ABSTRACT
In a relatively little-known article that fi rst appeared in the Cuban magazine Carteles in 1928, written more than a decade before his celebrated prologue to The Kingdom of this World [El reino de este mundo], Alejo Carpentier introduced the marvelous as a concept intimately linked to the cinema. The fi lm camera, he writes, possesses “a glass eye of magical virtues” (76). Like his contemporaries in Cuba and elsewhere in Latin America, Carpentier rejected the conventional narrative standard of Hollywood in favor of the “purer” nonlinear, noncommercialized visual approach of such directors as D. W. Griffi th, Sergei Eisenstein and Fritz Lang. For Carpentier, as for many other intellectuals of his generation, fi lm-art was fi ghting a losing battle against the vulgar demands of the mass audience; as he puts it, the “concept of the business man” had “imposed itself tyrannically” on the artistic ideal (75).2 The sooner fi lm dropped the bourgeois, mimetic pretensions of the theater, he writes, the sooner the “mysterious and unknown aspects” of everyday life would be poetically revealed by the microscopic gaze of the cinema (77).
