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.
PREFACE TO A NEW MILLENNIUM
Caracas, Venezuela, March 4, 1990
This bold exhibition opens at a historic moment, when humanity is beginning to be different. When Milagros Maldonado conceived of it some three years ago, the world was still in the shadow of the twentieth century, one of the grimmest in this moribund millennium. Thought was captive to irreconcilable dogmas and utilitarian ideologies sown on paper and not in people’s hearts, and whose greatest manifestation was the conformist fiction that we were in the plenitude of the human adventure. Then a sudden strong wind from no one knows where began to break apart that colossus with feet of clay, making us understand that we had been on the wrong road for who knows how long. But, contrary to how it might appear, this is not the prelude to turmoil but just the opposite: the long dawning of a world presided over by the total liberation of thought, so that no one is ruled by anyone other than his or her own mind.
Perhaps our pre-Columbian ancestors had an experience similar to this one in 1492, when a party of European navigators found themselves in these lands that blocked the way to the Indies. Our remote grandparents did not know about gunpowder or the compass, but they could talk to birds and see the future in earthenware bowls, and perhaps they suspected, looking at the stars in the immense nights of their time, that the Earth was as round as an orange, for they were ignorant of the great secrets of today’s knowledge but were already masters of the imagination.
This was how they defended themselves against the invaders, with the living legend of El Dorado, a fantastic empire whose king submerged himself in the sacred pool, his body covered in gold dust. The invaders asked them where it was, and the ancestors pointed out the way with five fingers extended. ‘This way, that way, over yonder,’ they replied. The paths multiplied, became confused, changed direction, always more distant, always over yonder, always just a little farther. They became as impossible as it was possible for the searchers, maddened by greed, to keep going and lose their way with no roads back. No one ever found El Dorado, no one saw it, it never existed, but its birth put an end to the Middle Ages and opened the way for one of the great eras in the world. Just its name indicated the extent of the change: the Renaissance.
Five centuries later, humanity must have felt once more the shudder of another new age beginning when Neil Armstrong left his footprint on the moon. In a summer house on Pantelleria, a deserted island south of Sicily, our hearts were in our mouths as we watched on television as that almost mythical boot searched blindly for the lunar surface. We were two European couples, with their children, and two couples from Latin America with ours. At the end of an intense wait, the extralunar boot placed its sole on the icy dust and the announcer recited the phrase that must have been thought about since the beginning of time: ‘For the first time in the history of humankind, a human being has set foot on the moon.’ We were all levitating at the awesomeness of history. All except the Latin American children, who asked in a chorus: ‘But is it the first time?’ And they left the room feeling cheated: ‘How stupid!’ For them, everything that had ever passed through their imaginations — like El Dorado — had the value of an accomplished fact. The conquest of space, just as they had supposed it in the cradle, had already happened a long time ago. And happened only once.
And so, in the world of the near future, nothing will be written ahead of time and there will be no place for any consecrated illusion. Many things that were true yesterday will not be true tomorrow. Perhaps formal logic will be degraded to a method used in schools so that children will understand what the ancient, abolished custom of being wrong was like, and maybe the immense, complex technology of current communications will be simplified by telepathy. It will be a kind of enlightened primitivism whose essential tool will be the imagination.
We are entering, then, the era of Latin America, the world’s leading producer of creative imagination, the richest, most necessary raw material in the new world, of which these one hundred paintings by one hundred visionary painters can be much more than a sample: they can be the great harbinger of a still-undiscovered continent, where death will be defeated by happiness and there will be more peace for ever, more time, better health, more hot food, more tasty rumbas, more of everything good for everybody. In two words: more love.
I’M NOT HERE
Havana, Cuba, December 8, 1992
This morning, in a European newspaper, I read the news that I’m not here. It didn’t surprise me, because earlier I’d heard that I had already removed the furniture, books, records, and paintings from the palace Fidel Castro had given me, and that, through an embassy, I was taking out the original of a novel harshly critical of the Cuban Revolution.
If you didn’t know, you do now. Perhaps this is the reason I can’t be here this afternoon to open this scree
ning room which, like films, and like everyone who has anything to do with films, may be nothing more than an optical illusion. For this room has cost us so many shocks and uncertainties that today — five hundred years, one month, and twenty-six days after the arrival of Columbus — we can’t believe it’s really true.
At different times in this story several miracles occurred, but one was definitive: the remarkable scientific development of the country. It was another of the great illusions that became reality around this house. No movie theatre has ever had such brilliant and generous neighbours. When this screening room really seemed doomed not to exist, they knocked at our door, not to ask us for something but to offer us a hand. It is for that reason that the Foundation of the New Latin American Cinema, in just reciprocity, today shares the use of this auditorium with the scientific community in Cuba, certain that we have a great deal to say to one another. This isn’t new: Saint-John Perse, in his splendid Nobel Prize acceptance speech, demonstrated how much the sources and methods of the sciences and the arts have in common. As you see, considering that I’m not here, I’ve been able to tell you quite a lot. I hope this inspires me to bring back my furniture, my books, and my stories, and that Torricelli’s equation would please allow us to bring from somewhere else other foundation stones for many more projects like this one.
IN HONOUR OF BELISARIO BETANCUR ON THE OCCASION OF HIS SEVENTIETH BIRTHDAY
Santafé de Bogotá, Colombia, February 18, 1993
Because of a mistake in calculating the time zone, I called the Presidential Palace at three in the morning. The intrusiveness seemed even more alarming when I heard the president in person on the phone. ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said in his bishop’s cadence. ‘This job is so complicated that now is the only time I have to read poetry.’ For that’s what President Belisario Betancur was up to during those tremulous small hours of power: rereading the mathematical verses of Don Pedro Salinas, before the newspapers arrived to embitter the new day with the fantasies of real life.
Nine hundred years ago, William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, also stayed awake on the nights before battle composing libertine sirventes and love ballads. Henry VIII — who devastated incomparable libraries and beheaded Thomas More — ended up in anthologies of the Elizabethan period. Tsar Nicholas I helped Pushkin correct his poems to prevent him from stumbling upon the ruthless censorship the Tsar himself had imposed. History did not prove as truculent with Belisario Betancur because in reality he wasn’t a ruler who loved poetry but a poet on whom destiny had imposed the penance of power. A ruling vocation whose first pitfall he encountered when he was twelve, in the seminary of Yarumal. This is what happened: fatigued by the dryness of rosa rosae rosarum, Belisario wrote his first verses clearly inspired by Quevedo before he’d read Quevedo, and in masterly octosyllables before he’d read González.
O Lord, O Lord, to Thee we pray
And we shall pray forevermore,
To please send down your rays of shit
Upon our Latin professor.
The first one fell on him, with his immediate expulsion. And God knew very well what He was doing. If this hadn’t happened, who knows whether today we would be celebrating the seventieth birthday of the first Colombian pope.
Young people today cannot imagine to what extent we lived back then in the shadow of poetry. We didn’t say first year of the baccalaureate but first year of literature, and the degree granted in spite of chemistry and trigonometry was bachelor of letters. For us, aborigines from all the provinces, Bogotá was not the capital of the country or the seat of government but the city of freezing drizzle where the poets lived. We not only believed in poetry but we knew with certainty — as Luis Cardoza y Aragón would say — that it is the only concrete proof of the existence of man. Colombia entered the twentieth century almost half a century late because of poetry. It was a frenzied passion, another way of experiencing a kind of fireball that moved everywhere on its own: you lifted the rug with the broom to hide the dirt and you couldn’t because poetry was already there; you opened the paper, even the business section or the police reports, and there it was; in the sediment in our coffee cup, where our fate was written, there it was. Even in the soup. Eduardo Carranza found it there: ‘The eyes that look at one another through the domestic angels of steam from the soup’. Jorge Rojas found it in the ludic pleasure of a magisterial quip: ‘Mermaids don’t spread their legs because the scales made them think there was something fishy.’ Daniel Arango found it in a perfect hendecasyllable written in compelling letters on the show window of a store: ‘the total fulfilment of your existence’. It was even in the public urinals where the Romans hid it: ‘If you don’t fear God, fear syphilis.’ With the same reverential terror we felt as children when we went to the zoo, we would go to the café where the poets met at dusk. Maestro León de Greiff taught us to lose at chess without rancour, never to give in to a hangover, and, above all, not to be afraid of words. That’s the city Belisario Betancur came to when he began the adventure of the world, in a crowd of untamed Antiochians, wearing his felt hat with a brim as wide as a bat’s wings and the priest’s overcoat that distinguished him from all other mortals. He came to stay in the poets’ café and was right at home.
From then on, history would not give him a minute’s peace. And as we know very well, even less so in the presidency of the republic, which was perhaps his only act of infidelity to poetry. No other Colombian president had to face at the same time a devastating earthquake, the eruption of a genocidal volcano, and two bloody wars in a Promethean country that for more than a century has been killing itself in its longing to live. I believe, however, that if he managed to sort everything out, it was not only because of his politician’s guts, which he has, and very firmly placed, but because of the supernatural power of poets to take on adversity.
It has taken seventy years and the faithlessness of a youthful journal for Belisario finally to reveal himself in the nude, without the many fig leaves of so many colours and sizes that he has used in his life to avoid the risks of being a poet. It is, in the backwater of old age, a worthy and beautiful way to be young again. That is why it seemed so fitting for this gathering of friends to take place in a house of poetry. And, above all, in this one, during whose small hours the secretive steps of José Asunción, kept awake by the sound of the roses, can still be heard, and where many of us, the friends who loved Belisario best from the time before he was president, have met again, we who so often pitied him while he was in office and who continue to love him more than ever now that he has achieved the rare paradise of not holding that office and not wanting to.
MY FRIEND MUTIS
Santafé de Bogotá, Colombia, August 25, 1993
Álvaro Mutis and I had made a pact not to say anything in public, good or bad, about the other, like a vaccine against the smallpox of mutual praise. And yet just ten years ago, in this very place, he violated that public health pact only because he didn’t like the barber I had recommended to him. Since then I’ve waited for an opportunity to eat my cold dish of revenge, and I don’t believe there will be another as auspicious as this one.
At that time Álvaro told how Gonzalo Mallarino had introduced us in the idyllic Cartagena of 1949. That encounter really seemed to be our first, until one afternoon three or four years ago, when I heard him casually mention something about Felix Mendelssohn. It was a revelation that all at once transported me to my years as a university student in the deserted music room of the National Library of Bogotá, where those of us who didn’t have the five centavos to study in the café took refuge. Among the few patrons at dusk, I hated one with a heraldic nose and the eyebrows of a Turk, an enormous body and shoes as tiny as those of Buffalo Bill, who came in without fail at four in the afternoon and asked for Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Forty years had to go by until that afternoon in his house in Mexico City, when without warning I recognized the stentorian voice, the feet of baby Jesus, the
trembling hands incapable of passing a needle through the eye of a camel. ‘Damn it,’ I said to him in defeat. ‘So it was you.’
The only thing I regretted was not being able to collect on my overdue resentments because we had already digested so much music together that we had no roads back. And so we continued to be friends, in spite of the unfathomable abyss that yawns in the middle of his vast knowledge and that will separate us for ever: his insensitivity to the bolero.
Álvaro had already endured the many hazards of his countless strange occupations. At the age of eighteen, as an announcer on Radio Nacional, an armed and jealous husband waited for him at the corner because he believed he had detected coded messages to his wife in the presentations Álvaro improvised on his programmes. On another occasion, during a solemn ceremony in this very Presidential Palace, he confused and reversed the names of the two older Lleras. Later, when he was already a specialist in public relations, he showed the wrong film at a benefit and, instead of a documentary about orphaned children he showed the good society ladies a pornographic comedy about nuns and soldiers, disguised by an innocent title: ‘Cultivating the Orange’. He was also the head of public relations for an airline that went out of business when its last plane crashed. Álvaro’s time was spent identifying bodies in order to notify the victims’ families before the newspapers did. The unprepared relatives opened the door, thinking that happiness was calling, and as soon as they saw his face they collapsed with a cry of pain, as if struck by lightning.
I'm Not Here to Give a Speech Page 4