943 Memories of Underdevelopment

[FrauBlucher]

Memories of Underdevelopment



This film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is the most widely renowned work in the history of Cuban cinema. After his wife and family flee in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the bourgeois intellectual Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) passes his days wandering Havana in idle reflection, his amorous entanglements and political ambivalence gradually giving way to a mounting sense of alienation. With this adaptation of an innovative novel by Edmundo Desnoes, Gutiérrez Alea developed a cinematic style as radical as the times he was chronicling, creating a collage of vivid impressions through the use of experimental editing techniques, archival material, and spontaneously shot street scenes. Intimate and densely layered, Memories of Underdevelopment provides a biting indictment of its protagonist's disengagement and an extraordinary glimpse of life in postrevolutionary Cuba.

SPECIAL FEATURES

• New 4K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New interviews with film critics B. Ruby Rich and José Antonio Évora
• New interview with novelist and screenwriter Edmundo Desnoes
• Titón: From Havana to "Guantanamera," a 2008 feature-length documentary on director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's life and career
• Segment from a 1989 audio interview with Gutiérrez Alea
• Segments from 2017 interviews with actor Daisy Granados and editor Nelson Rodríguez from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Visual History Collection archives
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: An essay by author Joshua Jelly-Schapiro

[DeParis]

I may be jumping the gun, as this could be part of another World Cinema Project.

I saw this yesterday. What an excellent film. Circa 1967/1968 this has all the earmarks of the French new wave and a touch of Bunuel. Tomás Gutiérrez Alea does a wonderfull job merging historical newsreel footage with a fictional narrative. A very interesting look inside Cuba in this transitional period of their history.

And it's a very strong restoration.

Very exciting to hear that Memories of Underdevelopment is getting an upcoming release, whether as part of the WCP or as a standalone release.

I saw this maybe 7-8 years ago in a world cinema class I took in college. I actually wasn't that taken with it the first time I saw it, but I rewatched again for a writing project and ended up really enthralled by it. The film does have something of a French New Wave aesthetic, and it features the sort of archetypally intellectual and alienated protagonist you might expect to pop up in a Godard or Antonioni film. What sets the film in more of a Third Cinema tradition is that Alea takes a politically critical stance towards his protagonist's self-isolation and disaffection, suggesting that it is the protagonist's unwillingness/inability to integrate into a newly diverse society that creates his alienation, rather then implicating external societal factors. I probably need to see the film again before writing more about it, but I hope anyone interested in 60s cinema gives it a look.

Another Cuban film I saw in that world cinema class, Sara Gomez's "De Cierta Manera", is also a wonderful film that similarly mixes a dramatic narrative with documentary footage. Alea was actually involved in finishing the shooting on that film due to Gomez's premature death. I hope that's a title that eventually ends up getting a restoration with the WCP, since as far as I know it's never had a wide commercial release in the US and the print I saw wasn't in great shape.

[knives]

Color me very excited. This is probably the best of TGA's dramatic movies (though there is still a decent amount of comedy) with a very exciting use of space. I'm definitely excited to revisit it and hope it is a sign of more to come.

[FrauBlucher]

Yeah, very excited for this. Saw this at the beginning of the year when the 4k was touring. Love it. Has a french new wave feel. The whole package looks like a great edition.

[L.A.]

From Alea I have seen The Twelve Chairs and The Last Supper and both are excellent films and would fit nicely to Criterion’s catalogue. This one is unfamiliar so it shall be the third I’m going to watch from the director.

[knives]

It's very different from those two, though that just highlights what a multifaceted talent he was.

[Hopscotch]

I was blessed to have an undergrad world film history prof screen this in class maybe nine years ago. Can't remember how it went over but it's lingered in my mind more than hundreds of movies I've seen since. Looking forward to revisiting it.

[Rupert Pupkin]

I have seen this movie years ago thus I'm really curious to see it again, restored, especially with the bonus which will help me to put this movie into the historical perspective, because I remember like I was like the character of the movie - I was a bit lost- I read in books about Cuba. I remember how I was fascinate by the editing (sometimes the camera moves like in Soy Cuba- I mean : diving (I remember the scene where he met Elena in the streets (the camera is almost flying above the stairs...), but I was much more thinking about French nouvelle vague movies, especially Godard's first movies)...

SpoilerShow

the end of the movie - for some reason sI don't totally understand why - made me think about the unreal and strange end of Antonioni "L'Eclipse"....

could you please refresh my memory ? speaking of French cinema, the character is fetishizing like me about Brigitte Bardot. I remember a scene where he buy a magazine with a photo of B.B. and put the torned page, slided into a crystal flower vase.
Then there's a scene with several excerpts of movie - one his a bed scene with Bardot. It will difficult for you with "bed scene" as a description to find which movie it could have been (clue: it's not le Mépris or Dieu créa la femme; certainly a following of Vadim movies...) ? do you remember which one it was ? (I could be wrong but I think that there's a scene of Bunuel "The Exterminating Angel")

[FrauBlucher]

Beaver

[domino harvey]

Unfortunately I didn't like this at all. Comparisons in this thread to Godard and Antonioni obviously got my hopes up, but the notion that this film stands with even their weakest work from this period offends me. Our protagonist is a garden variety arrogant bougie dude who thinks he's smart for attending roundtable discussions on the political issues of the day and remains blithely uninvolved in any meaningful way. So, I get it, the message is as relevant now in our own turbulent times as it was then. But I don't care, because how many times have we seen this before? And I really and truly was done with watching a movie about this dude when he picks up a sixteen year old girl, fucks her, insults her over and over for being beneath him and not as concerned with mature things as he is (no shit dude, she's sixteen, and even still she's more interesting than he is), and then stands by gobsmacked as the film turns into one of those awful Italian movies from the 50s where the shrill family berates the dude to marry the girl he "ruined" and eventually takes him to court. I'm not sure why this tale of statutory rape needs to consume about half the running time, or why I'm supposed to care long after I "got" its functional meaning, but no thanks. The only alienation here for me was and is my own from the rest of the commenters in this thread!

[RPG]

I'm perhaps not as harsh on this as domino, but overall I agree more with him than the others on this thread. While maybe I can see the comparisons to the French New Wave, it's not of the same quality. I found this to be very fragmented and uneven, with some sequences enjoyable and others forgettable. One of the enjoyable sequences was the flashback to his relationship with Hanna... however, the assertion that this doomed love affair is what caused him to become such a bitter, sexist, manipulative asshole didn't really sit right with me. He's just an entitled scumbag, and probably always was.

then stands by gobsmacked as the film turns into one of those awful Italian movies from the 50s where the shrill family berates the dude to marry the girl he "ruined" and eventually takes him to court.

This scene was especially painful.

I did find it interesting how this completely unlikable character is shown to be sympathetic (even longing for) America and Europe (yet he stubbornly refuses to leave Cuba...), so the audience gets the positive subjective viewpoint of the West from this character who is shown to be rather morally vacant. Other scenes depicting Americans are also shown in a negative fashion, like the smarmy journalist at the round table criticizing the Cuban revolutionaries for using an archaic method to discuss their political views, and then showing the shit-eating grin on his face as he sits back down. And the documentary footage of some stupid American soldier at Guantanamo throwing rocks at Cubans. It does critique post-Revolution Cuba as well though, what with the lack of supplies (can't fix a car!) and overall despondent attitude of the Cuban population, whose families have been torn apart.

[JakeStewart]

If I remember the scenes accurately (it’s been some months since I last watched it), it’s pretty clear he was always a bastard even during his relationship with Hanna. The tape recordings of their conversations revealed a very cruel and manipulative person. If the protagonist tries to rationalize his behavior because of that breakup, I don’t think we’re meant to buy it. I definitely didn’t.

[RPG]

If I remember the scenes accurately (it’s been some months since I last watched it), it’s pretty clear he was always a bastard even during his relationship with Hanna. The tape recordings of their conversations revealed a very cruel and manipulative person. If the protagonist tries to rationalize his behavior because of that breakup, I don’t think we’re meant to buy it. I definitely didn’t.

Different relationships. Hanna was his high school/college(?) girlfriend, who moved to NYC and he had to stay in Cuba. In the short segment we see of them two, the protagonist is shown to be happy in the relationship and seemingly a caring partner.

The woman he tormented on that tape recording was Laura, his wife who we saw emigrate to the US at the beginning of the movie.