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.
