The film poster is one of the best-known forms of Cuban art. Hecho en Cuba: Cinema in the Cuban Graphics is a compilation of Cuban film posters from the 1950s through the present, and an exploration of the designers who created them. The bold sensibility and visual inventiveness of post-revolutionary Cuban graphic design makes it instantly recognizable. But the designers contributing to this new style were still individual artists, bringing their different backgrounds to the task of creating a new visual identity for a post-revolutionary nation. With lavishly illustrated sections on Eladio Rivadulla, Raùl Martinez, Eduardo Muñoz Bachs, Antonio Reboiro, Antonio Pérez Gonzáles (Ñiko), Renè Azcuy, Alfredo Rostgaard, Rafael Morante, Raùl Oliva, Julio Eloy Mesa and Jorge Dima, Hecho en Cuba brings out the individual design sensibilities that shaped an extraordinary graphic culture, where the poster became the populist art form par excellence.

In 1953, Cuba had 694 cinemas and theaters. Havana alone had 134, more than New York or Paris. In 2014, documentary photographer Carolina Sandretto set out to find and photograph, with a 1950s_ medium-format camera, the remaining cinemas from that golden era. This book is the visual document of her journey. _The book is a voyage around the Island during which I documented what are the cinemas now and how do they look like outside and inside. These buildings, that where once the gathering of the people, have fallen into the oblivion of their own society_. Carolina Sandretto

The poster was the popular art form in Cuba following the Cuban Revolution, when the government sponsored some 10,000 public posters on a fascinating range of cultural, social, and political themes. Revolucin!, produced with unprecedented access to Cuban national archives, assembles nearly 150 of these powerful but little—seen works of popular art. From the 1960s through the 1980s, the posters rallied the Cuban people to the huge task of building a new society, promoting massive sugar harvests and national literacy campaigns; opposing the U.S. war in Vietnam; celebrating films, music, dance, and baseball with a unique graphic wit and exuberant colorful style. With an introduction illuminating the rich social and artistic history of the posters, and rare biographical information on the artists themselves, this striking volume offers a window into the story of Cuba—and a truly revolutionary chapter in graphic design.

Touring the commercial graphic culture of pre-Castro Cuba, photography curator Levi and senior art director for The New York Times Heller present color reproductions of postcards, tourism advertisements, cigar boxes, music poster, hotel advertisements, and other items that combined graphic styles from the United States with a distinctive Cuban style. A brief introductory essay extols the virtue of this "golden age" of graphic design, noting that Cuba was portrayed as a "paradise" (for wealthy Americans and Europeans). Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

With the recent shift in Cuba-US relations stemming from the relaxing of travel restrictions and an influx of American visitors, interest in Cuba and its culture has increased substantially. A new emphasis has been placed on the island country’s many cultural and artistic achievements, specifically in film. Cuban cinema is recognized around the world as having produced some of the most celebrated works originating from Latin America—such as Fresa y Chocolate and La Muerte de un Burócrata—as well as many prominent artists—including directors Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Humberto Solás. In A Cuban Cinema Companion, editors Salvador Jimenez Murguía, Sean O’Reilly, and Amanda McMenamin have assembled a collection of essays about more than100 films across six decades, including feature films, documentaries, and animation. These entries also provide information on directors, actresses, and actors of Cuban cinema. Entries range from films like Retrato de Teresa to Buena Vista Social Club and include descriptions of each film’s plot, themes, and critical commentary, as well as comprehensive production details and brief suggestions for further reading. Beginning with the victory of the Cuban revolution—from the first ten years of what is often referred to as Cuba’s “Golden Age” of film to the present—this volume offers readers valuable insights into Cuban history, politics, and culture. An indispensable guide to one of the great world cinemas, A Cuban Cinema Companion will be of interest to students, academics, and the general public alike.

Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is the first book to collect manifestoes from the global history of cinema, providing the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture. Focusing equally on political and aesthetic manifestoes, Scott MacKenzie uncovers a neglected, yet nevertheless central history of the cinema, exploring a series of documents that postulate ways in which to re-imagine the cinema and, in the process, re-imagine the world. This volume collects the major European “waves” and figures (Eisenstein, Truffaut, Bergman, Free Cinema, Oberhausen, Dogme ‘95); Latin American Third Cinemas (Birri, Sanjinés, Espinosa, Solanas); radical art and the avant-garde (Buñuel, Brakhage, Deren, Mekas, Ono, Sanborn); and world cinemas (Iimura, Makhmalbaf, Sembene, Sen). It also contains previously untranslated manifestos co-written by figures including Bollaín, Debord, Hermosillo, Isou, Kieslowski, Painlevé, Straub, and many others. Thematic sections address documentary cinema, aesthetics, feminist and queer film cultures, pornography, film archives, Hollywood, and film and digital media. Also included are texts traditionally left out of the film manifestos canon, such as the Motion Picture Production Code and Pius XI's Vigilanti Cura, which nevertheless played a central role in film culture.

New chapters express ongoing concerns about freedom of expression, the role of the Havana Film Festival in restoring Havana's central position in Latin American cinema, & the changing audience for Cuban films.

Conducting the first comprehensive study of films that do not move, Justin Remes challenges the primacy of motion in cinema and tests the theoretical limits of film aesthetics and representation. Reading experimental films such as Andy Warhol's Empire (1964), the Fluxus work Disappearing Music for Face (1965), Michael Snow's So Is This (1982), and Derek Jarman's Blue (1993), he shows how motionless films defiantly showcase the static while collapsing the boundaries between cinema, photography, painting, and literature. Analyzing four categories of static film--furniture films, designed to be viewed partially or distractedly; protracted films, which use extremely slow motion to impress stasis; textual films, which foreground the static display of letters and written words; and monochrome films, which display a field of monochrome color as their image--Remes maps the interrelations between movement, stillness, and duration and their complication of cinema's conventional function and effects. Arguing all films unfold in time, he suggests duration is more fundamental to cinema than motion, initiating fresh inquiries into film's manipulation of temporality, from rigidly structured works to those with more ambiguous and open-ended frameworks. Remes's discussion integrates the writings of Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Tom Gunning, Rudolf Arnheim, Raymond Bellour, and Noel Carroll and will appeal to students of film theory, experimental cinema, intermedia studies, and aesthetics.

Mapping the historical and cultural contexts of film practices in Latin America, this two-volume collection of programmatic statements, esays and interviews is devoted to the study of a theorized, dynamic and unfinished cinematic movement. Forged by Latin America's post-colonial environment of underdevelopment and dependency, the New Latin American Cinema movement has sought to inscribe itself in Latin America's struggles for cultural and economic autonomy. This volume comprises essays on the development of the New Latin American Cinema as a comparative national project. Essays are grouped by nation into two regions - Middle and Central America and Caribbean and South America - for comparitive study, particularly between capitalist and post-revolutionary socialist formations. The selected essays examine the relationship between cinema and nationhood and the ambiguous categories of culture, identity and nation within the socio-historical specificities of the movement's development, especially in Cuba, Brazil, Mexico, Chile and Argentina. This collection will serve as an essential reference and research tool for the study of world cinema. The collection, while celebrating the diversity and innovation of the New Latin American Cinema, explicates the historical importance of filmmaking as a cultural form and political practice in Latin America.

Cosmopolitan Film Cultures in Latin America examines how cinema forged cultural connections between Latin American publics and film-exporting nations in the first half of the twentieth century. Predating today's transnational media industries by several decades, these connections were defined by active economic and cultural exchanges, as well as longstanding inequalities in political power and cultural capital. The essays explore the arrival and expansion of cinema throughout the region, from the first screenings of the Lumière Cinématographe in 1896 to the emergence of new forms of cinephilia and cult spectatorship in the 1940s and beyond. Examining these transnational exchanges through the lens of the cosmopolitan, which emphasizes the ethical and political dimensions of cultural consumption, illuminates the role played by moving images in negotiating between the local, national, and global, and between the popular and the elite in twentieth-century Latin America. In addition, primary historical documents provide vivid accounts of Latin American film critics, movie audiences, and film industry workers' experiences with moving images produced elsewhere, encounters that were deeply rooted in the local context, yet also opened out onto global horizons.