Abstract

The article explores Nicolás Guillén Landrián’s short films in the context of Cuban documentaries of the 1960s. After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, documentary cinema was assigned a didactic and propagandistic mission in defense of the new institutional order. For a decade the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) produced a large number of films that combined aesthetic avant-garde and political propaganda. During those same years Guillén Landrián revamped the forms of the documentary from an ironic and self-conscious perspective that undermined the ideological foundations of the so-called documentales científicopopulares. In this article, I describe most of his films, which were influenced by a popular, nonofficialist perspective, aimed at revealing the contradictions between the revolution’s dreams and the geographical and social margins.

pdf