Hearts of Darkness
By Andrew Truong
Chronicles of the Absurd
Dir. Miguel Coyula, Cuba, no distributor
The Cuban filmmaker Miguel Coyula spent nearly ten years making Corazón Azul (Blue Heart), a sci-fi thriller in which genetically engineered assassins stage a series of terrorist attacks against the Castro regime. Given the subject matter, it’s no surprise that he was blackballed from his country’s film industry. Making matters more difficult, he was also unable to access money from crowdfunding platforms due to the U.S. trade embargo. Production frequently stalled. Cast members had a habit of dropping out, necessitating frequent script revisions, and the remaining actors would inhabit multiple roles. Coyula was often the only crew member on set. The one other constant presence was lead actress Lynn Cruz; the two married at some point during the film’s lengthy gestation.
Despite these setbacks, Corazón Azul was eventually finished in 2021. Although it bears the scars of its troubled production, the film has an unkempt energy that befits its radical politics. Coyula has followed it up with a documentary counterpart: Chronicles of the Absurd, a firsthand account of artistic repression that details the circumstances behind making Corazón Azul and the aftermath of its release. His government would prefer for the subversive filmmaker to go away. Yet the very existence of this brash film, which reveals the hearts of darkness at the center of Cuba’s cultural institutions, is proof that creative expression may be hindered, or sometimes stalled, but it can never be stopped.
In Cuba, the state exerts a massive amount of control, but it is not fully totalitarian. Although the DCP of this film had to be smuggled out the country by an Argentinian accomplice, Coyula and Cruz have been free to travel to various film festivals around the world, including the Museum of the Moving Image’s First Look Festival. Perhaps their outspoken stance against government censorship is an insurance policy of sorts; throwing them in prison would make martyrs of them.
Instead, they are kept in a limbo between free and not free, with the government restricting their ability to officially work in the arts. Cruz was dropped by her talent agency in retaliation for publishing political op-eds, which prevented her from booking any parts. Screenings of their work are constantly thwarted by the police, who close off the streets surrounding their DIY venues due to a vague “special operation.” Legally, they could have shut them down using a draconian law known as Decree 349, which requires advance permission to exhibit artistic works. But the barely plausible deniability is intended to create an endless sense of frustration for the artists affected. Franz Kafka is frequently invoked.
Each of Absurd’s ten chapters is built around secretly recorded encounters with various government functionaries, ranging from talent agents to police officers to cultural administrators. (Cruz and Coyula are equal partners in their struggles with the government, though the film cautions that “this is not a love story.”) Given that these clandestinely captured conversations were audio-only, or had an unusably blurry video component, Coyula presents these scenes as a sort of frantic PowerPoint. Whenever someone speaks, their image appears against a black screen, with subtitles placed underneath. If a photograph of a speaker is unavailable—often the case for members of law enforcement—they are represented by illustrations of nightmarish creatures taken from the works of expressionist painter Antonia Eiriz. Like Coyula, she was a lauded artist until she ran afoul of the government in the late 1960s, when one of her paintings was deemed counterrevolutionary. She didn’t paint again until moving to Miami, 25 years later. By repurposing her work as avatars of brutish authority figures, Coyula positions her in his own lineage of protest. The painting that halted Eiriz’s career, Una tribuna para la paz democrática (A platform for democratic peace), is among the first images we see in this film.
The film’s impassioned subtitles are a rare example of captions that visually match the emotions of its corresponding speakers. When conversations get heated, which happens often, crosstalk and shouting are represented by changing font sizes and liberal usage of the All Caps key. Besides occasional clips of shaky video or archival footage from the making of Corazón Azul, all we really see are those pictorial representations and the dynamic subtitles. Given the relative absence of moving images (and a complete lack of reverse shots), one could say that Coyula was successfully prevented from making a motion picture.
Most of the verbal battles in Chronicles of the Absurd are waged by Coyula and Cruz, but the most chilling encounter with the surveillance state involves Javier Caso, an expatriate photographer and friend of the duo. After pictures from the set of Corazón Azul were posted to Facebook, with Caso seen in the background, he was hauled into an immigration office for questioning. He records the ensuing interrogation with a cell phone strapped to his chest. Two brusque officials question him about his association with the renegade filmmakers, who they accuse of being CIA puppets. At first they are cagey about the reason why Caso was brought in, but they are cajoled into saying the quiet part out loud: “Being an independent artist is illegal.” Their words never amount to more than threats, insinuating that Caso is only free to leave on account of his globally famous sister by the name of Ana de Armas. Jailing him would be bad PR.
Given the massive challenges faced by Coyula and Cruz, it’s fair to wonder why they haven't left Cuba for good. The film’s most revealing chapter, aptly titled “Antihero,” sets the provocative filmmakers apart from those who fled to places like Madrid, where this particular scene takes place. During a literary event with self-exiled Cuban poets and writers, Coyula picks a fight with his ostensible allies, casting the rebel intelligentsia as yet another institution to rail against. Perhaps he thinks that they have given up on his beloved Cuba, or that their artistic abstractions hide (counter)revolutionary sentiment behind a veneer of respectability in order to please Western tastes. It is one of a handful of moments throughout the film where its protagonists come off as overly agitating, but these anti-establishment, punk-aligned artists don’t care to be the model of a modern major dissident.
Both Chronicles of the Absurd and Corazón Azul are intentionally provocative films that expose the mental gymnastics that uphold an illiberal society. Scrappy as their productions may have been, they exemplify the irrepressible spirit of artistic creation, proof that someone is fighting the system from within. The closing title card in Chronicles of the Absurd is Coyula’s ultimate act of defiance: “Made in Cuba.”