Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Memories of Underdevelopment
1968 · Tomás Gutiérrez Alea · Memories of Underdevelopment on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch how often Sergio looks at Havana through glass or a telescope. (camera)
Ramon Suarez keeps placing him on balconies and behind plate glass, the long lens turning the street and its women into a private slideshow he never joins.
Payoff: He can see everything and still do nothing with it. Watching becomes his way of avoiding the street below. In the reading: the voyant. Deleuze calls a character who only perceives and never acts a seer, and Sergio's telescope is exactly that kind of looking.
Notice the furniture and belongings crowding Sergio's apartment. (setting)
These are the leftovers of his family's flight to Miami, furniture and glassware, the abandoned trappings of a class that has already left the country.
Payoff: The clutter turns his home into a lookout post and a trap he does not leave.
Listen for how constantly Sergio narrates his own thoughts. (sound)
The voiceover is smooth, confessional, and almost nonstop, laid over images of the city and the people he watches. It draws you into his point of view.
Payoff: You start trusting his clever voice, which is the trap the film wants you to notice. In the reading: audiovisual disjunction. The reading calls this audiovisual disjunction: the smooth voice and the harsher images stop agreeing and the gap becomes the film's judgment.
Watch Corrieri's calm, unhurried manner around every woman he meets. (performance)
Sergio Corrieri plays him as urbane and magnetic, never raising his voice or rushing a scene, so his coldness reads as polish rather than cruelty.
Payoff: His charm is real, which is what lets you like him and distrust him in the same instant.
Watch for newsreel and still photographs breaking into the story. (cutting)
Alea cuts documentary images, archival stills, and radio bulletins against the dramatized scenes, so private moments keep colliding with the public record of the Revolution.
Payoff: The collisions keep testing Sergio's private view of himself against the larger history he tries to sit outside of.
Once you have seen it
Watch where Sergio sits during the writers' round table on underdevelopment. (staging)
He stays at the edge of the discussion, half listening, a spectator among people actually arguing through a problem, the same position he holds everywhere else in the film.
Payoff: He can sit inside an argument about his own paralysis and still not enter it. In the reading: discourse-image. The reading calls this a discourse-image, a scene built to pose a problem it will not resolve, and Sergio wanders through it as a tourist.
Track the film's drift from Bay of Pigs to Missile Crisis. (structure)
The plot follows Sergio's private idling across eighteen months of national emergency, ordered by memory and association rather than by cause and effect.
Payoff: His personal drift plays out exactly when the country is deciding, in public, what kind of people it will become.
Watch how Sergio tries to reshape Elena's clothes and manner. (setting)
He steers her toward the style and habits of the wife he lost, coaching her diction and dress until she starts to resemble a portrait he is still painting.
Payoff: He is not falling for a person so much as restaging a marriage he can control this time.
Carry this in: Watch the telescope. Sergio can see all of Havana and still never puts a foot in the street.