Hi,
We’re almost at the end. I am sharing excerpts from a recent project. Here’s an overview:
I wrote about two films, Chris Marker’s Cuba Si! and Agnes Varda’s Salut les Cubains. The films are about Cuba, yet they are not made by Cubans. Each plays with the visual language of politically-engaged documentary, the video essay and, at times, poetry. They are examples of many things: the optimism felt by artists, writers and filmmakers about socialism through the 20th century; they are tremendously influential examples of avant-garde cinema; each is a turning point in the life and career of its maker.
The previous excerpts ‘losers who didn't get to write history’ and ‘Castro as Gary Cooper’ are available online.
Chris
Screenshot, Cuba Si! by Chris Marker.
Cuba Si! has an uneasy position within Marker’s oeuvre. It’s one of the few not available on DVD and is rarely shown. Marker has distanced himself not too long after it was shown. Almost everything produced before 1962, the year after Cuba Si! was released, he’s referred to as an early ‘sketch’ of what was to come. When given the opportunity to curate his own retrospective at La Cinémathèque française in 1998, he would publicly state that he no longer wanted to ‘inflict’ his earliest films, mere rough drafts, on the viewing public. The earliest films shown were La Jetée and Le Joli mai – just eclipsing Cuba Si!.
To push against this statement is to interpret Marker’s oeuvre against his wishes. And to advocate for the renewed importance of any work by an influential figure is to push up against the limits of attention. They are already so well-known, so thoroughly discussed, that almost anything within their oeuvre gains an element of significance simply by their presence. But the case for appreciating Cuba Si! is strong. This was a film that was shot about the Cuban Revolution while it was still settling into a new society. Between Marker leaving the island and the film being complete, the Bay of Pigs took place; he had to re-edit the film to respond to this significant moment of the Cold War. When he returned to France and attempted to release the film, it was censored by the French government, who claimed it was a threat to public order. As an historical document, it contains an original interview with Castro.
The film itself would be incorporated into Le fond de l'air est rouge (1977), which would also be amalgamated into the English version of Grin Without a Cat (1988). And despite his later disavowal of Cuba Si!, it would feature in Commentaires (1961), a publication that accompanies his films, collecting scripts and other written material by Marker about his earliest works, signalling the importance of it to him at the time. Cuba Si! is the last film in the collection, which begins with Statues Also Die, includes Letter from Siberia, perhaps the most notable of the lot. A quick flick through the book is a reminder of how varied his projects were in that period: we see Peking, America and Russia, there’s discussions of colonialism, violence and cartoons; each page bristles with found photography, portraits, archival objects, quotes, fragments from letters, actual scripts and essayistic reflections. The exact relationship to the films is somewhat ambiguous: a footnote to expand concerns, a director’s extended cut, or an experimental play with image and text that exists beyond the original? Perhaps all at once.
His affirmation of Cuba Si! in Commentaires is full throated: ‘And here's the movie that's closest to my heart, and not just because it's the last.’ The affinity he feels in that moment – 1961, the same year Cuba Si! is completed and censored by the French government – is in part an expression of the optimism he feels about Cuba. ‘Filmed at full speed in January 1961, during the first alert (you know, at the time when most French newspapers laughed at the paranoia of Fidel who thought he was threatened with a landing...), it attempts to communicate, if not the experience, at least the tremor, the rhythm of a Revolution.’
La Jetée often features as a subject in the extensive writing about his life, work and influence. But I'm surprised at how absent Cuba Si! is from this conversation. He also, famously, made Le Joli mai, a vox-pop-style documentary, alongside the shooting of La Jetée during days off and at quieter moments of downtime. Le Joli mai involves numerous on the street interviews with people in Paris. Marker asks them a series of questions, often addressing the Accords, a pivotal political moment in France when the Algerian War (1954-62) ended. Each is a different kind of portrait of war: the Cuban Revolution and the Bay of Pigs, the unravelling of French imperialism in Algeria, and a dystopia speculation about the future. His focus is on the aftermath rather than the heroism of action. He highlights impacts on people, and offers a startling range of ideas.
One of the few to draw the link, Lee Hilliker has argued that the contrast between Marker’s perception of the ‘joyous revolutionary struggle for liberation in Cuba’ and censorship he experienced at home clearly informs the bleak, dystopian tone of La Jetée. Set in a Paris beset by post-nuclear fallout, the protagonist’s fixation on images from the past, his obsessive nostalgia for a hopeful past amid a ruined present, puts the use of time travel as a narrative tool in a different light. Curiously, Patrick Ffrench had suggested that understanding La Jetée, Marker’s only fictional film, could also be read as a documentary. The protagonist ‘views his memory as if he were watching a film.’ He doubts his memories, he’s haunted by the experiences of torture and war. This concept of the ‘separation of memory from consciousness and agency,’ Ffrench explains, ‘... raises the possibility that the image itself is or has a memory....’.
La Jetée’s time traveller is not selected for the mission due to any particular skill or heroism. It’s his fixation on images – a singular image from the past – that qualifies him for the role. The process is not entirely psychological, though. He’s injected with a mysterious drug and collapses physically; his body is still situated in the present, but it seems necessary to demobilise him, as if his consciousness is tied to his body but also independent of it. Reflecting on the metaphorical implications, Hiliker says: ‘his ability to fixate on an image from the past makes him a pawn in the struggle for the control of history.’ Other resonances of Marker’s Parisian dystopia would have been apparent to audiences then, and are often referenced in discussions of it since. The preoccupation with trauma performed by authoritarian scientists amid wider societal havoc makes an implicit reference both to the horrors of WW2, the threat of nuclear apocalypse during the Cold War and the unsettled colonial relationship between France and Algeria. Subtle details, such as the subterranean population, also evoke Freudian conceptions of the unconscious of a traumatised individual and society, a strain of thinking increasingly popular amongst French intellectuals, artists and writers then. La Jetée emerged at a time when the French New Wave was fully underway; Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais had released some of their most iconic films. A dual sense of optimism and peril could be felt in the scene, notes Margarida Medeiros, as ‘the French intellectual milieu was oscillating between an "end-of-times" feeling boosted by the war and the quick decay of colonial empires, and new expectations arising from urban youth, sexual liberation and the overcoming of the many barriers imposed by bourgeois morality.’