One of the peculiarities of our musical and audiovisual landscape is the tremendous cultural importance that some journalists, critics and the general public give to music videos. There is considerable quantity and quality of a cultural reflections on these short television staging designed to promote a song or artist. And while there are a group that attacks using as a flag the standards of good taste, the elevation and the need to encourage spirituality and organized crusades against sexism , the commonplace and the prevailing vulgarity in Cuban music video , there is another group that comes in defense of those pieces of music and audiovisuals in the name of national identity , the rejuvenation of the TV image, vast contributions to our music scene , and oxygenation of the visual context that the music videos represent.
When on November 24-25 the Lucas awards galas take place to choose the best Cuban music videos in its fifteenth edition, some major awards surely confer the ultimate backing up to the exceptional aesthetics of “Flight of the Bumblebee”, directed by a group of young and established designers like Raupa , Mola and Nelson Ponce , who undertook a virtuoso reinterpretation of the past, in a multiple quotation network devoted to show , among dozens of references and signifiers , the piano execution by the young Cuban pianist Aldo Lopez – Gavilan.
One of the most successful representational strategies by Raupa , Mola and Nelson Ponce was to convert the pianist in a dramatic character of his own video , instead of showing him as a mere performer . And that’s how the idea of the work matrix came to life: the young man becomes a pianist who accompanied the projections of the short silent films. But directors were not satisfied with this tactic to overcome the stiffness or the static characteristic of almost all of our instrumental music, coral or concert videos. Once they converted Aldo in silent movies pianist, the directors may well have intentionally selected fragments of old films of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton , place these clips on a screen in the background , edit the frantic pace flying hands of the pianist on the keyboard, and would have been a good music video. However, the filmmakers decided a road a hundred times more difficult: they invented and filmed a movie that looks a lot, but is very different, to hundreds of silent films.
It is in this silent film invented by the filmmakers where they are deposited several centuries of artistic and cultural tradition. I mean, the video shows the pianist running the interlude written by Nikolai Rimsky – Korsakov for his opera The Tale of Tsar Saltan, composed between 1899 and 1900 , from Alexander Pushkin ‘s poem, of his son and the famous and powerful prince Gvidon Bogatir Saltanovich and the beautiful Princess – swan . From Russian oral tradition , but with even earlier elements, which are connected with the cult heroic and mythological characters turning into animals of the Greco -Latin , Pushkin rescued for his romantic narrative poem the hero who is transmuted into insect , after Rimsky -Korsakov put music to hum and flight , and a few decades later reissued the theme of man as an insect through a radial American superhero called The green Hornet , he executed his exploits to the sound of the galloping music of Rimsky – Korsakov .
Both character and music were so identified with the serial version of the television and film of the Green Hornet also used the familiar melody, while the famous cartoon, published simultaneously, had to do without it for obvious reasons but amply contributed to promoting the fantastic halo of the character. More recently, the recycling master Quentin Tarantino used the music for Kill Bill, and in 2011 that other guru Michel Gondry made the The Green Hornet film filled with computer-generated images trying to defend, much like Spider-Man and Batman, the old story of the masked superhero that fights crime.
The talent of the filmmakers, trying to capture the spirit of the piece of music, used film references that integrate and concentrate centuries of preceding narratives and artistic events. And so a ” simple ” promotion exercise (never forget that it is a music video that will be seen in similar terms to reggaeton , house music or any other genre ) becomes certain a tour on certain trails of art history , culture multiplication respectful gesture from a TV ( complex , contemporary , aesthetic zed ) capable of integrating other artistic practices already interdisciplinary , such as opera , film and serials . Because, in this case, the very cultivated , and even learned, use of primal codes silent film ends giving it a much needed touch of “originality” to overexploited mode d’ emploi of the Cuban clip .
It is also necessary to recognize that the filmmakers never stopped in uncritical copying a way to tell and entertain, since it is passed by an autonomous work of parody and irony, and I would say to the loving mocking of naive and excesses linked to the movies produced in the early decades of the twentieth century. Flight of the Bumblebee , by Raupa , Mola and Nelson Ponce contains a kind of anthology of minimal special effects typical of those adventure films ( stunt double exposure and substitution , iris, ” animated “windows , painted celluloid , models, games scale), and go before the camera and faster allusions to the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , George Meliés , Metropolis , dozens of clashes between a villain and a hero for a damsel in distress, and the last minute rescue a la Griffith . All this with a art direction (signed by the directors themselves as, I suppose, were allowed to expound their recognized talents in design) able to play with the avant-garde, art or pure optical art nouveau.
So Flight of the Bumblebee should be, hopefully, named the best video of the year. And I hope this time the jurors know how to free themselves from prejudice of ” the little Cuban identity ” of the work referring to the absence of party and fun, beach and sun , mulatto and dancing . Ultimately, it also complies with the national agenda that exalts when our art is inserted properly in the world, with talent and intelligence.
Author
Joel del Río
