Santiago Álvarez
Santiago Álvarez Román (March 18, 1919– May 20, 1998) was a Cuban filmmaker. He wrote and directed many documentaries about Cuban and American culture. His "nervous montage" technique of using "found materials," such as Hollywood movie clips, cartoons, and photographs, is considered a precursor to the modern video clip. He studied in the United States but in the mid-1940s returned to Cuba, where he worked as a music archivist in a television station and participated in Communist Party activities. After the Cuban Revolution he became a founding member of the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC) and directed its weekly Latin American Newsreel. One of his most famous works, the short Now (1964) about racial discrimination in the USA, mixed news photographs and musical clips featuring singer/actress Lena Horne. Other well-known works included the anti-imperialist satire LBJ (1968) and 79 Springs (1969), a poetic tribute to Ho Chi Minh. In 1968, he collaborated with Octavio Getino and Fernando E. Solanas (members of Grupo Cine Liberación) on the four-hour documentary Hora de los hornos, about foreign imperialism in South America.
Director
-
Cerro Pelado
Though lesser known than Leni Riefenstahl’s OLYMPIA or Kon Ichikawa’s TOKYO OLYMPIAD, Santiago Alvarez’s tribute to Cuba’s sporting triumphs is no less breathtaking. A ship of athletes training on the rough seas becomes a symbol of Castro’s Cuba, the games projected on the backdrop of political...Watch Movie -
LBJ
Most definitely an unauthorized biography, Cuban agit-prop filmmaker Santiago Alvarez scavenges imagery from LIFE magazine, cowboy movies and Playboy to lampoon Lyndon B. Johnson’s tyranny. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and Martin Luther King, Jr. are all laid at...Watch Movie -
Hanoi, Martes 13
Santiago Alvarez’s tribute to the Vietnamese people transcends its narrow aim as anti-imperialist agit-prop. Patient documentation of local folkways contextualizes the American military actions as brutal, unnatural incursions. Alvarez’s camera was there when the bombs fell on...Watch Movie -
Hasta la Victoria Siempre
Cuban agit-prop filmmaker Santiago Alvarez produced this radical newsreel within forty-eight hours of Che Guevara’s death by special request of Fidel Castro himself. Fellow filmmaker and Alvarez admirer Travis Wilkerson accordingly calls it "a pure distillation of the highly...Watch Movie
-
79 Primaveras
Santiago Alvarez’s portrait of Ho Chi Minh braids beauty and devastation from its opening montage of blooming flowers and bomb clouds. Poring over documentary footage of the Vietnamese leader to search out the signs of bravery, Alvarez tracks Ho's political education from the French communist...Watch Movie -
El Tigre Saltó y Mató, Pero Morirá... Morirá...
Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez's hurried response to the 1973 Chilean coup d’état rests upon the music of Victor Jara, the folk singer who was brutally murdered within days after Augusto Pinochet assumed power. Connecting events in Chile to other repressive police crackdowns...Watch Movie
Writer
-
Hanoi, Martes 13
Santiago Alvarez’s tribute to the Vietnamese people transcends its narrow aim as anti-imperialist agit-prop. Patient documentation of local folkways contextualizes the American military actions as brutal, unnatural incursions. Alvarez’s camera was there when the bombs fell on...Watch Movie -
Hasta la Victoria Siempre
Cuban agit-prop filmmaker Santiago Alvarez produced this radical newsreel within forty-eight hours of Che Guevara’s death by special request of Fidel Castro himself. Fellow filmmaker and Alvarez admirer Travis Wilkerson accordingly calls it "a pure distillation of the highly...Watch Movie -
79 Primaveras
Santiago Alvarez’s portrait of Ho Chi Minh braids beauty and devastation from its opening montage of blooming flowers and bomb clouds. Poring over documentary footage of the Vietnamese leader to search out the signs of bravery, Alvarez tracks Ho's political education from the French communist...Watch Movie

Other content from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA