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    Memories of Underdevelopment

    Michael Chanan (Author)

    9780813515373

    Paperback / softback, published 1 June 1990

    274 pages
    22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.313 kg

    Here is a film that is wise, sad, and often funny... effective and moving... complete in the way very few ever are. - Vincent Canby

    Memories of Underdevelopment was the first great international success of Cuban cinema. The film provides a complex portrait of Sergio, a disaffected bourgeois intellectual who remains in Havana after the Revolution, suspended between two worlds. He can no longer accept the values of his family's reactionary past and yet boredom and the conditioning of his early life prevent him from committing himself to the new revolutionary society. Sergio's story is played out in the turbulent period of the Bay of Pigs invasion and the 1962 missile crisis, events he can only watch on his television screen or from his apartment balcony.The film, initially banned by the U.S. government as part of its trade quarantine of Cuba, was shown here five years after its original release. But American critics responded enthusiastically to it and the National Society of Film Critics bestowed an award on its director.

    This double volume includes the complete continuity script of Memories, as well as the complete novel, Inconsolable Memories, upon which the film is based. An interview with Alea is reproduced here, as well as documentation of the political controversy that surrounded the film in this country. Michael Chanan's introduction places the film in the context of Cuban political and cultural history. The volume also includes a biographical sketch of Alea, a chronology of the Cuban Revolution, reviews, commentary, a filmography, and a bibliography.Michael Chanan lives in England, where he teaches and writes on film. He is the author of The Cuban Image: Cinema and Cultural Politics in Cuba.

    Introduction - 
    Lessons of Experience 
    Tomas Gutierrez Alea: A Biographical Sketch
    Chronology

    Memories of Underdevelopment - 
    Credits and cast
    The Continuity Script
    Notes on the Continuity Script

    Contexts - 
    Source :
    Inconsolable Memories 
    Aftermath: Politics and Cinema : 
    Federal Agents Seize Cuban Festival Films Here
    Film Critics' Letter
    U.S. Refuses Visa to Cuban Director to get Film Award
    Editorial: Celluloid Menace
    Telegram from Tomas Gutierrez
    Personal Recollections of T.G. Alea :
    Individual Fulfillment and Collective Achievement: An Interview with Tomas Gutierrez Alea
    Memories of Memories

    Reviews and Commentaries - 
    Reviews:
    New York Times
    The New Republic
    The New Yorkers
    Sight and Sound [London]
    Cinema 74 [Paris]
    Cinema &
    Film [Rome]
    Commentaries:
    A Dialectal and Partisan Film
    Memories of Underdevelopment in the Land of Overdevelopment 
    "
    Witnesses Almost Everywhere"
    : The Rhetorical Strategies of Memories of Underdevelopment

    Filmography and Bibliography - 
    Alea Filmography, 1950-1988
    Selected Bibliography
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