Between myths and realities in the history of the Cuban cinema

By: Yuldys Márquez Díaz \ Camagüey Television

To break up with the myths is an act, more than of everything, of courage; to try to persuade the human beings that believe or not, in such or more which history, it can be to rain on that wet, but in spite of it, the cinema space debates denominated "Symbolic City", favored by the Center of Cinema and the National Union of Artists of Cuba and that is carried out every Wednesday in the Video Room New World of Camagüey, it proposed in its last edition the topic of two myths that are about in the history of the cinema: the "icaicentrism" and the call author focus when counting the history of the Cuban cinema.

The specialist Juan Antonio García who alternates these debates with Armando Pérez Census, observed like when counting the history of the Cuban cinema, erroneously we think that the kilometer zero is with the inauguration of the Cuban Institute of Film Industry (ICAIC), thought that reinforces the thesis of a version "icaicentrist" of the matter. But this is not real, because are all the productions carried out in Cuba that don't respond to the interests of the ICAI, out as is the silent cinema , the prerrevolucionary sound cinema, the productions of the International school of Cinema San Antonio de los Baños, fílmics studies of the Revolutionary Armed forces, also the fílmics studies of television, the cinema creation clubs, etc..

The expert also conversed on how the history of the Cuban cinema was counted starting from the impressions of those denominated cinema critics, it is the history that go counting and canonizing at the same time, "this is the good thing and this is the bad thing". TO that history, story or not, objective in its moment and why not, subjective in occasions, it would be necessary to add him the experience of the cinema in Cuba. For example that importance had in its moment the arrival of materials of filming of Czechoslovakia and not of United States that the one that was used up to 1961, was and other so many example could make an appointment this way so that was the true history of the cinema in Cuba.

The specialist assures that if we have to look for the kilometer zero of the history of the Cinema in Cuba, is not in fact in the ICAIC, is necessary to go outside and to find it in those first productions that led the ICAIC in time. Also to build this history asserts that "it would be necessary to formulate and to think instead of a group of movies, a group of practical."

The space that has as objective the debate film, also proposed and like complement, the evaluation of the aesthetics captured in the documentaries "P.M." carried out by Sabad Cabrera and Orlando Jiménez in 1961 and "NOW" of Santiago Álvarez; besides a sequence of the movie "Memoirs of the Underdevelopment."