“En el vórtice de la enajenación”: Nicolás Guillén Landrián y la implosión del documental científico-popular cubano de los 60

Abstract

The article explores Nicolás Guillén Landrián’s short films in the context of Cuban documentaries of the 1960s. After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, documentary cinema was assigned a didactic and propagandistic mission in defense of the new institutional order. For a decade the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC) produced a large number of films that combined aesthetic avant-garde and political propaganda. During those same years Guillén Landrián revamped the forms of the documentary from an ironic and self-conscious perspective that undermined the ideological foundations of the so-called documentales científicopopulares. In this article, I describe most of his films, which were influenced by a popular, nonofficialist perspective, aimed at revealing the contradictions between the revolution’s dreams and the geographical and social margins.