How I regret not being in Havana. If I were, for no reason I would miss that adventure, almost literary, that event made for laughter, history and memory, which will be the first public showing of a film in three dimensions in Cuba.
You heard it right: when it is almost a relic in much of the world, when Burundi and Burkina Faso have had it for years and for months now even our hard-working private businessmen and when elsewhere projection systems are in four, five and six dimensions (with smells and seats that move to the beat of the plot), Cubans will see in a movie theater for the first time, a film in 3D.
Up close, it will be a historic moment, one more event for our busy, almost full collection of national commemorations, when tens of Havana people repeat the unequivocal absurd: that the figures seem to come off the screen, that they that look real. Moving in the seats, because the figures jump at them.
A thing to behold will be the shrieks and shouts, the subtle emotions that for sure will fill the small room prepared by the ICAIC Muestra Joven when the special glasses (how many functions will they last?) will perform the miracle and the Cubans get as back as 118 years ago, on the ceremony of the amazed by the arrival of the unstoppable train of Lumière.
Although hardly anyone has seen the famous short film (that sublime silliness, that fraction of a minute that changed history and conception of reality), everyone knows how that ended: with Parisians losing all French composure, cast to run Jamaican style, tails fleeing tremendous, as they could, from the locomotive coming their way.
Forgetting about the time, distance and the fact that Cubans lack any composure, chances are that after running all the length of 23rd street, they will get into huge lines at the ICAIC gates in search of Parisian amazement that surely will cause those unclassifiable gems that Muestra Joven selected (or has been forced to choose) for their 3D shows.
Dear God, look at the proposals: The Three Musketeers (yes, the attack against Dumas, that infamy sword movie they played last year in the Yara), The Green Hornet (just because of the title I wouldn’t see it), Titanic (again!, to mourn in 3D!) and those we could not miss: the Smurfs. And I say that we had to have it because only a grim economic spell by Gargamel, a conspiracy of special period by his cat, can justify these displays for the History of Cuba to become a sort of film orgasm.
But let us not complain, since the Parisians didn’t get to watch masterpieces the first time. Do not be fooled by the film manuals, those short films were as unfortunate as these films.
But ultimately, they, Parisians, didn’t go that December night to the Grand Café, 14 Boulevard des Capuchins, to seek aesthetic manifestations, to analyze plans, thesis, composition, framing and other such nonsense, which, thank God, did not exist. They were so new, so chic, because it was something nobody had seen before. To be fashionable. For the adventure of the unknown. To say I saw it. They were all snobs. Reason enough to fill it en masse, as the Plaza, the second floor of ICAIC.
They were not looking for transcendence, and however, those short films opened a new chance for curiosity. They created an unfailing antidote against loneliness, against oblivion, against death: Cinema. Who knows what might happen then when Cubans see the three musketeers dressed in green riding as smurfs on the Titanic?
The truth, most likely, is nothing. But perhaps, as that night in Paris, the daily life and its limits, the possibilities of the imagination, will provide to those attending, with that third dimension in life that is not dependent on glasses and technologies. The look at things, the reality, from the depths, from the volume and measures, and not flat on one side, as often happens in the continuous display of everyday.
For if the Big Bang left a flatland, the mind of man was responsible for giving body and tastiness to the adventure of creation. Then came the film and completed the task. It became, since then, the new, third, sixth or tenth chance to dimension the human nature, reinvent it, or make at least a little bit one more funny.
Except that not everyone has had the glasses required to see it. Or the eyes, because the films and their dimensions, like life, is always a matter of focus, of sights.
That’s why we will not complain on how late 3D arrives in Cuba or its disastrous first proposals. And we will not complain either on how many years (or decades) will pass before we get movies in 5D or 6D. Anyway, smells and moving seats are common in Cuban movie theaters.
Author
Liomán Lima
