Abstract
The Introduction establishes a conceptual framework, covering Chaos theory, Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s metaphor of the ‘repeating island,’ Fernando Ortiz’s distinction between ‘cubanidad’ and ‘cubanía’, and the psychoanalytical notion of the ‘screen’ that both conceals and projects content. It presents a corpus of films made outside (‘independently’), within, and with the national film institute (ICAIC), organises them according to key figures—the monster, the child, the historical icon, and the recluse—, and situates them in relation to the history of Cuban film, the Revolution, and the economic and political crisis known as the Special Period in Times of Peace. It thus outlines the overarching thesis of the book: 21st-century Cuban cinema attests to the continued relevance of national identity understood not as an essence but as an anxious dynamic of differential repetition.
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Notes
- 1.
Of course, this idea of cubanía as a very particular national sentiment has a long historical trajectory, deftly mapped out by Antoni Kapcia in Cuba: Island of Dreams (2000). As Kapcia points out, cubanía, defined succinctly as ‘the political belief in cubanidad’ (2000: 22), is a multivocal tradition that has evolved from a competing discourse set against the weakening ideology of Spanish colonialism to a dominant ‘cubanía rebelde’ (rebellious cubanía) with the Revolution of 1959. The notion that cubanía not only allows for but also often emerges from a disjunction between physical location and psychological state is present throughout Cuba’s history, from key individuals such as priest and independence leader Félix Varela and Cuba’s national ‘Apostle’, José Martí and important groups, such as the US-based separatist organisations who mobilised for Cuba’s independence through the Partido Revolucionario Cubano in 1892.
- 2.
All translations from Spanish are my own, except where a translated edition is available.
- 3.
Studies such as ‘Exilio, insilio y diáspora’ (Ingenschay 2010) or ‘Between Cosmopolitanism and the National Slot’ (Berg 2009) differentiate between waves of emigration from Cuba (starting with exile, based on political opposition, and diversifying to include predominantly economic-based emigration). There are also significant demographic differences between the various waves, not least on a racial basis.
- 4.
Perhaps most famous of these is Ortiz’s notion of ‘transculturation’, which aimed to describe how the violent encounter between cultures changed and affected all those involved, creating something new. It thus complicated existing concepts of ‘acculturation’ and ‘deculturation’, whereby ‘weaker’ cultures were eliminated and replaced by ‘stronger’ cultures in the contact created by conquest. Ortiz departs from this insight to develop his model of the ‘ajiaco’, a distinctly Cuban melting pot that described the unique and dynamic make-up of a society produced through transculturation (1963: 98).
- 5.
It is for this reason that Catherine Davies identified the crisis of the Special Period as a postmodern moment for Cuba (2000). However, she nuances this reading by pointing out that the triumph of 1959 also marked a break, albeit one in which the dominant metanarrative of capitalism was replaced by another: socialism. As we will see over the course of this study, whether or not Cuban culture can be analysed in terms of postmodernity is a complex question, since the socialist utopian metanarrative has been somewhat replaced by a related but more pragmatic grand récit of national identity, struggle, and survival.
- 6.
- 7.
For critics such as Paul Julian Smith (1996), Catherine Davies (1996) and Enrico Mario Santí (1998), the seamless reconciliation and rose-tinted optimism of the film failed to show or acknowledge real—sexual, political—difference and therefore did little to really challenge the political and cultural status quo.
- 8.
Where previous efforts to embrace the margins, epitomised by Fresa y chocolate, had sought to sublimate difference and conflict through fictional, emotional resolution, these later institutional efforts were more open in acknowledging the controversies and conflicts of Cuba’s cinematic and cultural history. This has contributed to the deconstruction of a single, teleological account of Cuban Revolutionary culture and encouraged the acknowledgement of different strands, as with Juan Antonio García Borrero’s concept of ‘cine sumergido’ (submerged cinema) (2001).
- 9.
At the same time, the label also evokes the practice, aesthetics, and ideologies of Italian neo-realists, who stepped out of the studio into the street, turning the camera onto ‘ordinary’ people in order to reflect critically on poverty and injustice. Although they do at times ‘turn their cameras towards the margins to recover the disenfranchised’ (Stock 2009: 16), the designation ‘street filmmakers’ seems rather to describe their modus operandi than to signal an engagement with this legacy.
- 10.
At the first meeting, the filmmakers elected a smaller ‘Grupo de trabajo’ (working group), which has been led by newer filmmakers such as Kiki Álvarez as well as well-known, ICAIC-based auteurs such as Fernando Pérez, both of whose work will be examined here.
- 11.
For scholars such as Sharon Packer, Freud’s choice of term is emblematic of the common ground, mutual influence, and interaction between psychoanalysis and cinema that began with the shared cultural, intellectual, and political contexts from which they emerged (2007: 18).
- 12.
It is in this sense that the screen memory resembles the fetish: both simultaneously show and hide or, more specifically, show by hiding and hide by showing. Freud suggested this parallel when, in 1920, he added a footnote to Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (originally published in 1905) in which he compared the screen memory to a fetish: ‘behind the first recollection of the fetish’s appearance there lies a submerged and forgotten phase of sexual development. The fetish, like a ‘screen memory’, represents this phase and is thus a remnant and precipitate of it’ (Freud 2001: 154).
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Fehimović, D. (2018). Introduction: Screening the Repeating Island. In: National Identity in 21st-Century Cuban Cinema. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93103-6_1
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