pm

it's been many years since i first watched pm by sabá cabrera infante, and i just recently watched it again.

in 1961 this 15-minute documentary had the distinction of being the first film refused public screening rights by icaic, the cuban institute of film arts & industry, an action usually recalled as the first major act of artistic "censorship" by the new revolutionary government in havana. liberal cultural historians, then & now, have generally regarded this event as an early example of the suppression of intellectual & artistic freedoms intrinsic to this/any socialist revolutionary project, and as a(nother) example of leftists not knowing how to have any fun.

the episode is of course a bit more complicated than that. it was preceded just weeks before by fidel castro's declaration of the cuban revolution as "socialist" & the bay of pigs invasion, and was followed by castro's famous words to the intellectuals speech. the u.s.-sponsored invasion had of course failed in its intent, but it had succeeded in igniting a profound pro-revolution & anti-imperialist sentiment in the general public, an acute sense that what they were building in cuba would need to be ardently defended. documenty filmmaker & writer michael chanan has an excellent account of this historical moment in his book, cuban cinema. the banning of pm is best understood, he argues, less as the capricious act of a heavy-handed and overzealous revolutionary state, and more as an extension of the debates, splits, and coalescing tendencies that were present at the time among cuban cultural workers and the organizations they belonged to. the revolutionary experiment was in its early days and sincere consideration was given by artists & intellectuals to questions about the creation of a new revolutionary culture. for sugar plantations you could expropriate, collectivize, and redistribute, but in the realm of aesthetics how precisely to kick out imperialist & ruling class ideologies and promote true liberation??

as for the content of pm, it's a collection of scenes of havana night life, concentrated in predominantly black & working class old havana & regla. i won't detail here the debate about its potential counter-revolutionary nature, but will just mention that the primary concerns were 1. its (alleged) narrow representation of working-class black cubans 2. its concentration on a cultural space strongly identified with the playground-for-the-american-rich character of havana in the 1950s, which had flourished under the batista dictatorship with mafia-run hotels & bars, gambling, drug trafficking, and prostitution and 3. its (perceived) allegiance to the importance of aesthetic form over content.

the particular controversy over pm is of course difficult to fully appreciate from this distance. but i think a consideration of the role of artists & intellectuals in making the revolution is always timely, no? also, admittedly, i like the rumba scene that begins the 2nd part ;)

pm : sabá cabrera infante y orlando jiménez





i also just have to say, i have a very deep appreciation for the individuals & organizations that make this kind of thing available online for free like a public service. this film would otherwise be very difficult to come across. thank you!