Imperfect Relations: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Hasta cierto punto and Federico Fellini's 8½. (2nd January 2020)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Waller, Marguerite
• Is Part Of: Italian culture. Volume 38:Number 1(2020)
• Page Start: 73
• Page End: 81
• Publication Date: 2020-01-02
• Subjects: Fellini -- Gutiérrez Alea -- Cuba -- relational reading -- Solanas -- Getino; Arts, Italian -- Periodicals; Italian philology -- Periodicals; Italy -- Civilization -- Periodicals; 700.945
• DOI: 10.1080/01614622.2020.1751997
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0161-4622

Abstract

Abstract : Italian neorealism's influence on Cuban revolutionary filmmaking is well-known, but ongoing dialogs between Italian and Cuban film are less so. I propose an alternative film historiography, inspired, in part, by Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino's manifesto, "Toward a Third Cinema, " which suggests that such intertextualities are consequential. An exchange between Italian auteur Federico Fellini and revolutionary Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea about twentieth-century masculinities is exemplary. In the space between two pregnant musical moments separated by twenty years, the Atlantic Ocean, and geopolitically opposed political contexts, a dialog emerges between the Saraghina sequence in Fellini's 8½ (1963) and its counterpart in Gutiérrez Alea's Hasta cierto punto [ Up to a Certain Point ] (1983). I argue that when cinema historiography opens itself up to such dialogs, a kind of "decolonization" of the hegemonic discourses on both sides can occur.