UC San Diego

This this thesis deepens our understanding of the work of Sara Gómez, Cuba’s first woman director and one of the earliest-known Afro-Cuban filmmakers in history. As a celebrated participant in the 1960s vanguard aligned with Cuba’s then recently created Institututo Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), Gómez is best known for her only feature-length film, De Cierta Manera. Her thirteen documentary shorts have garnered less attention in scholarship and are conventionally read as aesthetically interesting pieces that follow the conventions of “direct cinema” and pre-1960s ethnographic films. Rather than analyzing them as hyper-realist “representations” of Afro-Cubanness, this thesis articulates a deeper reading of two of her documentaries: Guanabacoa: Crónica de Mi Familia (1966), and Iré a Santiago (1964). I argue that these works combine quasi-ethnographic but also carefully conceived montages to slyly transgress the strictures of government censorship in the immediate post-Revolutionary period. They do so to convey open-ended poetic ruminations about the local complexities of Afro-Cuban lives, and their various locally based struggles to (re)define themselves and their historically racialized and marginalized communities.