My contribution

Sara Gómez

For the first time in a museum, this exhibition presents the most complete retrospective of the work of Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez (Guanabacoa, 1942 - Havana, 1974), one of the main figures in Cuban documentary filmmaking during the 1960s and 1970s.

Despite her premature death, Sara Gómez had an exceptional career in the already memorable scenario of 1960s and 1970s Cuban documentary filmmaking.

She was a pioneer of what would later be termed as “anti-ethnographic film”, an exponent of a filmography based on the political power of testimony, the filmmaker who investigated her era from the viewpoint of a triple controversial minority: young, female and black.

All of Sara Gómez’s work is inscribed within the framework of the revolutionary project that began in 1959. However, unlike other contemporary creators, her films could be considered a seismograph of the real tensions that were being generated in Cuba during the first fifteen years after the revolutionary triumph.

This is how Mi aporte... (My Contribution...; 1972), one of her most important films, should be understood. It explores the places constructed by women in the public sphere, the workplace and the domestic sphere and is about the ideologies they display according to their different economic backgrounds and their particular value systems, against a totalitarian machismo.

Sara Gómez’s films pay particular attention to processes of marginalisation and class antagonisms. However, in contrast to certain concepts used excessively by the narratives of the time, her work addresses the knowledge that the most vulnerable layers use to challenge history with a capital H and under what circumstances individuals become complex social subjects.

Guanabacoa, crónica de mi familia (Guanabacoa, Chronicles of My Family; 1966), De bateyes (The Sugar Workers’ Quarters; 1971) and De cierta manera (One Way or Another; 1974) make up a sort of triptych on blackness seen from different perspectives. The first—an autobiographical documentary—traces the origins of the filmmaker’s family within a lineage of middle-class musicians and professionals. The second delves into the colonial wounds of Cuba’s racialised working class, through the memory of numerous descendants of people enslaved in the 19th-century sugar mills, most of them owned by Catalan businessmen. The last—the first feature film made by a woman on the island—tells the romantic story of two characters: a white schoolteacher who unwaveringly embraces the creeds of the revolution and a mulato worker, born in the shantytown of Las Yaguas, who, despite beginning a process of emotional and ideological change, resists dismantling the machismos that are dominant in the neighbourhood, the home and the workplace.

Finally, there is another group of films, including Iré a Santiago (I’m Going to Santiago; 1964), based on Federico García Lorca’s poem “Son de negros en Cuba” included in Poet in New York (1929) and, in particular, Y... tenemos sabor (And We’ve Got Flavour; 1967), which analyses the African legacy in Cuban culture, recapturing the studies carried out by Fernando Ortiz Fernández, Argeliers León, Lydia Cabrera and Rómulo Lachatañeré.

These documentaries not only give an account of some of the intellectual debates shared with various colleagues of her generation—such as Inés María Martiatu, Sergio Vitier, Nancy Morejón, Rogelio Martínez Furé, Jacinto Abraham Rodríguez and Miguel Barnet Lanza—on the traditions that the working classes and black people build around themselves and the circumstances of life that challenge them, but also looks into how music and dance, together with other festive manifestations, burst into the collective space and create unexpected and non-appropriable politicisations.