The postcolonial city symphony film and the ‘ruins’ of Suite Habana

Abstract

This paper situates the recent Cuban film Suite Habana (Pérez, 2003) in relation to the city symphony film tradition. I argue that Pérez's preoccupation with the question of individual self-realization within a socialist society constitutes an elaboration of García Espinosa's main theoretical contribution to the aesthetics and politics debate. That Pérez turns to the tradition of the city symphony film – the first film genre to systematically treat the nature of labor and leisure in capitalist modernity – underscores the film's engagement with another premise of García Espinosa's manifesto – namely, that authentically socialist art cannot exist unless work and leisure are reorganized. In Suite Habana, the questions of work, leisure, and technology come together in the film's style and narrative, but this time with a difference from the first city symphony films. If the early city symphony films tried to mimic for the spectator the sensorial experience of capitalist modernity, Suite Habana goes after the experience of an alternative modernity – one in which work, leisure, and technology have been configured along the lines of García Espinosa's utopian vision.