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DESCRIPTION:Rachael's Film Night at ATA \n\n\nThe films of Cuban director Santiago 
 Alvarez are inextricably linked to the United States, and nearly all of his 
 key works concern some matter of American history: the civil rights 
 movement, the wars in South-East Asia, U.S. interventions in the Americas. 
 They exist as a kind of fractured mirror to the last 40 years of American 
 history-a subversive, alternate history. Alvarez's first exposure to 
 radical politics came while he worked briefly as an immigrant coal miner in 
 Pennsylvania in the 1940s (with the outbreak of war, he returned to Cuba). 
 He didn't produce his first film until he was in his forties, but the 
 indefatigable Cuban director more than compensated for lost time. In a film 
 career which began with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and 
 continued until his death in 1998 at the age of 79, he directed nearly 700 
 films. Lacking formal training, Alvarez was tapped to direct the Cuban Film 
 Institute's (ICAIC) newsreel division Noticiero ICAIC. The choice was one 
 of political utility and little artistic ability was expected from the 
 novice director. Yet over the next 30 years, Alvarez supervised the 
 production of nearly 1500 weekly newsreels and in the process transformed a 
 banal and wholly utilitarian genre into a veritable laboratory of radical 
 innovation.\n\nAlthough he produced works of nearly every conceivable 
 length, it is surely in the short film that his audacious talent is most 
 impressively manifest.\n\nNow | 6 min. | 1965. "Using a Lena Horne song 
 that was banned in the United States, Alvarez constructs a powerful montage 
 on racial discrimination in the USAS(. The film is impressive not only for 
 the resourcefulness with which it uses its found materials, including 
 pirated newsreels, but also for the syncopation of the editing, which 
 intensifies the insistence of the song itself."\n\n\nCerro Pelado | 34 min. 
 | 1966 . "The film takes as its title the name of the boat that carried the 
 Cuban sports team to the 10th Central American and Caribbean Games, which 
 in 1966 were held in San Juan, Puerto Rico, where the United States 
 attempted to prevent Cuban participation. By now, Alvarez has developed the 
 principal characteristics of his style. The film is constructed in the form 
 of a chronological visual narration of the sequence of events, with minimal 
 verbal commentary, interspersed with sections using montage and captions to 
 expound the political background to the central events. Music is used in 
 place of commentary to narrate the film." \n\nHanoi Martes 13 (Hanoi 
 Tuesday the 13th) | 38 min . | 1967. Filmed in Hanoi on December 13, 1966, 
 this documentary records the lives of people in the Vietnam capital and 
 surrounding countryside at the height of U.S. bombing. "One of Alvarez's 
 indisputable masterpieces, this is a film of great sensitivity. It also 
 displays the greatest integrity and is constructed with the greatest 
 economy of meansS(. Although the means are of the simplest, the editing is 
 exceedingly subtle. The narrative line is there, yet it's anything but 
 linear. The result is that the film informs in a way quite alien to what 
 documentary orthodoxy has taught us to expect." \n\nLBJ | 18 min. | 1968. 
 "LBJ is deservedly one of Alvarez's best known shorts, a stunning piece of 
 visual and musical montage using found materials, reaching a high pitch of 
 satire Alvarez seems to have reserved for President Johnson. The film 
 contains three main sections, with a prologue and an epilogue. The sections 
 correspond to the three letters of Johnson's initials. Alvarez uses them to 
 stand for Luther as in Martin Luther King, Bob as in Robert Kennedy, and 
 Jack or John, his brother. It's a bold play on the strange coincidence that 
 the corpses of these three men littered Johnson's ascent. The film steers 
 pretty close to libel, so to speak, in linking Johnson to the 
 assassinations, but this is not the pointS(. What Alvarez does is to 
 portray Johnson's presidency as the culmination of a whole history of 
 socio-political corruption, not of individual presidential corruption of a 
 kind that was yet to come."\n\ninfo: rachael@akpress.org, 510.208.1706 
 \n\n\n \n\n https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2004/02/03/15113.php
SUMMARY:He Who Hits First, Hits Twice:The Urgent Cinema of Santiago Alvarez
LOCATION:992 Valencia @ 21 st\nSan Francisco\n415-824-3890\nwww.atasite.org
URL:https://www.indybay.org/newsitems/2004/02/03/15113.php
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DTEND:20030201T060000Z
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