It all began with those two pylons at the entrance to this house. Two horrible pylons, like two giraffes of barbaric concrete, which a heartless bureaucrat ordered planted in the front garden without even warning the legitimate owners, and which sustain over our heads, at this very moment, a high-tension current of 110 million volts, enough to keep a million television sets turned on or to support 23,000 35-millimetre movie projectors. Alarmed at the news, President Fidel Castro came here six months ago, trying to see if there was some way to correct the injustice, and this was how we discovered that the house could shelter the dreams of the Foundation of the New Latin American Cinema.
The pylons are still there, of course, more and more hateful as the house has been made more beautiful. We have tried to mask them with royal palms, with flowering branches, but their ugliness is so obvious that it prevails over every artifice. The only thing we can think of, as a final recourse to turn our defeat into victory, is to beg you to see them not as what they are but as a hopeless sculpture.
Only after adopting it as the seat of the Foundation of the New Latin American Cinema did we learn that the story of this house did not begin or end with these pylons, and that a good deal of what is said about it is neither truth nor falsehood. It is cinema. Well, as you must have already surmised, it was here that Tomás Gutiérrez Alea filmed The Survivors, a film that, eight years after its completion and twenty-seven after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, is not one truth more in the history of the imagination nor one falsehood less in the history of Cuba, but part of this third reality between real life and pure invention which is the reality of cinema.
And few houses could be as auspicious as this one for undertaking in it our final objective, which is nothing less than achieving the integration of Latin American cinema. That simple and that excessive. And no one could condemn us for the simplicity but only for the excess of our initial steps in this first year of life, which happens to be celebrated today, the day of Santa Bárbara, which, through the arts of sainthood or santería, is the original name of this house.
Next week the Foundation of the New Latin American Cinema will receive from the Cuban state a grant for which we are eternally grateful, as much for its unprecedented generosity and timeliness as for the personal dedication devoted to it by the least-well-known film enthusiast in the world: Fidel Castro. I am referring to the International School of Film and Television, in San Antonio de los Baños, established to train professionals from Latin America, Asia, and Africa, using the best resources of current technology. The construction of the centre is complete only eight months after it was begun. Instructors from countries throughout the world have been appointed, students have been selected, and most of them are here with us now. Fernando Birri, the director of the school, who is not distinguished by his sense of unreality, described it not long ago in the presence of the Argentine president, Raúl Alfonsín — and not a muscle in his saint’s face twitched — as ‘the best school of film and television in the history of the world’.
By its very nature, this will be the most important and ambitious of our initiatives, but it won’t be the only one, for the training of professionals without a job would be too expensive a method for encouraging unemployment. And so in this first year we have started to lay the foundation of a vast undertaking to promote the enrichment of the creative environment in Latin American film and television. The initial steps are these:
We have coordinated with private producers in the production of two full-length features and three long documentaries, all of them under the leadership of Latin American filmmakers, and a package of five one-hour stories for television, realized by five film or television directors from various Latin American countries.
At present we are holding meetings to assist young Latin American filmmakers who have not been able to carry out or complete their film or television projects.
We have moved forward with negotiations to acquire a screening room in every country in Latin America, and perhaps in some European capitals as well, devoted to the permanent viewing and study of Latin American film from all periods.
In each country in Latin America we are promoting an annual meeting of film lovers, through the respective sections of the foundation, as a way to obtain advance notification of those who have a vocation, and as a means for the International School of Film and Television to select future students.
We are sponsoring scholarly research into the status of film and television in Latin America, the creation of an audio-visual databank of Latin American cinema, and the first film library of Third World independent cinema.
We are sponsoring the development of a definitive history of Latin American film, and a dictionary to unify cinematographic and television vocabulary in the Spanish language.
The Mexican section of the foundation has already initiated the publication that compiles, country by country, the principal articles and documents of the New Latin American Cinema.
Within the framework of this Film Festival in Havana, we propose to call on the governments of Latin America and their cinematic entities to begin to think creatively about certain points in their laws that protect national film industries, which in many cases hinder more than they protect and in general terms are contrary to the integration of Latin American cinema.
Between 1952 and 1955 four of us who are aboard this ship today were studying at the Centre of Experimental Cinematography in Rome: Julio García Espinosa, deputy minister of culture for film; Fernando Birri, supreme pontiff of the New Latin American Cinema; Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, one of its most notable goldsmiths; and I, who in those days wanted nothing more in this life than to be the film director I never became. Even back then we talked, almost as much as we do today, about the films that had to be made in Latin America and about how that would be done, and our thoughts were inspired by Italian neo-realism, which is — as ours would have to be — the most human cinema with the fewest resources that has ever been made. But, above all, even then we were aware that Latin American cinema, if it really wanted to exist, could only be one cinema. I’d like to point out that our still being here this evening, talking about the same thing, like madmen who haven’t changed the subject in thirty years, and that so many Latin Americans from different places and generations are with us, talking about the same thing, is one more proof of the inescapable power of an indestructible idea.
In those days in Rome I had my only adventure on a cinematic directing team. In school I was chosen as third assistant to the director Alessandro Blasetti for the film Too Bad She’s Bad, and this brought me great joy, not so much for my personal progress as for the opportunity to meet the lead actress, Sophia Loren. But I never saw her, because for a month my work consisted of holding up a rope at the street corner so that onlookers couldn’t walk by. It is with this certificate of good service, and not with the many pretentious ones I have for my work as a novelist, that I now dare to be so much more of a president in this house than I ever have been in my own, and to speak in the name of so many meritorious film people.
This is your house, everyone’s house, and the only thing missing to make it complete is a sign visible throughout the world, one that says in compelling letters: ‘DONATIONS ACCEPTED’. Come in.