Enrique Garcia

With Cuban Cinema After the Cold War Enrique Garcia provides a wonderful point from which future scholarship on Cuban cinema can start. There is both a historical contextualization as well as detailed analyses of several films. Garcia also positions Cuban cinema within the larger scope of world cinema by demonstrating where influences show themselves.

Like any work there are problematic areas (both within the films and with the analyses) but these serve to open areas for further discussion and debate. One such area is the question of gender and sexuality in Juan of the Dead.

While this is an academic book it is written in a manner that should be accessible by the general reader. This is not a work on the making of any of the movies, so there is not a lot of dialogue or scene analysis, but rather a bigger picture contextualization of each film within the realm of Cuban cinema.

Reviewed from a copy made available by the publisher via LibraryThing.… (mere)

Cuban Cinema After the Cold War is a well written book of critical analysis of Cuban films. It would be a perfect discussion tool for any film study class or individual research project. The book begins in the preface with a nice historical overview to put things into perspective with a discussion of the changes in cinema in relation to history and WHY the changes took place. It provides a very thoughtful critical analysis, integrating American, Latin and Cuban film titles, making available titles a priority and analyzing a variety of genres.

The introduction explores the history of the ICAIC, with continued connections of the history of film as related to events that took place in history. Each chapter discusses and analyzes a film or films and a unique topic to the time period in chronological order. This text could be used in its entirety for a study of Cuban film through time, or individual chapters for research. The conclusion does a nice job of tying it all together.

The author, Enrique Garcia, uses an impressive number of resources extensively in his research including detailed chapter notes, a bibliography, as well as a filmography. In addition, there is a detailed index for quick access to the specific topics.… (mere)

And I was so busy watching the last Superman movie or visiting the last world discovered in the Star Wars saga that I completely ignored Cuban movies. Not one. Zero.
How could I let this happen? I have also never watched a movie produced in the Caribbean though I went as far as Japan and Siberia....Finland and Rumania...and in their original languages mind you whenever I could with some subtitles.

What do I know? What do I not know? What will I ever know? What about the unknown unknowns? Cuban Cinema exists. It is alive.

Yet if there was one book I would recommend to fill this incredible ignorance gap it is "Cuban Cinema after the Cold War: A critical Analysis of selected films." by Enrique Garcia.

First because Enrique Garcia - unlike me - claims he has seen hundreds of Cuban movies and the way he classifies film synopsis through time periods and intellectual kinship is brilliant. It could indeed apply to any national cinema analysis. Therefore his book is above all an invitation to accomplish a journey to the many landscapes of Cuba, its people and its challenges through how they appear in Cuban Cinema. He reviews the films' arguments through the prisms of the history of Cuba itself. The pre-revolutionary period and its tropical biases, the Cuban Revolution and censorship, the collapse of Communism and its economic and cultural consequences for the island's film creators and production. He also tells us how relevant or significant is a particular movie not only according to him but also to film critics both inside and outside Cuba.

Also noteworthy is the comparative analysis that includes a review of international sources of inspiration to Cuban filmmakers - from Italian neorealism to the French new wave innovative film techniques or the surrealism of Juan Bunuel in Spain and Mexico.

For the general public it will provide points of reference in order to search for Cuban cinema filmmakers. Such a book would certainly be served by photos and perhaps future editions will have visual points of reference. It also confronts us with how to approach and visualize the cinemetrics that compose the fibers of Cuban Cinema and how film distribution - for those living in the USA - makes them absent of cinemas. Supporting your local Arthouse & Public Library may be the answer providing they read this book and get inspired in showing and having on their catalogues more Cuban movies. Unfortunately for those who produce movies in Cuba, a quick search on Cuban Cinema/movies on Netflix and Amazon produced near 0 results. I did not search per filmmaker and would have to redo with the book of Mr. Garcia close by.

Being a pianist, one chapter that caught my attention was that of Cuban musical films both pre and post revolution. I thought this chapter was interesting throughout in that it explored how certain themes such as sexuality and sexual stereotypes such as that of the Mulatta were treated or exploited by these pictures. I particularly liked the one describing a musical movie post revolution in which most of the actors could not sing, a true example of the Cuban concept of "imperfect cinema". The author mentions the film review "Cine Cubano" and the article of Julio Garcia Espinosa who famously stated: "Nowadays, perfect cinema — technically and artistically masterful — is almost always reactionary cinema. The major temptation facing Cuban cinema at this time — when it is achieving its objective of becoming a cinema of quality, one which is culturally meaningful within the revolutionary process — is precisely that of transforming itself into a perfect cinema." The Author also joins a concert of film critics who attacked Wim Wenders' movie "The Buena Vista Social Club" as being too "Paternalistic" with Cuban culture. It is about aging Cuban Musicians taken out of retirement by an ambitious music producer, Wim Wenders responded himself to this criticism when he commented: " My answer to this sort of comment is to explain that it is much simpler to make a film that is explicitly political. My aim, however, was to make a film that refrained from a political view of Cuba or Havana or these people's lives and just phenomenologically show it as it was. This, I believe, has a bigger political impact in the long run."

Wenders added: " In Cuba music is anything but that. It's not a luxury or commercial entertainment but something essential, like eating, breathing and sleeping. It is an integral part of living, and that for me was extraordinary and very moving because I've never lived in a place where this was the case." (Retrieved from an interview of Wenders Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).… (mere)

I wish I could unread this book. It's partly that Garcia doesn't spend enough time talking about the films as films (the lack of photos and dialogue excerpts doesn't help). It's partly that the book buries what information there is about Cuba, its history and its films under a haystack of unexplained references to surrealism, dialetics and other ill-defined terms. But what really left a bad taste in my mouth was the last chapter, in which the author -- after several chapters of focusing on each film's message, and of cataloguing each work's flaws when it comes to racial or sexual stereotypes, basically dismisses the homophobia of the last film as just the way things are, and even calls one act of violence (with an accompanying insult) an act of ambiguous dark humor. I don't care how much literary criticism you apply, there's nothing ambiguous or humorous about the described act, and Garcia's attempt to excuse it earned his book a trip to the recycling bin.… (mere)