Imperfect Relations: Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s Hasta cierto punto and Federico Fellini’s 8½

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.