MADRID, Spain.- One of the many artists repudiated by the Cuban regime in the 1960s and 1970s was the filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián; despite being among the greatest documentalists that Cuba has produced.
Nephew of the poet Nicolás Guillén, Landrián was director of short films at the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), from where he was expelled in 1971 for his “anti-system” ideas. Supervised by the official filmmaker Santiago Álvarez, Landrián carried out commissioned propaganda work; but the filmmaker printed his transgressive look in the technical aspect and showed the Cuba of those years, which he was not interested in showing the Cuban authorities.
According to the director’s own statements, “he tried to make a cinema that was not the same as the rest, that did not coincide with the rest, that was a very personal cinema (…) The image was more important than the word itself. I was interested in creating the image through a new language, a daring language, interesting for the viewer”.
After the appearance of documentaries Reportage (1965) and Return to Baracoa (1966), where he reflected the problems of the Cuban peasantry, Landrián was sent to the work camps on the Isle of Pines.
In Isla de Pinos he developed schizophrenia, for which he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital, where he received electric shocks. After recovering and having served his sentence, he returned to his position at ICAIC.
About this return to the ICAIC, his widow, Gretel Alfonso, told the media The escape: “Thanks to Theodore Kristensen… who had been, along with Joris Ivens, one of his decisive teachers in documentary filmmaking, both war documentary filmmakers, they were the ones who accepted Nicolás’ entry into the studio and documentary filmmaking.”
Upon returning to ICAIC, he directed Arabic Coffeeone of his greatest documentaries, defined by the Digital Encyclopedia of Cuban Audiovisual (ENDAC) as “an irreverent exercise in creation, the most varied techniques (still photos, archive images) combined with a use of music where there is no shortage of not even The Beatles, banned from national radio at that time”.
Though Arabic Coffee is one of his best-known achievements, it was Line Workshop and 18 the one that led him to be definitively fired from the ICAIC, harassed and repudiated until his exile in 1989.
On leaving Cuba, his wife has recounted: “We were both exiled. For him, who was expelled, there was no alternative, and I wanted to accompany him. Let’s say he was ordered out. You cannot expel a national just like that, but you can force, pressure and squeeze him, and also make everything easier for him, including contacts with the Embassy, with the Interests Office, so that he leaves; Even the passport that cost 50 pesos was given to us for free”.
Gretel Alonso also explained that “the 80s were a particularly miserable decade. Nicolás already knew that there was no return to the cinema, but rather a fight for survival and constant persecution”.
Back in the United States, Landrián filmed his latest documentary, Inside Downtown (2001), co-directed with José Egusquiza Zorrilla. The filmmaker died of cancer in Miami in 2003, at the age of 65.
Many years after his death, the Cuban government has shown signs of trying to rescue his figure; as has been the case with some editions of the Muestra Joven, which prepared cycles with part of his work. In this edition of the Havana Film Festival, almost 20 years after his death, tribute is paid to him with the presentation of the audiovisual landriandirected by the filmmaker Ernesto Daranas.
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