Memories of Underdevelopment · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Start with the telescope. Sergio, on his high balcony above a Havana his own class is fleeing, swings a long lens across the rooftops and turns the living city into a slideshow — women in the street, a distant crane, the sea toward Miami. He never goes down to any of it. That instrument is the whole film in one object: seeing raised to the status of an action it has quietly replaced.

Deleuze has a name for what happens when a character can perceive a situation with total lucidity and still do nothing to change it. He calls it the crisis of the action-image. Ordinary cinema runs on a circuit — you see a problem, you act, the situation shifts (Deleuze's "sensory-motor schema"). Sergio's circuit is cut at the second stage. He diagnoses the "underdevelopment" of everyone around him, catalogues his ex-wife's vanity and Elena's inconstancy, reads the missile crisis off the radio like a man grading an exam — and none of it discharges into a deed. Alea makes this refusal the film's subject rather than its flaw. Post-1961 Havana is a situation demanding you choose, and Alea builds a protagonist constitutionally unable to.

What fills the space where action used to be is what Deleuze calls the pure optical and sound situation — the opsign. A character stops being an agent and becomes a seer (voyant), someone who can only look and listen. Sergio behind plate glass, on the balcony, at the edge of the round table, at the back of his own memories: Ramón Suárez frames him again and again as a watcher isolated in deep space, the long lens doing to people what Antonioni's architecture does to Vittoria in L'Eclisse — isolating a body against a world it can no longer touch. That debt is exact. Alea took the European alienation study and gave its emptiness a specific political address.

Because the camera keeps catching Sergio in the act of perceiving, the perception itself becomes visible — Deleuze's dicisign, where we feel the apparatus perceiving a character who is perceiving. We are never simply looking with Sergio; we are watching him look, which is a colder and more useful position. His idle circuits through the city — the strolls, the pickups, the aimless afternoons — are what Deleuze calls the balade or voyage form: the trip that transforms nothing, motion that has given up on being action. Umberto D.'s solitary dead time is the ancestor here, but Alea inverts its pathos. Sergio's drift is not to be pitied; it is to be examined.

And examined is precisely the word, because the film's most treacherous element is the voice. That continuous first-person monologue seduces you into Sergio's intelligence, and then the image quietly indicts it. Deleuze would call this a lectosign — an image that has lost its sensory-motor self-evidence and has to be read. Sound and picture stop confirming each other and start telling two stories: the smooth confessional voice over documentary footage of atrocity, a private recollection dissolving into a public catastrophe. This audiovisual disjunction is the film's engine of irony. When Sergio narrates his own cleverness while newsreel of the real emergency breaks in, the gap between the two tracks is the judgment. Alea learned the braid of interior monologue and archive from Hiroshima mon amour, and the ironic commentary-over-found-footage from Marker's Letter from Siberia — but he weaponized it against his own narrator.

All of this rests on a montage that argues instead of flowing. Nelson Rodríguez cuts image against image so the collision produces a thought — the dialectical, intellectual montage of Potemkin, retooled for an essay-film. A dramatized scene strikes an archival still and the spark is a proposition about class, or blindness, or history. This is why the film feels like a mind composing itself in real time, sorting materials it cannot master. The famous round table on "literature and underdevelopment" is the clearest case: Alea stages a discourse-image, an image that poses a problem it openly cannot resolve, and lets Sergio wander through it as a tourist of ideas.

What does this do to political cinema? It relocates the political from the crowd to the fracture inside one bourgeois skull, and it does so without letting that skull win. Deleuze's modern political cinema turns on the idea that "the people are missing" — that a revolutionary people is not a given but something still to be brought into being. Sergio is the man who watches that people forming and cannot join it; the film's whole apparatus of document and montage speaks for a collective he is exiled from, fusing Alea's vision with his character's in a free-indirect address that both inhabits Sergio and convicts him.

The significance is quiet and large. Memories of Underdevelopment proved that the time-image — the cinema of the seer, of dead time, of the readable disjunctive image — was not a European luxury but a decolonizing tool. It let a revolution look at itself through the eyes of the man least able to belong to it, and trusted the audience to see past him. Watch it again for the telescope. Then notice how often the film hands you the lens, and dares you to do more with it than he did.