The most exciting filmmaker I’ve come across during my wanderings through the cinematic wilderness is Cuban agitprop documentarian Santiago Alvarez. A member of the Cuban Communist Party and working for the Cuban Film Institute, where he cranked out weekly installments of Latin American Newsreel, he was the model of energetic resourcefulness.
Alvarez declared, “Give me two photos, music, and a moviola and I’ll give you a movie.” And that’s a fitting self-description of his work. Three out of four films described below are constructed largely of images re-photographed from newspapers and tattered copies of Life magazine, creatively edited and set to bouncy pop music.
His most famous film is Now (1965). It is a desperate call to arms; a riotous film seemingly intended to incite riots everywhere. And boy does it work. I’m a mellow guy and it makes me want to go out and march arm-in-arm right up into the face of “The Man.” Alvarez’s camera cuts and bounces and pans across one still photograph after another and seldom smoothly. This isn’t Ken Burns stuff here. This is crude, sometimes handheld. The film lasts as long as it takes Lena Horne to sing the title song and concludes with “NOW!” bullet-riddled into the screen.
Another justly famous film is LBJ (1968). Structured into three sections, it focuses on the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. (“L”), Bobby Kennedy (“B”), and John Kennedy (“J”), and implicates Lyndon Johnson in all three. The movie expands upon the materials of Now to include images from Playboy and found footage ranging from television commercials to old B-westerns. Its conspiracy theory conceits may seem factually suspicious today, but the film’s spirits are still intoxicating.
My favorite films are Hanoi, Tuesday 13th (1967) and 79 Springtimes (1969), both focusing on the Vietnam War in ways that Hollywood wouldn’t dare.
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