Now! (1965)
The following is an Accepted Manuscript version of an article in A Cuban Cinema Companion (edited by Salvador Jimenez Murguía, Sean O’Reilly, and Amanda McMenamin), published by Rowman & Littlefield in January 2020.
NOW! (1965)
Director: Santiago Álvarez
6 minutes; black and white
Now! is one of Santiago Álvarez’s earliest and best-known films. It is regarded today as a seminal work made in the agitprop montage tradition, which blurs the distinction between documentary, newsreel and experimental film, as well as a prototype of the music video format. The six-minute short film combines still and moving images of racial oppression and civil rights protests in the United States with singer, actress, and activist Lena Horne’s “Now!”—an antiracist protest song set to the tune of the Jewish folksong “Hava Nagila” (Horne’s song had been banned in the United States due to its radical political content, and her record label later attempted to sue Álvarez for the unauthorized use of the song in his film; the case was dropped after Horne granted the filmmaker permission to use it). Now! is a culmination of the racism and classism Álvarez experienced while living in the United States—he moved there in the 1930s searching for work, before returning to Cuba in the mid-1940s—and the resources made available to him at Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematográficos (ICAIC), the institution where he headed the newsreel section from 1959.
After a brief prologue of newsreel footage depicting police and soldiers clashing with protestors, the opening credits of the film are superimposed over a photograph of Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders in discussion with Lyndon B. Johnson. This image of polite and respectful dialogue will eventually be framed as one of inaction and futility; the final archival image in the film is that of a young black woman shouting and raising her fist victoriously during a street protest. In between these photographs, Álvarez inserts harrowing images that connect the then-ongoing civil rights protests of the 1960s as a continuum in the struggle against racial oppression in the United States throughout its history: images of lynchings, Ku Klux Klan cross burnings, racial segregation, police brutality, and a neo-Nazi rally are all featured. The final sequence hints at the possibility of liberation through political action: an image of a black man whose hands have been tied by a lynch mob cuts to images of protestors who have chained their hands together in solidarity, and the film ends with a series of defiant black Americans, young and old, their clenched fists emphasized.
Horne’s song does not merely provide a musical accompaniment to these appropriated images. Álvarez applies a huge array of editing and postproduction techniques (dissolves, superimpositions, rapid cuts, split screens, crosscutting, various zooms, and camera movements achieved with a rostrum camera), coordinating the images meticulously with the rhythms of the song and amplifying both the emotional impact of the images and the political content of Horne’s lyrics. “Now!” is repeated numerous times in the lyrics and becomes an urgent imperative of both the song and the film. It is an explicit call for radical action— the final image of the film is of machine-gun bullets marking out the title of the film/song over a blank white canvas—but also represents a measured lesson in how images of the past, including those created by the oppressors, can be used and reused to spur action and address the social and political present. As such, and despite the scarcity of resources at Álvarez’s disposal, Now! would become a powerful inspiration and artistic template for countless other politically committed filmmakers working within limited means.
Bibliography
Rist, Peter. “Agit-prop Cuban Style: Master Montagist Santiago Álvarez.” Offscreen 11, no. 3 (Mar. 2007). http://offscreen.com/view/agit_prop_cuban_style.
Wilson, Kristi M. “Ecce Homo Novus: Snapshots, the ‘New Man,’ and Iconic Montage in the Work of Santiago Alvarez.” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture 19, nos. 3–4 (August 13 2013): 410–22.