Cuban Revolutionary Cinema: Suite Habana
Thursday, April 19 at 7pm
Co-presented by the University of Pennsylvania's Cinema Studies Program, Center for Africana Studies, Departments of English and Hispanic Studies, and Latin American and Latina/o Studies.
dir. Fernando Pérez, Cuba, 2003, 35mm, 80 mins, color, Spanish w/ English subtitles
A cinematic homage to the city of Havana and its inhabitants, Suite Habana resists the reading of Cuba as a place that is stuck in time. In the course of one day and one night, the documentary shows figures in constant if also conflictive motion. A film filled with sounds and cuts of spoken words, Suite Habana relays no audible dialogue. What does a film of no audible dialogue visually suggest? The mechanics of life at its most basic overdetermine all talk, or, at least, the filmic desire to relay that talk to the viewer. But one wonders, is this because the language of the documentary's subjects does not matter? Or instead, does this emphasis on the rituals of survival, rather than on audible voice, drive the point that the state and the staid narrative of the Revolution find themselves on one side of an interstice, and the nation on the other. Not a silence, but an intense incongruity of needs, concessions, foregone demands, and delimited hopes are activated and actively ignored between them.
This event is free to attend. Please RSVP by clicking the EventBrite link above.
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