Tomas Gutierrez Alea

Tomas Gutierrez Alea (1920-1996), Cuban motion-picture director, whose works explore revolution and bureaucracy. Gutiérrez Alea was born in Santiago and began making short films during his late teens. He studied law at the University of Havana. After graduation, he moved to Rome in 1950 to attend the Italian film school, Centro Sperimentale de Cinematografia. There he encountered neorealism, a movement in filmmaking that aimed to present life realistically by filming on location (rather than in a studio), casting nonprofessionals as actors, and allowing technical imperfections to remain. Upon returning to Cuba in 1953, Gutiérrez Alea began making documentary and semidocumentary films. His short film El megano (The Charcoal Worker, 1955), which revealed the exploitation of workers in Cuba, was confiscated by dictator Fulgencio Batista’s government.

After Batista’s government was overthrown by Fidel Castro in 1959, Gutiérrez Alea, who supported Castro’s government, continued his career at the new national film institute, Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). His first feature-length movie, Historias de la revolución (Stories of the Revolution, 1960), tells the history of Cuba’s fight against the Batista regime in a semidocumentary style, using the techniques of neorealism. Gutiérrez Alea then made two dark comedies that ridiculed governmental bureaucracy, Las doce sillas (The Twelve Chairs, 1962) and Muerte de un burocrata (Death of a Bureaucrat, 1966), before making Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968), generally considered his masterpiece. Memorias del subdesarrollo examines the life of a wealthy intellectual caught in the transition from prerevolutionary to postrevolutionary Cuba. The film uses both documentary and fictional footage to subtly criticize the landed rich who benefit from the colonial legacy.

Gutiérrez Alea’s notable films of the 1970s and 1980s include La última cena (The Last Supper, 1976), about a slave revolt, and Hasta cierto punto (Up to a Point, 1983), which attacks Cuban machismo. Gutiérrez Alea codirected his final two films with Juan Carlos Tabío. In 1993 their film Fresa y Chocolate (Strawberry and Chocolate) premiered and won acclaim with audiences and critics around the world. A criticism of Cuba’s harsh treatment of homosexuals, it became the first Cuban movie to earn an Academy Award nomination for best foreign film. The 1995 comedy Guantanamera lampoons bureaucracy.