For an Impossible Cinema. Documentary and Avant-garde in Cuba (1959-1972)
Held on 16, 17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 30 jun, 01, 02, 07, 08, 09 jul 2016
Museo Reina Sofía presents this retrospective film-program dedicated to Cuban documentary movement around the Revolution, an Avant-garde episode in Latin America usually ignored. Together with the impulse to show a new reality and rethink the public function of the image, the documentary in Cuba merges the factual record with the aesthetics of shock and agitation of the montage, producing a unique visual manifesto. The program, with original cinema formats from the ICAIC, is articulated in dialogue with the exhibition dedicated to the artist Wifredo Lam (from 6th April to 15th August 2016).
In 1959, Cuban reality changed radically with the triumph of the Revolution, and one of the consequences was the birth of a new cinema, in which the documentary figured centrally. Barely a decade later, one of its leading figures, Julio García Espinosa, wrote a manifesto calling “Por un cine imperfecto” (For an imperfect cinema), a polemical reflection on the practice of revolutionary film, where he argued that the imperfections of a low budget cinema of urgency, which sought to create a dialogue with its audience, were preferable to the sheen of high production values which merely reflected the audience back to itself. It was a thesis he demonstrated in his own documentary, Tercer mundo, tercera guerra mundial, shot in Vietnam in 1968, which is one of the centrepieces of this season, but it is also manifest in the experimental current which runs through many of the others.
The new documentary that emerged in Cuba in the 1960s involves a paradox. The moment was one in which the appearance of new synchronous 16mm cameras in the metropolitan countries stimulated the aesthetic revolution of direct cinema and cinéma vérité, but not in Cuba, where the new film institute, the ICAIC (Instituto Cubano del Arte y Industria Cinematográficos), being geared to cinema exhibition, stuck with 35mm. They quickly learnt to overcome its limitations. The Revolution unleashed a frenzy of creative endeavour as the enthusiastic new filmmakers went out onto the streets to document their rapidly transforming world, which thus became a forcing ground for the documentary as they tried to keep up.
At the core of the season, the boldest innovator, Santiago Álvarez, was in charge of the weekly Noticiero, which he soon transformed. Instead of an arbitrary sequence of disconnected items, he joined them up into a political argument, or turned them into single topic documentaries, and then proceeded to longer films. Audiences flocked to see his fast, strongly montage-driven style of political satire, usually directed against US international politics, just when documentary was disappearing from metropolitan cinema screens. Alvarez also turned the newsreels into a school for young film-makers in how to make films quickly, cheaply, and using whatever materials were at hand. Their imagination fired up, they became, among other things, masters of working with found footage.
To counterpoint the Cuban films are a handful of documentaries made in Cuba by filmmakers coming from abroad in the Revolution's early years. Joris Ivens eagerly accepted the ICAIC's invitation to make two films with them, while others, including Chris Marker and Agnès Varda, came and made films of their own which stand as timely testimonies of solidarity.
To sum up, the series seeks to present an ignored movement in the histories of avant-garde cinema, but foundational in the critical transformation of the documentary in a medium which negotiates with a historical moment while examines its own limits and possibilities.
Film series dedicated to Julio Garcia Espinosa (Havana, 1926-2016).
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía
Curatorship
Michael Chanan
With the collaboration of
Cinemateca de Cuba
Acknowledgement
Embassy of Cuba in Spain
Itinerary
DOCLISBOA - International Film Festival, Lisbon (October 20 - 30, 2016)
TABAKALERA - Centro Internacional de Cultura Contemporánea, Donostia / San Sebastián (November 4 - December 30, 2016)
CGAI-Filmoteca de Galicia (November 15 - December 14, 2016)
Filmoteca de Catalunya (February 3 - March 13, 2017)
BFI - British Film Institute (August 1, 2017 - August 31, 2017)
In collaboration with
![Miguel Brieva, ilustración de la novela infantil Manuela y los Cakirukos (Reservoir Books, 2022) [izquierda] y Cibeles no conduzcas, 2023 [derecha]. Cortesía del artista](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/ecologias_del_deseo_utopico.jpg.webp)
![Ángel Alonso, Charbon [Carbón], 1964. Museo Reina Sofía](https://recursos.museoreinasofia.es/styles/small_landscape/public/Actividades/perspectivas_ecoambientales.jpg.webp)
Más actividades
Christian Nyampeta and the École du soir
13, 14, 15 NOV, 11, 12, 13 DIC 2025
Christian Nyampeta is a Rwandan artist, musician and film-maker whose work encompasses pedagogies and community forms of knowledge production and transmission. His Ècole du soir (Evening School) is an art project conceived as a mobile space of collective learning and is named in homage to Ousmane Sembène (1923–2007), a pioneer of African cinema who defined his films as “evening classes” for the people, a medium of education and emancipation through culture.
This block is made up of three double sessions: the video work of Christian Nyampeta, the films of École du soir and one of Ousmane Sèmbene’s feature-length films. Nyampeta will introduce all three first sessions.
Long Live L’Abo! Celluloid and Activism
4, 5, 6 DIC 2025
L’Abominable is a collective film laboratory founded in La Courneuve (Paris, France) in 1996. It came into being in response to the disappearing infrastructures in artisan film-making and to provide artists and film-makers with a self-managed space from which to produce, develop and screen films in analogue formats such as Super 8, 16mm and 35mm. Anchored in this premise, the community promotes aesthetic and political experimentation in analogue film opposite digital hegemony. Over the years, L’Abominable, better known as L’Abo, has accompanied different generations of film-makers, upholding an international movement of independent film practices.
This third segment is structured in three sessions: a lecture on L’Abo given by Pilar Monsell and Camilo Restrepo; a session of short films in 16mm produced in L’Abo; and the feature-length film Une isle, une nuit, made by the Les Pirates des Lentillères collective.
UP/ROOTING
11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16 NOV 2025
Museo Reina Sofía and MACBA Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) invite applications for the 2025 iteration of the School of Common Knowledge, which will take place from November 11th to 16th in Madrid and Barcelona.
The School of Common Knowledge (SCK) draws on the network, knowledge and experience of L’Internationale, a confederation of museums, art organizations and universities that strives to reimagine and practice internationalism, solidarity and communality within the cultural field. This year, the SCK program focuses on the contested and dynamic notions of rooting and uprooting in the framework of present —colonial, migrant, situated, and ecological— complexities.
Building on the legacy of the Glossary of Common Knowledge and the current European program Museum of the Commons, the SCK invites participants to reflect on the power of language to shape our understanding of art and society through a co-learning methodology. Its ambition is to be both nomadic and situated, looking at specific cultural and geopolitical situations while exploring their relations and interdependencies with the rest of the world.
In the current context fraught with war and genocide, the criminalization of migration and hyper-identitarianism, concepts such as un/belonging become unstable and in need of collective rethinking:
How can we reframe the sense and practice of belonging away from reductive nationalist paradigms or the violence of displacement? How to critically hold the entanglement of the colonial routes and the cultural roots we are part of? What do we do with the toxic legacies we inherit? And with the emancipatory genealogies and practices that we choose to align with? Can a renewed practice of belonging and coalition-making through affinity be part of a process of dis/identification? What geographies —cultural, artistic, political— do these practices of de/centering, up/rooting, un/belonging and dis/alignment designate?
Departing from these questions, the program consists of a series of visits to situated initiatives (including Museo Situado, Paisanaje and MACBA's Kitchen, to name a few), engagements with the exhibitions and projects on view (Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture from Panafrica), a keynote lecture by Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, as well as daily reading and discussion gatherings, editorial harvest sessions, and conviviality moments.
Ylia and Marta Pang
Thursday, 6 November - 8pm
The encounter between Spanish DJ and producer Ylia and visual artist Marta Pang is presented in the form of a premiere in the Museo Reina Sofía. Both artists converge from divergent trajectories to give form to a new project conceived specifically for this series, which aims to create new stage projects by setting out from the friction between artists and dialogue between disciplines.
On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes
23, 24, 25, 30, 31 OCT 2025
On the Art of Occupying Spaces and Curating Film Programmes is a film programme overseen by Miriam Martín and Ana Useros, and the first within the project The Cinema and Sound Commons. The activity includes a lecture and two films screened twice in two different sessions: John Ford’s Fort Apache (1948) and John Gianvito’s The Mad Songs of Fernanda Hussein (2001).
“By virtue of a group of film curator enthusiasts, small plazas and vacant lots in Madrid’s Lavapiés neighbourhood became cinemas with the arrival of summer. The city streets made room for everyone: the local residents who came down with their seats tucked under their arms, or those who simply came across the Lavapiés Film Festival with no prior knowledge of it, but knowing how to recognise a free and convivial film screening, as enticing as light is to moths. The Festival’s film curators had to first reach a consensus with one another, by assembly, and then with others, addressing issues ranging from electricity to the transfer of rights to show the films.
Whereas the annually organised Festival resembled a camp, the weekly CSOA (Squatted Self-managed Social Centre) La Morada film society looked more like a settlement. In each squatted social centre, a micro civilisation is founded, and nestled among its infrastructures is always a film society. Why? We’ll see. A direct outcome of the 15M anti-austerity movement, this film society was contentless in form (the content, the films, were decided upon from session to session). Anyone was free to enter, and therefore free to curate the line-up, although not haphazardly — there was a method, ultimately devised so the community would not close, so it would never have one set image of itself.
Part of this method entailed relating the film from the following week to the recently viewed one, and the same method has gone into putting together this two-session programme. The Festival and the film society were, moreover, attempts at rectification: the festival logic and the very same film-club logic, according to which film boils down to an excuse for debating serious issues. There would be nothing to debate but much to ponder. For instance, about the manufacturing of enemies by a nation that chooses enemies in the world, with one film from the year the State of Israel was proclaimed and another from the year the Twin Towers were razed to the ground. The USA manufactures functional enemies and heroes and American cinema, in addition to showing us this, manufactures unforgettable characters: the Apache chief, Cochise, and mother courage, Fernanda Hussein. We’ll see”.
Miriam Martín and Ana Useros