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4. Film Culture in the Digital Millenium
- Rutgers University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
t 4 FILM CULTURE IN THE DIGITAL MILLENNIUM Working in his bedroom at his parents’ Havana home in 1996, Miguel Coyula, then eighteen years old, began crafting special effects for his personally created films on a 486 personal computer. The computer processor was eight times slower than the machines he would use twelve years later to render the effects for Memories of Development (2010), a sequel to the 1968 masterwork by Tomás G. Alea, Memories of Underdevelopment. In the time it then took to render a single, simple effect, today he can make complex and beautiful composite images. In Cuba in the 1990s, blackouts lasting up to eight hours made the completion of projects a heroic endeavor. Coyula made his first two shorts, Pirámide (1996) and Válvula de luz (Light Valve, 1997), in the bleak conditions of the Special Period and prior to his attendance at film school in Cuba. Válvula was shot sequentially on a VHS camcorder “edited in the camera” and on a 3/4-inch U-matic videotape system without direct sound recording. In his experimentation with reality, narration, and form, and in his expanded range of expression and themes, Coyula characterizes the international generation of media producers who have integrated digital technology and the Internet into their mode of filmmaking. As a Cuban filmmaker, he embodies through his work a transition into the digital era that understands individual practice, productivity, and expression that are complicated by institutional involvement. Although Coyula’s emergence has become celebrated in Cuba (if not always in film school), he now lives and works in New York. He demonstrates typical Cuban inventiveness under constraints that have become part of his style. His is a brand of creativity begun in spite of, and informed by, difficult conditions. Cuba, with its insistence on social purpose , has not seduced him with its long record of filmmaking support and its 132 DIGITAL DILEMMAS involvement in content, production, and distribution. In fact, Coyula spills out of the history of Cuban filmmaking with an individual, lucid approach that challenges the central position of the state. He represents a democratization of filmmaking that is molded by digital innovataion and new creative interactions among political, cultural, and social factors. Coyula is not alone. As I show in this chapter, the political and social culture of Cuba offers a dynamic view of factors interacting in the digital, global era and yields insights into popular and political responses in filmmaking as well as their adaptations in terms of content, production, and distribution. By reviewing the utopian views of filmmakers, as expressed in manifestos such as “For an Imperfect Cinema” (Julio García Espinosa, 1969) and “Manifesto of Poor Cinema” (Humberto Solás, 2003), along with the work of new filmmakers , I reveal the adaptation of Cuba’s media discourse to the digital age. Applied to the Internet, these filmmakers’ theories provide fresh emphasis, and question the orientation of media in general. In forecasting the empowerment of audiences and users to do away with elitist artistic production and distribution, García Espinosa and Solás embrace the potential of digital media to strengthen local expression in the face of dangerously homogenizing corporate globalization. In this chapter, I also examine the cinema of the Special Period in the context of what anthropologist Arjun Appadurai calls a mediascape, which reveals media as one of several cultural flows overlapping in global dimensions. Media extend beyond national dimensions of culture onto multinational capital, technology, diasporic communities, and ideological groupings.1 The cinema links and embodies these overlapping aspects of global culture. Since the 1990s, Cuban state film production has survived in various ways: expanding partnerships with international networks for coproduction ; encouraging independent producers, internal and external to Cuba, who increasingly move between market and noncommercial interests; and building the infrastructure of computer networks (described here in chapter 1) that have increased the global presence of Cuba through improved circulation of information and images. Backstory of an Industry After the revolution (especially in the period 1959–1979), cinema was used to encourage cultural survival and social change and to aid new governance systems. As a cultural and political project, Cuban cinema served to [44.203.219.117] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 16:17 GMT) FILM CULTURE IN THE DIGITAL MILLENNIUM 133 integrate the vernacular into national culture to reinforce cultural memory. Ideas of cultural survival find new currency in light of the greater cultural exchange made possible by...