Directors: Jose Antonio Torres & Antonio Manuel Rodriguez
Writers: Jose Antonio Torres & Antonio Manuel Rodriguez
Cast: Javier Jimenez
Running time: 1hr 27mins
Does lyric poetry work in the cinema? The question came to mind after viewing Lorca in Havana, a feature length documentary written and directed by Jose Antonio Torres and Antonio Manuel Rodriguez. Unsurprisingly, given the prosaic title, the movie tells the story of a visit to Cuba in 1930 by the Spanish poet Federico Lorca.
After a ransack of cinema memories, I came up with only one film where poetry might be said to have played an integral part – Jim Jarmusch’s remarkable genre melting maelstrom: Dead Man. Jarmusch believably transposed a reverence for the English mystical poet, William Blake into the consciousness of a First Nation shaman living on the brutally contested US imperial frontier.
I wonder whether IFL readers can think of any other examples – aside from film adaptations of works by William Shakespeare. Note the Anglo-centric bias of the above – more of this later.
As to why poetry and film is not an obvious mix, I would guess that poetry of itself has an intensity of experience – you have to read it aloud to make every word work to the full, even the punctuation marks are crucial – and accompanying visual images usually act as a distraction. Similarly, to get the most out of listening to symphonic or chamber music, it is best to give oneself up entirely to the music – to pure sound.
With Lorca in Havana, the filmmakers have produced a highly credible piece of cinema. The production values are excellent with fine cinematography from Manuel Carrasco and first class editing by Hazeina Rodriguez – the movie looks great.
Torres and Rodriguez opt for a fairly conventual documentary format to give us the feel of Havana – talking heads and location shots of places where Lorca stayed during his visit. Mercifully, there is not too much use of that tired trope of so many films about Cuba – footage of ancient and to contemporary eyes exotic, US automobiles.
Innovatively, the filmmakers use performances from local theatre and music groups to illustrate the indigenous cultures that they believe had a profound impact on Lorca during his time on the island – these sequences work well. As does, the use of actors to portray Lorca and some of the local artists and intellectuals that he met, sharing their reminiscences of their time spent together. All the supporting actors do well but the star of the show is Javier Jimenez in the lead as Lorca.
Jimenez exudes the charisma that many observers apparently attributed to Lorca. In a nicely judged touch, the filmmakers chose to shoot Jimenez in a room sitting on a bed in a dressing gown voicing his thoughts to camera – the scenes have a marvellous sense of intimacy and, at times, of vulnerability. Jimenez features in the opening shot of the movie. We see the image of a full moon and then the camera pans slowly across the beautifully lit counterpane of the bed to reveal Jimenez/Lorca. The scene is a tour de force of cinema and will stay with me for a long time.
Torres and Rodriguez deploy the talking heads in fairly lengthy sequences throughout the film – to act as signposts and essentially tell us what to think about Lorca. The talking heads are, I would assume, members of contemporary Cuban academia or the Cuban arts community and given the enduring dead hand of Fidelismo I would recommend IFL viewers to employ some radical doubt as to their contributions.
The line we are given is that Lorca was a Great Poet and a Great Man – that everything he did was of importance and that his visit to Cuba reflected his profound love of Cuban culture and its startlingly racially diverse society. Maybe so.
The problem here is I know fuck all about Lorca – I am an outsider. OK, I have picked up over the years that Lorca was generally on the side of the angels, was murdered during the Spanish Civil War, that his poetry reflected his Andalusian roots, and that he was a gay man trying to live in a deeply conservative society. But that is all. I would suggest it would have been helpful for the filmmakers to have given has some context – why we should be interested in Lorca and an argument for why his poetry matters today.
Lost in translation. Poetry of all forms of literature truly does not move across languages easily – Lorca or say Baudelaire in English does not cut it. The only poetry translations that I have read and enjoyed have been Seamus Heaney’s rendition of the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf into modern English and various English transliterations of Homer and Ovid. My primary object in these cases was not to experience pure joy in the play of the words, the poet’s song, but to gain some understanding of the works’ contribution to the culture which has shaped my life.
So, the filmmakers, in trying to get across their message as to the power of Lorca’s poetry to a non-Spanish speaking audience, were between a rock and a hard place, to use a difficult to translate idiom. I have only rudimentary spoken Spanish so was reliant on the subtitles provided by the production team. Unhappily, the translation given is wooden throughout and at times becomes incomprehensible – it had the feeling that it had been generated by machine learning. The failure in translation is such a pity as I would suggest it would make the movie pretty much unwatchable for IFL viewers without Spanish.
Overall: 3 stars
On the evidence of Lorca in Havana, Torres and Rodriguez have demonstrated a fine feel for cinema. For future work, I would recommend that they do not take as given their audience’s interest in their subject matter but to try and draw them into engagement and to make a greater effort to seduce them into thinking about why the subject is of importance both historically and in contemporary society.
A future priority would have to be, if they wish to reach the widest possible audience, to invest more time and resources in provision of adequate, comprehensible sub-titles. But maybe your reviewer has missed the point in that the filmmakers simply took for granted the uniquely Spanish quality of Lorca’s art and only felt the need to make a cursory nod at provision of an English transliteration.
Notwithstanding the issues over translation, I have no doubt that Lorca in Havana will play an important part in Lorca studies over the coming years and will be a key resource for students of the Great Man.
The marriage of poetry and cinema is yet to be celebrated.