MIAMI, United States. – The platform of streaming The Criterion Channel is a haven for cinephiles, where the deepest anxieties about the so-called seventh art are satisfied.
In addition to its extensive and sophisticated vault of classics and new releases at your fingertips, like a cinematheque or art house cinema, Criterion changes its main programming every month, with new themes on genres, actors or directors, among other attractive new releases.
Right now, there is a retrospective of Ingmar Bergman with almost all of his work together with the cinematography of Nicolas Roeg and Pier Paolo Pasolini, as well as the golden era of the Columbia studios and the last concert of the great Japanese musician Ryuichi Sakamoto, brought to the cinema under the title of Opus.
The subject of Cuba is also making its way modestly on The Criterion Channel. The film Lucy includes a 33-minute commentary with its director Humberto Solas and another very brief one from Martin Scorsese, where the latter recalls that Vladimir Lenin He considered cinema to be the most important of the arts for transmitting messages and slogans to the masses, due to which Fidel Castro He founded early on the ICAIC. When referring to one of the tales of LucyThe American filmmaker describes Gerardo Machado as a dictator, a term he is careful to use when mentioning Lenin or Castro.
Memories of underdevelopment It is presented on the channel along with thoughtful and anecdotal comments of great value by film critic José Antonio Évora, a profound connoisseur of the work of Thomas Gutierrez Aleaas well as editor Nelson Rodríguez and actress Daisy Granados, who highlights the film’s relevance to current events in Cuba.
In addition to these films considered classics within the canon of revolutionary cinema, there are unexpected rarities such as the documentary For the first time (1967), by Octavio Cortázar, about the arrival of cinema to remote places in the Cuban countryside and Sworn to the Drum: A Tribute to Francisco Aguabelladirected by Les Blank in 1995, about the figure of another influential Cuban percussionist in American culture who arrived in the United States during the 1950s.
The legendary documentary Buena Vista Social Club (1999), by Wim Wenders, can also be seen on The Criterion Channel, as well as Greetings to the Cubanswhich Agnes Varda created with more than 1,000 photos taken during a visit to the island in 1963, when the revolutionary chimera was captivating the international intellectual class.
The socialist nonsense I am Cuba (1964), by Mikhail Kalatozov, and a kind of making of yours, I am Cuba, the Siberian mammoth (2004), by Vicente Ferraz, are part of the programming.
So far the only representation I have found of the new Cuban cinema is a highly speculative short film, The cemetery lights up (2018), by Luis Alejandro Yero.
Like any self-respecting site of cultural intensity, The Criterion Channel abounds in unexpected dramatic twists within its vast and diverse filmography.
Recently, the platform made the documentary available to viewers 32 Soundsdirected by Sam Green in 2022.
Green strings together vignettes of people who discuss the importance of sound in the course of life. Musicians, creators of sound themselves, scientists, poets, theorists… sometimes reveal themselves through revealing anecdotes and in other cases they are conversations about personal nonsense that are frankly boring.
The documentary is narrated by Green himself, who unexpectedly sets one of his stories in Cuba, which he confesses he had visited years ago.
On the Island someone suggested that he meet an exiled American revolutionary, who turned out to be Cheri Laverne Daltona terrorist wanted by the FBI, better known by her nom de guerre Nahanda Abiodun. Linked to radical groups such as The Black Liberation Army, she helped her compatriot escape Assata Shakuralso a refugee in Cuba, accused of killing a police officer.
These two women consider themselves soldiers in a war against the alleged oppression of the US government. Abiodun He died in Cuba in 2019 and Shakur, who is one of the FBI’s most wanted terrorists, remains a fugitive on the Island.
Documentary filmmaker Green expresses his friendship with Abiodun and, in a somewhat inappropriate scene, puts headphones on her so she can feel melancholic with the music of the 60s.
The guerrilla remembers that when the song Ain’t No Stopping Us Now It became known that his violent group was organizing a march in front of the UN in NY to accuse the United States of genocide. Near the end of the chapter dedicated to his dear comrade, Green states that “like all exiles, Nahanda always dreamed of returning home.”
OPINION ARTICLE
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