The Night of the Museums

Open-Air Cinema with Sara Gómez

As part of the first exhibition dedicated to this essential Afro-Cuban filmmaker, three films by Sara Gómez (Guanabacoa, 1942–1974) will be screened in the courtyard of the Virreina Palace: Guanabacoa, Chronicle of My Family (1966, 14 min), And We’ve Got Flavour (1967, 25 min) and My Contribution... (1972, 34 min).

Guanabacoa: Chroricles of My Family

This is an autobio- graphical documentary, in which the filmmaker appears for a few minutes for the first time and tells the story of her family and of Guanabacoa, where she was born. 

The first part is a journey through the town’s streets and focuses on the inhabitants and emblematic places, such as the statue of Ernst Hemingway—who lived in nearby Cojímar—, the Jewish cemetery, the military fort and a square dedicated to the memory of the Creole politician Pepe Antonio, mayor of the town between 1748 and 1762. 

The second, presents the filmmaker’s relatives, from the men, who then and in the past were musicians, to the women portrayed in the old photographs that show a distinguished social class, with elegant dresses, strict rules of conduct and visits to “the societies for black people”—“for certain blacks”, as Sara Gómez points out. 

In the third part of the film, she introduces Berta, the filmmaker’s cousin, who reflects another point of view of a once-wealthy family. “Will we have to fight against the need to be different as black people who have improved our lot?” asks Sara Gómez at the end of the film. “Will we come to Guanabacoa accepting our entire history, the entireness of Guanabacoa and be able to say this?” 

This recapitulation about class fragility connects with the story of her madrina—as she called her great aunt who, as we are told at the beginning of the film, died while the editing was being completed—with the evolution embodied by Berta. These two black women—three if we count the filmmaker herself—, make up the corners of a triangle in which the different ways of confronting collective and private memory are expressed, always against the backdrop of this syncretic Guanabacoa, where the African cultural presence and blackness are constituent elements.

And We’ve Got Flavour

Sara Gómez’s work advocates a displacement that was later underpinned by the Vietnamese filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-ha when, regarding her film Reassemblage (1982), she said that she understood ethnographic practice to be “speaking nearby” rather than “speaking about”. 

This vision, completely alien to the most elementary agencies, is unrelenting from the beginning of Sara Gómez’s career to the point of distinguishing her from other contemporary creators, making her a kind of pioneer of the “anti-ethnographic films” of the 1980s and 1990s. 

The importance of music culture in her work should, perhaps, be understood the same way: it is not so much a rhythmic inventory or an overview of the anthropology of Cuban sound, but a dive into those processes of emancipatory and collective affirmation that use dance and music as a channel. 

Therefore, although she took part in several documentaries that, during the 1960s, researched the island’s musical roots—we refer, among many others, to Ritmo de Cuba (1960) by Néstor Almendros, La tumba francesa (1961) by Orlando Jiménez Leal and Néstor Almendros, Nosotros, la música (1964) by Rogelio París and, particularly, La herrería de Sirique (1966) by Héctor Veitía—, Sara Gómez, more specifically, explored the narrative that the working classes and black Cubans constructed about themselves and about the conditions that challenged them, based around the antagonisms they raised against the system of thought and order for the world imposed by whiteness and around the musical traditions, but at the same time “together with” those who constructed and nourished them. 

Y… Tenemos sabor (And We’ve Got Flavour; 1967) is, perhaps, the work that best illustrates these interests. This film, with the participation of luthier Alberto Zayas, traces the origins and uses of numerous instruments used for dance music. 

The filmmaker combines technical and historical descriptions with live performances by the groups Changüí, Típico Habanero, Clave y Guaguancó and Conga de Santiago de Cuba, as well as the trios Los Decanos and Virgilio, Almenares y Márquez. 

In addition to teaching the spectator about the different musical genres and how to recognise them when they are being performed, Sara Gómez records those who sing and dance in tenements, on ramshackle streets, at funerals or spontaneous gatherings, all without resorting to paternalistic picturesque qualities, but questioning the persecution of festive moments in the public space or its kidnapping by the authorities as an official narrative, as occurred in the case of P.M. 

The footage also recaptures some of the pioneers of research on the African legacy in Cuban culture, such as Fernando Ortiz Fernández, Argeliers León, Lydia Cabrera and Rómulo Lachatañeré. However, Y… Tenemos sabor concludes with a reference to the new experimental rhythms of the era. A young Chucho Valdés and his Combo—formed by legends of the calibre of Carlos Emilio Valdés, Julio Vento, Manuel Armesto “Cala”, Roberto Concepción and Orlando “Cachaíto” López—opens the traditional roots towards the horizon of Afro-Cuban jazz, without considering the suspicions that these rhythms of American origin provoked at the time. The evocative phrasing of Amado Borcelá Navarrete “Guapachá” and his genuine blend of the guaracha and bebop genres, guaranteed that popular music would continue its journey in times to come.

My Contribution…

Released in 1972, Mi aporte... (My Contribution...) is probably one of Sara Gómez’s best films. In it, she condenses the most important features of her cinematographic work and the developments she introduced into Cuban film of the time. 

Her approach to certain social processes from situated, complex experiences, which do not always provide an accurate account of what is happening. Her constant questioning of the revolutionary project through the people who comprise it and who remain on the sidelines of the universal concepts. Film, understood as a place where the positions of listening and speaking are permanently reworked and modified. 

Mi aporte... investigates the conclusions that can be drawn about the presence of women in the workplace, thirteen years after the triumph of the revolution. To this end, Sara Gómez structures the documentary around four segments, which, in a way, summarize what happened but also raise questions about the future. 

The words of Che Guevara open the film. They describe a genderless working class, united by common causes and indistinct enemies. However, we soon begin to see and hear how several women contradict the guerrilla leader, the propaganda praising women’s work included by the filmmaker from time to time, the stereotypical advertisements of smiling female workers and the punitive opinions of male comrades who smugly judge what women contribute to industrial productivity and, specifically, what they detract from it. 

“Have we created the condition for the formation of the new woman?”, asks Sara Gómez at one point in the film, to which she responds minutes later, perhaps as a reply to the hombre nuevo (new man) proclaimed by Che. “We must violate the male conscience that prevents women from developing. We must attack them; we have weapons.” 

Here, the filmmaker touched a nerve: while Cuban women had been included in the workplace, in the domestic sphere sex discrimination continued, particularly among revolutionaries. So, the double working day assumed by women and naturalized by social ideologies, hindered their position in the public sphere, increased economic instability in relation to men and constructed subalternation within the same family. 

However, the women featured in the documentary do not represent an archetypal idea of woman; on the contrary, they belong to different classes, are of different ages and have different jobs, they are black, mixed race, white, widows, single, brides, with large families or have chosen not to have children. None of them explain their sexual orientation. In short, all these women speak from specific positions that clash with each other and prevent a single discourse, an encapsulation of vicissitudes, a single recipe that cauterizes complexity. 

The last sequence of Mi aporte... is a discussion among female workers in a tobacco factory, who had previously seen the recording of a conversation between Sara Gómez and a designer, a journalist and a scientific researcher. 

The articulate and programmatic reflections of these four young middle-class women, including the filmmaker herself, precede the inopportune testimonies of the women we later see in their workplace. 

Sara Gómez thus forces, with even a self-critical honesty, the antagonism between the fashionably dressed girls, who chat in a relaxed atmosphere, in a space that meets the modern interior design codes of the time and the group of workers from another social background, other moral systems, other ideologies. 

Although it may appear to, the sequence does not compare people with university studies and those with no academic training. On the contrary, Sara Gómez widens the political zoom of her camera to show us different ways of opposing a totalizing machismo, whose anchor traverses purchasing power, accumulations of knowledge and ideologies.