Join us on Wednesday the 27th of November from 5pm (film starts at 5:15pm) in the Professor Stuart Hall Building (here) room LG02 Media Research Building room 05 (screen 1) for a screening of Humberto Solás’s Lucía (1968). The film is 2 hours 40 minutes long so the screening will be finished by 8pm.
Lucía is an important work of Cuban history and politics, a symbol for the fundamental developments of analytical forms and discourse in art and film occurring during the revolutionary period. The film is a melodrama which recounts three narratives of different women, all named Lucía, who each politically symbolise and represent the tensions of different class and gender relations and definitions.
Humberto Solás was a filmmaker who worked with other artists to help kickstart the Cuban Institute of Cinematic Arts (ICAIC) during the revolutionary period. Lucía was his first feature film, and is particularly remarkable for its shifts in form and style simultaneously with the changes in social tensions of each narrative. The film can be seen as an instrument of decolonization and ideological deconstruction, comparable to other key works of ‘Third Cinema’ like Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (1968) or Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers (1966).
For more about the film, see J. Hoberman’s 2018 article on it for the New York Times, where he says the film is “considered by many as Cuban cinema’s peak accomplishment”.