Global Arenas: Narrative and Filmic Translation of Identity

The link between salvage ethnography and the testimonio genre, as described by Amy Fass Emery (1996, 15), rests on a shared “necrological” intent to represent the “other” in the moment prior to its disappearance. Like the interlocutor of testimonios that focus on disappearing populations, the ethnographer approaches an object of representation with the knowledge that what is alive today will be tomorrow an artifact of a distant past. While the object of representation of Julian Schnabel's film Before Night Falls (2000), Reinaldo Arenas, died ten years prior to the release of the biopic loosely based on his autobiography Antes que anochezca (1992; published in English as Before Night Falls in 1993), this association of salvage ethnography and testimonio still has important echoes in my analysis of the film and in the “fables of intimacy” that circumscribe the author (Emery 1996, 20). Bringing Before Night Falls into the context of salvage ethnography and testimonio, the genre for which the Cuban cultural institution Casa de las Américas established a prize in 1970, is complicated further by outsiders' fascination with the inside of a Cuban world that is supposedly set off from time's corrosive effects.

As U.S. citizens grow weary of the restrictions their government places on travel, their craving intensifies to experience firsthand what the rest of the world has been enjoying but they have only glimpsed, most recently in a paradigmatic film of salvage ethnography, Wim Wender and Ry Cooder's The Buena Vista Social Club (1999). Bearing in mind, first, this more general desire to see Castro's Cuba, second, the collective memories of prerevolutionary excess, and, third, the eclipse of modernism signaled by the substitution of artists and intellectuals formulating manifestos with knowledge workers and technocrats framing competing worlds on the Internet, I read Schnabel's Before Night Falls.

How do the filmic Arenas and the literary Arenas relate to the scholarly academy, the film industry, and post-Soviet Cuba, one of the last vestiges of an authentic ideological dream? To answer this question I consider diverse narratives of affiliation with and representations of Arenas. This discussion will allow us to ask, more specifically, how a Hollywoodian rendition of hope disguises itself within the framework of independent film. Finally, by examining the coordinates of authenticity, male sexuality, and language in Schnabel's film, we can illuminate the ways in which less formal strategies of pedagogy, which include DVD commentary tracks and the Internet, transform the patrimony of Arenas in distinct international spheres.

Risking with Arenas

Schnabel might appreciate songs of loss, but he did not “rescue Arenas for the world,” as Philip Weiss (2001, 68) described it in his New York Times Magazine article “Julian Schnabel's Lust for Life.” The heroic dimensions of this narrative are captured in the heading on the article's first page: “Big.” The director's words on the commentary track of Before Night Falls uphold a “fable of intimacy” that, in turn, supports Weiss's assessment.¹ In decorating his project with undertones of warlike heroism, Schnabel gives in to a globalizing narrative that he conceives his individual craft to be stubborn enough to resist. Who comprises the world for which Schnabel believes he has rescued the Cuban writer, who died little more than a decade ago? Is it the film critics who, having admittedly never heard of Arenas before the film, dismiss him as less talented than painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, subject of Schnabel's 1996 film? Is it the New York artists whose creative tourism had somehow sidestepped Arenas? Or is it perhaps the multiplex cinemas that favor Hollywood, leaving screens for a handful of independent productions? Schnabel's world diminishes the contributions of those who for many years have read Arenas in Spanish as well as in French, German, Portuguese, and English translations. Rendered by Andrew Hurley, Dolores M. Koch, Alfred MacAdam, and Gordon Brotherston, and published by Viking/Penguin, Grove, and Harper and...