THE SCREEN:
Westerbeck, Colin L. Jr.
CUBA, SE the first Lucia has fantasies-even the rape of the nun is a fantasy...
...The rebels, for instance, are a band of melodrama to comedy is completed...
...It is a film about the ways to in a capitalist society-the alienated artist trying to in which history raises the level of consciousness and create a work perfect in itself, a work that reflects only makes revolution inevitable...
...The transfr...
...arroser: to water, spray, baste...
...At the end it is not yet settled what the soon resorts to the machine gun again to oppose the outcome will be...
...We begin to realize that the significance of events in this In effect this is the revolution...
...activity of the later years turned out vantaged that Commonweal is not fis- After the "Large Glass," Duchamp to be but another irony from the sucally up to a four-page color-spread evidently stopped making altogether ex- preme ironist of twentieth century art...
...When Lucia first meets him, he is recuperating Revuelta) falls in love with a Spaniard who seduces her from a wound, and another woman warns her before into betraying a hiding place of the rebels, her own she marries that she will face many more, bloody, latebrother among them...
...The whole struggle seems so Though this plot is already melodramatic enough in pathetic...
...Holed up and hurting as usual believes that there the two of them can escape from after the attack on the police, the revolutionaries hear a society into some sempiternal idyll, but...
...This flashback...
...It is to give this girl film, like that of events in history, only reveals itself in the courage and the right to defy her husband that the the long run...
...No, that is not a negative comment on the man who has been called the Grand- Appealing to minds, not eyes dada of modern art...
...This "reality" is also pretty gamut being run from rich women to poor and from fanciful, however...
...from under the oppression of her husband...
...Solas has indeed been guided by such historical conIn the end, then, Lucia has a very large and extraor- siderations...
...Like the other Cuban film that has new regime...
...Nevertheless, it was in this preparing in deepest secrecy for twenty DENNIS O'BRIEN, a frequent contributor to period of apparent inactivity that Da- years a monumental object entitled these pages, is Dean of Middlebury College in Vermont...
...But each Lucia nun raped while offering spiritual comfort to dying men is really trying to break out of her shuttered confinement, on the battlefield...
...history we have been watching finally comes down to But in the next episode the tone changes, and does this: the attempt by an illiterate peasant girl to get out so in a way that makes us reevaluate the first episode...
...Rrose- of the objects is "The Bride Stripped the modern sense of the word...
...All three Lucias muscular blacks fighting and riding on horseback stark live their lives much of the time closed up in shuttered naked...
...it is a comment on the fact that one doesn't go to see a Duchamp exhibit, if for no other Imagine to yourself a blank page and certain artists...
...Octavio Paz isn't very much to see at all...
...No one is more surprised than they...
...Yet this inThus, dear reader, do not feel disad- meticulous craftsman...
...Just the thing-if ever there was an exhibition for not seeing this is it...
...Accordingly, Lucia is also the impeccable sensibilities of the artist in his isolation...
...As a consequence her brother is night arrivals...
...story is also clearly intended as an analogue to Lucia's The whole revolutionary struggle whose seventy-year story, for which it sets the tone...
...The better known ing less than the negation of work in cel Duchamp/Rrose Selavy...
...trying to reach What is at first hard to fathom about this film is that an understanding whereby she can bear to live with him...
...made from the vantage point provided by the level of Mr...
...pointedly on either side...
...When her huband ambushes some policemen, itself, the treatment given to it by director Humberto guns jam, shots go astray, and no one dies easily or Solas reinforces that melodrama on virtually every level...
...To sistently for a period of more than fifty Marcel Duchamp must be the descrip- say that Duchamp "worked" on this years...
...shouting on a beach (the Bay of Pigs...
...In this first episode, Lucia has a sub-plot ond out of impropriety, as it were, because she and her about a maddened hag who is reputed to have been a husband are hiding from the authorities...
...working itself out in a guerrilla war between the rebels With the third episode which is set in the 1960s, the and Spanish mercenaries...
...Eslinda Nunez) is a middle-class girl who leaves her Mr...
...She naively have brought this about...
...Solas has not glorified the fighting (or included parents to marry an urban terrorist fighting against the Castro's decisive campaigns at all) because it is not in Machado regime...
...To tell the truth, Duchamp did in writes: "Perhaps the two painters who The last (of few) exhibits of Du- fact definitively incomplete (his ter- have had the greatest influence on our champ's works in America prior to his minology) two major objects after century are Pablo Picasso and Marcel death was at the Cordier and Ekstrom 1913...
...1895 as a naked black warrior, it is only because that is COLIN L. WESTERBECK, JR...
...champ produced almost - almost - bored" over it seems most inappropri- ("Marcel Duchamp or the Castle of nothing between the super-notorious ate to the intermittent attention which Purity," Paz's slim essay on Duchamp "Nude Descending a Staircase" of the it received and to an artist who pre- is an unusually insightful and profound Armoury show in 1913 and his death ferred to call himself un respirateur...
...Moreover, there is little melodrama in the real new Cuban film-new to us though made in the 1960s experiences with which her life supplants the romantic -tells the stories of three different women named Lucia dreams of her predecessor...
...The former by his works...
...In the second episode, set in 1933, Lucia other Lucias suffer violence, betrayal and bereavement...
...Mr...
...In 1895, at a time when Spain is trying in general been a series of bad risks and near catastroto purge Cuba of native insurgents, Lucia (Raquel phes...
...Even when Machado is actually Because her lover is married, Lucia proposes that they overthrown, we have little sense that Lucia and the others run away to her father's coffee plantation...
...have astonished conIndeed, not seen and less seen of or by termittently from 1913 to 1923...
...which was influential...
...W I asked the generous editors ~'~' of Commonweal whether they would care to have a review of the NUDE DESCENDING Marcel Duchamp show then on view THE PHILADELPHIA MUSEUM at the Philadelphia Museum, I received a "yes" of notably measured enthusiasm -with the admonition to remember that DENNIS O'BRIEN not many of the readers of this periodical would be likely to see the show...
...premiered recently in this country, Alea's Memories of In this episode there are no fancy photographic effects Underdevelopment, which ends in the midst of the Cuban because there are no romantic illusions to project...
...what she finds at commotion outside and open the windows to news of the the plantation is the opposite: the reality of Cuba's future dictator's overthrow...
...He is not the filmmaker we are accustomed dinary historical perspective...
...She narrates her own story while sitting at her work in a tobacco factory THE SCREEN sometime after most of the events have occurred...
...It deals with a young identify the body...
...The first Lucia does so out of propriety, the secidealizing here...
...commentary on the artist and on art in a Paris studio fifty-five years later...
...Solas sees what he is doing as something that has a consciousness that exists in each historical epoch it deals wider responsibility to a whole national history, and he with...
...C'est Bare by her Bachelors, Even" or "The formations that Picasso's painting has la vie was a Duchampian pseudonym...
...Where missile crisis, Lucia ends before the battle is over...
...It is not Lucia alone who is romanticizing and rooms...
...comes a dangerous gesture...
...These "works" have been enor- Duchamp...
...It is so melodramatic...
...as accompaniment to this commentary...
...Large Glass" on which he "acted" in- gone through...
...comedy which comes after, that the revolution is truly But things afterwards are no better, so Lucia's husband won or lost...
...And it was the inactivity reason than the fact that there really we can begin...
...Rather than being some living in Cuba in different historical epochs...
...For all that, he was an extraordinarily in the twentieth century...
...In her and Solas makes it appropriately horrific with flashy case the shutters, and the door, have literally been camera work and solarized photography...
...cept for some paper cut-outs, and oc- Following his death, it was revealed casional metaphysical and erotic prac- that Duchamp and his wife had been tical jokes...
...She joins him in the revolutionary the drama of the military operations, but in the domestic struggle, and together they eventually see Machado's fall...
...champ became a virtual cult hero for "Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illu5 April 1974: 110...
...CUBA, SE the first Lucia has fantasies-even the rape of the nun is a fantasy sequence, realized from gossip at a sewing bee-this second Lucia has memories...
...Yet the nun's nailed up by her husband, who has a bad macho problem...
...the Gallery in New York and was called mously influential but they also count latter by a single work which is nothNot Seen and/ or Less Seen of/by Mar- as part of the unseen...
...Lucia Commonweal: 109 and her husband are in the final scene wrestling and the way in which the rebels of that age saw themselves...
...Duchamp's inactivity is no less tive title of any exhibit because Du- project, "busied himself" at it, "la- astonishing and, in its way, fruitful...
...And the sort of Spanish revenge tragedy, this Lucia's life apepisode dealing with the first epoch is in many ways the proaches a genuine tragedy, one we can take seriously, hardest to take, the hardest to imagine an artistic ration- when her husband is futilely killed and she must go to ale for...
...The only cinematic technique being employed now is the It is important not to be put off by Lucia at first...
...Hers is really a penny-dreadful story, and the third Lucia (Adela Legra) is no different...
...If the film represents the Cuban revolutionary of tempers his art to his responsibilities...
...woman born into a rich family and cursed with a hope- The revolution fought by Lucia and her husband has less romanticism...
...For her own part, an act as trivial as killed, and she is so distraught she stabs her lover to scribbling a few slogans in the washroom at work bedeath...
Vol. 100 • April 1974 • No. 5
