Salut les Cubains

Salut les Cubains (1963) was directed by Agnès Varda. This film is really a montage of photographs taken by Varda in Cuba, just four years after the revolution. By manipulating the images, Varda can make a couple who are dancing--in stills--appear to be actually moving. (Not exactly dancing, but moving to the beat.) The music is wonderful, and it's good to see Cuba with the eyes of someone from a country who wasn't trying to destroy Cuba. (Remember that the CIA-sponsored Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba had taken place just two years earlier, in 1961.)

We saw this film on the large screen at the excellent Dryden Theatre in the George Eastman Museum in Rochester, NY. This screening was part of an Agnès Varda retrospective, sponsored by Rochester Institute of Technology and the Eastman Museum. It's hard to know how the movie would look on a small screen. Unless you're a Varda fan, it's probably not worth seeking out.

I had saved this for a time when I might want to vicariously visit Cuba. Fidel Castro passed away last week so it felt like an occasion on which to look back and reflect. The place is seductive and the guide would not be just anyone. Chris Marker had been there two years before but Varda is second to none in my book.

Agnes is reflecting on her own right here. It's not meant to be a chronicle of anything, much less paean of revolution, but a sketchbook of impressions, glimpses on the road. She had been there and came back with still images which she edits in a playful way. The revolution does loom central of course, in the campaigns to literate peasants and the collective dances of gathering sugarcane, the frescoes and images of heroes, but seen through Varda's eyes, Cuba is a place that above all sways in rhythms and music that well up from inside of it, from generosity of heart. It is collective joy that Varda graces us with and salutes.

It's in the music, the religious dances and masks, the sugarcane work, the women's bodies, such evocative women that even Varda pauses to admire. It's no less in the gallery of gruesome photos from the war, exhibits of pride. Another segment admires soldiers on horseback as movie figures from westerns, ironically admiring the capacity of image to support our own imprints of meaning, able to bridge odd divides. Fidel as the Gary Cooper of the revolution, the narrator muses.

It all turns around form, image, dances of recollection from these, the transient and impromptu. It all points to how the image is pliant, a field where memories and narratives intersect. Some of these she has just improvised for us.

I don't leave feeling like I'm much the wiser about Cuba or revolution, which is okay, I'm fine without being wise in that sense. I leave feeling like I have briefly swayed in the breeze of being able to touch without smudging, partake without taking, know without knowing. More important this.

A half-hour photo montage made up of 1500 out of over 4000 pictures Agnes Varda took while vacationing in Cuba. It deals with the revolution of Fidel Castro and his crew, its effects on the people (shown in a very positive light by Varda) and the island's cultural history. It's decent, but mostly forgettable. The best part are the two or three "musical numbers." There is beautiful Cuban music throughout the film, but there are a couple of sections where Varda makes her photographic subjects dance and sing. That's quite fun. 7/10.