One Way or Another

De Cierta Manera

Cuba

1978

78 Min

Black and White

Spanish

Currently 3.8/5 Stars.
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DIR Julio García Espinosa, Thomas González Pérez, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Sara Gómez

SCR Julio Garcia, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Sara Gómez

CAST Mario Balmaseda, Yolanda Cuéllar, Mario Limonta, Isaura Mendoza, Bobby Carcases, Sarita Reyes

Yolanda, a female teacher, cannot find the best methods to teach the marginalized children of the slums because of their different origin. Mario, a worker in a bus factory and a typical macho man, is confronted by Yolanda’s instinct for emancipation. The two nonetheless become lovers. Their relationship portrays the idea that racism, sexism, and class-based prejudices must be demolished in order to succeed. —wikipedia

Director

Julio García Espinosa

Julio Garcia Espinosa was born in Havana on September 5, 1926. As a young man worked as director and actor at the Theatre Vernáculo, and later directed programme on radio. He was President of the Section of Cinema of the Cultural Society: “Our Time”.

Co-Author; together with other filmmakers made a film that was called “El Mégano”, considered the historical precedent of the New Cuban Cinema. He was also one of the founders of the Group “Teatro Estudio”. At the Triumph of the Revolution he became Head of the Art Section of the Cuban Culture Direction of the Rebel Army.The first documentaries made after the Revolution were released there: “Esta tierra nuestra y La Vivienda”. He is also recognized as a Film theorist, among his work highlight the essay “For an imperfect cinema”.

He studied cinematographic direction at the Experimental Cinematographic Center in Rome. He was a founder of the ICAIC and the UNEAC as well as Vice-minister of Culture. In the ICAIC, he has assumed… read more

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea came from a progressive middle-class family. Born in Havana in 1928, Alea experienced a vivid career, one closely tied to the history of his country. Fidel Castro was his classmate when he studied Law at the University of Havana, where he was already engaged in making films for the Communist Party. In 1951, he enrolled at Italy’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, one of the first international film schools. There he received exposure to films from around the world. He returned to Cuba to make the Neorealism-influenced El Megano; a film about the exploitation of charcoal burners. The film was seized by the authorities of Fulgencio Batista’s government after a screening at the University campus. In the years leading to the Cuban Revolution, Alea was employed making short documentaries for Television. Upon Castro’s victory, Alea was placed in charge of building Cuba’s national film institute – ICAIC (The Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry). read more

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea came from a progressive middle-class family. Born in Havana in 1928, Alea experienced a vivid career, one closely tied to the history of his country. Fidel Castro was his classmate when he studied Law at the University of Havana, where he was already engaged in making films for the Communist Party. In 1951, he enrolled at Italy’s Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, one of the first international film schools. There he received exposure to films from around the world. He returned to Cuba to make the Neorealism-influenced El Megano; a film about the exploitation of charcoal burners. The film was seized by the authorities of Fulgencio Batista’s government after a screening at the University campus. In the years leading to the Cuban Revolution, Alea was employed making short documentaries for Television. Upon Castro’s victory, Alea was placed in charge of building Cuba’s national film institute – ICAIC (The Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry).

In his critical study of the director (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea: Dialectics of a Filmmaker), Paul Schroeder notes: “To view and study Alea’s films is to see revolutionary Cuba through the eyes of the island nation’s most important and consistently critical filmmaker.” Indeed Alea’s features from Stories of a Revolution to Death of a Bureaucrat and Memories of Underdevelopment present a distinct perspective on the Revolution and its aftermath. While committed to the cause, Alea was conscious that the success of the movement hadn’t transformed Cuba overnight. Remnants of pre-revolutionary cultural and class attitudes persisted in the New Cuba, especially among the urban educated elite from which Alea himself descended from. His most influential film Memories of Underdevelopment is celebrated for its ambivalent vision. It depicts the wanderings of a middle-class aesthete who remains in Cuba after his family leaves for Miami following Batista’s fall. He struggles to find a stable identity for himself, haunted by notions of “underdevelopment”, the feeling that he is out of place in the New Cuba.

Alea dabbled in a variety of genres. The 70s witnessed a turn to historical films. A Cuban Fight Against the Demons, made in 1972, portrayed 17th Century Cuba’s struggle against its Spanish masters. The ambitious The Last Supper (1976) brought to light Cuba’s troubled history, its involvement in the enslavement of African people. Up to a Certain Point, made in 1984 was a more personal endeavour. A documentary film-maker researching machismo in Cuban society faces a crisis after he falls in love with a working single-mother. The film returned to the theme of Memories of Underdevelopment in outlining an intellectual’s struggle in Communist Cuba. Personal illness halted Alea’s output in his final years. His final films were co-directed by Juan Carlos Tabío. Strawberry & Chocolate was Alea’s final popular success before his death in 1996, at the age of 67. It proved both controversial and popular in Cuba. Controversial for bringing to light Cuba’s institutionalized homophobia and popular for its lighthearted depiction of friendship between a young Communist student and an older homosexual intellectual living in Havana. The film made history as the first Cuban film to be nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Film category. —Mr Bongo

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Sara Gómez

We shall never know all that Sara Gómez might have given to us. We have her one feature film, the marvelous De cierta manera , and a few short documentaries to indicate what might have been had she lived beyond the age of thirty-one. But we will never really know all that this prodigiously talented black woman was capable of.

Sara Gómez could be seen as prototypical of the new Cuban directors. Entering the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) at an early age, she worked as assistant director for various cineastes, including Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, whose influence marked her work as it has so many young directors. During a ten-year period (1964–74) she fulfilled the usual apprenticeship among Cuban cineastes by directing documentary films. Documentaries are seen as an important training ground for Cuban directors because they force them to focus on the material reality of Cuba and thus emphasize the use of cinema as an expression of national culture. As Gutiérrez Alea noted, “the kind of… read more

We shall never know all that Sara Gómez might have given to us. We have her one feature film, the marvelous De cierta manera , and a few short documentaries to indicate what might have been had she lived beyond the age of thirty-one. But we will never really know all that this prodigiously talented black woman was capable of.

Sara Gómez could be seen as prototypical of the new Cuban directors. Entering the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) at an early age, she worked as assistant director for various cineastes, including Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, whose influence marked her work as it has so many young directors. During a ten-year period (1964–74) she fulfilled the usual apprenticeship among Cuban cineastes by directing documentary films. Documentaries are seen as an important training ground for Cuban directors because they force them to focus on the material reality of Cuba and thus emphasize the use of cinema as an expression of national culture. As Gutiérrez Alea noted, “the kind of cinema which adapts itself to our interests, fortunately, is a kind of light, agile cinema, one that is very directly founded upon our own reality.” This is precisely the kind of cinema Sara Gómez went on to produce, beginning work on De cierta manera in 1974 and finishing the editing of the film shortly before her death of acute asthma.

Gómez’s early training in documentaries and the influence of Gutiérrez Alea is evident in De cierta manera. The film combines the documentary and fiction forms so inextricably that they are impossible to disentangle. Through this technique, she emphasized the material reality that is at the base of all creative endeavor and the necessity of bringing a critical perspective to all forms of film.

In choosing this style, which I call “dialectical resonance,” Gómez appeared to follow Gutiérrez Alea’s example in the superb Memories of Underdevelopment. But there is a crucial difference between the two films—a difference that might be said to distinguish the generation of directors who came of age before the triumph of the revolution (e.g. Gutiérrez Alea) from those who have grown up within the revolution. In spite of its ultimate commitment to the revolutionary process, Memories remains in some ways the perspective of an “outsider” and might be characterized as “critical bourgeois realism.” However, De cierta manera is a vision wholly from within the revolution, despite the fact that every position in the film is subjected to criticism—including that of the institutionalized revolution, which is presented in the form of an annoyingly pompous omniscient narration. Thus, the perspective of Gomez might be contrasted to that of Memories by calling it “critical socialist realism.” The emphasis on dialectical criticism, struggle, and commitment is equally great in both films, but the experience of having grown up within the revolution created a somewhat different perspective.

Despite its deceptively simple appearance—a result of being shot in 16mm on a very low budget— De cierta manera is the work of an extremely sophisticated filmmaker. Merely one example among many of Gómez’s sophistication is the way in which she combined a broad range of modern distanciation techniques with the uniquely Cuban tropical beat to produce a film that is simultaneously rigorously analytic and powerfully sensuous—as well as perhaps the finest instance to date of a truly dialectical film. Although we are all a little richer for the existence of this work, we remain poorer for the fact that she will make no more films. —John Mraz

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