Youth culture in global cinema

out of depth 125
tion to the tangibility of emotional states and the textures of reality. When
the older man stands on the malecón at the end of the sequence mentioned
above and the camera cranes up, in slow motion, to an overhead shot, the
film encourages the spectator to perceive the textures of that moment. The
chipped surface of the seawall and the pockmarked sidewalk stand in for
the grating emotional wear of familial separation. Yet, as the camera cranes
down again, on the other side, to frame the man looking out over the wall
toward the oncoming waves and the distant horizon, the shot also captures
the underlying love and longing for reconnection, signaled by the man’s gaze
in the direction of Spain, that the rewritten letter has brought to the surface.
Throughout the extended crane shot, we hear the continuation of Carla’s
voice-over:
On some days your face appears more sweet; on others, more bitter,
but it is always there, essential, silent, eternal, urgent. There are times
when I’m dying to talk with you, to hear your voice. ...Therearedays
when you are God, Dad, and that bridges the distance between us ...
Rather than attesting to the waning of affect, Nada’s preoccupation with
the surface of things gestures toward the way in which emotion weighs on
everyday life.
The film’s call for ‘‘affective mobilizations’’ to draw together the Cuban
people—figured here not as a function of the nation-state, but rather as an
imagined, paraterritorial, affective affiliation—appears to offer one solution
to the dilemma of contemporary Cuban cinema as articulated by Cuban
critic Juan Antonio García Borrero. In his recent book La edad de herejía,
García Borrero characterizes 1990s cinema as stylistically innovative, but
plagued by individualistic navel-gazing (176). Attributing such solipsism to
a number of factors, including the crisis of the Socialist bloc, the fall of
utopias, and, on a more immediate level, the lack of vigorous debate among
the island’s filmmakers, García Borrero calls on the younger filmmakers to
recapture a sense of collectivity and to propose new utopias (173, 177–178).
And, this is precisely what Nada does in the end when Carla renounces the
lottery slot that would allow her to leave Cuba for the United States. In so
doing, she acknowledges what her mail-carrier boyfriend César has written
to her in a letter prior to her departure: ‘‘People leave without ever truly getting
anywhere. ...Ifeverybody leaves, nothing changes ...nothing at all.’’
Her decision reconfirms the well-established revolutionary exhortation to
find personal fulfillment through commitment to the larger social good and,
at the same time, reasserts the joyfulness of such an endeavor. In the final se-