Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site bbncca.ARPA Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!mhuxr!ihnp4!bbncca!sdyer From: sdyer@bbncca.ARPA (Steve Dyer) Newsgroups: net.movies,net.politics,net.motss Subject: Almendros' IMPROPER CONDUCT Message-ID: <1279@bbncca.ARPA> Date: Tue, 22-Jan-85 00:21:38 EST Article-I.D.: bbncca.1279 Posted: Tue Jan 22 00:21:38 1985 Date-Received: Mon, 21-Jan-85 04:44:21 EST Organization: Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Cambridge, Ma. Lines: 35 Xref: watmath net.movies:5498 net.politics:7016 net.motss:1434 Nestor Almendros is best known as a cinematographer, much sought-after by directors to give their films his beautiful but effortless patina. Thus, it is rather surprising to see his film, IMPROPER CONDUCT, directed along with Orlando Jiminez Leal, a conventional documentary of "talking heads", newsreels and voice-overs, looking deliberately rough-cut and without the professional gloss of his Hollywood work, perhaps to let the power of his subject speak for itself. The phrase, "improper conduct", covers a multitude of vices in Castro's Cuba, including that ultimate affront to machismo, homosexuality. The film is a series of interviews with Cuban emigres detailing their experiences of repression under the Castro regime. At first, it seems to concentrate on the plight of gay people since the revolution, describing the capricious behavior of the police, the prisons and the notorious reeducation camps. But Almendros uses the particulars of one minority's oppression as a mirror for the entire society: this is more than a gay-rights tract (though it is a very effective one), for it presents the issues of conformity, individualism and oppression in the most universal way. It is a very depressing film to watch, filled as it is with wrenching testimonies of lives disrupted and destroyed. The film offers no answers, only the anger and despair of the two emigre directors and their subjects. IMPROPER CONDUCT has become an event of sorts in New York circles, with debates about its accuracy and honesty flying back and forth in the Village Voice and American Film magazine, New York being one center for the unreconstructed Left. I know little about this meta-discussion, though I intend to hunt through my library to follow it--it should provide entertaining reading. But it all seems rather irrelevant to the essentially personal (and strangely non-political) testimony given by those interviewed in the film. -- /Steve Dyer {decvax,linus,ima,ihnp4}!bbncca!sdyer sdyer@bbnccv.ARPA