Having now seen Tomas Guiterrez's "Memories of Underdevelopment," I can now understand why it was this film that ushered in the new age of Cuban cinema. This 1968 film about a bourgeois intellectual alienated by the Cuban revolution is, by far, my favorite of all the movies we have screened in class. Its masterful mix of unusual documentary footage, still photographic images, and invasive filming methods are not only impressive from a visual standpoint, they catalog the complex contradictions of the protagonist's loyalty to the revolution and narrate the class divide in ways spoken narrative could not.
This is not to say that the spoken narrative, as told by Sergio, does not merrit equal praise. The stream of consciousness style manages to be cohesive while still maintaining an abstract quality. He begins his story by saying, "For years I wanted to find time to write or keep a diary. Have I anything to say?" The contradictory nature of this thought perfectly embodies Sergio as a character and immediately struck me as possessing some deeper meaning. Many of his thoughts have a conflicted nature about them. For example, he imangines baptizing Elena in a highly explicit way. He is visualizing a purifying ritual in a sexual manner, therefore corrupting it.
He lives in an untethered society, a monotonous "cardboard city" in which he struggles to identify with anything. He feels that he is developed man lost in an underdeveolped society. The idea of underdevelopment, as the title suggests, is clearly a driving force behind this film. Throughout the movie I found myself questioning to what extent this conflict of a developed individual vs. the underdeveloped population surrounding him was imagined. Was his isolation the result of his developed state or his inaction? The conclusion I came to by the end of the film was the latter of the two. It seemed to me that his inaction, the general apathy that the viewed the world around him was the reason for his departure from society. It is easy to see why he became intolerant of the world surrounding him. Povery was in abundance and the upper class was blissfully turning a blind eye. The infrastructure has become corrupt and is collapsing from within. However, despite Sergio's disapproval, he does nothing to change what he feels is unjust. In fact, he removes himself from that world completely, which, in its own way, is equally injust.
I agree that, in his own way, Sergio is "underdeveloped." What makes the film unusual is, however, that the "working class" characters are also "underdeveloped," though in a radically different way.
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