Fictual factions: on the emergence of a documentary style in recent Cuban films

Abstract

In its most idealistic form a documentary film maintains a strict correspondence between the “outside world” and the resulting film. However, in the process of filmmaking some element of fiction must take place. Extrapolating on these representational slippages, I suggest that the documentary film style provides viewers with something of a “factual fiction.” To highlight this, I compare five films that have been classified as documentaries. The first two are set in Cuba, but made by outsiders (Buena Vista Social Club and Cuban Rafters) and both present striking similarities to the “salvage method” of ethnography–where the role of the filmmaker in this case is to record the already vanishing culture of the other. The next three films discussed (If You Only Understood, Suite Habana, and Who the Hell is Juliette) significantly break with many of the conventions of the salvage method. If You Only Understood is basically a fiction film but made to look like a documentary, whereas Suite Habana was filmed as a documentary but it begins to take on the appearance of a fictional film. Who the Hell is Juliette moves in and out of the island, as the camera's gaze is inverted through the actions of the Cuban Juliette. Thus, in the end, I propose that the factual fiction of documentary is inverted in these films so as to become, as the title of my essay suggests, a “fictual faction.”