Political Pilgrimage Cinema toward the Cuban Revolution. Genre Consolidation between the Revolutionarism and the Acosmism

Abstract

What we name political pilgrimage cinema arrives in Cuba for the first time in the sixties as a consequence of the confluence between the heyday of the mass media civilization and the revolutionarism. This cinema, which is composed by twenty films, has a seminal value with regard to the foundation and reproduction of the so-called Cuban revolutionary imaginary, and the development of the Left’s imaginary in general. The symbolical register of this cinema was negotiated between the political Other and Self; that is, between the Cuban Revolution, on one hand, as a way to look for its legitimation at an international level; and, on the other hand, those European filmmakers who went to the island as political pilgrims in order to appropriate the Cuban Revolution’s militant precepts.