1961-1970ArthouseChris MarkerDocumentaryFrance

Chris Marker – ¡Cuba Sí! (1961)

Documentarists tend to be an eccentric breed. They need to be, since none of the main film festivals allow their films into competition (an incomprehensible decision), and to get a documentary into a cinema these days is a fraught process. But there is no more highly personal yet elusive film-maker than Chris Marker. His importance lies not in how many audiences have been affected by his films, but in how many of his fellow film-makers regard him as something of a genius.

It would be possible to choose half a dozen of his films as classics. I only select the 1961 Cuba Si! because its importance at the time was so obvious, and it remains the best and most intimate film on the making of a revolution. Marker’s preface to the script is illuminating. “Shot rapidly in January 1961,” it reads, “during the first alert period (you know, at the time when the majority of French papers were hooting over Fidel’s paranoia in imagining himself threatened with invasion), it aims at communicating, if not the experience, at least the vibrations, the rhythm of a revolution that will one day perhaps be held to be the decisive moment of a whole era of contemporary history.

“It also aims at countering the monstrous wave of misinformation in the major part of the press. It is interesting that it was the same minister who tolerated in the press and sanctioned on the radio the most outrageous untruths at the moment of the invasion of April 1961 who had the nerve to ban Cuba Si! in the name of historical truth.”

Perhaps what makes Marker so valuable as a recorder of slices of our time is that he is also a writer and poet who, in another time, might have been a keeper of journals like Johnson or Goethe. It was not for nothing that someone once called him “our unknown cosmonaut”. Cuba Si!, like so many of his films – Letter from Siberia, Le Joli Mai, La Jetée and Sans Soleil, for instance – seems to discover what everyone else has missed. That, of course, is what the best kind of film-maker is supposed to do

From another review…
Castro is the star of this personal, passionate and influential documentary that Marker made to celebrate the second anniversary of the Revolution. He gives two interviews during Marker’s account of the early days of the Cuban revolution and the building of the new nation. It ends with the Bay of Pigs fiasco that took place in April 1961 during the cutting of the film. The anti-American tone caused the French government to ban the film until 1963, but Marker published the text and stills. However, these could not communicate his expert use of sound, image and text that makes his films so special.

993MB | 55m 22s | 700×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/4FC4BB1309608B8/Cuba_Si_(1961).mkv
or
https://fikper.com/HzJTNLMO8A/Cuba_Si_(1961).mkv.html

Language:French & Spanish
Subtitles: Fench hardcoded for non-french parts,English

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