| Julio Garcia Espinosa's "For An Imperfect Cinema", written in 1969 is
a bit of committed writing that came out of Cuba during the cold, Cold war.
He asserts, in his first paragraph, that quality cinema is equal to revolutionary
meaning. And while he never sets an example before the reader to test this
assertion, he develops his abstracted ideas from a global viewpoint.
For example, he divides cinema into the "uncommitted" and the revolutionary.
~~"There can be no "impartial" or "uncommitted" art, there can be no new and
genuine qualitative jump in art, unless the concept and the reality of the "elite"
is done away with once and for all." If I am to take this sentence seriously, it
would mean that since the revolution has not yet done away with the "elite" and their
"impartial" cinema, no "new and genuine qualitative jump in art" has occurred in the
last thirty years anywhere on the globe. Even Hollywood cinema has managed a masterpiece
or two in the past thirty years, not to mention the thirty years before this writing.
But he is thinking of the future, wishing for a revolutionary cinema. He continues~~
"Three factors incline us toward optimism: the development of science, the social
presence of the masses, and the revolutionary potential in the contemporary world."
Espinosa completes this remarkable paragraph with an odd remark, "All three are without
hierarchial order, all three are interrelated." His dreams, it seems to me, of "pure"
equality have blind-sided him. He is seeing in "today" what he wants to see tomorrow.
"Outside In Inside Out" first delivered at a 1986 conference by Trinh-T.MInh-ha, is a very abstract discussion of filmic aesthetics and third world "authentic" cinema. ~~"The injunction to see things from the native's point of view speaks for a definite ideology of truth and authenticity;...To raise the question of representing the Other is, therefore, to reopen endlessly the fundamental issue of science and art; documentary and fiction; universal and personal; objectivity and subjectivity; masculine and feeminine; outsider and insider." Only a weakened mind would, I think, write such a run-on, catch-all, let's-play-opposites-against-each-other sentence. Sorry, I just could not take this in. So, I cannot really give it its due response.
The third reading for today, "To Make a Film Means to Take a Position" by Sarah Maldoror (1977) has the ring of authenticity about it. She comes across as a mix of extreme views ("For me there are only exploiters and the exploited, that"s all.") and artistic common sense and careerism (which I don"t take as negitive at all.) Appearantly, her more political critics want more politics in her films, but she resists, "I have no time for films filled with political rhetoric." Good for her. Reading this, I would like to see her 1972 film, "Sambizanga", if possible in our 502 class.
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