POINT BACK reads like an intense and provocative diary in which Valeriano López pours out a torrent of ideas, anxieties, and doubts that have accumulated in his vast perception of Cuba, a country he has been visiting, exploring, and returning to for more than three decades, like an inescapable, infinite destination. Cuba seems like an inevitability for Valeriano, a predestination, an unpaid debt.
The epigraphs, chapters, and sections of this film-log, film-map, film-collage, conceived, written, and made with hurried calm, propose an approach to various facets of masculinities that, since López’s first forays onto the island, have revealed themselves to him as divergent from gender stereotypes, heteronormative ethics, and patriarchal intransigence. Even the virility that has sought to promote—and establish itself on—the impregnable image of the traditional island “macho, male, masculine” man.
This sort of trinity—an inexcusable axiom, an enormous dogma—stands as the doctrinal pinnacle of what would be the true, unconfessed great religion of Cuba: phallocentrism, the cult of the male, the worship of masculinity, the idolatry of men. A liturgy imposed by those in power, a sophisticated device of social control, cryptic and subversive, concealed behind the shadow of history and culture.
Instead of being the ideological pillar of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s “macho” revolution—in the words of composer and performer Ignacio Villa, Bola de Nieve—the sect of hegemonic masculinity has become the core around which the entire fabric of this process has been generated and strengthened.
Shot by shot, sequence by sequence in POINT BACK, the “man of the house” transforms into a man on the hunt: for other men, for other worlds. He becomes a dual, multiple being, an infinite polyhedron of desires, duplicity, hypocrisy, secrets, taboos, doubts, abjections, delusions, insecurities. Valeriano’s carefree and sharp investigations through the streets of Havana and the fields of San Antonio de los Baños reveal guilty and desperate facets. Fragile. Inconsistent. Just the opposite of what is apparent in heteropatriarchal social paradigms.
Valeriano skins the Cuban male and strips him of his dense layers until the ambiguities and contradictions of his hegemonic mandates are revealed, which throw the various forms of being into a perennial contradiction: that of inhabiting the suffocating gap between the paroxysm of the macho-male-masculine and the factual impossibility of such a chimera. Masculine myths are revealed as a metropolis (or necropolis) of houses of cards and ziggurats of crystallized sugar, including that of collective virility, which has been implemented as state policy since 1959. Machos for communism, we will be, will we be? What will we be? Are we, perhaps? Do we think we are machos, and therefore we are?
Valeriano López’s film continues to raise questions, each one more uncomfortable than the last, each one more disturbing than the previous one, each one with far less chance of being answered than the one before it. POINT BACK is a fractal question mark. It rhizomatizes into an eternal questioning. His written observations, accompanied by documented, fictionalized, hallucinatory images, offer no scholarly conclusions nor do they shed encyclopedic light on labyrinthine masculinities, but they do expose them. He dares to shout from the rooftops that the emperor is more than naked, and at the same time he reveals the multitude of complicit silences that feed the illusion of luxurious and fearsome garments.
The scathing, brash, and (self-)parodic tone chosen by the filmmaker-researcher does not detract from the discussion. He never reduces the “subject of study” to a caricature. Such a risk is avoided. However, it does highlight the many caricatured aspects of hegemonic Cuban masculinity, and everything contributes to sharpening the scalpel so that it cuts deep into the flesh of the many Renés—with Vigilio Piñera’s permission—who inhabit and overflow the island, lifting it up. Valeriano manages to lift machismo up. And the fall is spectacular.
POINT BACK is also a sample or cartography of audiovisual forms, devices, and manners that tend very little to repeat themselves in the constant volatility between generic territories that defies any orthodox taxonomy. It is a veritable cinematic stew that recklessly emulates the cultural stew that Fernando Ortiz discerned in the Cuba he lived in and rediscovered.
The hieraticism, monochromaticity, statism, and immobility that characterize the stereotypical hegemony in question are challenged, or rather exorcised, with a flurry of sparkling, joyful, ingenious, and imaginative solutions. It is an expressive and protean maelstrom that provokes but does not exhaust. It visibly transmutes into a multiple and ingenious discourse.
At the epicenter of this work, which offers no peace to anyone, nor allows itself to be at peace, is Valeriano López, entrenched (barricaded?) in his honesty, in the personal legitimacy of his doubts, in his right to express them and to POINT, inquisitively, his own finger. The film becomes a ritual or incantation against everything conservative and immobile. At the same time, it is an allegory-celebration of perpetual motion, of the living, the mutable, the dialectical. It is an intense party, celebrated at full throttle right on top of the empty and inert shell of the supposedly definitive.
Antonio Enrique González Rojas
Cuban, journalist, and art critic
POINT BACK reads like an intense and provocative diary in which Valeriano López pours out a torrent of ideas, anxieties, and doubts that have accumulated in his vast perception of Cuba, a country he has been visiting, exploring, and returning to for more than three decades, like an inescapable, infinite destination. Cuba seems like an inevitability for Valeriano, a predestination, an unpaid debt.
The epigraphs, chapters, and sections of this film-log, film-map, film-collage, conceived, written, and made with hurried calm, propose an approach to various facets of masculinities that, since López’s first forays onto the island, have revealed themselves to him as divergent from gender stereotypes, heteronormative ethics, and patriarchal intransigence. Even the virility that has sought to promote—and establish itself on—the impregnable image of the traditional island “macho, male, masculine” man.
This sort of trinity—an inexcusable axiom, an enormous dogma—stands as the doctrinal pinnacle of what would be the true, unconfessed great religion of Cuba: phallocentrism, the cult of the male, the worship of masculinity, the idolatry of men. A liturgy imposed by those in power, a sophisticated device of social control, cryptic and subversive, concealed behind the shadow of history and culture.
Instead of being the ideological pillar of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara’s “macho” revolution—in the words of composer and performer Ignacio Villa, Bola de Nieve—the sect of hegemonic masculinity has become the core around which the entire fabric of this process has been generated and strengthened.
Shot by shot, sequence by sequence in POINT BACK, the “man of the house” transforms into a man on the hunt: for other men, for other worlds. He becomes a dual, multiple being, an infinite polyhedron of desires, duplicity, hypocrisy, secrets, taboos, doubts, abjections, delusions, insecurities. Valeriano’s carefree and sharp investigations through the streets of Havana and the fields of San Antonio de los Baños reveal guilty and desperate facets. Fragile. Inconsistent. Just the opposite of what is apparent in heteropatriarchal social paradigms.
Valeriano skins the Cuban male and strips him of his dense layers until the ambiguities and contradictions of his hegemonic mandates are revealed, which throw the various forms of being into a perennial contradiction: that of inhabiting the suffocating gap between the paroxysm of the macho-male-masculine and the factual impossibility of such a chimera. Masculine myths are revealed as a metropolis (or necropolis) of houses of cards and ziggurats of crystallized sugar, including that of collective virility, which has been implemented as state policy since 1959. Machos for communism, we will be, will we be? What will we be? Are we, perhaps? Do we think we are machos, and therefore we are?
Valeriano López’s film continues to raise questions, each one more uncomfortable than the last, each one more disturbing than the previous one, each one with far less chance of being answered than the one before it. POINT BACK is a fractal question mark. It rhizomatizes into an eternal questioning. His written observations, accompanied by documented, fictionalized, hallucinatory images, offer no scholarly conclusions nor do they shed encyclopedic light on labyrinthine masculinities, but they do expose them. He dares to shout from the rooftops that the emperor is more than naked, and at the same time he reveals the multitude of complicit silences that feed the illusion of luxurious and fearsome garments.
The scathing, brash, and (self-)parodic tone chosen by the filmmaker-researcher does not detract from the discussion. He never reduces the “subject of study” to a caricature. Such a risk is avoided. However, it does highlight the many caricatured aspects of hegemonic Cuban masculinity, and everything contributes to sharpening the scalpel so that it cuts deep into the flesh of the many Renés—with Vigilio Piñera’s permission—who inhabit and overflow the island, lifting it up. Valeriano manages to lift machismo up. And the fall is spectacular.
POINT BACK is also a sample or cartography of audiovisual forms, devices, and manners that tend very little to repeat themselves in the constant volatility between generic territories that defies any orthodox taxonomy. It is a veritable cinematic stew that recklessly emulates the cultural stew that Fernando Ortiz discerned in the Cuba he lived in and rediscovered.
The hieraticism, monochromaticity, statism, and immobility that characterize the stereotypical hegemony in question are challenged, or rather exorcised, with a flurry of sparkling, joyful, ingenious, and imaginative solutions. It is an expressive and protean maelstrom that provokes but does not exhaust. It visibly transmutes into a multiple and ingenious discourse.
At the epicenter of this work, which offers no peace to anyone, nor allows itself to be at peace, is Valeriano López, entrenched (barricaded?) in his honesty, in the personal legitimacy of his doubts, in his right to express them and to POINT, inquisitively, his own finger. The film becomes a ritual or incantation against everything conservative and immobile. At the same time, it is an allegory-celebration of perpetual motion, of the living, the mutable, the dialectical. It is an intense party, celebrated at full throttle right on top of the empty and inert shell of the supposedly definitive.
Antonio Enrique González Rojas
Cuban, journalist, and art critic
