"Death of a bureaucrat" (1966) at the Palace Theatre, downtown LA

Every year, the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles has a slot in the series Last Remaining Seats, organized by the LA Conservancy.  On June 14,  it will be La muerte de un burócrata/Death of a Bureaucrat (Cuba, 1966), directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea.

I'm always honored that Michael E. Díaz, its founder and director, asks me to write the program notes.

“Had Kafka been a Cuban, instead of being a writer of the absurd, he world have been a writer of customs and manners” – Virgilio Piñera

The cinema of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea cannot be properly understood without grasping a historical event - the Cuban Revolution of 1959 – with its ideological roots and political objectives.  The success of the Revolution, fought in the rugged Sierra Maestra of southeast Cuba for several years, brought to power a small and audacious group of guerrilla fighters, led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, after toppling the military dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, and enjoying popular support.

Like the Russian Revolution of 1917 fifty years earlier, this call to replace the social, political and economic order of the former Spanish colony and a de facto American protectorate, appealed to many in Cuba, especially young intellectuals and artists.  Successfully exported to Latin America, and elsewhere, as a leftist ideological paradigm and a praxis to take over power, the fascination the Cuban Revolution still exerts could be felt in November of last year when most reactions to the death of 90-year Fidel Castro, in power for forty years, unelected, glossed over the brutal price exacted by the communist leader and his regime on the Caribbean nation.

This is the context in which Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1928-1996), the most significant of Cuban directors, has to be placed to examine his film career.  Known as “Titón”, and born to a family of means and progressive ideas, Gutiérrez Alea studied law in Cuba and then filmmaking at the renowned Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, in the early 1950s.  He observed first hand the punch Neorealism – then at its heyday – packed when portraying the social and political struggles of post-WWII Italy.  Back in Cuba he directed a documentary about coal workers,  El Mégano (1955), with Julio García Espinosa.

Fervent supporters of the Revolution, they joined forces with others from the cine club circles of La Habana to found the Instituto de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficos, or ICAIC.  It was set up as a state-sponsored institution designed to manage the Cuban film industry, under the ideological and financial aegis of the new regime that soon declared itself a one-party socialist state under communist rule and the patronage of the Soviet Union.  “Within the Revolution, everything; against the Revolution, nothing”, proclaimed Castro in June 1961, considering cinema a weapon of choice to educate and proselytize.

Gutiérrez Alea never wavered in his support of the Revolution, but good director that he was his pictures never toe an overt propaganda line.  They are aligned with the tenets of the regime but at the level of form, they are an artist’s creative take on the medium.  La muerte de un burócrata is a case in point, both in content and style.  Fifty years after it was made, La muerte is still a refreshing, almost post-modern, satire on the plague of bureaucracy … under any type of government and organization.

In La muerte de un burócrata, Alea develops a skill we’ll see at play in his later work, especially in his best films, Memorias del subdesarrollo (1968), La Última Cena (1976), Fresa y chocolate (1993) and Guantanamera (1995): a sharp eye “for identifying and then dramatizing the historical and cultural legacies that stand in the way of turning Cuba into a truly socialist society” as Paul Schroeder wrote in his doctoral thesis for Stanford University in 2000.

La muerte de un burócrata uses the conventions of the satire to blast the bureaucratic mindset that reduces life to a succession of absurdities, with witty homages to films and directors, in the guise of scenes filmed a variety of comedic styles: the assembly line of Chaplin’s Modern Times, the clock from which Harold Lloyd hangs in Safety Last, Dracula’s fangs, the pie fights of Laurel and Hardy, a scattered and curvaceous Cuban Marilyn Monroe, and surrealist dreams like those of Buñuel. The potpourri works very well, and gets hearty laughs from the audience.  

The film is centered on the predicament of a hapless nephew (Salvador Wood) to retrieve the ID of his recently deceased uncle, a model worker and inventor. His widow (Silvia Planas) placed it in the coffin, but now needs it, admonished by a bureaucrat that she will not get a pension without this piece of identification.  But the bureaucrat in the cemetery tells him no exhumation is possible without a court order.  A clandestine operation yields the coffin, but the nephew has to wheel it back to their home when the police unexpectedly show up.  (Imagine the depredations of the Caribbean heat on an unrefrigerated cadaver). The farce escalates, the lampooning of recognizable government employees gets more ridiculous, and some sacred cows are turned upside down – like socialist realist art, and the fact that everybody is equal but some are more equal than others.   

The film opens with a typewriter typing out the first page of an “expediente”, or administrative file, listing the credits of the film, while Chopin’s funeral march is heard in the background. After finishing typing the film acknowledgments, the document is stamped with a “Nihil Obstat”, alluding to the Church official’s seal of approval – not objectionable on doctrinal grounds.

Shot on location in central Havana, in black-and-white, the film quite unexpectedly becomes a portrait of what the bustling city looked like in the sixties (those American cars!) before the benign neglect of the ensuing decades.  The viewer gets to see what Cuban life was like then, under the lens of a black comedy that gets progressively blacker. In the mayhem and slapstick of the final scene – punctuated by expressionistic sound effects – the nephew has a nervous breakdown and kills the bureaucrat of the title, who couldn't approve a re-burial without a proper certificate of exhumation. A Chinese national looks at the camera and says something unintelligible to the Spanish speakers, in the melée on screen or the spectators viewing the film. La muerte de un burócrata ends where it began, in the cemetery, with a view from up high that becomes an eloquent comment on the folly of men adhering to rules which defy common sense.

E pluribus unum, or what a documentary by Roxanne Frías says about Hispanics in the U.S.

Roxanne Frías, an American filmmaker based in Paris for the last 25 years, came to the film school at UCLA on March 22,  to present her latest documentary, Latino: the Changing Face of America. Produced in 2016 for two French television organizations  - Point du Jour, specializing in documentaries and investigative journalism, and Arte, the renowned French German cable station – the documentary describes the Hispanic Americans primarily to the European audience for which it was made. 

This point of view, both intimate and mediated by the director’s French experience, is what makes Latino: the Changing Face of America a thought-provoking documentary.  At its core is the director’s autobiographical impulse: as the daughter of a Mexican immigrant born in the border near El Paso, her family story reflects the experience of being an American of Hispanic descent. But as Frías noted in an interview with the magazine Angelus in Los Angeles: “It’s not about me. I’m merely the vessel.”  So her first-person narration is subtle and only to sustain the two key building blocks of the film:  the personal stories and the insightful interviews with experts, that place the growth of the Hispanic population in the US in the context of its social, political, economic and cultural impact. 

The documentary interviews two high school students from Mexico and Honduras in Montebello and Bell Gardens, voicing their aspirations and describing backgrounds of love and hardship; and distinctive members of a newly formed Hispanic community in Ottumwa, Iowa, working hard for a shot at the American Dream.  Framing the spontaneity of these interviews are the comments of well-chosen experts, like a demographer from the Brookings Institution; Jorge Ramos, the influential journalist and news anchor for Univisión; a representative of a large school district in Southern California; the priest in the Iowa parish; and a state senator from Texas.

The small-scale stories and the larger picture provided by these experts work very well together to produce an expository documentary in the Grierson tradition.  They offer the basics to understand, emotionally and intellectually, the issues at stake, first and foremost the integration of this new wave of immigrants to the fabric of the American life.   A virtue of this outsider’s point of view is that there is no polarization, no parti pris, no ax to grind, in examining a topic that became a bone of contention during the last presidential elections.   Through the sequence of the small Spanish-language radio in Ottumwa, we get to see the ugly and bombastic anti-immigration rhetoric of a certain  presidential candidate, a foreshadowing of what came to pass.  But in the climax of the film, the glowing faces of immigrant parents and children celebrating the 4^th of July displays a confident view of the future.

When one becomes American by choice not by birth – as is my case – this documentary, through the many voices heard, rings true to experience.  Observing how previous waves of immigrants have inexorably, indelibly, become part of the American fabric, it is not difficult to understand that the multilayered Latinos – regardless of their ethnic and cultural specificities spreading the Americas – will also become integrated.   Many of the films of John Ford describe precisely how that happened, how the many become one, e pluribus unum.  Interestingly, Roxanne Frías finishes the documentary along these Fordian lines: the school superintendent notes that in his heavily Hispanic district the children of immigrants begin kindergarten with limited English skills but when they reach high school they want to be cheerleaders, football players, or play in the march band, quintessentially American things. They have become American but with a flavor. 

Warm and elegant in its execution Latino: the Changing Face of America offers an excellent point of departure for an intelligent discussion of how Hispanic are doing exactly that. I would love to see Roxanne Frías’ next documentary be about how this process of integration unfolds, following the young people interviewed here, a few years down the road, in the steps of Michael Apted and his Up series.

A conversation with Roxanne Frias at UC Santa Barbara about her film, on October 6 of last year, is worth watching in YouTube, http://www.uctv.tv/shows/Latino-The-Changing-Face-of-America-31623

Documentary explorations at the 67th Berlinale: "Beuys" and "Monsieur Mayonnaise"

Of the 18 films in the Competition section of this Berlinale, there is only one documentary vying for the Golden and Silver Bears, the remarkable Beuys, directed by Andres Veiel.

Beuys paints a tantalizing portrait of Joseph Beuys (1921-1986), the German avant-garde sculptor and performance artist, whose teachings, artwork and installations sought to redefine and expand the place and function of art in modern society.  If anything, the film is a feat of research and editing, as the director noted in the press conference: 20,000 photos, 400 hours of video and 18 months of editing. 

What makes this documentary compelling is not the Sisyphean task of sorting through archival footage, but the way these building blocks have been organized to yield a film that combines a poetic and performative approach to the life and work of an artist.  I use the terms “poetic” and “performative” in the sense of Bill Nichols’ documentary modes, six useful categories to help the students make sense of that vast continent we call the non-fiction film.  (In his words: “The poetic stresses tvisual and acoustic rhythms, patterns and the overall form of the film … the performative emphasizes the expressive quality of the filmmaker’s engagement with the film’s subject, and addresses the audience in a vivid way “, Introduction to Documentary, 2^nd edition, 2010).

Beuys has no narrator, the story does not follow a strictly chronological order, there is no climax, and the talking heads are few and far between.  And yet, the portrait has clear contours and a moving depth, partly by lingering on photos of Beuys’ haunted face and the scope of his projects – like planting 7,000 oak trees, with a stone next to each one, the tree grows, the stone doesn’t, hence the statement.  A recurring visual device is the use of a large display of contact sheets, with the camera zooming into photos to open up short narratives, or stringing them together for a motion effect., very pop art. 

The mark of a good documentary like Beuys, simply put, is that at the end you are still asking, no, begging the filmmaker to tell you more …

Along different lines, and in the Culinary section of the festival (eleven years old now, and pairing films with chefs that cook meals inspired by them), I saw an Australian documentary, Monsieur Mayonnaise, featuring the LA-based filmmaker Philippe Mora, a dear friend, two of whose 1970s documentaries I feature in my class every semester, Swastika and Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?.  

Directed by Trevor Graham, a filmmaker based in Melbourne, Monsieur Mayonnaise follows Philippe Mora engaged in two tasks, one pursuing his personal history  - that of an emblematic European Jewish family marked the hecatomb of World War II - and the other, Mora the painter making a comic book from these facts in Los Angeles today.  The documentary is engagingly observational - Mora is a born storyteller and entertainer - as the director accompanies Mora in various trip:  Melbourne, to see his mother (a force of life) and brother, and to Leipzig and Paris to interview people and dig in archives.  Mora carries his easel, canvas and brushes, to capture places and paint emotions in bright colors - the Eiffel Tower and the Branderburg Gate are iconic locations in his search.  There are significant expository sections about key moments of his father and mother: they met in Paris after the war and later settled in Australia where they opened a restaurant. Their life story is explained with photos, documents, anecdotes, and, of course the mayonnaise recipe of the title.

It would seem that the subject matter of Monsieur Mayonnaise – the title comes from the nom de guerre of Mora’s father, who was a member of the Résistance, as the film explains – is not the stuff of comedy. But this is the road taken by the film, and it feels integral to the story, with Mora as its narrator, on camera and voice over. He is first seen, shot in black and white, writing his family history on a vintage typewriter as a Hollywood writer in the 1940s working on a film noir. It id a distancing effect repeated throughout the film, that sets the comedic tone and poke some fun at the artistic style of the era.  This narrative conceit, and the humorous tone of Mora’s narrating his family escape, gives this serious film a light touch. 

Perhaps the most valuable lesson of this film for my documentary class, is how Graham and Mora succeed in transcending the “home movieness” of their materials. They embed a family story, woven from anecdotes, fading photos and assorted documents, into the larger tapestry of 20^th century.

The cost of an idea: "The Young Marx" and "Últilmos días en La Habana"

One of the benefits of watching four or five films a day is that unexpected connections are formed when mixing and matching titles from the Berlinale sections, based on screening times.

In the case of The Young Karl Marx, directed by Raoul Peck, and Últimos días en La Habana, by the Cuban Fernando Pérez, these connections were too obvious to miss: the birth of communism as an ideology that ... (fill in the blanks) the 20^th century; and the impact of these ideas in Cuba for over five decades and still counting. More indirectly, an Argentine first person documentary essay, Cuatreros by Albertina Carri, and Sally Potter’s satire The Party, show the ramifications and appeal of these ideas in the 1970s Argentine left, and in a pre-Brexit academic circle in London.

Cobbling together a variety of European sources for producing the film, Peck also wrote the screenplay together with Pascal Bonitzer, and cast two German actors, August Diehl and Stefan Konarske, fluent in French and English, with all three languages spoken in the film for historical accuracy. The Young Marx covers the first three years of the friendship between Karl Marx, a recent Ph.D. from a German university who wants to change the world with the might of the pen, and Friedrich Engels, the son of a German textile manufacturer in Manchester, UK, a first hand observer of unfettered capitalism.  The climax of this biopic of sorts is the writing of the Communist Manifesto in 1848, treated in this picture as a sacred text.  The film’s angle is to bring Herr Marx down from a marble pedestal. It does so by concentrating on his marriage and family life, as the husband of a German aristocrat and the young father of two girls, throughout a hand-to-mouth life in Paris and Brussels.  Engels’ milieu is a Dickensian England, in the style of BBC productions.  Asked about the inspiration for the screenplay, Peck noted that an important source were the letters exchanged by the friends that allowed for a detailed recreation of their domestic world.  The key ideas are explained without didacticism through conversations and meetings: class struggle, surplus value, means of production, alienation, and the motto “workers of the world unite”. It has a refreshing dramatic impact – Marx and diapers.

It will be interesting to see how the film fares in theaters, DVD and streaming, after its world premiere at the Berlinale.  Its production values will appeal to the consumers of historical dramas and Masterpiece Theater, but I bet it will disappoint those looking for a meaty political film like Peck’s powerful Lumumba  (2000) and his knockout documentary essay I Am Not Your Negro, up for an Oscar in two weeks.  The Young Marx takes the road of melodrama, or as an Italian colleague noted somewhat sarcastically,  “it’s just a feuilleton”.   Other reviews have been harsher.

If The Young Marx romanticizes the birth of these ideas, Últimos días de La Habana shows the cost of the communist ideology on the Cuban population, since the Revolution of 1959.  This cost is the subtext of the cinema of Fernando Pérez, one of the most interesting filmmakers working in Cuba today. I use his 1998 Berlinale entry La vida es silbar, a magical realist portrait of Havana in the decade the Soviet Union collapsed, with good results in my courses on international cinema.  Pérez is back this year in the Berlinale Special section with Últimos días en La Habana, the third of his trilogy on the city. It is a loose follow up to Suite Habana (2002), a documentary-style portrait of a cross section of the Cuban society.

The trilogy is best explained against the context of the Castro era, and its political evolution and fossilization during the past fifty years.  In light of the political stagnation in the two decades since La vida es silbar, the characters and plot of Últimos días retreat from the willfully optimistic vision proposed by the on-camera narrator to the audience, breaking the fourth wall. The allegorical ending suggested where the foundations of the post-Castro Cuba should be rooted, mainly tolerance for other political, cultural and religious ideas, including a healthy respect for dissenters. The film called for Fidel to be a father to all.  In Últimos días, the ending is very similar: a young girl, who has nothing and goes nowhere, again addresses the audience directly, but now with a mix of defiance and despair in her lively monologue about an uncertain future – symbolized by the death by AIDS and the exile of the two protagonists.  In the press conference, Perez kindly answered this very question I asked,  saying that “it’s not that the Cuban situation has worsened, it’s that it has become more complex” (he used e neologism  in Spanish, “complejizada”).  If you put the endings of the two films side by side, the material deterioration is visible (the 1950s cars on the road are emblematic), and the deflation of hope too evident to ignore. Últimos días en La Habana the film proposes friendship and laughter to fight the dampening of dreams and the scarcity of goods.  With a documentary eye, trained in the making of newsreels for the Instituto Cubano de Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficos, Perez captures the current phase of Cuban politics, and what you infer is a question mark. No ending set in Plaza de la Revolución this time.

A last minute addition to these comments is the German dramatic comedy I saw last night: In Times of Fading Light, adapted from a novel, and directed by Matti Geschonneck, that centers on the 90^th birthday celebration of a fervent communist (Bruno Ganz, phenomenal) in 1989, before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. The party is a minutely described microcosm of the tightly-surveilled GDR. The family and functionaries toasting to a forgetful comrade are rocked by the unexpected defection of the only grandson to the West.  The son’s Russian wife, an alcoholic with a quick wit, has the best lines. “What happens when our children - the future – no longer believe in it and leave ?”(It was too dark to write down the exact lines). Different in tone and style to Goodbye, Lenin! (2003) and The Lives of Others (2006) In Times of Fading Light, and as entertaining, this is a political comedy of manners about people with regrets, acknowledged or buried, about how they could have lived. Distributed by Warner Bros. Germany, film deserves to do well in Germany and abroad.  

I come back to the hotel every night walking on Stresemannstrasse, in the city’s Mitte district.  The Berlin Wall used to go through that street.  Now two parallel lines of cobblestones, as shown in the photo I took, remind us where the Mauer stood.  The irony is not lost when you watch these films and think about the cost of the ideas that got this wall built.