Cuban cinema and the sites of gender. Cuban film locations and their relationship to issues of gender in Cuban cinema of the Revolution

• In Event: Cultural manifestations of marginality, uncertainty and change in contemporary Cuba

Abstract

All cinema is produced and consumed in a highly interconnected global industry of capital, personnel and ideas, but in all films the specificity of place, of location, is hugely important in the construction of meaning. There is a strong link therefore between location/geography and this construction. Of course meaning in cinema is derived from many sources and is constructed at various sites of consumption. Do we locate meaning in the place the film is made, in the mind of the scriptwriter or director, or in the mind of the audience? I contest that filmic locations are important to the construction of meaning not so much at the level of the writer’s or the director’s intention, but at the level of reception – of how a particular audience reads and therefore constructs the significance of a particular location. This paper takes a number of Cuban films from 1968-2012 and looks at how specific locations help illustrate certain issues concerning gender relations that emerge from them. From Diego’s apartment in Fresa y chocolate to the Castillo de los Tres Reyes Magos del Morro, Cuba’s distinctive spaces have been used as locations that emphasise notions of gender in a nation with a patriarchal history. It becomes obvious when looking at these examples that the more public spaces are illustrative of male heterosexual dominance while the more private spaces are indicative of the female and of homosexuality.

Author

• Guy Baron