Memories of Underdevelopment
Memories of Underdevelopment • 1h 39m
Directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea • 1968 • Cuba
This film by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea is the most renowned work in the history of Cuban cinema. After his wife and family flee in the wake of the Bay of Pigs invasion, the bourgeois intellectual Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) passes his days wandering Havana in idle reflection, his amorous entanglements and political ambivalence gradually giving way to a mounting sense of alienation. With this adaptation of an innovative novel by Edmundo Desnoes, Gutiérrez Alea developed a cinematic style as radical as the times he was chronicling, creating a collage of vivid impressions through the use of experimental editing techniques, archival material, and spontaneously shot street scenes. Intimate and densely layered, MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT provides an indictment of its protagonist’s disengagement and an extraordinary glimpse of life in postrevolutionary Cuba.
Restored by the Cineteca di Bologna at L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory in association with Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). Restoration funded by the George Lucas Family Foundation and The Film Foundation’s World Cinema Project.
Up Next in Memories of Underdevelopment
-
The Revolutionary Subjectivity of MEM...
The first Cuban film to garner international attention in the years following the nation’s 1959 revolution, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT remains one of the most important works of the influential Third Cinema movement that emerged in the developing world as a response to ne...
-
B. Ruby Rich and José Antonio Évora o...
This program features interview with film critics B. Ruby Rich and José Antonio Évora. They were recorded in San Francisco and Miami in 2018.
-
Titón: From Havana to “Guantanamero”
This 2008 documentary by Mirtha Ibarra, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s widow, features interviews with Gutiérrez Alea, along with Ibarra; screenwriter Enrique Pineda Barnet, actor Jorge Perugorriá; novelists Edmundo Desnoes and Lisandro Otero; film editor Nelson Rodríguez; filmmakers Julio García Espinos...
