"I was 40 when I started making movies." Not just any movies, and one name, Santiago Álvarez, appeared on the screen that the first time, black background and white letters, heading the credits of Noticiero Icaic Latinoamericano.
An antecedent and a reference, this is a story we cannot forget, although we cannot remain imprisoned in a 60-year-old memory. Time does not stand still. A great work was created, and we do today's job with a similar spirit and vocation, demonstrating that those ideas are relevant as representative of the ideology and dreams of the Revolution.
The huge technical transformation, the digital era, the compact cameras, filming with cell phones, all this universe would have made Santiago jump with joy. What would the Noticiero of this moment look like? It would be different.
The one imagined and made concrete by Santiago, continued by a team, ended when it did for a reason. He lived a real time and a cinematic time. His approach and method endures: using images again and again, sometimes to evoke particular moments, or latent memories, and other times to call attention to conflicts that inhabit zones of silence. The call to see beyond a news item - which today survives only a few second - is a premise that reflects a cultural, aesthetic and ideological position. Nothing is isolated.
1960: Emotion, questioning, joy. The atmosphere was so polarized that every week the projection of the Noticiero Icaic Latinoamericano meant a singular, live confrontation in theaters. The audience bears witness to the Revolution, with applause and cheers for what they see, in endless, exhilarating euphoria. They see themselves and another country, perhaps they recognized themselves in another reality that the cinema gave back to them. It was the same and different.
In the seats, a strange confrontation takes place, personifying political positions. Some applaud Fidel, and then, when the image of the MGM lion appears, roaring, others, sitting in the same theater, respond in kind: they applaud.
With the weekly newscast, Icaic was responding to an urgent need of the moment: to compete to the point of replacing the newsreels Cine Periódico and Noticiero Nacional, which were very well established. To do so was to hasten the conquest of the public with the new vision the Revolution was creating every day. The space that was cinema was within the reach of all, and there, amidst confrontations of all shades, the Noticiero Icaic began to fertilize a new way of thinking and seeing the news and information.
Intuition was Santiago Álvarez's best weapon. He used it as a filter to choose information, data or situations, and he did so with such clairvoyance that sometimes it seems to me, when I see the film again, that they were revelations from who knows where, from another world, because Santiago was not given to theorizing; he acted and, if necessary, attacked, always straightforwardly, without hesitation.
He said: "We wanted to deal with reality and its complexity." And that style, almost method, gained ground until it became a trademark, that with the years Miguel Torres, Daniel Díaz Torres, Fernando Pérez, Rolando Díaz and Manolo Pérez transformed, giving it their personal stamp with the rhythm that every moment demanded.
The approach was not to present news, but to show relationships, put the news in a broad context, with a dynamic, aggressive montage, and music as a narrative element. There were still shots when moving images were not available, for an integrated whole that created and cemented a style and a look.
Remembering “Now” is one way to make the relevance of Santiago's heritage clear today. He disdains the immediacy of the news. What he seeks and achieves is to link, in an unprecedented and emotional way, drama, politics, journalism, using all the narrative resources he knows and integrates into the discourse.
He admitted, in 1963, that he was surprised, "when I made the Noticiero (no. 142) that included a note about Benny Moré’s death. I saw for the first time the transfer of my feelings, and I felt that I was using the language of cinema to express my emotions. I felt that there was something new, different, a turning point. Emotion is passion, and if there is no passion or emotion, can there be an effective reason?
"We wanted to deal with reality and its complexity. The function of cinema and journalism is not to solve problems that arise, but to contribute to knowledge of them, to help clarify and reflect (...). The problems detected are not solved because one writes a thousand articles or a thousand news items. A denunciation helps, mobilizes, but it does not solve the problem. I say with pride that Cuban cinema has a tradition of criticism, of dealing with real problems.
"I was 40 when I started making movies. My first 20 years! I was happy at 20... At 14 or 15 I wanted to be a linotypist, or a typesetter, I tried to learn the trade," until the day he discovered that it is in the cinema that all his concerns come together and he began the adventure with his imagination, of seeing and looking at reality, committing himself to living among anarchists, communists, republicans and revolutionaries, experiences that accompanied him all his life, and that he left or attempted to leave to Cuban filmmaking.
This anniversary is not, and cannot be, a clean slate. There is much of the past in the present and in the future. This is why we remember Santiago Álvarez, and never forget Noticiero Icaic Latinoamericano.
