memories of underdevelopment: an introduction.

In reading the entirety of Memories of Underdevelopment further, I was happy to see that my question regarding how Desnoes’s first-person narrative would be translated to the screen was almost immediately answered in Michael Chanan’s Introduction (this also grows off of Rachel’s comment on my previous post). First, Chanan words my question much more eloquently. He writes, “How can you translate the first person of the narrator to the screen as more than a conceit? The convention of the voice on soundtrack is logically not the same; in film, there is no true equivalent of the first-person narrator in literature, for the camera as an analogue of the writer’s pen is impersonal: it cannot say ‘I’; it always says ‘there is,’ ‘here is.’”(4).

Well, it seems that, in making the film, Tomas Gutierrez Alea pushes the form of film, as Desnoes seems to be pushing the form of literature. While Desnoes’s protagonist refers to his typewriter and journal as tools to tell his story, Alea uses documentary footage and unscripted scenes. I suppose when I proposed my original question, I was thinking about taking the story to the screen in more of a purely adaptive way. Though Chanan’s explanation of the filmmaking process shows me the consideration for mechanics that Alea had and how he made them fit his medium.