Returning the Gaze: Mapping the Soviet Socialist Project in Julio García Espinosa’s 'The Sixth Part of the World'

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Aesthetics across Media IV: Transcultural Flows and their Socialist Valences: Different Scales of Second and Third World Exchange

Abstract

Post-revolutionary Cuba developed its sphere of cultural production through a distinct socialist lens, casting a cinematic gaze back on the Soviet Union’s socialist project. This paper explores Cuban cultural producers’ use of documentary film to make sense of “Second World” cultural practices as they were being integrated into Cuban culture. Specifically, I will investigate Julio García Espinosa’s La sexta parte del mundo (The Sixth Part of the World, 1977), which marked the 60th anniversary of the Soviets’ October Revolution. In part, I seek to characterize García Espinosa’s conception of Soviet geography and to identify the film’s relationship (if any) to Dziga Vertov’s The Sixth Part of the World (1926). This investigation can reveal a diversity of representations of Soviet socialism – did post-revolutionary Cuban cinema confirm or disrupt notions of the Soviet socialist utopia? More broadly, through examination of the role of cultural production in the post-1959 Soviet-Cuban relationship, I will further explore how Cuban representations of the Soviet Union align with the Third Cinema movement.

Author

• Dasha Prokhorova, U of Pittsburgh