located optical and radio telescopes to take advantage of the extraordinarily clear air, the zero humidity and almost total lack of clouds, and an absence of light pollution and radio interference from nearby cities. In the film’s opening scenes, Guzmán’s gentle voice tells us how he became attracted to the region as a consequence of his boyhood fascination with astronomy and enthusiasm for Jules Verne—the subject of a film he made for French television a few years ago (Mon Jules Verne, 2005)—and he now waxes lyrical over the magnificence of the Atacama skies, where an extraordinary number of stars and constellations can be seen even by the naked eye. The first film that Guzmán has shot in HD, the pellucid light of the film’s title, and the bleak expanses of the extraordinary landscape, are beautifully captured in the limpid cinematography of Katell Djian. The soundtrack too is permeated by the landscape, full of silences and reticent touches of music by the Chilean musicians Miranda and Tobar.