Seeing through ‘Cuban Eyes’

Here’s a challenge: Name a Cuban film. Can’t do it? Try naming a Latin American movie that doesn’t involve Gael Garcia Bernal, Guillermo del Toro or Pedro Almodovar. Cuban Eyes/Cubanize: Fifty Years of Cuban Cinema Since the Cuban Revolution

Frick Fine Arts Auditorium

Wednesdays and Thursdays at 6:30 p.m. through Dec. 9

Free Admission

Here’s a challenge: Name a Cuban film. Can’t do it? Try naming a Latin American movie that doesn’t involve Gael Garcia Bernal, Guillermo del Toro or Pedro Almodovar.

If you came up with an answer, odds are you either know the Spanish language or you’re a cinephile with omnivorous tastes, or both. For those who failed, it’s pretty safe to assume Cuban cinema is a great unknown to you.

Pitt’s Center for Latin American Studies, in conjunction with the Department of Hispanic Languages and Hillman Library’s Eduardo Lozano Latin American Collection, will work now through Dec. 9 to provide the public a taste of what it’s missing.

One of the highlights of series will come tonight. Director Luciano Labrobina will be in the Frick Fine Arts Building for a reception at 6 p.m. At 6:30 p.m., people can view his film “HavanYork” in the building’s auditorium. “HavanYork” explores the current Cuban hip-hop counterculture.

Martha Mantilla, head of the Lozano collection and coordinator of the “Cuban Eyes/Cubanize” series, said those who attend the series’ screenings will savor a vision of Cuba and Cuban-American relations that they will probably not find elsewhere.

“I think [the American people] know the Cuban revolution, because it was so big for American history. The cinema, not so much,” Mantilla said.

Mildred Lopez, a Pitt grad student and volunteer series organizer, echoed Mantilla’s sentiment, saying that “to watch these films is a huge opportunity to see other aesthetics, other ways of life.”

More specifically, the series will introduce attendees to Cuban cinema’s distinctive treatment of art and politics — especially politics. Through methods of indirection, Cuban directors have been able to bypass government-imposed strictures to create sophisticated works of what Pitt’s Center for Latin American Studies calls “socially responsible cinema.”

As an example, Mantilla cites Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s “Fresa y Chocolate,” which uses allegory to call attention to Castro’s homophobia. Without these creative strategies, filmmakers would be reduced to rehashing strictly government-doctrinal representations of gender, sexuality and race relations in Cuba — three issues that merit addressing.

The late Alea will be the series’ dedicatee because he was among the first to recognize the revolutionary potential of the film medium in the wake of Fidel Castro’s coup against Fulgencio Batista; Alea “developed the grammar of Cuban film,” Lopez said.

During his long career, he critiqued Castro’s legacy through deeply ambivalent movies that draw from traditions as diverse as Soviet montage, religious parable, surrealism and early American physical comedy. Too self-reflexive to be propagandistic, Alea’s films are accomplished works of subtle, politically committed direction.

“Cuban Eyes/Cubanize” will also host Mirta Ibarra, wife of the late Alea, at the screening of her husband’s film, where she will discuss his work and entertain any other questions concerning Cuban filmmaking. Ibarra will introduce “Titon: De La Habana a Guantanamera,” a documentary about Alea.

Mantilla stresses that the films in the series offer a wholly Cuban view of Cuba, suggesting that our distance from Cuban affairs in some sense compromises our ability to understand Cubans’ self image. For example, our Hollywood-influenced notion of how film production works corresponds poorly to the less glamorous conditions under which movies like Alea’s “Memories of Underdevelopment” or Gloria Rolando’s “Roots of My Heart” were made.

This is not to say that all the films in the series are low-budget art house fare — “Fresa y Chocolate” is an international co-production that grossed millions — but rather that the behind-the-scenes history of these works is as rich as the national history they dramatize.

Mantilla says that, despite the greater visibility of its commercial successes, Cuban cinema is primarily about “maximizing limited resources.”

Emphasizing this theme, “Cuban Eyes/Cubanize” will pay tribute to Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematographicos, a cinema collective co-founded by a number of directors featured in the series, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary.

“It was one of the leading institutions in Latin America because it started to do film as an art — film as an expression of inequality, a means of speaking about difference,” Lopez said.

Indeed, it is the sheer variety of ways in which political commitments find cinematic expression that interested persons can most look forward to in “Cuban Eyes/Cubanize.” . Mantilla and Lopez place a high valuation on the power of cinema to bring the political dimensions of Cuban culture into sharp and compelling focus.

As Lopez put it, “In cinema, filmmakers open a new space for conversation.”