The Pixelated Afterlife of Nicolás Guillén Landrián: Migratory Forms

Abstract

Through migratory, traveling, and transnational understandings of the evolution of cultural objects and canon formation, the following article explores the Cuban national film archive and its conceptual and material afterlives in the digital sphere, with the Afro-Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián as a case study. Located within a Third Cinema canon of oppositional and liberationist filmmaking, Guillén Landrián's work is primarily associated with the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) and the 35mm celluloid film that principally characterized both ICAIC feature-length and newsreel production. This article examines Guillén Landrián's Inside Downtown (2001), the only video in his oeuvre, produced while in exile in Miami, Florida. I will demonstrate how the digital circulation of Inside Downtown, alongside Guillén Landrián's other works, creates new social and aesthetic meaning, subjectification, and systems of value. Cuban filmmaker Nicolás Guillén Landrián's final and sole audiovisual work produced in exile, Inside Downtown (2001), lives on YouTube distressed and marked by encoding artifacts. In collaboration with Jorge Egusquiza Zorilla, Inside Downtown is one of fifteen surviving films directed by Guillén Landrián (1938-2003), many of which have been transferred to digital formats and later smuggled across the Florida Straits, eventually making their way to YouTube. The first fourteen were produced within the context of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) 1 from 1962 to 1972 and then languished in the Cinemateca de Cuba's film archive on 35mm celluloid film until transferred to VHS, and later to DVDs and computer files in the 1990s and in the early 2000s, bearing with them the visual artifacts produced by multiple formats, copies, and compressions. 2 Oscillating between epic and satire, solidarity and critique of the Cuban Revolutionary project, these films possess physical lives that evoke a transnational territory of circulation but also a convergence between cinematic and digital media. 3 Reaching viewers beyond theatrical screening contexts and national boundaries, these works illustrate what becomes of art when it is reduced to a file in one of our newer seeing machines. Albeit with an emphasis upon its contradictions, in Cuba, Guillén Landrián's work at the ICAIC imprinted a national project upon celluloid. Produced in Miami, Florida, Inside Downtown, which portrays street dwellers of urban Miami and artists and poets of Guillén Landrián's generation, to the contrary, manifests its informality and extranational nature in both its digital video's materiality and its eroded spaces of representation. Attesting to the migratory status that inheres in Inside Downtown as a work, the transposition from national to extranational and from film to digital reveals changes both in media production and circulation and in Guillén Landrián's work conditions as a filmmaker. In Inside Downtown these axes inextricably intertwine as part of a broader story of diasporic production, rewriting historical maps of spectatorship, ide...