Memory and vestige, representations on the young Cuban film

Abstract

Memory is a framework for understanding the narrative of history, based on recovery and forgetting. The young filmmakers of Cuban audiovisual have privileged the vestige as a form of memory representation. They emphasize the remains and ruins that connect, in a ghostly or imaginary way, past and present. The following essay is based on three films produced in 2015: La obra del siglo by Carlos M. Quintela, Cosmódromo by Joanna Vidal and Héroe de culto by Ernesto Sánchez Valdés, to explore the ways in which residual traces of memory are reinscribed by a new generation of filmmakers.

In today’s visions, which are involved in these films, Cuba is presented as an unfinished project-sketch that is explained using fragments represented by the vestige (architectural, object, spiritual). The reconstruction of the national narrative is pluralized with peripheral voices and intimate stories that reinscribe the remains in symbolic terms.