Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s ‘Death of a Bureaucrat’
A dark Orwellian satire from the Cuban Revolution.
This review was originally published on May 5th, 2023.
Shortly after seizing control of Cuba in 1959, Fidel Castro established his own film institute, formally known as the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC). The Castro regime recognized cinema as "an instrument of opinion and formation of individual and collective consciousness". The ICAIC was used to bring up a new generation of Cuban filmmakers, as before its formation, there were only a handful of prominent directors leading the nation’s film industry.
The highest-profile filmmaker in Cuba at the time would have probably been Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, one of the co-founders of ICAIC. Seven years into La Revolución, Alea made La muerte de un burocrata.
A funeral is held for dearly departed Paco, who died in an industrial accident, as depicted in this Czech-style cut-out animation, which pre-dates Monty Python’s Flying Circus by three years.
Afterwards, Paco’s widow goes in with her nephew to collect her pension, and is told that she needs her husband’s work card to complete the paperwork. The problem is… the family decided to honor their late "proletarian" by burying him with his work card. Since the agency cannot make a duplicate of the card without the presence of its owner, they tell the family that they’ll have to exhume the body to collect the card.
The nephew heads to the cemetery to dig up old Paco, but is told that he needs to submit an order from the court to exhume the corpse. Thus, the nephew is sent down a rabbit hole of red tape, as he's bounced from one agency to the next in order to get the approval he needs.
Tomás Alea had been directing films for nearly twenty years, since his days studying law at the University of Havana. He directed both fiction and documentaries, and his partners included future Oscar-winning cinematographer Nestor Almendros, and Julio García Espinosa, the other top Cuban director.
La muerte de un burocrata was the seventh film he made under ICAIC, and it combines two of his great influences; classic comedy and Italian neorealism. While the film was made as state-funded propaganda meant to promote Castro’s agenda, it really comes across as more of a backhanded critique of the regime. Perhaps the censors were too blind to see the irony.
One standout bit of satire is when we see the nephew visiting his employer, who is directing a team of propaganda artists. They use an octopus to symbolize imperialism and a worm to symbolize the opposition to the state. Castro campaigned against the Cuban citizens that didn’t get with the program, and referred to them as "gusanos". Today, in the United States, the "gusanos" are referred to as MAGA.
Under a Communist dictatorship, one must don two faces. You must hold "a public position and a private position", as Hillary Clinton once put it. Two years after making La muerte de un burocrata, Tomás Alea would repent for his sins by making Memorias del subdesarollo, the most widely acclaimed of all Cuban films. Imagine if Castro hired Jean-Luc Godard to make a film for him. That is not meant as a compliment. It’s an amalgam of many of the worst aspects of European New Wave cinema used to promote the regime’s agenda.
The film's score was written by renowned composer Leo Brouwer, who provided music for over a hundred films throughout his career, most notably the Mexican film Like Water For Chocolate in 1992. He was never a card-carrying member of the Communist Party, although he did hold several positions in the government's art programs, including ICAIC. In La muerte de un burocrata, you get to hear his rendition of Chopin's Funeral March, and no film about death would be complete without that piece.
While I wouldn't go as far to call it one of the great comedies, La muerte de un burocrata is an enjoyable satirical take on big government in a similar vein as Terry Gilliam's Brazil, but on a much smaller scale and with a '60s New Wave flavor. More importantly, it gives the viewer a sense of the frustration that the Cuban people felt towards their overlords, both old and new.
Supposedly, the film has been given a 2K restoration by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and has been screened at a few festivals, including Venice, but I cannot find it anywhere online. For now, you’ll probably have to stick with some lower-quality VHS transfers, until the film eventually finds a proper distributor that isn’t afraid of ruffling a few feathers.
