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Memories of Underdevelopment

Original title: Memorias del subdesarrollo
  • 1968
  • Not Rated
  • 1h 37m
IMDb RATING
7.6/10
4.5K
YOUR RATING
Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
Drama

A Cuban man cycles through his opinions and memories as the threat of foreign invasion intensifies and the rest of his family moves to Miami.A Cuban man cycles through his opinions and memories as the threat of foreign invasion intensifies and the rest of his family moves to Miami.A Cuban man cycles through his opinions and memories as the threat of foreign invasion intensifies and the rest of his family moves to Miami.

  • Director
    • Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
  • Writers
    • Edmundo Desnoes
    • Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
  • Stars
    • Sergio Corrieri
    • Daisy Granados
    • Eslinda Núñez
  • See production, box office & company info
  • IMDb RATING
    7.6/10
    4.5K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
    • Writers
      • Edmundo Desnoes
      • Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
    • Stars
      • Sergio Corrieri
      • Daisy Granados
      • Eslinda Núñez
    • 25User reviews
    • 32Critic reviews
  • See production, box office & company info
  • See more at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 2 wins & 2 nominations

    Photos10

    Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
    Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
    Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
    Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
    Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
    Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
    Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
    Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)
    Memories of Underdevelopment (1968)

    Top cast

    Edit
    Sergio Corrieri
    Sergio Corrieri
    • Sergio Carmona Mendoyo
    Daisy Granados
    • Elena
    Eslinda Núñez
    • Noemi
    Omar Valdés
    • Pablo
    René de la Cruz
    • Elena's brother
    Yolanda Farr
    Ofelia González
    Jose Gil Abad
    Daniel Jordan
    Luis López
    Rafael Sosa
    Beatriz Ponchova
    Gilda Hernández
    Julio Vega
    Eduardo Casado Revuelta
      Oscar Alvarez
      José Fraga
      Juana Alburquerque
      • Housing Inspector
      • Director
        • Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
      • Writers
        • Edmundo Desnoes
        • Tomás Gutiérrez Alea
      • All cast & crew
      • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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      Storyline

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      Did you know

      Edit
      • Trivia
        The first film to be made in post-revolutionary Cuba to be released in the United States.
      • Quotes

        Sergio Carmona Mendoyo: One thing about people that upsets me is their inability to sustain something without collapsing. Take Elena: she was totally inconsistent. Didn't relate things. That's a symptom of underdevelopment: the inability to relate things, to gain experience, develop. It's difficult here because women are conditioned by sentiments and culture. A soft environment. People waste talents on inconsistent adaptations. They always need someone to think for them.

      • Connections
        Featured in New Cinema of Latin America: Cinema of the Humble (1983)

      User reviews25

      Review
      Review
      Featured review
      9/10
      Complex and probing
      If you are inclined to think that Third World Cinema is simplistic and one-dimensional, I invite you see Tomas Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment, selected by the New York Times in 1974 as one of the year's ten best movies. Based on the novel Inconsolable Memories by Edmundo Desnoës, a Cuban writer who lived in the United States, Memories is a complex and probing film about the dilemma faced by intellectuals in Cuba following the revolution. Although directed by a Cuban who supported the revolution and remained in Cuba until his death, the film has a European sensibility, interlacing fiction and documentary footage and using poetic images, literary narration, flashbacks, and newsreel footage reminiscent of Alain Resnais' Hiroshima Mon Amour.

      Sergio (Sergio Corrieri) is a frustrated writer who chooses to remain in Cuba rather than follow his family to Miami just "to see how it all turns out". Though he has strong feelings for his people, he is indifferent towards politics an observer rather than a participant. Alea shows the artist as anti-hero, a man who undergoes an identity crisis, is sapped of all his vitality, feels old in his thirties, and drifts along without meaning and purpose. Unable to write the novel he wants, Sergio survives on rental income from apartments and lives in middle class luxury while around him housing is deteriorating and there are serious gas and oil shortages. He spends his days smoking in bed, looking out of a telescope through his bedroom window, taking walks, watching television, and meeting young women. He makes no pretense of his being an outsider but complains that "everything happens to me too early or too late". Hanna, the woman he says he truly loved urged him to move to New York with her and become a writer but he chose to remain in Cuba to go into the furniture business.

      When Sergio makes the acquaintance of Elena (Daisy Granados), a sixteen- year-old girl who wants to be an actress, his life takes on new meaning but it is temporary and the affair ends badly. Persuading her that he knows important people in the theatrical world, he brings her to his apartment and they begin a relationship in which he tries to model her to fit his ideal of the bourgeois Cuban woman. He takes her to modern art galleries and the home of writer Ernest Hemingway to expose her to culture but it doesn't work and he complains when she doesn't fit into his mold. "She doesn't relate to things," he tells himself. "It's one of the signs of underdevelopment." Elena, like other Cuban women", he says, has an "inability to relate to things, to accumulate experience, to develop", but the stricture can just as easily refer to himself and he pays the price of this experience when the girl's parents bring a lawsuit against him for rape. Although he escapes the fate of a criminal, little by little the outside world, the world of guns, slogans, and rallies closes in on him and he feels trapped.

      There are several documentary sequences interspersed throughout the film that have no apparent connection to the narrative but convey the sense that no one living in revolutionary Cuba is able to escape the presence of history. The opening sequence shows a public dance in which all the participants are black with the exception of Sergio who is white. In this sequence continued later in the film, an unnamed political leader is assassinated. In other footage, we see excerpts from the trial of counterrevolutionaries captured at Playa Giron, the site of the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, and a third in which we hear the voices of Castro and Kennedy during the Cuban Missile crisis.

      Though Alea apparently wants us to see the fate that befalls someone who does not directly endorse revolutionary activities, he makes his character so appealing and sympathetic that, to me, the film had mixed messages. I was torn between my support of the aims of the revolution and empathizing with Sergio's disdain for the emptiness of both the Cuban bourgeois and the revolutionary leadership. An event that took place only three years after Memories of Underdevlopment was released, however, underscored the point that Sergio was making. At that time, Castro, at the First National Congress on Education and Culture, said that artists and writers must reject "all manifestations of a decadent culture, the fruit of societies that are rent by contradictions". Not surprisingly, although due to receive a special prize for the film from the U.S. National Society of Film Critics in 1973, Gutiérrez Alea was denied a visa to attend the ceremony.
      helpful•38
      6
      • howard.schumann
      • Aug 1, 2005

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      Details

      Edit
      • Release date
        • May 17, 1973 (United States)
      • Country of origin
        • Cuba
      • Official sites
        • Mr Bongo Films
        • Official site (Japan)
      • Languages
        • Spanish
        • English
      • Also known as
        • The cuban thing
      • Filming locations
        • Havana, Cuba
      • Production companies
        • Cuban State Film
        • Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC)
      • See more company credits at IMDbPro

      Box office

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      • Gross US & Canada
        • $29,647
      • Opening weekend US & Canada
        • $8,244
        • Jan 14, 2018
      • Gross worldwide
        • $33,103
      See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

      Technical specs

      Edit
      • Runtime
        1 hour 37 minutes
      • Color
        • Black and White
      • Sound mix
        • Mono
      • Aspect ratio
        • 1.66 : 1

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