A Scattered Homage to Guillermo Cabrera Infante

		A Scattered Homage to Guillermo Cabrera Infante (1929-2005) Victor Fowler Calzada

The story begins more than thirty years ago, in a used bookstore in Havana. Exploring the shelves, I found an old book dedicated to an old cinema, a book written by an unknown author named G. Caín (obviously inspired by Cain and Abel) and with a curious title: Un oficio del siglo XX (A Twentieth Century Job). You have to have lived in Havana in those times to fully understand the nature of my surprise before this book, its author, title and contents. I am speaking about the late 1970s, a time when our screens (in cinemas or on television) where massively occupied by films from East Europe, mostly USSR films. The process of Sovietisation was at its peak.

My childhood take place in a time of changes, when the last pieces of the old capitalist world were swept away and the cultural objects of the new order were rapidly filling the cultural field. I was born in 1960; as a child I could see on television a lot of North American films, classics and films from the B series, classic TV series like Flash Gordon or Dick Tracy, Donald Duck or Popeye, the Sailor Man, and I could read many FBI and Western paperbacks. Every Sunday, the morning would begin with cartoons of Mickey Mouse, Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Pie, Woody Woodpecker, Yogi Bear and Mr Magoo. After that there would be a program named La comedia silente, a big hit and a classic for my generation, in which a voice performer named Armando Calderón would create dialogues for all the characters, also imitating the noises of punches, gunshots and falls. With Mr Calderón we learned to love Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, Laurel and Hardy, Langdon, the Mack Sennett Company, Max Linder and many other heroes of classical American comedy. The climx of Sunday morning was the time for a series: fantasy or Western, Flash Gordon or Dick Foran (with his horse, Smoke) and Rocky Lane (with his horse, Beauty). Afternoons and night were the hours of feature movies, and the names of Barbara Stanwyck, Ida Lupino, Rita Hayword, Lana Turner, Betty Davis or Joan Crawford, John Garfield, Clark Gable, Cary Grant, John Wayne and many, many more Hollywood stars, are absolutely familiar to me from that time. As we are speaking here about the ashes of a disappeared world, I was even able to see many Superman cartoons, as well as many short films featuring Hopalong Cassidy and the Lone Ranger – an incredible heritage, a treasure, preserved in the house of a friend (a son of the former middle-class), along with a 16mm projector.

1. In 1950, Cabrera Infante published a short story in Bohemia, the most famous Cuban magazine of the time; it story contained ‘offensive and obscene words’, and Cabrera Infante was put in jail and fined one hundred and fifty American dollars. After he was released, his name was banished from the Cuban press and he was obliged to write under a pseudonym; thus G. Caín appeared. (In the English version of A Twentieth Century Job, Caín loses the accent and becomes Cain.)

In the late ‘70s, you could find less and less of all that culture which nourished my childhood. Maybe the only reserve of the past was the Cinematheque, where we saw the best Hawks, Ford, Hitchcock, Wilder and many more. In this landscape, to find A Twentieth Century Job was a kind of reconciliation with a lost heritage, and a door to discovering new ways of understanding movies. Not only was the author speaking about films with a feeling of belonging (maybe bonding) and erudition you could not find in any other Cuban critic of the time; he was also travelling into a type of film which was almost exiled from the field of vision of the new criticism. In the same manner, the critic has a poignant style (full of humour and irreverence), completely different from all the other Cuban film critics I was reading at the time in newspapers or magazines. This book was written using masks: a supposed friend of the author, who is dead at the moment of the publication, has selected the texts (which originally appeared as a column in the magazine Carteles from 1954 to 1960) and wrote the introductory piece to each section, as well as an epilogue. The friend speaks of the author (G. Cain) and the author is the pseudonym of the friend: Guillermo Cabrera Infante. (1) As he explains in the introduction to the book:

2. G. Cabrera Infante (trans. Kenneth Hall and the author), A Twentieth Century Job (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p. 10.

There was nothing sacred for Cain when the hoax sickness attacked him: history, economy and geography were converted into pieces of a lame puzzle, which, once assembled, turned out to be one leg pull. (2)

3. ‘Lunes de Revolución [literary supplement, edited by Cabrera Infante, of the pro-Castro newspaper Revolución] had vanished, and my dissidence in relation to the regime had become more and more evident, only increasing as time went by; so when it came to writing the epilogue [of A Twentieth Century Job] in February 1962, the journey of my critic-character was over – demonstrating that, in a totalitarian country, the critic can only exist as a fictional entity.’ Cabrera Infante (eds. Nivia Montenegro and Enrico Mario Santí), Infantería (México: D.F. Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999), pps. 1080-1081.

The book was published in 1962 (three years after the triumph of Cuban revolution), and by then the meaning of the masks had changed hugely; to Cabrera Infante the use of this second mask was a sort of strategy conceived to show that ‘in a totalitarian country, the critic can only exist as a fictional entity’. (3) You only need to read, randomly, a few pages of A Twentieth Century Job to see how socialism could be a sombre, far too serious place. And I am not even speaking of the political situation; rather of the joy and spirit that can flow from a work of prose.

An important part of the films of my life was introduced to me by Cabrera Infante’s book. To write the present homage I read again all his books of criticism; I was shocked to realise how well I remembered his best texts. Films like The Trouble with Harry (1955) and Vertigo (1958) by Hitchcock, Fellini’s La Strada (1954), Tati’s Mr Hulot’s Holiday (1953), Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1950), Minnelli’s Tea and Sympathy (1956), Chaplin’s The Gold Rush (1925), Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (1954), Juan Antonio Bardem’s Death of a Cyclist (1955), Renato Castellani’s Two Cents Worth of Hope (1952), Hawks’ Rio Bravo (1959) and Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959) are absolutely tied in my memory to Caín, because he paved my way to all of it. He gave me a sense of complexity, a set of tools to understand that films are a sophisticated mix of music, sounds, lines of dialogue, photography, performance and more at the service of a plot. He was my master, and I guess that it was the same to all those of my generation, and many others since.

A Twentieth Century Job is a climactic book in a double sense: the triumph of a film critic who is at his best, just when he had a personal language and was pointing not to the present but the future of cinema (read his analyses of Vertigo and The 400 Blows for examples of this); at the same time, it was the end of Cain, because after the book his author abandoned Cuba (the place), film criticism (the career), and deals with poverty and delocalisation in a way that is typical of exiles. This is a moment in which the novelist displaces the film critic. Only in 1971, in the American road movie Vanishing Point, would Cain be briefly resurrected as a screenwriter – between Cabrera Infante’s other two produced scripts, for Joe Massot’s Wonderwall (1967) and Andy Garcia’s The Lost City (2005).

I love this first film book by Cabrera Infante. At the end of the ‘90s, I found Cine o sardina (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1997), his final collection of film criticism, looking for the same kind of experience I had before. But, even as I laughed a lot and enjoyed his erudition, this was an almost unhappy encounter. Because time and cinema had continued moving on, past the old lessons of the master. Maybe this is a way of saying that, when years passed, my field of vision became wider than Hollywood films and histories and then my understanding of cinema. I missed the presence of more texts about the present and, even when taking pleasure in the essays devoted to Lynch’s Eraserhead (1978), Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs (1992), Kiarostami’s Where is My Friend’s House? (1987) and Almodóvar’s The Flower of My Secret (1995), it was not enough to live up to my expectations or my hunger. The pupils had grown up. We are citizens of today, educated under different influences; the dynamic of world communications has changed, and now is possible to see (more easily than fifty years ago) films from different countries, cultures and aesthetic intentions – even in Cuba. We think differently and have other questions.

Yes, the pupils have grown up. But the master remains the master. Speaking of Vertigo (February 7 1960), Cabrera Infante wrote:

4. A Twentieth Century Job, p. 292.

The cronista [chronicler] would like to insist on the importance of understanding Vertigo in order to understand the cinema of now and of tomorrow. A cinema that will return to romanticism in frank opposition to neorealism, a cinema that will be served by magic, the subconscious, the sound and the pictures of passion, rather than by conflicts between poverty and wealth, rather than by the subject that seems concerned with the social destiny of man and is almost always condescending ...(4)

As the same Caín had previously praised the best films of neorealism, we need to understand this statement as the search for an opposition based on cinematic reasons; the last word, ‘condescending’, could be our key. If you have on one side a condescending cinema, there is on the other a radical cinema (pay attention to his description and you will discover the ties with romantic and surrealist movements). If that is true, then we could read the paragraph as an announcement of the period of Oshima, Lynch, Godard, Bergman, Fellini, Mekas, Brakhage, Warhol, Jodorowsky, Ruiz, Akerman, Marker, Rocha and many other radical filmmakers and poetics.

In the introductory pages to A Twentieth Century Job, the fictitious friend of the dead Cain writes:

5. A Twentieth Century Job, p. 9.

Curioser and curioser, Cain always went to movies alone. For this he also had an explanation: ‘Women don't let you watch movies in peace,’ he explained. ‘It seems that the combination of the darkness, the music and the so soft seats predisposes them to something quite different from a critical judgement: to erotic prejudice.’ (5)

6. G. Cabrera Infante (trans. Suzanne Jill Levine and the author), ‘Movies Must Have an End’, in Infante’s Inferno (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), pp. 392-410.

In spite of (or because of) this, the last pages of the 1979 novel La Habana para un Infante difunto (Infante’s Inferno) depict a fantastic voyage beginning in the body of a woman and ending in the clear light of a cinema projector. (6) The character, more or less the author himself, goes to a well-known Havana cinema with a premonitory name: Fausto. There, in the lobby, he perceives a gesture of invitation in a woman’s face. Immediately he buys a ticket and enters the theatre in pursuit of this woman, who is sitting in the middle of a group of empty seats. Sitting means waiting: the woman is, the whole time, paying attention to the action on the screen (a Pluto cartoon) as he begins putting a hand on one of her knees, then one of her breasts, until she finally opens her legs, where he touches her ‘intimate nakedness’. It is at this very moment that magic begins, because he loses his wedding ring ... inside her.

I know that I am spoiling one of the most beautiful passages ever written in the Spanish language, but I need to tell this story to finally return to cinema via another route. She gives him permission and the incredible quest for the ring begins, but then ... he loses his wristwatch in the same place/hole and, then, then the cuff links from his shirt. As all efforts to find these objects end in failure (there is so little light in a movie theatre), she gives him a flashlight and opens her legs as wide as she can. Not only to facilitate the search, but to give him the possibility of entering her body. Inside, he does not find the ring, watch or cuff links, but a book with Latin words on the cover: ‘Ovarium, corpus luteus, labium majus, matrix, tubae Falloppi.’ The next phase is the loss of the book and the exit from the labyrinth in a grand parody of Jules Verne’s famous novel, Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The only thing which the character never leaves behind is the light: the phallic light of the cinema projector.

This journey into the body of woman is a strange rite of passage in which the hero loses time (the watch), social bonds (the wedding ring), and the correct dressing (the cuff links) that symbolises his civilised condition. The woman with open legs, hieratic and tempting at the same time, with enormous internal organs, wet and dark, is a sort of absolute Nature – at least, if we consider the loss of time, social bonds and civilised condition experienced by the character. From this point of view, the words printed in the cover of the book (and the loss of the book when the character is finding the exit of the labyrinth) are not only logical, but the only words one could find there, as we are now in the empire of origins. Matrix is source, rising, birth. The novel starts with an adolescent character, an emigrant from a provincial town in the big city, the capital of the country, trying to find his way in life in a double direction: erotic and professional. At the end we have travelled, with him, the road to maturity and cinema (both of them signifying creation) in a single movement of reading.

		© Victor Fowler Calzada and Rouge 2005. Cannot be reprinted without permission of the author and editors.