Memorias del Subdesarrollo (1968)
14 11 2008
Production year: 1968
Director: Tomas Gutierrez Alea
Screenwriter: Edmundo Desnoes
Cinematography: Ramón F. Suárez
Sergio Corrieri … Sergio Carmono Mendovo
Daisy Granados … Elena
Eslinda Núñez … Noemi
Running Time: 97 minutes
It’s almost fitting that Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s 1968 masterpiece, Memories of Underdevelopment, remains one of the most overlooked and underappreciated films in modern cinema. Like its popular appeal and the nations it portrays, the film’s aesthetic is in many ways “underdeveloped,” rife with photograph stills, documentary footage and the voice-overed meditation of a jaded bourgeois artist.
While generally disregarded or overlooked by mainstream critics (the film isn’t even available on DVD in America), it’s no stretch to say that it belongs among the very best films ever made for its technical brilliance and – above all – its success in capturing the nuances of the 1959 Cuban revolution.
Migration – or, perhaps more accurately, the decision not to migrate – is at the heart of “Memories.” It portrays Sergio, a moderately successful writer whose family and friends have recently fled Havana after the Communist take-over. Bored and indifferent to his changed nation, Sergio is left alone in his Havana high-rise to linger among his wife’s left possessions, replaying the collapse of his country and family through memories and media: flashbacks, tape recorded conversations, newsreels, and documentary footage.
Migration is a consistent undercurrent in the film and the foundation of Sergio’s own anxiety. In one scene he visits the home of famous American writer Ernest Hemingway (an American migrant to Cuba), contemplating in quiet resentment Hemingway’s small Cuban empire (“Hemingway, the colonist. Cuba, Gunga Din,” Sergio muses). Above all, Sergio resents Hemingway’s mobility, Hemingway’s ability to transcend national and political priorities that consistently hamper Sergio’s own artistic and personal ambitions.
Sergio is not a migrant, but his life is profoundly changed by his decision to remain in Havana. Memories is therefore a unique migration film in that it avoids the typical “journey narrative” and explores the mental, political and emotional distress behind the decision to move away.
