Tag Archives: art

Imperfect Cinema & MACHETERO

For An Imperfect Cinema – Julio Espinosa & MACHETERO

“Art will not disappear into nothingness; it will disappear into everything.“
- Cuban Filmmaker Julio Garcia Espinosa

When i was nearing the end of production and beginning the edit on MACHETERO i came across this essay/declaration… For An Imperfect Cinema by Cuban filmmaker Julio Garcia Espinosa written in 1969. The essay/declaration calls for a new way of working with cinema. It calls for a paradigm shift in the production of filmmaking and calls on filmmakers to prioritize their ideas over their technical expertise. It also calls into question the reasons for making a film and the inherent conflict that arises with having the critic be a mediary to the audience. The essay had a huge impact on me in the post production phase of MACHETERO. Rather than trying to explain it, i reprinted the essay/declaration below… A warning to those looking for a quick read… Look elsewhere… If you take the time to read this you’ll get something invaluable out of it as i did and as reflected in my film MACHETERO…

MACHETERO opens in New York City for a limited one week theatrical run.

WED. JUNE 12TH – WED. JUNE 19TH
CLEMENTE SOTO VELEZ
KABAYITO’S THEATER (2ND FLOOR)
107 SUFFOLK STREET
NY NY 10002
(BTWN RIVINGTON & DELANCEY)

TICKETS $10
SCREENING TIMES • 1PM • 3PM • 5PM • 7PM • 9PM
F Train to Delancey Street or J , M , or Z Trains to Essex Street.
Walk to Suffolk Street, make a left.
Get Tickets Here http://machetero.bpt.me

FOR AN IMPERFECT CINEMA
by Julio Garcia Espinosa
Havana, Cuba - December 7th, 1969

Nowadays, perfect cinema — technically and artistically masterful — is almost always reactionary cinema. The major temptation facing Cuban cinema at this time — when it is achieving its objective of becoming a cinema of quality, one which is culturally meaningful within the revolutionary process — is precisely that of transforming itself into a perfect cinema.

The “boom” of Latin American cinema — with Brazil and Cuba in the forefront, according to the applause and approval of the European intelligentsia — is similar, in the present moment, to the one of which the Latin American novel had previously been the exclusive benefactor. Why do they applaud us? There is no doubt that a certain standard of quality has been reached. Doubtless, there is a certain political opportunism, a certain mutual instrumentality. But without doubt there is also something more. Why should we worry about their accolades? Isn’t the goal of public recognition a part of the rules of the artistic game? When it comes to artistic culture, isn’t European recognition equivalent to worldwide recognition? Doesn’t it serve art and our peoples as well when works produced by underdeveloped nations obtain such recognition?

Although it may seem curious, it is necessary to clarify the fact that this disquiet is not solely motivated by ethical concerns. As a matter of fact, the motivation is for the most part aesthetic, if indeed it is possible to draw such an arbitrary dividing line between both terms. When we ask ourselves why it is we who are the film directors and not the others, that is to say, the spectators, the question does not stem from an exclusively ethical concern. We know that we are filmmakers because we have been part of a minority which has had the time and the circumstances needed to develop, within itself, an artistic culture; and because the material resources of film technology are limited and therefore available to some, not to all. But what happens if the future holds the universalization of college level instruction, if economic and social development reduce the hours in the work day, if the evolution of film technology (there are already signs in evidence) makes it possible that this technology ceases being the privilege of a small few? What happens if the development of videotape solves the problem of inevitably limited laboratory capacity, if television systems with their potential for “projecting” independently of the central studio renders the ad infinitum construction of movie theaters suddenly superfluous?

What happens then is not only an act of social justice — the possibility for everyone to make films — but also a fact of extreme importance for artistic culture: the possibility of recovering, without any kinds of complexes or guilt feelings, the true meaning of artistic activity. Then we will be able to understand that art is one of mankind’s “impartial” or “uncommitted” activities [via actívidad desinteresada]. That art is not work, and that the artist is not in the strict sense a worker. The feeling that this is so, and the impossibility of translating it into practice, constitutes the agony and at the same time the “pharisee-ism” of all contemporary art.

In fact, the two tendencies exist: those who pretend to produce cinema as an “uncommitted” activity and those who pretend to justify it as a “committed” activity. Both find themselves in a blind alley.

Anyone engaged in an artistic activity asks himself at a given moment what the meaning is of whatever he is doing. The simple fact that this anxiety arises demonstrates that factors exist to motivate it — factors which, in turn, indicate that art does not develop freely. Those who persist in denying art a specific meaning feel the moral weight of their egoism. Those who, on the other hand, pretend to attribute one to it, buy off their bad conscience with social generosity. It makes no difference that the mediators (critics, theoreticians, etc.) try to justify certain cases. For the contemporary artist, the mediator is like an aspirin, a tranquilizer. As with a pill, the artist only temporarily gets rid of the headache. The sure thing, however, is that art, like a capricious little devil, continues to show its face sporadically in no matter which tendency.

No doubt it is easier to define art by what it is not than by what it is, assuming that one can talk about closed definitions not just for art but for any of life’s activities. The spirit of contradiction permeates everything now. Nothing and nobody lets himself be imprisoned in a picture frame, no matter how gilded. It is possible that art gives us a vision of society or of human nature and that, at the same time, it cannot be defined as a vision of society or of human nature. It is possible that a certain narcissism of consciousness — in recognizing in oneself a little historical, sociological, psychological, philosophical consciousness — is implicit in aesthetic pleasure, and at the same time that this sensation is not sufficient in itself to explain aesthetic pleasure.

Is it not much closer to the nature of art to conceive of it as having its own cognitive power? In other words, by saying that art is not the “illustration” of ideas, which can also be expressed through philosophy, sociology, psychology. Every artist’s desire to express the inexpressible is nothing more than the desire to express the vision of a theme in terms that are inexpressible through other than artistic means. Perhaps the cognitive power of art is like the power of a game for a child. Perhaps aesthetic pleasure lies in sensing the functionality (without a specific goal) of our intelligence and our own sensitivity. Art can stimulate, in general, the creative function of man. It can function as constant stimulus toward adopting an attitude of change with regard to life. But, as opposed to science, it enriches us in such a way that its results are not specific and cannot be applied to anything in particular. It is for this reason that we can call it an “impartial” or “uncommitted” activity, and can say that art is not strictly speaking a “job,” and that the artist is perhaps the least intellectual of all intellectuals.

Why then does the artist feel the need to justify himself as a “worker,” as an “intellectual,” as a “professional,” as a disciplined and organized man, like any other individual who performs a productive task? Why does he feel the need to exaggerate the importance of his activity? Why does he feel the need to have critics (mediators) to justify him, to defend him, to interpret him? Why does he speak proudly of “my critics”? Why does he find it necessary to make transcendental declarations, as if he were the true interpreter of society and of mankind? Why does he pretend to consider himself critic and conscience of society when (although these objectives can be implicit or even explicit in certain circumstances) in a truly revolutionary society all of us — that is to say, the people as a whole — should exercise those functions? And why, on the other hand, does the artist see himself forced to limit these objectives, these attitudes, these characteristics? Why does he at the same time set up these limitations as necessary to prevent his work from being transformed into a tract or a sociological essay? What is behind such pharisee-ism? Why protect ones self and seek recognition as a (revolutionary, it must be understood) political and scientific worker, yet not be prepared to run the same risks.

The problem is a complex one. Basically, it is neither a matter of opportunism nor cowardice. A true artist is prepared to run any risk as long as he is certain that his work will not cease to be an artistic expression. The only risk which he will not accept is that of endangering the artistic quality of his work.

There are also those who accept and defend the “impartial” function of art. These people claim to be more consistent. They opt for the bitterness of a closed world in the hope that tomorrow history will justify them. But the fact is that even today not everyone can enjoy the Mona Lisa. These people should have fewer contradictions; they should be less alienated. But in fact it is not so, even though such an attitude gives them the possibility of an alibi which is more productive on a personal level. In general they sense the sterility of their “purity” or they dedicate themselves to waging corrosive battles, but always on the defensive. They can even, in a reverse operation, reject their interest in finding tranquility, harmony, and a certain compensation in the work of art, expressing instead disequilibrium, chaos, and uncertainty, which also becomes the objective of “impartial” art.

What is it, then, which makes it impossible to practice art as an “impartial” activity? Why is this particular situation today more sensitive than ever? From the beginning of the world as we know it, that is to say, since the world was divided into classes, this situation has been latent. If it has grown sharper today it is precisely because today the possibility of transcending it is coming into view. Not through a prise de conscience, not through the expressed determination of any particular artist, but because reality itself has begun to reveal symptoms (not at all utopian) which indicate that “in the future there will no longer be painters, a rather men who, among other things, dedicate themselves to painting” (Marx).

There can be no “impartial” or “uncommitted” art, there can be no new and genuine qualitative jump in art, unless the concept and the reality of the “elite” is done away with once and for all. Three factors incline us toward optimism: the development of science, the social presence of the masses, and the revolutionary potential in the contemporary world. All three are without hierarchical order, all three are interrelated.

Why is science feared? Why are people afraid that art might be crushed under obvious productivity and utility of science? Why this inferiority complex? It is true that today we read a good essay with much greater pleasure than a novel. Why do we keep repeating then, horrified, that the world is becoming more mercenary, more utilitarian, more materialistic? Is it not really marvelous that the development of science, sociology, anthropology, and psychology is contributing to the “purification” of art? The appearance, thanks to science, of expressive media like photography and film made a greater “purification” of painting and theatre possible (without invalidating them artistically in the least). Doesn’t modern-day science render anachronistic so much “artistic” analysis of the human soul? Doesn’t contemporary science allow us to free ourselves from so many fraudulent films, concealed behind what has been called the world of poetry? With the advance of science, art has nothing to lose; on the contrary, it has a whole world to gain. What, then, are we so afraid of? Science strips art bare, and it seems that it is not easy to go naked through the streets.

The real tragedy of the contemporary artist lies in the impossibility of practicing art as a minority activity. It is said — and correctly — that art cannot exercise its attraction without the cooperation of the subject. But what can be done so that the audience stops being an object and transforms itself into the subject?

The development of science, of technology, and of the most advanced social theory and practice has made possible as never before the active presence in the masses in social life. In the realm of artistic life, there are more spectators now than at any other moment in history. This is the first stage in the abolition of “elites.” The task currently at hand is to find out if the conditions which will enable spectators to transform themselves into agents — not merely more active spectators, but genuine co-authors — are beginning to exist. The task at hand is to ask ourselves whether art is really an activity restricted to specialists, whether it is, through extra-human design, the option of a chosen few or a possibility for everyone.

How can we trust the perspectives and possibilities of art simply to the education of the people as a mass of spectators? Taste as defined by high culture, once it is “overdone,” is normally passed on to the rest of society as leftovers to be devoured and ruminated over by those who were not invited to the feast. This eternal spiral has today become a vicious circle as well. “Camp” and its attitude toward everything outdated is an attempt to rescue these leftovers and to lessen the distance between high culture and the people. But the difference lies in the fact that camp rescues it as an aesthetic value, while for the people the values involved continue to be ethical ones.

Must the revolutionary present and the revolutionary future inevitably have “its” artists and “its” intellectuals, just as the bourgeoisie had “theirs”? Surely the truly revolutionary position, from now on, is to contribute to overcoming these elitist concepts and practices, rather than pursuing ad eternum the “artistic quality” of the work. The new outlook for artistic culture is no longer that everyone must share the taste of a few, but that all can be creators of that culture. Art has always been a universal necessity; what it has not been is an option for all under equal conditions. Parallel to refined art, popular art has had a simultaneous but independent existence.

Popular art has absolutely nothing to do with what is called mass art. Popular art needs and consequently tends to develop the personal, individual taste of a people. On the other hand, mass art (or art for the masses) requires the people to have no taste. It will only be genuine when it is actually the masses who create it, since at present it is art produced by a few for the masses. Grotowski says that today’s theater should be a minority art form because mass art can be achieved through cinema. This is not true. Perhaps film is the most elitist of all the contemporary arts. Film today, no matter where, is made by a small minority for the masses. Perhaps film will be the art form which takes the longest time to reach the hands of the masses, when we understand mass art as popular art, art created by the masses. Currently, as Hauser points out, mass art is art produced by a minority in order to satisfy the demand of a public reduced to the sole role of spectator and consumer.

Popular art has always been created by the least learned sector of society, yet this “uncultured” sector has managed to conserve profoundly cultured characteristics of art. One of the most important of these is the fact that the creators are at the same time the spectators and vice versa. Between those who produce and those who consume, no sharp line of demarcation exists. Cultivated art, in our era, has also attained this situation. Modern art’s great dose of freedom is nothing more than the conquest of a new interlocutor: the artist himself. For this reason, it is useless to strain oneself struggling for the substitution of the masses as a new and potential spectator for the bourgeoisie. This situation, maintained by popular art, adopted by cultivated art, must be dissolved and become the heritage of all. This and no other must be the great objective of an authentically revolutionary artistic culture.

Popular art preserved another even more important cultural characteristic: It is carried out as but another life activity. With cultivated art, the reverse is true. It is pursued as a unique, specific activity, as a personal achievement. This is the cruel price of having had to maintain artistic activity at the expense of its inexistence among the people. Hasn’t the attempt to realize himself on the edge of society proved to be too painful a restriction for the artist and for art itself? To posit art as a sect, as a society within society, as the promised land where we can fleetingly fulfill ourselves for a brief instant — doesn’t this create the illusion that self-realization on the level of consciousness also implies self-realization on the level of existence? Isn’t this patently obvious in contemporary circumstances? The essential lesson of popular art is that it is carried out as a life activity: man must not fulfill himself as an artist but fully; the artist must not seek fulfillment as an artist but as a human being.

In the modern world, principally in developed capitalist nations and in those countries engaged in a revolutionary process, there are alarming symptoms, obvious signs of an imminent change. The possibilities for overcoming this traditional disassociation are beginning to arise. These symptoms are not a product of consciousness but of reality itself. A large part of the struggle waged in modern art has been, in fact, to “democratize” art. What other goal is entailed in combating the limitations of taste, museum art, and the demarcation lines between the creator and the public? What is considered beauty today, and where is it found? On Campbell’s soup labels, in a garbage can lid, in gadgets? Even the eternal value of a work of art is today being questioned. What else could be the meaning of those sculptures, seen in recent exhibitions, made of blocks of ice, which melt away while the public looks at them? Isn’t this — more than the disappearance of art — the attempt to make the spectator disappear? Don’t those painters who entrust a portion of the execution of their work to just anyone, rather than to their disciples, exhibit an eagerness to jump over the barricade of “elitist” art? Doesn’t the same attitude exist among composers whose works allow their performers ample liberty?

There’s a widespread tendency in modern art to make the spectator participate ever more fully. If he participates to a greater and greater degree, where will the process end up? Isn’t the logical outcome — or shouldn’t it in fact be — that he will cease being a spectator altogether? This simultaneously represents a tendency toward collectivism and toward individualism. Once we admit the possibility of universal participation, aren’t we also admitting the individual creative potential which we all have? Isn’t Grotowski mistaken when he asserts that today’s theater should be dedicated to an elite? Isn’t it rather the reverse: that the theater of poverty in fact requires the highest refinement? It is the theater which has no need for secondary values: costumes, scenery, make-up, even a stage. Isn’t this an indication that material conditions are reduced to a minimum and that, from this point of view, the possibility of making theater is within everyone’s reach? And doesn’t the fact that the theater has an increasingly smaller public mean that conditions are beginning to ripen for it to transform itself into a true mass theater? Perhaps the tragedy of the theater lies in the fact that it has reached this point in its evolution too soon.

When we look toward Europe, we wring our hands. We see that the old culture is totally incapable of providing answers to the problems of art. The fact is that Europe can no longer respond in a traditional manner but at the same time finds it equally difficult to respond in a manner that is radically new. Europe is no longer capable of giving the world a new “ism”; neither is it in a position to put an end to “isms” once and for all. So we think that our moment has come, that at last the underdeveloped can deck themselves out as “men of culture.” Here lies our greatest danger and our greatest temptation. This accounts for the opportunism of some on our continent. For, given our technical and scientific backwardness and given the scanty presence of the masses in social life, our continent is still capable of responding in a traditional manner, by reaffirming the concept and the practice of elite art. Perhaps in this case the real motive for the European applause which some of our literary and cinematic works have won is none other than a certain nostalgia which we inspire. After all, the European has no other Europe to which to turn.

The third factor, the revolution — which is the most important of all — is perhaps present in our country as nowhere else. This is our only true chance. The revolution is what provides all other alternatives, what can supply an entirely new response, what enables us to do away once and for all with elitist concepts and practices in art. The revolution and the ongoing revolutionary process are the only factors which make the total and free presence of the masses possible. And this will mean the definitive disappearance of the rigid division of labor and of a society divided into sectors and classes. For us, then, the revolution is the highest expression of culture because it will abolish artistic culture as a fragmentary human activity.

Current responses to this inevitable future, this uncontestable prospect, can be as numerous as the countries on our continent. Because characteristics and achieved levels are not the same, each art form, every artistic manifestation, must find its own expression. What should be the response of the Cuban cinema in particular? Paradoxically, we think it will be a new poetics, not a new cultural policy. A poetics whose true goal will be to commit suicide, to disappear as such. We know, however, that in fact other artistic conceptions will continue to exist among us, just like small rural landholdings and religion continue to exist.

On the level of cultural policy we are faced with a serious problem: the film school. Is it right to continue developing a handful of film specialists? It seems inevitable for the present, but what will be the eternal quarry that we continue to mine: the students in Arts and Letters at the University? But shouldn’t we begin to consider right now whether that school should have a limited lifespan? What end do we pursue there — a reserve corps of future artists? Or a specialized future public? We should be asking ourselves whether we can do something now to abolish this division between artistic and scientific culture.

What constitutes in fact the true prestige of artistic culture, and how did it come about that this prestige was allowed to appropriate the whole concept of culture? Perhaps it is based on the enormous prestige which the spirit has always enjoyed at the expense of the body. Hasn’t artistic culture always been seen as the spiritual part of society while scientific culture is seen as its body? The traditional rejection of the body, of material life, is due in part to the concept that things of the spirit are more elevated, more elegant, serious and profound. Can’t we, here and now, begin doing something to put an end to this artificial distinction? We should understand from here on in that the body and the things of the body are also elegant, and that material life is beautiful as well. We should understand that, in fact, the soul is contained in the body just as the spirit is contained in material life, just as — to speak in strictly artistic terms — the essence is contained in the surface and the content in the form.

We should endeavor to see that our future students, and therefore our future filmmakers, will themselves be scientists, sociologists, physicians, economists, agricultural engineers, etc., without of course ceasing to be filmmakers. And, at the same time, we should have the same aim for our most outstanding workers, the workers who achieve the best results in terms of political and intellectual formation. We cannot develop the taste of the masses as long as the division between the two cultures continues to exist, nor as long as the masses are not the real masters of the means of artistic production. The revolution has liberated us as an artistic sector. It is only logical that we contribute to the liberation of the private means of artistic production.

A new poetics for the cinema will, above all, be a “partisan” and “committed” poetics, a “committed” art, a consciously and resolutely “committed” cinema — that is to say, an “imperfect” cinema. An “impartial” or “uncommitted” (cinema), as a complete aesthetic activity, will only be possible when it is the people who make art. But today art must assimilate its quota of work so that work can assimilate its quota of art.

The motto of this imperfect cinema (which there’s no need to invent, since it already exists) is, as Glauber Rocha would say, “We are not interested in the problems of neurosis; we are interested in the problems of lucidity.” Art no longer has use for the neurotic and his problems, although the neurotic continues to need art — as a concerned object, a relief, an alibi or, as Freud would say, as a sublimation of his problems. A neurotic can produce art, but art has no reason to produce neurotics. It has been traditionally believed that the concerns of art were not to be found in the sane but in the sick, not in the normal but in the abnormal, not in those who struggle but in those who weep, not in lucid minds but in neurotic ones. Imperfect cinema is changing this way of seeing the question. We have more faith in the sick man than in the healthy one because his truth is purged by suffering. However, there is no need for suffering to be synonymous with artistic elegance. There is still a trend in modern art — undoubtedly related to Christian tradition — which identifies seriousness with suffering. The specter of Marguerite Gautier still haunts artistic endeavor in our day. Only in the person who suffers do we perceive elegance, gravity, even beauty; only in him do we recognize the possibility of authenticity, seriousness, sincerity. Imperfect cinema must put an end to this tradition.

Imperfect cinema finds a new audience in those who struggle, and it finds its themes in their problems. For imperfect cinema, “lucid” people are the ones who think and feel and exist in a world which they can change. In spite of all the problems and difficulties, they are convinced that they can transform it in a revolutionary way. Imperfect cinema therefore has no need to struggle to create an “audience.” On the contrary, it can be said that at present a greater audience exists for this kind of cinema than there are filmmakers able to supply that audience.

What does this new interlocutor require of us — an art full of moral examples worthy of imitation? No. Man is more of a creator than an innovator. Besides, he should be the one to give us moral examples. He might ask us for a fuller, more complete work, aimed — in a separate or coordinated fashion — at the intelligence, the emotions, the powers of intuition.

Should he ask us for a cinema of denunciation? Yes and no. No, if the denunciation is directed toward the others, if it is conceived that those who are not struggling might sympathize with us and increase their awareness. Yes, if the denunciation acts as information, as testimony, as another combat weapon for those engaged in the struggle. Why denounce imperialism to show one more time that it is evil? What’s the use if those now fighting are fighting primarily against imperialism? We can denounce imperialism but should strive to do it as a way of proposing concrete battles. A film which denounces those who struggle against the evil deeds of an official who must be executed would be an excellent example of this kind of film-denunciation.

We maintain that imperfect cinema must above all show the process which generates the problems. It is thus the opposite of a cinema principally dedicated to celebrating results, the opposite of a self- sufficient and contemplative cinema, the opposite of a cinema which “beautifully illustrates” ideas or concepts which we already possess. (The narcissistic posture has nothing to do with those who struggle.) To show a process is not exactly equivalent to analyzing it. To analyze, in the traditional sense of the word, always implies a closed prior judgment. To analyze a problem is to show the problem (not the process) permeated with judgments which the analysis itself generates a priori. To analyze is to block off from the outset any possibility for analysis on the part of the interlocutor.

To show the process of a problem, on the other hand, is to submit it to judgment without pronouncing the verdict. There is a style of news reporting which puts more emphasis on the commentary than on the news item. There is another kind of reporting which presents the news and evaluates it through the arrangement of the item on the page or by its position in the paper. To show the process of a problem is like showing the very development of the news item, without commentary; it is like showing the multi-faceted evolution of a piece of information without evaluating it. The subjective element is the selection of the problem, conditioned as it is by the interest of the audience — which is the subject. The objective element is showing the process which is the object.

Imperfect cinema is an answer, but it is also a question which will discover its own answers in the course of its development. Imperfect cinema can make use of the documentary or the fictional mode, or both. It can use whatever genre, or all genres. It can use cinema as a pluralistic art form or as a specialized form of expression. These questions are indifferent to it, since they do not represent its real alternatives or problems, and much less its real goals. These are not thebattles or polemics it is interested in sparking.

Imperfect cinema can also be enjoyable, both for the maker and for its new audience. Those who struggle do not struggle on the edge of life, but in the midst of it. Struggle is life and vice versa. One does not stuggle in order to live “later on.” The struggle requires organization — the organization of life. Even in the most extreme phase, that of total and direct war, the organization of life is equivalent to the organization of the struggle. And in life, as in the struggle, there is everything, including enjoyment. Imperfect cinema can enjoy itself despite everything that conspires to negate enjoyment.

Imperfect cinema rejects exhibitionism in both (literal) senses of the word, the narcissistic and the commercial (getting shown in established theaters and circuits). It should be remembered that the death of the star-system turned out to be a positive thing for art. There is no reason to doubt that the disappearance of the director as star will fail to offer similar prospects. Imperfect cinema must start work now, in cooperation with sociologists, revolutionary leaders, psychologists, economists, etc. Furthermore, imperfect cinema rejects whatever services criticism has to offer and considers the function of mediators and intermediaries anachronistic.

Imperfect cinema is no longer interested in quality or technique. It can be created equally well with a Mitchell or with an 8mm camera, in a studio or in a guerrilla camp in the middle of the jungle. Imperfect cinema is no longer interested in predetermined taste, and much less in “good taste.” It is not quality which it seeks in an artist’s work. The only thing it is interested in is how an artist responds to the following question: What are you doing in order to overcome the barrier of the “cultured” elite audience which up to now has conditioned the form of your work?

The filmmaker who subscribes to this new poetics should not have personal self-realization as his object. From now on he should also have another activity. He should place his role as revolutionary or aspiring revolutionary above all else. In a word, he should try to fulfill himself as a man and not just as an artist, that its essential goal as a new poetics is to disappear. It is no longer a matter of replacing one school with another, one “ism” with another, poetry with anti-poetry, but of truly letting a thousand different flowers bloom. The future lies with folk art. But let us no longer display folk art with demagogic pride, with a celebrative air. Let us exhibit it instead as a cruel denunciation, as a painful testimony to the level at which the peoples of the world have been forced to limit their artistic creativity. The future, without doubt, will be with folk art, but then there will be no need to call it that, because nobody and nothing will any longer be able to again paralyze the creative spirit of the people.

Art will not disappear into nothingness; it will disappear into everything.

MACHETERO Poster by vagabond ©

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-11V

Terrorist Semantics

2 Replies

Terrorist Semantics by vagabond ©

“In our age there is no such thing as ‘keeping out of politics.’ All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”
- George Orwell

With the reported discovery, attempted capture and assassination of Osama Bin Laden, the attacks on the US consulate in Benghazi, Libya and the recent terrorist attacks in Boston, questions left lingering in the shadows since the terrorist attacks on the US on 9/11/2001 have once again stepped into the light. Questions that have not been answered and that haunt us not on a conscious level, but on a subconscious level. Questions like what lead to the US 9/11/2001 attacks. The exploration of those questions leads to other questions about American foreign policy and hegemony. Those questions lead to who and how are the terms “terrorism” and “terrorists” reshaped and to whose benefit. Those questions open up a whole new round of examination and each level of inquiry seems to only lead us further down the rabbit hole.

i was living in Harlem when the attacks took place. i watched the television news cameras trained to the aftermath of the first plane hitting the World Trade Center and thought it to be a horrible accident. When the second plane hit it became clear that this was an attack of epic proportions. Whoever planned this knew that with the first plane hitting there would speculation as to what happened, judgement would be withheld on whether or not it was an attack or an accident. In the process of trying to figure out what happened, every available camera would be trained on the World Trade Center and when that second plane hit all the hope of a horrible accident would be drained from us and there would be no doubt that this was an attack.

The second plane hitting the World Trade Center just a few minutes after the first would change the world. In the moment that second plane hit, the US would experience the fear, vulnerability and insecurity that is common place around the world due in large part to US foreign policy. This is a lesson that the US never heeded when Malcolm X commented on the assassination of President Kennedy with his famous “chickens coming home to roost.” The same can be said of the terrorist attacks of 9/11/2001. The terrorism sponsored by the US to achieve its own dominance in the world was coming back to haunt us. What kind of terrorism? The Iran-Contra Affair that lead to the crack cocaine epidemic in the US. The overthrow of governments who put their own interests ahead of US interests. The backing of dictators who put the interests of the US ahead of the interests of their own country. The use of torture in Afghanistan, Iraq, Guantanamo and other CIA black sites around the world. The karma laundry list goes on and on…

In the years following those attacks i struggled with the questions of defining “terrorism” and “terrorists” and how those terms are defined and by who and to what benefit. This is the question that you chase down into the rabbit hole. It was something that would not leave me alone because these were terms that i was already wrestling with in terms of the way US political prisoners and prisoners of war (PP & POW) are treated. People like Oscar Lopez Rivera, Russell Maroon Shoatz, Leonard Peltier, Sundiata Acoli, Herman Bell, Marshall Eddie Conway, David Gilbert, and many others who had decided that they couldn’t stand by and allow US hegemony to exercise its will over Puerto Rican, African-American and Native American Peoples. They stood up in defiance to US empire within its own “borders” and in doing so their actions were often labeled as “terrorism” and they were often labeled as “terrorists”. With these recent terrorist attacks on the US the definition of these words “terrorism” and “terrorist” changed.

Within the zeitgeist of 1970 – 1980 the terms “terrorism” and “terrorist” didn’t hold the same kind of weight that it does in a post US 9/11 world. The US government and corporate media had refined and redefined “terrorism” and “terrorist” to now encompass anyone who disagreed with the American empire. The US was drawing a line in the sand and it couldn’t be more clear than when President Bush declared “You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists”. The US government and the corporate media had now found a way to compress all dissent to American Empire by expanding the definition of “terrorism” and “terrorists”. As an added bonus this new refinement of the definition of “terrorism” and “terrorist” now seemed to remove any doubt that the actions that US PP & POW’s were accused of, convicted of and were serving incredibly long sentences for, were anything but “terrorist” actions and that they couldn’t be anything but “terrorists”.

In the days, weeks, months and years following those attacks the supporters of members of the Black Liberation Army, Weather Underground, American Indian Movement and Puerto Rican separatists groups languishing for three and four decades in the US now had to fight to keep them from being categorized in this new expanded definition of “terrorism” and terrorist”. We were saddled with the responsibility of having to explain that they were not terrorist’s, because their actions were not acts of terrorism. They were freedom fighters who fought against US oppression.

This issue of “grandfathering” in US PP & POW’s was one that led me to the writing of my film MACHETERO. It was this expansion of the terminology of “terrorism” and “terrorist” in the post US 9/11 attacks that inspired me to make a clear delineation that would exclude US PP & POW’s from the new “terrorism” and the new “terrorist” definition. The film takes a stand against including US PP & POW’s within this all-encompassing and ever-expanding terminology. In trying to get people to think about how and who defines these terms i needed to stay away from the US 9/11 attacks because they were so polarizing so i used a different approach to begin a dialogue that would get people to think outside of the parameters that were being defined within this post US 9/11 zeitgeist.

The issue of US imperialism in Puerto Rico is an issue that unfortunately most people don’t know about. Oddly enough it was the fact that many people didn’t know about the colonial relationship that the US has with Puerto Rico that allowed me to bring up the issues of how and who defines “terrorism” and “terrorist” in a kind of hermetically sealed bubble that could possibly circumvent post US 9/11 polarization. Within that hermetically sealed bubble these issues could spark a potential dialogue that could safely allow that to re-think the issues of 9/11/2001 while at the same time educating them on the US colonial relationship with Puerto Rico.

Now that the issues of terrorism and terrorist are on the minds of many once again i invite you to explore some of these issues through the prism of my film MACHETERO…

MACHETERO Poster by vagabond ©

MACHETERO opens in New York City for a one week limited theatrical run.

WED. JUNE 12TH – TUES JUNE 19TH
CLEMENTE SOTO VELEZ
KABAYITO’S THEATER (2ND FLOOR)
107 SUFFOLK STREET
NY NY 10002
(BTWN RIVINGTON & DELANCEY)

TICKETS $10 http://machetero.bpt.me
SCREENING TIMES • 1PM • 3PM • 5PM • 7PM • 9PM
F Train to Delancey Street or J , M , or Z Trains to Essex Street.
Walk to Suffolk Street, make a left.

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-13T

John Penley Anarcho Yippie Pt. 1

5 Replies

JOHN PENLEY ANARCHO YIPPIE by vagabond ©

John Penley is an Anarcho Yippie is a new web series that i’m launching today with a new episode coming each week for the next few weeks. The story of how John became an Anarcho Yippie and what an Anarcho Yippie is, has everything to do with NYC in the 1980′s… John first moved to the Lower East Side of New York City in 1985 and became a freelance photojournalist. His photos were featured in all the daily newspapers like the The Daily News, The NY Post, The New York Times and many other publications. His archive of some 30,000 images was recently acquired by the Tamimnet Library at NYU.

At the end of the summer of 2011 John became homeless. Since then he’s been a part of various Occupy movements in New York, Washington DC, and Asheville NC. In March of 2013 John returned to New York to work on his archive in the library. In true Anarcho Yippie fashion John is also holding a protest against NYU by sleeping on the sidewalk in front of the library that houses his archive to bring attention to NYU’s contribution to the rapid gentrification to the Lower East Side and it’s planned expansion into Greenwich Village. In this episode John talks about his days as a photojournalist and how he came to NYC after serving a federal prison term for jumping bail to join the Yippies on Bleecker Street.

Tune in next week for Part 2 of John Penley Anarcho Yippie…

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-12o

MACHETERO And An Aesthetic Of Hunger

4 Replies

Freedom Is the Aesthetic We Hunger For by vagabond ©

“Here lies the starting point for the colonizer to understand the existence of the colonized. Only by becoming conscious of the colonized’s one possibility, violence, that’s the only way the colonizer can understand, to his horror, the power of the culture that he exploits. As long as he does not rise up, the colonized is a slave: there had to be a first dead policeman for the French to see an Algerian.“ – Glauber Rocha

Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha was a leading proponent of Cinema Novo, a Brazilian film movement that began in 1960 that called for a cinematic reflection of the realities that people in Brazil were struggling with. Cinema Novo came about as a kind of cultural response to the Cuban revolution and the rise of left leaning politics in Brazil and throughout Latin America against imperialism. Along with other radical Brazilian filmmakers of the time like Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Ruy Guerra, Carlos Diegues and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade, Cinema Novo was a call to cultural arms that lead to other anti-imperialist Latin American film theories. In 1965 Rocha wrote an essay entitled An Aesthetic Of Hunger that seemed to capture the exact aims and desires of Cinema Novo.

With MACHETERO‘s obvious anti-imperialist message there are things here that resonate with me as a filmmaker and with MACHETERO as a film. There are things here that i can claim as a filmmaker who is trying “to put his films and his profession at the service of the crucial causes of his times“. Making MACHETERO was a way for me to jump-start the conversation about US imperialism in Puerto Rico and the historic struggle of Puerto Ricans to combat that imperialism.

Having screened MACHETERO in universities, cultural centers, living rooms, basements, libraries, squats, alternative spaces as well as theaters and in festivals around the world, i’ve found people who would never have heard of the Puerto Rican independence struggle if it had not been for MACHETERO. For the most part, people who have seen the film but have never been aware of that struggle are now seeking ways to become acquainted with the hunger that Glauber Rocha so aptly describes below. And they became interested because MACHETERO exists…

i say this not for any self-congratulatory effect but because we need more art that reflects our history, our struggle, our reality… i say this for inspiration… because with all the trials and tribulations of making MACHETERO this kind of work can succeed on a level that is outside of accolades and awards, praise and adulation… i say this because the reward of being able to be understood is a universal one and the ability to understand is also universal… i say this because there are others who have tried to do these things and succeeded and now it’s time for us to build on that foundation as artists, as thinkers, as people…

i’m self releasing MACHETERO theatrically for one week in NYC • June 12 – 19
Clemente Soto Velez Kabayito’s Theater
107 Suffolk Street NY NY 10002

Glauber Rocha

Aesthetic of Hunger
by Glauber Rocha

Leaving aside the type of informative introduction which characterizes discussions about Latin America, I prefer to situate the relation between our culture and civilized culture in term less reduced than those which characterize the European observer’s analysis. While Latin America bemoans its general wretchedness, the foreign interlocutor cultivates a taste for this wretchedness not as a tragic symptom, but rather as simple formal information for his field of interest. Neither does the Latin convey his true wretchedness to civilized man nor does civilized man truly comprehend the Latin’s wretchedness.

Here lies, basically, the situation of the arts in Brazil before the world: until now, only lies drawn up as truths (formal exoticisms that vulgarize social problems) have been conveyed in quantity, producing a series of errors not limited to Art, but that contaminate, above all, the terrain of politics. The European observer is only interested in artistic creation from the underdeveloped world to the extent that it satisfies his nostalgia for primitivism; and this primitivism is hybrid, dressed up as late legacies from the civilized world, misunderstood because imposed by colonialist conditioning.

Latin America is still a colony, and the only thing that differentiates yesterday’s colonialism from today’s is the colonizer’s more perfect form as well as the subtle forms of those who assemble future blows on us. The international problem of Latin America is still a case of a change of colonizers, given that any possible liberation will be a function of a new dependence for a long time to come. This economic and political conditioning led us to philosophical emaciation and impotence which, sometimes consciously and sometimes not, produce first sterility and then hysteria.

Sterility: this is seen in the abundant work in our art where the author castrates himself through formal exercises that are still not in full possession of their forms, and in the frustrated dream of universalization. Artists who have not awoken from the adolescent aesthetic ideal. So, especially in San Pablo, we see hundreds of dusty and forgotten paintings in galleries, books of stories and poems, plays and films that have even caused bankruptcy. The official world in charge of the arts generated carnivalesque exhibitions in festivals and biennials, contrived conferences, easy formulas for success, cocktail parties around the world, in addition to monstrous cultural officials, academics of Arts and Letters, juries for painting and cultural delegations that travel abroad. University monstrosities: the famous literary magazines, the contests, the titles.

Hysteria: a more complex chapter. Social indignation leads to impetuous discourses. The first symptom is the anarchism that characterizes young poetry and painting, even today. The second is the political reaction of art that is bad politics due to an excessive sectarianism. The third and most efficacious is the search for a systematization of the people’s art. But what’s misunderstood in all of this is that our possible balance is not the result of an organic body, but rather a titanic and self-consuming force trying to overcome impotence. We are frustrated, confined to only the lower limits of the colonizer as a result of that use of forceps. And if he understands us, it is not, then, due to the clarity of our dialogue but rather the humanitarianism that our information inspires.

Once again, a language of tears and mute suffering is understood through paternalism. Latin hunger is not, then, just an alarming symptom: it is the very nerve of its own society. Here lies the tragic originality of Cinema Novo for the world cinema: our originality is our hunger, and our greatest woe is that, because it is felt, this hunger is not understood.

From Amanda to Vidas Secas, Cinema Novo narrated, described, poetized, discoursed, analyzed. It aroused the themes of hunger: characters eating dirt, characters eating roots, characters stealing to eat, characters killing to eat, characters fleeing to eat, dirty ugly and starving characters living in dirty ugly dark houses. It was this gallery of the hungry that identified Cinema Novo with the miserabilism so condemned by the government, by criticism at the service of anti-national interests, by producers and by the audience, who can not bear images of its own wretchedness

Cinema Novo’s miserabilism is opposed to the digestive cinema championed by the oldest critic from Guanabara, Carlos Lacerda: films about rich people, in their houses, in luxury cars, happy funny fast films without messages, films with purely industrial aims. These are the films that stand in contrast to hunger, as if in luxury apartments, filmmakers could hide the moral wretchedness of a nebulous and fragile bourgeoisie, or as if the technical materials and sets themselves could hide the hunger that is taking root in this very uncivilization Above all, as if through this tropical landscape apparatus, the mental indigence of the filmmakers who make, this type of film could be dissimulated. What made Cinema Novo into an internationally important phenomenon was the degree of its commitment to the truth; once written by the literature of the thirties, this very miserabilism was now photographed by the cinema of the sixties. If it was once written as a social condemnation, today it is discussed as a political problem.

The stages of miserabilism in our cinema evolve according to an internal logic. Thus, as Gustavo Dhal observes, these stages go from the phenomenological (Porto das Caixas), to the social (Vidas Secas), to the political (Deus e o Diabo), to the poetic (Ganga Zumba), to the demagogic (Cinco Vezes Favela), to the experimetal (Sol sobre a Lama), to the documental (Os Mendigos). These are experiences in various senses; some them frustrated, others fruitful, but, after three years, all of them compose a historical scene that, not by chance, will characterize the Jânio-Jango period: the period the great crises of conscience and of rebellion, of uprising and revolution, which culminated in the April coup. And it was after April that the thesis of digestive cinema became weightier in Brazil, systematically threatening Cinema Novo.

We understand this hunger that the European and most Brazilians do not understand. For the Europeans it is a strange tropical surrealism. For the Brazilians, it is a national disgrace. The Brazilian does not eat, but he is ashamed to say so. And, mostly, he does not understand where this hunger comes from.

We, makers of those ugly and sad films, those shouted and desperate films where reason does not always speak in the loudest voice, we know that hunger will not be cured by the cabinet’s formulations and that Technicolor patches do not hide, but only worsen, hunger’s tumors. Thus, only a culture of hunger, drenched in its own structures, can take a qualitative leap. And the noblest cultural manifestation of hunger is violence. The act of begging, a tradition set up along with redeeming; colonialist pity, has been one of the causes of political mystification and of a haughty cultural lie: official tales of hunger ask the colonizing countries for money in order to build schools without creating teachers, to build houses without giving work, to teach a trade without teaching the alphabet. Diplomats solicit, economists solicit, politicians solicits. On the international front, Cinema Novo did not solicit anything, but rather imposed the violence of its images and sounds at twenty-two international festivals.

For Cinema Novo, the precise behavior of the hungry is violence, and his violence is not primitivism. Is Corisco primitive? Is the woman in Porto das Caixas primitive? Cinema Novo: more than primitive and revolutionary, it is an aesthetic of violence. Here lies the starting point for the colonizer to understand the existence of the colonized. Only by becoming conscious of the colonized’s one possibility, violence, that’s the only way the colonizer can understand, to his horror, the power of the culture that he exploits. As long as he does not rise up, the colonized is a slave: there had to be a first dead policeman for the French to see an Algerian.

Despite it all, that violence is not part of the fear, as it is not bound to the old colonizing humanism. The love that this violence contains is as brutal as the violence itself, because it is not a complacent or contemplative love, but rather a love of action and transformation.

That’s why Cinema Novo did not make any melodrama. The women in Cinema Novo were always searching for a possible opening for love. Given the impossibility of loving when hungry, the prototypical woman, the one from Porto das Caixas, kills her husband. Dandara from Ganga Zumba flees the war for a romantic love. Sinh Vitoria dreams of new times for her children. Rosa turns to crime to save Manuel and love him in other circumstances. The priest’s girl needs to tear her habit to get a new man. The woman in O Desafio breaks up with her lover because she prefers to be faithful to her bourgeois husband. The woman in São Paulo S.A. wants the security of a petty bourgeois love and so she tries to reduce her husband’s life to a mediocre system.

The time when Cinema Novo had to explain itself to exist has passed. Cinema Novo needs to be processed to be explained, and this is possible to the degree that our reality is more intelligible in light of thoughts that are not weakened and delirious from hunger. Cinema Novo can not be effectively developed while at the margin of the economic and cultural process of the Latin American continent, especially because Cinema Novo is a phenomenon of colonized peoples and not a privileged Brazilian entity. Wherever there is a filmmaker willing to film the truth and to confront the hypocritical police model of censorship, Cinema Novo will have a living cell. Wherever there is a filmmaker willing to confront commercialism, exploitation, pornography, technicalism, Cinema Novo will have a living cell. Wherever there is a filmmaker of any age or origin ready to put his films and his profession at the service of the crucial causes of his times, Cinema Novo will have a living cell. That is the definition, and because of it, Cinema Novo is at the margin of the film industry because the film industry is committed to lies and exploitation. Cinema Novo’s integration into the economy and the film industry depends on freedom in Latin America. Cinema Novo swears on its name, on the name of its closest and its most distant members, on the name of its crudest and its most talented, on the name of its weakest and its strongest for that freedom. It is a moral question that is reflected in the films at the moment of filming a man or a house, in the detailed observation, in this philosophy: it is not a film, but rather an evolving set of films that will give the public, finally, consciousness of its own existence.

This is why we do not have more in common with cinema from around the world. Cinema Novo is a project carried out in the politics of hunger and, for that very reason, it suffers all of the resulting weaknesses in its existence.

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-10c

MACHETERO Recruitment

1 Reply

Machetero Recruitment Poster by vagabond ©

The NYC theatrical release of my film MACHETERO is a DIY effort but DIY is a kind of misnomer. Yes i’m doing it myself… but no one does anything by themselves… The DIY aesthetic is a non-corporate one, but not a non-community one… So i’m asking for help in promoting MACHETERO’s upcoming screening in NYC on Facebook and on Twitter… MACHETERO opens the Wednesday after the 116th Street festival and the Puerto Rican day parade in NYC, two of the biggest Puerto Rican events in NYC and perhaps in the diaspora… The one week run begins June 12 and closes June 19th…

There are three things that can help right now…

ONE
i’ve created a Facebook Event Page and i need folks who are on Facebook to commit to attending the screening by clicking on the Join button… As comedian Charlie Barnett used to say before he performed in Washington Square Park in NYC… “Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.”

TWO
Once you say you are going, invite your friends in the NYC area and beyond to go… This may take a few days as you have to click on each friend individually so if you could do 25 or 50 or 100 whatever number you’re comfortable with then that would be a big help… (Doing a hundred at a time takes about 3 minutes)

The link to the Facebook Event page is below…
https://www.facebook.com/events/595866190441186/

THREE
For those of you on Twitter if you could send out an update for the Facebook Event Page with the hash tag #MACHETERO that would help spread the word on the screening…

i don’t see this film being just about my success… i’m already a success… i made the film i wanted to make on my own terms and in my own way… i don’t need anything beyond that… But i do see this film being a part of the struggle to free Puerto Rico from US Colonialism… And that’s a much bigger goal than just packing a theater…

If MACHETERO generates a lot of buzz then people will start to dialogue about colonialism in Puerto Rico and maybe, just maybe, this film could play a very small part in moving us that much closer to a free Puerto Rico…

If you have any questions or concerns or want to know what else you can do to help email me at machetero.movie at gmail.com Much thanx in advance…

- vagabond
Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-ZC

MACHETERO History Lesson

3 Replies

Dylcia Pagan on the set of MACHETERO

Today being International Women’s Day i’d like to share this story that came from my film MACHETERO about a very strong woman, Dylcia Pagan. The role that women play in the ongoing revolution to make the a world better place than when we came into it is something that i think is completely exemplified here by Dylcia. This is the story of how Dylcia Pagan, a former US held Puerto Rican political prisoner of war who served 20 years in US prisons for fighting to free Puerto Rico from US colonialism came to be in my film and in the process gave the film a much need dose of feminine power that brought into focus what it was that MACHETERO was really all about.

MACHETERO started out as a short film but as i worked on it, it began to take on it’s own life and i needed to respect that and allow it to take me where it needed to go. As an artist i believe that the ego is a dangerous thing and the more you get in the way of the ideas that are flowing the greater the chance there is for polluting what needs to be said. i think the artistic process is really a process of creative meditation and that as the ideas flow through you they take on your own unique shape. The danger is in the ego wanting to take those ideas as they flow through you, claim them for their own purposes and shape them for their own selfish desires. The hard part is being able to recognize the natural shape that the ideas will take as they flow through you, from the ideas that the ego wants to distort. This is the artistic and creative battle i feel every artist faces.

While in the midst of my artistic struggle with MACHETERO i found myself in the Brooklyn studio of the great Puerto Rican painter Juan Sanchez talking to him about this particular creative journey that I was on. He had seen the short version of the film and was going on and on about how much he liked it and how bold and courageous a work MACHETERO was, not just in terms of its political stance but also in terms of it’s artistic aesthetic value. Although I was flattered because Juan’s opinion is something that I greatly respect and appreciate it made me think how I had better stay on track and not let things get out of hand.

While talking to Juan he suggested that i call one of the Puerto Rican political prisoners that President Clinton released at the end of his second term in 1999 for the role of the mentor. This was a really amazing idea and we started to talk about who we thought would be a good natural fit for the role. We came to the conclusion that Dylcia would be perfect.

Dylcia Pagan was born in the Bronx and raised in East Harlem to Puerto Rican parents. She was a child actor on a show called The Children’s Hour on NBC in the 1960’s. As an adult she continued to work in television as a producer working for ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS. As a member of the FALN (Fuerzas Armadas de Liberacion Nacional – Armed Forces for National Liberation) she fought for the independence of Puerto Rico. While pregnant with her first and only child, the father of that child, William Morales was arrested for seditious conspiracy to bring down the US government after an accidental explosion in garage in Queens. While recovering from his injuries in a hospital bed, William escaped custody.

Shortly after that Dylcia gave birth to her son Guillermo. The FBI began was not pleased with William Morales escape and suspected Dylcia of also being involved in the FALN. They were looking to arrest her for seditious conspiracy to overthrow the US government as well. Dylcia felt that the FBI was closing in on her and she was forced to give her son to sympathetic supporters of the Puerto Rican independence movement in Mexico and go underground. That Mexican family raised Dylcia’s son as their own. A short while later Dylcia was arrested and convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 55 years. She served 20 years until her pardon by President Clinton in 1999. There was a documentary produced for PBS about the hardships that she and her son Guillermo endured called The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez. It’s an interesting film that people should definitely check out.

i needed to get in touch with Dylcia to talk to her about the project. Not4Prophet (who plays the lead character Pedro Taino in the film) got Dylcia’s phone number from Jesus Papoleto Melendez one of the founders of the Nuyorican Poets movement and a life long friend of Dylcia. At the time my main concern was that Dylcia was still on parole and i was worried that her being involved in a project that dealt with the question of political violence as a means of liberation could get her put back in jail. i don’t mean to over inflate MACHETERO’s importance but the US Federal Parole Board needs very few excuses to bounce you back into the joint and i didn’t want in any way to supply them with that excuse.

When i called Dylcia and re-introduced myself (we met briefly when she first got out in ’99 and came back to El Barrio, NYC) i told her about MACHETERO and what it was that i was trying to do. i let her know that i knew she was still on parole and that i didn’t want this project to in any way jeopardize her hard-won freedom, she’d done enough time as it was already. She then laughed and told me that the phone call she had received just minutes before i called. It was a call from her lawyer telling her that she was no longer on parole and that she was legally, (Dylcia has always been spiritually free) completely and without restriction a free woman. i was totally relieved to hear it and she said that she couldn’t refuse the role because it was too much of a coincidence. A few months later we flew down to Puerto Rico and shot this scene on the beach in Loiza a short walk from where Dylcia lives today.

In this scene the Young Rebel is dreaming of Puerto Rico and he dreams that he is at the grave of someone he loves. It’s not clear who the person is but as the dream goes on he dreams of his mentor (played by Dylcia) and the idea is that it’s her grave that he’s visiting. The grave is actually in the cemetery of Loiza and is the grave of a famous Puerto Rican mother and grandmother Doña Adolfina Villanueva who was killed as she stood outside of her home with a machete in her hand to defend against an eviction that police were sent to enforce. The killing of Doña Adolfina Villanueva was meant to send a message to other poor landowners in the area who were also being evicted.

His dream then moves onto a memory of himself as a child (played by Francisco Sanchez Rivera, Dylcia next door neighbor’s son) bringing a coconut to Dylcia. The “FUTURE” title that comes up on the screen as we see the Young Rebel as a boy is not so much a chronological representation but one of character. In the film Pedro Taino “the terrorist” is the “PAST” and Jean Dumont the journalist is the “PRESENT” while the Young Rebel represents the “FUTURE”. So when these titles appear on the screen throughout the film they are not chronological representations but characteristic representations. As the young boy comes running through the tress with his machete and his coconut Dylcia is sitting on the beach smoking a cigar (as older Puerto Rican women will) and proceeds to tell him the history of Puerto Rico’s 500-year struggle for autonomy. She tells him that he must one day continue to carry on that tradition of struggle when he grows up.

i never wrote any dialogue for this scene. i spoke to Dylcia about what it was that i was looking for and what it was that the story needed in terms of tone and intent. She took it from there and improvised all the dialogue compressing 500-years of history into a 3-minute story. It was amazing to watch.

The role that Dylcia Pagan played in the film although small (she’s only in two scenes) was crucial. Her specific role was as a mentor but her specific relationship to the Young Rebel and to Pedro Taino however was intentionally left open to interpretation. In Puerto Rico as in the African tradition a village raises a child and so i wanted Dylcia to be mother, grandmother, aunt and neighbor. Her role also helped solidify two concurrent ideas in terms of the relationship that the Young Rebel and Pedro Taino share with Dylcia.

One interpretation that could be drawn from these scenes was that both characters are sharing flashback scenes that incorporated the same grave and memories of this mentor that Dylcia played because she influenced them both as two separate characters. Another interpretation that is inferred is that the Young Rebel and Not4Prophet are the same character living in the same time. This is physically impossible in real life but completely possible in cinema and makes for an interesting idea that only served to further illustrate the cyclical themes of violence presented in the film.

This scene takes place pretty late in the film and it’s the scene that really illustrates what it is that’s at stake in terms of revealing the natural beauty of Puerto Rico. Up until this point the film has been full of rage and anger and although that rage and anger may be completely warranted and justified i wanted to switch gears with this scene and have the emotional core of the scene be one of sadness. i wanted that sadness to be the seed for all the rage and anger that is felt throughout the rest of the film. It was difficult to pull off, the scene had to be played with a certain subtlety and without an air of nostalgia. The way to do this was to have this dream scene be a scene in which the Young Rebel remembers who he is and what he must do going forward. This took the nostalgic edge off the scene and gave the scene a relevance to his future.

None of this would have been possible had it not been for the creative generosity of Dylcia Pagan. MACHETERO would not be what it is, had it not been for Dylcia bringing a strong, rebellious, nurturing feminine energy into the film. Although her scenes take place late in the film, those scenes set the stage for everything we have seen that comes before them and after them. They become the lynch pin by which everything else hangs. It was a true honor to have Dylcia be a part of this film. Looking back now MACHETERO would not have the power that it has without her participation and i wanted to take this moment out to honor her on this International Women’s Day.

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-Yr

March 1st 1954

4 Replies

BLUE LOLITA STAR RICANSTRUCTED by vagabond ©

In the years following World War II the colonized nations who had fought and died alongside the imperial Allied powers began seeking independence and Puerto Rico was no exception. The US government was not interested in giving up Puerto Rico but it also didn’t want to be seen as a colonial power in the eyes of the world. In 1947 the US Congress passed a law allowing Puerto Ricans the ability to vote for their own governor. As the US Congress allowed Puerto Ricans the right to vote for their own governor they passed a gag law in 1948 known as Ley de la Mordaza. It made flying or displaying the Puerto Rican flag illegal and barred anyone from speaking, printing, publishing, organizing or advocating for independence. In 1949 Luis Muñoz Marin was elected the first Puerto Rican governor. The leader of the Nationalist Party Don Pedro Albizu Campos saw this governorship as a means of having Puerto Ricans administer US colonial interests.

As governor Luis Muñoz Marin immediately endorsed a proposal known as “Free Associated State” to try to get as much autonomy for the island as possible. “Free Associated State” granted some autonomy over Puerto Rico but nowhere near complete autonomy. Albizu Campos, the Nationalists Party and other independence supporters all agreed that “Free Associated State” simply put a Puerto Rican face on US colonialism. In response to all these developments Albizu Campos and the Nationalists Party began to plan an island wide insurrection. On October 30th of 1950 in the towns of Jayuya, Utuado, Arecibo, Ponce, San Juan, Mayagüez, Naranjito and Peñuelas there was an open armed revolution to rid Puerto Rico of the US imperialism it had suffered under since the Spanish American War of 1898. The revolution failed and Albizu and hundreds of other Nationalists were rounded up and arrested.

In 1952 the US Congress ratified “Free Associated State” status for Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico has existed in this very confusing and very nebulous state since then. While in prison for his role in calling for and leading the revolution of 1950, Albizu began writing a young Puerto Rican Nationalist woman named Lolita Lebron. In that correspondence he asked Lolita to lead an attack on the US Congress. She accepted the mission and along with Raphael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores and Andrès Figueroa she led an attack on the US Congress on March 1st of 1954. The date was chosen because it was the first day of the Interamerican Conference in Caracas, Venezuela and the attack was meant to draw international attention to Puerto Rico’s plight as a US colony especially to the Latin American nations meeting in Caracas.

Lolita, Rafa, Irving and Andrés got into the visitor’s galley of the Congress as it was in session. Lolita unfurled a Puerto Rican flag and screamed “¡Que Viva Puerto Rico Libre!” – Long Live A Free Puerto Rico! then the group shot into the Congress. Five Congressmen were wounded in the attack and the four Nationalists were captured. When Lolita was asked if it was her intention to kill she replied, “I didn’t come to kill, I came to die.”

Lolita, Rafa, Irving and Andrés all served 25 years in prison for the attack. At that time Lolita Lebron was the longest held female political prisoner in the world, a fact that did not go unnoticed during the Cold War. In 1979 President Jimmy Carter pardoned the Lolita Lebron and the other Nationalists after and a long and lengthy international campaign to free them. Carlos Romero Barceló the then governor of Puerto Rico was opposed to the pardon claiming that it would only encourage further acts of “terrorism” on the Puerto Rican government and US interests on the island. When the Nationalists returned home they were received as national heroes, much to Barceló’s chagrin.

Throughout the history of Puerto Rico’s long and complex colonial relationship with the US government there have been many of these uprisings that, at the time of these actions, seem to receive very little support from Puerto Ricans. Yet the Puerto Rican people have always supported their political prisoners and have had an outstanding track record of garnering global support for them that has brought pressure to bear on the US government to free Puerto Rican political prisoners time and time again. If Puerto Ricans don’t want independence from the US then why do they want independence for the political prisoners and prisoners of war who fight to free Puerto Rico from US colonialism?

There have also historically always been massive outpourings of support for these independence leaders when they die. Many Puerto Ricans agreed with the ideas of the Filiberto Ojeda Rios, the independence leader assassinated by the FBI in 2005, even if they didn’t agree with his decision to use violence as a means of expressing those ideas. Puerto Ricans felt that Filiberto was worthy of their admiration. Filiberto’s funeral procession was the longest in Puerto Rican history. The same could be said for Lolita Lebron. When she passed away in August of 2010 it wasn’t only the so-called minority of Puerto Rican’s who want independence that mourned her passing but the whole Puerto Rico nation that mourned. It was also the Puerto Rican diaspora that mourned as well as the international community that has always supported Puerto Rico’s independence. Many will say that the violent actions taken by Lolita Lebron, Rafael Cancel Miranda, Irving Flores and Andrés Figueroa on March 1st of 1954 can’t advance the cause of Puerto Rican independence but history has proven that this argument doesn’t hold up…

The image of Lolita Lebron above is available as a T-shirt and a 1″ button from my design company RICANSTRUCTED. There are other designs that can be found there of other Puerto Rican independence leaders there as well… You don’t need to believe in Puerto Rican independence to wear a shirt with an independence leader on it like you don’t have to be Argentinian or Cuban to wear a Che T-shirt… Show your support for the independence of Puerto Rico and get yourself a RICANSTRUCTED shirt…

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-Xu

An Ongoing Cost To Be Free (Part 3)

Puerto Rican PSA#1

6 Replies

A T-shirt of the DEFIENDE LO TUYO is available from RICANSTRUCTED

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-V6

From Kandahar To Kindergarten

4 Replies

America Opens Pandora’s Box by vagabond

“In defense of humans
Lay down your sticks and stones
Weapons and violence are better off left alone
Cause you don’t rise when people fall

I see you rot this world
I see you ride this world
I see you rape this world
On, off, on, off, on, off
And I don’t like what I see
Greed
You don’t rise when people fall“
- Fugazi – from the song In Defense Of Humans

From its inception America decided to open Pandora’s box in the name of financial profit… They opened Pandora’s box and out came the genocide of Native people for their land. The Trans-Atlantic slave trade to profit off the lives and labor of others also came out of the box. The flimsy excuses to go to wars that line the pockets of the military industrial complex also came out of that box. The zombie capitalism that allowed profit to be a guiding cultural principal in America also came rushing out of that box.

These ills that came streaming out of Pandora’s box were opened because financial benefit was to be made and to hell with whatever consequences followed… And when the naked horror of the consequences rears up its ugly head we search for ways to close the box without ever trying to put what came out, back in… But there is no closing Pandora’s box… Not without a paradigm shift in thinking from capitalism (which is profit, at any cost) to something humane, something sustainable… Something that works for the many instead of something that works for the few…

While we reflect on the recent tragedy in Newton, Connecticut, and search our souls for some solace i propose that surest way to go about that is to investigate the history of violence that has shaped America into a death culture and it’s connection to making a profit at any cost. This country has a long history of placing financial profit over life. It was founded on that principle with the Native American genocide for land. Built upon with the enslavement of Africans. Expanded with war into imperialistic adventurism from Mexico to Puerto Rico and continues today in places like Afghanistan. i’m not trying to belittle or set side the Newton massacre, on the contrary, i’m trying to expand it, to have it be thought of and included within a larger context of ongoing tragedy’s that we have refused to either connect or recognize.

The occasional outburst of random senseless violence that bursts forth into our consciousness like the recent Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting and the Wisconsin Sikh temple shooting and this latest tragedy in Newtown Connecticut should be a wake up call to us. There’s writing on the wall in each of these incidents. A writing on the wall that we’re refusing to read because of the unease it’ll bring. The issue isn’t about gun control or gun laws it’s about placing the desire of financial profit above everything else. The problem is that laws created to control gun ownership curb the profits of gun corporations. Capitalism is God in America and nothing gets in the way of God in America.

Nothing is allowed to get in the way of making a dollar in America, not the delicate balance of the eco-system, not the unlivable wages paid by corporations at the expense of obscene profits, not the homelessness that is created by banks foreclosing on homes, not the maiming or death of soldiers that comes from the profiteering of the military industrial complex, not the privatization of prisons for profit and the link to increased prison population in times of low crime, nothing gets in the way of making a dollar in America. The guiding principle of placing profit above people in America is what makes the culture of America a death culture. The examples of this death culture abound…

The BP oil disaster placed profit above the lives of people. The government can’t afford to oversee these oil rigs properly but it can afford to subsidize the fossil fuel industry at the cost of billions to create record making profits for oil companies. Eleven people died on that BP oil rig, and untold number of wildlife, not to mention the destruction of an entire eco-system.

The company with the most employees on federal assistance programs in the US, like Food Stamps, is the low wage, part-time employment machine known as Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart pays its employees a substandard wage forcing them to seek federal assistance to survive. In essence, the federal government is subsidizing the billions of dollars in profits made by Wal-Mart by helping to feed its low wage employees.

The banks who became to big to fail capitalize their profits and socialize their risks. Their failures become our responsibility, we absorb their risk and bail them out. Our reward for that, is to be turned out of our homes in foreclosures and made homeless so that the bank ledger turns from red to black. Our misery quickly becomes their profit.

Nobody loves a war like the military industrial complex because it means multi-billion dollar profits. For the soldiers who are fighting that war it means asking their families for money to get the body armor they lack. In the meantime the federal money used for war that could have been spent on domestic needs like education or infrastructure or health care is fattening the pockets of private military contractors who seem to never lack for body armor or anything else…

The privatization of prisons all across the country for profit has seen an explosion in prison construction and in the prison population. The fact that the crime rate all across the country is at an all time statistical low is of no consequence. Crime statistics are ignored in order to fill the coffers of the prison industrial complex.

There’s money to be made at every turn in this death culture, even in these shootings that take place from time to time. In 1999 at Columbine thirteen were shot and killed, in 2007 thirty-two were shot and killed at Virginia Tech, in 2008 five were shot and killed at Northern Illinois University, in that same year thirteen were shot and killed in an immigrant center in Binghamton NY. In 2011 in Arizona a congress woman and six others were shot and killed, including a child. In April of 2012 seven were shot and killed at Oikos University, in July of 2012 twelve were shot and killed in a movie theater in Aurora and in August of 2012, six were shot and killed in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin. Each time there is a massacre there’s talk of gun control but no talk of the death culture that permeates American society… No discussion on limiting the ability to procure profits that are built on tragedy, in massacre, in war, in prison, in homelessness, in unsustainable wages, in hunger… Meanwhile there are 310 million guns in America and 312 million Americans… There’s money to be made in guns and the price we pay for these massacres could just be the price of doing business for gun manufacturers…

When the US sends out drones to “surgically” drop a bomb in order to kill a terrorist hiding in a village in Kandahar and a few others die in the process this is called “collateral damage” by the war machine profiteers and their lackeys in the media… In Kandahar they call that “collateral damage” mother, father, son, daughter, grandfather, grandmother, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, cousin, friend… The fallout of the slaughter that takes place in Columbine and Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University, and in Binghamton NY and in Arizona and in Okios University, and in Aurora and in a Sikh temple in Wisconsin and yes even in a school in Newtown Connecticut is also called mother, father, son, daughter, grandfather, grandmother, sister, brother, aunt, uncle, cousin, friend… But on the balance sheets of the military industrial complex and the gun manufacturers, the victims of these massacres is listed as “collateral damage” to the profits of a death culture…

And this may be why the questions that are posed by these massacres are so difficult to answer… When you are forced to look for an answer within the current paradigm of American death culture, where profits trump life, then there is no answer to be found… Pandora’s box can’t be closed again and what has escaped can never be put back in the box within the current paradigm of thinking… If you’re looking for an answer within the system as it’s currently designed you’ll only find it in more dead bodies… Until there is a radical shift in the legal profiting off of the misfortune and misery of others, there will be no answer that will prevent another massacre. Until there isn’t a profit in America’s death culture the body count will continue to climb from Kandahar to Kindergarten…

Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1eniL-Ti

#nothingtobegainedhere

less than ideal art, ideas and ideals for a less than ideal world…

Tag Archives: art

Imperfect Cinema & MACHETERO

FOR AN IMPERFECT CINEMA
by Julio Garcia Espinosa
Havana, Cuba - December 7th, 1969

Terrorist Semantics

John Penley Anarcho Yippie Pt. 1

MACHETERO And An Aesthetic Of Hunger

MACHETERO Recruitment

MACHETERO History Lesson

March 1st 1954

An Ongoing Cost To Be Free (Part 3)

Puerto Rican PSA#1

From Kandahar To Kindergarten

Follow “#nothingtobegainedhere”

FOR AN IMPERFECT CINEMA by Julio Garcia Espinosa Havana, Cuba - December 7th, 1969

If you see something, share something...

Like this:

If you see something, share something...

Like this:

If you see something, share something...

Like this:

If you see something, share something...

Like this:

If you see something, share something...

Like this:

If you see something, share something...

Like this:

If you see something, share something...

Like this:

If you see something, share something...

Like this:

If you see something, share something...

Like this:

If you see something, share something...

Like this:

Follow “#nothingtobegainedhere”

FOR AN IMPERFECT CINEMA
by Julio Garcia Espinosa
Havana, Cuba - December 7th, 1969