At the age of 14, Humberto Solás left home to participate in a guerilla struggle against Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. After Castro’s victory, he would graduate from University with a degree in history; perhaps explaining the attention devoted to history by Solás’ in his films. After joining Cuba’s state film school (ICAIC), he worked on a series of shorts which he would later disown for its imitation of European films and lack of involvement with Cuban reality. He regarded the 1966 film, Manuela, as his first real film. The film earned praise for featuring a woman farm worker’s engagement in guerilla warfare. Solás films often centered on women, who he felt were ideally placed to present a critique on society. Lucía, made in 1968, was a sensation on initial release. It narrated the story of three women named Lucía across the history of Cuba. Its popular success led it to becoming, along with Memories of Underdevelopment, the banner film of Cuban cinema.
Inspired by Luchino… read more
At the age of 14, Humberto Solás left home to participate in a guerilla struggle against Fulgencio Batista’s dictatorship. After Castro’s victory, he would graduate from University with a degree in history; perhaps explaining the attention devoted to history by Solás’ in his films. After joining Cuba’s state film school (ICAIC), he worked on a series of shorts which he would later disown for its imitation of European films and lack of involvement with Cuban reality. He regarded the 1966 film, Manuela, as his first real film. The film earned praise for featuring a woman farm worker’s engagement in guerilla warfare. Solás films often centered on women, who he felt were ideally placed to present a critique on society. Lucía, made in 1968, was a sensation on initial release. It narrated the story of three women named Lucía across the history of Cuba. Its popular success led it to becoming, along with Memories of Underdevelopment, the banner film of Cuban cinema.
Inspired by Luchino Visconti’s period films, especially Senso, Solás hoped to portray “a coherent, lucid, and dignified appreciation of our national past”. His succeeding films continued in a similar vein.Simparelé (1974) presented a unique chronicle of the history of Haiti by using a theatrical style centered on traditional Haitian dance. Cantata de Chile ostensibly focused on a massacre of dock workers in Northern Chile in 1907 but its real subject was the 1973 coup d’état of Augusto Pinochet and the resulting death of political prisoners. The style of these films ran the gamut from melodrama to documentary to musical theatre. Like Glauber Rocha, Solás sought to create an authentic South American film grammar, which owed little to Europe and Hollywood.
He suffered a major career setback with the production of Cecilia. This 1981 epic was the most expensive film production in Cuba up to that time; an adaptation of Cirillo Villaverde’s novel Cecilia Valdés, regarded as a culture treasure among the Cuban public. It was a major commercial and critical flop, public anger was directed towards Solás’ perceived betrayal of the source material. His subsequent works were sparser in budgets, many of them relying on funding from Europe. The most significant film from this period is La siècle des lumièrs -an adaptation of Alejo Carpentier’s modernist classic Explosion in a Cathedral, made for French Television. Solás considered it his “political testament”.
The most important endeavour undertaken by Solás in his final years was the installation of a film festival at Gibara, located on Cuba’s north-eastern coast. The festival was intended to champion a “cinema of poverty”; a cinema best exemplified by his own final feature – Barrio Cuba, shot in digital for little money. Established in 2003, five years before Solás’ death, the ongoing festival presents a significant challenged the hegemony of the official Latin American Film Festival at Havana. By programming films not only from South America but also from Africa, Europe and Asia; it serves as a major outlet for emerging film-makers from around the world. —Mr Bongo
