In the era of silent cinema, the interplay between text and image was a constant. Humberto Mauro, a major figure in the Brazilian avant-garde who believed that spoken dialogue and intertitles detracted from the moving image, integrated text in the form of speech bubbles in his experimental cinematic melodrama, GANGA BRUTA (1932). By the late 1960s, the use of text on screen finds a master of ambiguity and irony in the Cuban Nicolás Guillén Landrián. Following Santiago Álvarez’s tradition, Guillén Landrián, nephew of the poet laureate Nicolás Guillén, playfully intermingles text and images on many different levels, generating a corrosive sense of irony and confusion in allegedly ‘didactic’ documentaries. The starting point of this program is Guillén Landrián’s masterpiece, COFFEA ARÁBIGA (1968), a parody of the utopian 1968 Greenbelt agricultural project. The selection continues with more contemporary explorations of the combination of typography and film syntax.

Nicolás Guillén Landrián COFFEA ARÁBIGA (Cuba, 1968, 18 min, 35mm-to-digital)
Salvador Díaz Zubieta & Oscar Santos JÍCAMA (Mexico, 1970, 6.5 min, Super-8mm-to-digital)
Jorge Honik & Laura Abel EL INMORTAL (Argentina, 1968, 7 min, Super-8mm-to-digital)
Francisca Duran EVEN IF MY HANDS WERE FULL OF TRUTHS (Canada/Chile, 2012, 7.5 min, digital)
Leticia Obeid JANO (JANUS) (Argentina, 2015, 2.5 min, digital, silent)
Juan Carlos Alom DIARIO (Cuba, 2009, 13.5 min, 16mm-to-digital)
Poli Marichal UNDERWATER BLUES (Puerto Rico, 1981, 6 min, Super-8mm-to-35mm)
Paulo Bruscky POEM / POEMA (Brazil, 1979, 2 min, Super-8mm-to-digital)
Total running time: ca. 70 min.