The Cinema of Sara Gómez: Reframing Revolution ed. by Susan Lord and María Caridad Cumaná (review)

Abstract

As a newly minted art historian, I had the immense pleasure of presenting at the Coloquio Sara Gómez: Imagen múltiple (Sara Gómez Colloquium: Multiple Images) in Havana in the fall of 2007. During those two busy days in Havana, Sara Gómez was the focal point around which a diverse crowd of film historians, art historians, journalists, filmmakers, film students, and researchers from a broad spectrum of the humanities and social sciences came together to analyze the enormous potential of gendered film practice, analysis, and theorization in Cuba, as well as the many challenges this work has faced. Gómez’s film corpus served as a platform for an engaged, intersectional approach to Cuban audiovisual tradition at a time when feminist, queer, and critical race theories were only timidly alluded to and not openly or comprehensively discussed in Cuba. Little did I know that I was witnessing the birth of the book The Cinema of Sara Gómez: Reframing Revolution. Much like the multiple perspectives offered during that colloquium, Susan Lord and María Caridad Cumaná, with the collaboration of Victor Fowler Calzada—all part of the colloquium’s original line-up of presenters—harness the same inquisitive, pluralistic spirit of that event in this volume. Only now it is enhanced with the added perspectives and research focus afforded by time. From the onset, the volume embraces the varied, complex readings that this Afro-Cuban auteur tackled head on in the ecstatic early years of Cuban revolutionary film culture. Gómez shared this enthusiasm, of course, but she was careful to remain critical toward the same processes and organizations that she herself helped build from the ground. The Cinema of Sara Gómez compiles “a history, criticism, biography, methodology, and theory of [her] work,” according to Lord. It takes the form of essays and a wide variety of archival material: film scripts, interviews, personal photographs, film stills, a detailed filmography, and posters (Lord 1-2). The sheer diversity of knowledge interventions, theoretical lenses, testimonial voices, and artifacts is one of the most singular contributions of this book. Throughout its pages, Gómez’s full being is revealed through her professional career—as a young journalist, ethnographer, film director, and