One of the consequences of streaming has been the emergence of a new form of cinephilia, as previously unseeable or unobtainable films find afterlives on the internet for extremely dedicated – some might say, obsessive – viewers. This new cinephilia is also fed by film festivals, such as Havana Glasgow Film Festival, which gives adventurous viewers access to rare films which have evaded the attention of mainstream cinemas and critics.
However, while it may be hard to imagine for younger viewers, there was a time when British TV, specifically BBC2 and Channel 4, would screen not just individual films but entire seasons of films devoted to heavy duty arthouse and radical films, often on a coveted Friday or Saturday evening time slot.
Which is how, as a boy, I had my first encounter with Cuban cinema, via a screening of Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s La Ultima Cena (The Last Supper). This film, a brutal satire on the intersection between Christianity and colonialism, would also be my first encounter with postcolonial critique. I can’t remember exactly what I made of all that. But, as an ardent horror movie fan, the images of violence from the film lingered with me for some time afterwards.
I wasn’t the only person to witness this screening. During this period, around 1979 -80, the renowned Scottish novelist William McIlvanney was writing a TV column for the Glasgow Herald, due to the fact that he “was even shorter of money than usual”. He chose to write about the film, which he loved, in his TV column. I reproduce the whole piece below, including his review of Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way (a wildly popular BBC show of the time) to indicate how wildly diverse TV output could be then, before TV execs chose to dumb down in a quest to court the ‘modern mainstream’, and were still juggling notions of public service with entertainment.
I must warn you of a spoiler alert here. However, you probably weren’t expecting a film about the intersection of colonialism and Christianity to have a happy ending, were you?
“Good comedy being notoriously difficult to come by, it’s not surprising that the BBC should be repeating what is currently the best situation comedy around: “Training Dogs the Woodhouse Way”.
The basic theme is megalomania in the Home Counties and the main character is Barbara Woodhouse, a Valkyrie in a skirt and jumper. She’s an amazing creation, only slightly marred by being not entirely credible. Most of the humour stems from Barbara’s evident belief that God is a woman whose initials are B. W. and her certainty that all dogs are only slightly more intelligent than their owners.
This week’s programme was terrific. I only hope that R.S.P.C.O. (Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Owners) have the wit to see the joke and don’t start self-righteously protesting. I feel sure the owners enjoy being made to do tricks. They are so obviously delighted when Barbara praises them for saying “Si-it!” as if they’d just completed a research degree.
Barbara stood facing umpteen owners and their dogs and talked the most remarkable gibberish, purporting to teach a sort of canine sign language. While this was going on, there was a saturnine man having what looked like a fight to the death with a kind of over-grown husky.
“What’s happening over there?” Barbara barked. “I saw you.” Mr Daggis (for indeed it was he, or sounded as if it was) was suitably ashamed of wanting to go on living. Barbara came across like a visiting thunderstorm and proceeded to strangle the dog to within a couple of gasps of its life, apparently noticing no contradiction between this and her insistence on love between owners and dogs: “Go back and love them.”
That’s one of the funniest devices in the whole show: how Barbara establishes one law for herself and another for the rest of the world. When the owners have done exactly what she has told them to do she says, “No, no.” Then, when they do exactly the same thing again, she says it’s wonderful. She has the classic skill of the bully – whatever you do, it’s wrong, unless she wilfully decides it’s right.
She was concentrating her aggro this week on a Dr Johnson, who was stumbling around with a dog that looked as if the doctor’s mother must have been on her fourth ball of wool before she finished it. I don’t know in what field the good doctor took his degree. I assume it was a doctorate in forbearance. Barbara gave him a terrible roasting, as if to prove to him that fancy letters after your name mean nothing in the doggy universe.
The next episode is not for a couple of weeks – it should take that long for my ribs to recover.
“The Last Supper”. I made a simple mistake with this Cuban film written and directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea. I didn’t videotape it. I wish I could have watched it more than once.
Centering on the brief rebellion of some negro slaves on a sugar plantation in eighteenth-century Cuba, the film released a cataract of complex and interacting ideas on the nature of religion and power and their uses in society. It was also very moving, depicting credible people with sympathy and showing how the lives of masters and slaves alike had been shaped by the assumptions that had surrounded their births like amniotic fluid. The violence was sparingly deployed, always a way of clarifying meaning, never in the service of sensationalism. The final image was stunning: the severed heads of the defeated slaves mounted on sticks with one pole empty and Sebastian, the only rebel remaining at liberty, running free with a machete. Whatever reason those Cuban refugees may have for wanting to live outside their country, it’s not to see better films.
The Last Supper is simply the kind of film we rarely attempt to make here, depending as it does for its power on ideas regarded as a matter of life and death.”
I wish that William, who was a true gent of the old school, had set his video recorder, and that he’d lived long enough to see the restored print at Havana Glasgow Film Festival.
