The film I chose for my analysis piece is Memories of Underdevelopment. The film is a drama directed by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea in 1969. The scene I am analyzing is the one in which Sergio walks out the door onto his patio and begins to gaze at the street through a telescope. This experimental film technique of the telescopic view allows the director to characterize Sergio.
The clip begins with Sergio exiting his room and entering his patio through a door. This door creates what we call frame within a frame because the use of rectangular frames shows a much larger area. We then go on to see him looking through a telescope, and here something extraordinary, unlike anything ever seen before this time period, occurs. This would be the telescopic view. The telescopic view is an experimental film technique created not by looking through the lens of a camera, but by looking through the lens of a telescope, therefore limiting the onscreen space. It allows for a circular view of the subject or subjects. Because the telescope is focused on the street and seems distant from Sergio, whom we just saw up close, it provides the audience with the thought that Sergio could be separating himself from the rest of Cuba. This, in turn, tells a lot about his character. Because we see that he is on a patio and looking down below, we could say that he is powerful, and reclusive.
After looking out into the street, Sergio then moves the telescope through what we can call a newsreel kind of view, in which he gazes over the city at such a fast pace that we barely catch a glimpse of the whole thing. The next line Sergio says explains exactly why the director chose to incorporate that newsreel kind of view into the scene. He says, “Here everything is the same.” By Sergio saying this, we understand that it was not essential for the audience to see all of the different places in the city that he was gazing at because they were all pretty much the same in Sergio’s view. So, seeing the first view of the street was enough for us to envision what the rest of the city was like. This again, enables the director to characterize Sergio as someone who is bored with his surroundings, and bitter about it. The characterization of Sergio is key to the film as a whole because the whole film revolves around his character and the development of his story.
This film portrays many cinematographic elements that appeared in the 1960’s. Firstly, as Sergio is looking through the telescope down on the street, he doesn’t say anything but just watches people and their activities. This kind of filming refers to the new realistic documentary style of filming that came about during this time period. This style is defined as “filming people in their natural environments, and letting events unfold before the camera.” This is also the type of style Dziga Vertov would call “film truth”. Another new element we see when he gets a close up of the lady laying down on the beach chair would be the zoom lens. This is a new type of lens that came out during the 1960’s that allowed for a director to provide close-up shots of far away objects. Lastly, and most importantly, seeing the surroundings through the eye of a telescope was fairly new as well. This ties in with the loose shooting styles that came about during the 1960’s. Before, we would be able to see the surroundings only through a rectangular camera lens, which would provide us with a larger focus area. But now, with the telescopic view, we are able to minimize the focus into a mere oval shaped view.
The new experimental and radical filming and editing techniques that were presented during the 1960s definitely aided this director and many more to come in making their films more complex and intricate.