Imperfect Cinema Transformed: Independent Cinema in Cuba in the 21st Century
Keywords:
Cuba, Independent Cinema, Por un cine imperfecto, Digital Video, EICTV (The International Film and TV School), ICAIC (Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry), transnationalism, production, distribution, Cuban cinemaAbstract
We’ve arrived in 2016 at a situation already imagined by Julio García Espinosa back in 1969 in his polemical essay For an Imperfect Cinema when he wondered if the evolution of film technology (there were already signs) would make it possible that it ceased being the privilege of a small few. Indeed, when digital video came to Cuba as everywhere else, it produced the rise of independent production outside institutional norms. Despite the problema of internet Access within the country, there has been a process of transnationalisation at the aesthetic level which does not seem to have occurred in institutional production. Independent documentary, for example, is strongly marked by a turn towards the personal and subjective, and the question arises about its political implications, especially given that political conditions in Cuba are rather different from the rest of Latin America (not to mention Europe). Nevertheless, the situation is much the same as elsewhere, in that production is perfectly posible, while distribution remains problematic. It is not the first time that the paradoxes of making films in Cuba demonstrate the contradictory features of global cultural production.
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Lisa Maya Knauer (2009): «Audiovisual Remittances and Transnational Subjectivities», en Ariana Hernandez-Reguant (ed.): Cuba in the Special Period, Culture and Ideology in the 1990’s. Nueva York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 159-178.
Hamid Naficy (2001): An Accented Cinema, Exilic and Diasporic Filmmaking. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Ann Marie Stock (2009): On Location in Cuba, Street Filmmaking during Times of Transition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
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