“Certain stereotypes are being broken: that only people with a certain profile can be actresses or be on the cover of magazines. Other faces of Mexico are now being recognised. It is something that makes me so happy and proud of my roots.”

Cuarón’s Problem with Portraying the Working & Middle Class in “Roma”

This piece is not spoiler free. Going into Roma, the new film by Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón, my expectations were quite high. It wasn’t only because he happened to be my favorite director growing …

muchadoaboutcinema.com

[…] Cuarón’s own guilt drives him to expose how much service workers have to give to prove their worth. Nonetheless, this reading is problematic as well, as it reeks of condescension. Indigenous women are aware of how bad it is. They know they are the less protected people in México. They don’t fall for the pretense that they’re part of their bosses’ family, but instead, they’re stuck being a second-class member as long as they’re required, or are able to fulfill their duties.

However, despite all of this, the moment that has stayed with me more than anything I’ve mentioned so far is the one in the middle of the film, where Cléo attends a town party with an old friend. Even at this party she’s not allowed to enjoy herself, as moments after sitting down to have a drink someone collides into her, effectively ruining her night. It may seem insignificant, but it speaks to the larger issue regarding the film and its treatment of Cléo that borders on sadism.

As a tribute to Liboria “Libo” Rodriguez, the real Cléo, the film fails her in every way, being instead an opportunity for Cuarón to atone for his faults regarding class and race. Celebrating Libo is an after-thought. I was stricken by a exchange in an interview for Variety where Libo talks about how the movie came to be: “He was getting all this information without me knowing what it was for, […] ‘How do you remember this, Libo?’ he said. ‘Help me remember and understand.’ Then it started to become weird. ‘Libo, what did you used to wear? How did you dress?’ Things like that. I never imagined everything I’m living right now, that a film would be based on me.”

[H]er story is inevitably constructed from Cuarón’s childhood memories and direct recollections from others, Libo included, but filtered through his understanding of them and his storytelling ambitions for the film. It’s her story told by him, with sincere admiration and loving intentions, but still by him.

However, Cuarón’s truly astounding film is never facetious about the grave issues of inequality in Mexico. The divide between those with money and those who work for pennies is ever-present in Roma, but he aims to close that gap, if ever so slightly, via the central friendship between employer and employee. Still, some may rightfully argue that his idealism comes from an inability to fully comprehend lower class hardships, even as he genuinely empathizes with them.

(x)

Mockumentary about film-makers who use the Colombian poor to make their films. Deliberately detached from the cinema of denunciation of the militant left, Luis Ospina and Carlos Mayolo launch in 1978 what could be called their cinematic-political thesis: The Vampires of Poverty, an outrageous protest against national and international documentary models which at the time –and even today- shamelessly exploited all kinds of Third World suffering (referred to by the directors as “poverty-porn”) and exported it to European television stations and festivals. Counter-informative from beginning to end and in every sense of the word, the film mixes staged and real scenes of a typical film crew commissioned by a German television channel to seek out archetypical social horrors, trampling over the basic principles of professional ethics, the meaning of information and -naturally- sociological research.

Although One Way or Another is now considered a classic of both Latin American and feminist cinema, feminist film discourse relating to One Way or Another continues to be characterized by an effacement of the question of race, resulting, I would argue, from a tendency by Euro-American feminists to privilege gender over other axes of oppression such as race and class. Admittedly, One Way or Another itself both articulates and effects issues of race, sometimes in complex ways. While class and gender conflicts are explicitly addressed, race remains a subtext. In scenes depicting the tension arising out of class differences between the middle-class teacher, Yolanda, and the mothers of the children she teaches, Gómez acknowledges that the marginalized sector in Cuba comprises primarily black and mulatto Cubans. Gómez’s articulations of the racial underpinnings of the socioeconomic hierarchy is reflect in her casting rather than through explicitly dialogue or themes.

Sergio Giral suggests that Gómez may have felt that a black protagonist would not have been popular with Cuban audiences, whose notions of beauty and desirability is generally invested in the iconic image of the mulatta. Kutzinski observes that Cuban society encoded its national identity in the iconic figure of a mulatta, the copper-skinned Virgin of Charity, the Virgen de la Caridad de Cobre – Cuba’s patron saint – and in numerous images of mulattas in the country’s literature and popular culture. ‘Cuban novelists were particularly fascinated by women of ambiguous racial origin’. All of this ‘high symbolic or cultural visibility’ notes Kutzinski nevertheless, ‘contrasts sharply with social invisibility’ of the mulatta. Thus, it may be that the casting of Yolanda simply reflects what is frequently a parallel, although not always congruent, relationship between class and race. After all, Gómez was herself black and middle-class.

The casting of the light-skinned female protagonist is not by accident either. Catherine Benamou notes that throughout the body of ‘men’s films about women’ (with a few exceptions, notably the work of Humberto Solas and Sergio Giral) this pattern of casting is prominent in Cuban film. Benamou argues: ‘The casting of prominent female protagonists echoes that of the male characters in that regardless of class or level of Revolutionary/feminist consciousness they are predominantly white, ranging at most to light mulattoes in phenotype. Since these are the men and women who have been chosen to ‘struggle’ on the screen, the issues of race as a co-determinant of women’s self-perception and social treatment is significantly elided’.

Why, one cannot help but ask, would Gómez, herself a black woman, perpetuate this pattern of casting? In recalling his first conversation with Gómez regarding One Way or Another, Tomás González, who co-wrote the script, notes that Gómez believed that a film with a black woman protagonist in a contemporary setting would be ill-advised (‘it would be too much’) in 1970s Cuba. It is worth nothing that the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) has always been predominantly white, and Gómez had already encountered disapproval of her documentary Crónica de mi familia at this point.

Entre la población negra de la Costa Chica oaxaqueña, el “queridato” es aceptado socialmente. Juana y Magdalena comparten su vida con Neri. Su dinámica marital se irrumpe cuando Juana es diagnosticada con una enfermedad terminal.

Centered on the Afro-mexican community of Costa Chica in Oaxaca, La Negrada explores the socially accepted marriage of Neri and his two wives, Juana and Magdalena. Their marital dynamic shifts when Juana becomes terminally ill.

Gloria Rolando‘s Dialogue with my Grandmother (2015) speaks directly to the representations of black women in contemporary Cuba. Based on a conversation she had with her grandmother, Inocencia Leonarda Armas y Abrea, on February 17, 1993, the documentary is a magical blend of her grandmother’s voice, Afro-Cuban religious incantations, and Rolando’s narration about central moments in Cuba’s past. It took over twenty years for Rolando to rediscover the cassette tape where she had recorded the initial conversation and find the funds to make this end product in conjunction with the National Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC). In a 2016 interview, she admits that she had not planned to use the recording. The filmmaker and her grandmother talked all the time and that day in 1993 had been no different. Only in recent years while caring for her ailing mother did Rolando decide that she wanted to give something back to the women who had given so much to her.

One of the ways the film challenges negative stereotypes about black women in Cuba is through a focus on her grandmother’s labor and contributions to her family and the nation as a whole. While Inocencia recounts her childhood in Santa Clara and tells stories of attending dances in some of the city’s most well-known black social clubs, the camera flirts back and forth between family photographs and the hands of an aging black actor clutching a handkerchief. Repeatedly, the only image on the screen is Rolando and her grandmother’s hands. Rolando said, “This is a the story of the many black women who washed, ironed, and who were the foundation of our families. This is why I showed her hands; out of respect for those hands that worked so hard to build a family.”

[…]

But, it is the documentary’s final scene that visually contradicts the idea of Cuba as America’s playground. In a halting voice, as images of blackface minstrels on tourist shirts and figurines of black women smoking cigars flash across the screen, Rolando concludes: “There is something I can’t avoid saying. They’ve wanted to distort my grandmother’s image many times … Since the colonial times they’ve invented the patterns for an industry that doesn’t represent us. But sadly many people in Cuba and other countries too still reproduce and sell those disrespectful colonial versions. Why that false and degrading picture of the black woman? Why? Why? Why?”

Each “why” is punctuated by a rhythmic drumbeat and a different figurine smashing to the ground. This final scene showing the broken pieces of a Cuban paradise that sells blackfaces to tourists and devalues Afro-Cuban women’s bodies sits in stark contrast to the story of the woman featured in Dialogue with my Grandmother. Rolando ends the documentary as it begins by sitting in a rocking chair across from the empty chair of her late grandmother. She challenges us as viewers to decide which Cuba we want to see. As you plan your trip to the island, will you only see the cars and the girls flaunted in the Fast 8, or will you remember the oft-overlooked hands of the many women and men of African descent who built and continue to build Cuba?

2017 - Film Journal

Rey | Niles Atallah | Chile | 2017 | 9.5