Every Night, The Night

Every Night, The Night / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo
Posted on August 31, 2013

People without God and the State, after the incessant media deaths of
Fidel Castro, as in a classroom-cage that's been left without their
despotic teacher, our society is doomed to becoming unhinged overnight.
Even in a single night, without having to wait for the morning, our
little lives can experiment the one thousand, nine hundred and
ninety-nine anecdotes and extract from them a single significance.

In effect, Cuba is beginning to resemble a tele-play, class Z
revolutionary themed. An uncaptioned series. Pasture for foreign
productions. Scenario where all the characters are extras: scraps of the
script floating in the wind of an unbearable island dullness.

Nothing is old under the same post-socialist sun. Ecclesiastical
guidelines. Newspeak, newhistory, New. Cuba is not the tedium of a
cinematic Moebius strip with no inside, no outside, but rather it is an
empty adventure in the style of The Matrix, where the despotic power is
unseen but present. And where all that still shines in the middle of the
barbarity are the glasses of the General President, whose clapperboard
controls not the fraud change but the unchangeable fraud. Ad islinitum.

Much of this televised velocity is included in the copy-and-paste of a
New York film, One Night, from the director Lucy Molloy, a film made in
Manhattabana that even its actors mistook for a reality-show, using it
as a springboard to escape the Castro catacombs of our Caribbean North
Korea.

Here in the beginning and at the end it is the verb: the action, the
persecution whose only purpose is to take away from Death a few minutes
of film, cut to Che. Poetics of the video-clip, of the ephemeral
gimmick, of the superficial that almost always is a symptom much more
sincere than so-called profundity.

The rush-rush of faked sequences, anger and haste, sometimes with hints
of a fake police documentary. Words like kicks. Free, crazy and
loquacious language, as befits a professionally amateur cast. And, in
the background, in addition to the redundant Cuban music, it's not even
necessary to voice-over Desnoes' rudeness that our capital "looks like
Tegucigalpa." And it doesn't seem so at this point in the story. The
ironies of Memories of Underdevelopment confronting the illusions of the
Left, at half a century of totalitarianism, is already an inevitable
background, spontaneously occupying even the worst of tourist
photographs of official propaganda.

One Night is not a bad story-board for when Lucy Molloy returns to
Havana one night, not only to recreate but to create the tragedy. We
need that, a culture without capitalist guilt resulting in an "unjust"
dessert for the Cuban people. Or "inappropriate" before the altar of
American academia (without the Revolution there would be no PhD theses
nor copyrighted textbooks). I fear that we need a reactionary
filmography. From the indecent Right. Neocon. Movies disposed to
precipitate the debacle not from art, but from the disaster.

The other would be another half century of kitsch.

Cubansummatum est!

From Diario de Cuba

27 August 2013

Source: "Every Night, The Night / Orlando Luis Pardo Lazo | Translating
Cuba" -
http://translatingcuba.com/every-night-the-night-orlando-luis-pardo-lazo/