ABSTRACT
The central purpose of this chapter is to refocus on Sara Gomez's filmmaking by way of her documentaries. In doing so, I also introduce some theoretical and methodological problems raised by the cross-cultural encounter particular to undertaking an analysis of Gomez's documentaries.2 S develop the claim that the politics of time induces one of several disjunctions that must be recognized in the act of analysis and that, without recognizing these, the writer would not only lose the opportunity for critical self-reflection and decolonization, but also reproduce the imperial imaginary by effectively transposing a chronotope of Western and postrevolutionary culture/
The documentaries made by Gomez in the first decade of the Cuban Revolution4 insist on the reality, immediacy, and contemporaneity of the social subjects on screen. Thirty-some years later, in another country, that presenttense is at once palpable and remote, making it, according to some, all the more "real." And to write about the double-time of these representations and referents is to participate in the production of certain narratives of revolution, nation, colonialism, and so on and, thus, to participate (at least implicitly) in the erasure of others. In the early stages of a research project, such as this, the tendency is to identify with the images through structures
250 Women Filmmakers: Refocusing
of fiction and fantasy, nostalgia and rescue, and so on, as opposed to through those structures of judgement that are afforded to the historian or anthropologist. (Clearly, neither "side" goes uninformed by the other at any stage of research.) Here and now, in the era of George W. Bush and global corporate capital, where socialism has become homeless, as I watch the films 1 think about revolutionary Cuba's formative years from a position between activist and scholar, friend and stranger, participant and observer; that is, as one whose identification is phenomenological and psychological, ethical and political.
