"El Megano", 1955 Every dictatorship treats art in general and cinema in particular — and, I must say, not without reason — with apprehension; the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista is no exception. Cuban cinema of the era of his rule was dominated by low-quality comedies and musical films co-produced by Mexican-Cuban producers, that is, films created for the sake of entertainment and escapism. The more scandalous looked at all, to our modern view, not scandalous, simple and “sophisticated”, both in form and content, the short documentary “El Megano”. Shot on 16-millimeter film by amateur filmmakers from the intellectual community Nuestro Tempo, which aimed to combat tyranny on the cultural front, and confiscated by the Military Intelligence Service (SIM), this film survived only by a miracle: the authors managed to hide one negative of the tape.
It is believed that "El Megano" opened the way, which was followed by the revolutionary cinema of Cuba (although, to be fair, in the same 1955 was made a documentary of social orientation "Jocuma" by Jose Antonio Sarola, also banned and confiscated by the government of Fulgencio Batista). For us, modern viewers, the film is more historical than artistic value: the premiere of the film was organized in 1955 at the University of Havana, the session was interrupted by the “guardians of order”, the audience was subjected to repression, and one of the directors of the film, Julio García Espinoza, and the cameraman Jorge Aida was arrested. About his first experience in cinema years later, as a mature master, Espinosa said: “Today I see it as a naive film, without any formal charm and, even worse, with a very simple vision of reality...” Nevertheless, "El Megano" occupies an iconic place in the history of Cuban cinema - as a fundamental work of new cinema, as a neorealist manifesto and an artistic challenge that the future founders of the Cuban Institute of Film Arts and Film Industry (ICAIC) Julio García Espinosa and Thomas Gutierrez Alea threw to class oppression.
“El Megano” is a 25-minute documentary about the living and working conditions of the coal miners of the Zapata swamps, an image of absolute suffering and a call to defend human dignity. The position of García Espinoza and Gutierrez Alea is that, not content with the point of view of passive observers, they make the film with the intention of causing a conscious reaction in contemporaries that can change the intolerable situation that the filmmakers expose through the camera. The filmmakers themselves explained the meaning of the film in the opening credits: This film is just a reflection of a fragment of life in this place. The actors are the workers themselves. We dedicate this film to them.
The head of the Military Intelligence Service - one of the main repressive bodies of Batista Cuba - Colonel Antonio Blanco Rico (by the way, a year later killed by revolutionary students at the entrance to the Montmartre cabaret) called "El Megano" "shit." An irritated criticism from the mouth of a state scumbag is the best praise for true revolutionary art.
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