Girón, Manuel Herrera, 1972, 120’.
Girón is a tremendously original docudrama on the frustrated US-led Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, which deconstructs the conventional cinematographic representation of heroism.
The film combines archive images, interviews, stagings and VO narration to weave an account of the events; the people relating the events are not experts, analysts and leaders, but normal people who took part in the incident and then went back to their lives. All of these characteristics are amplified by the panorama screen format, typical of the war film genre, which has the effect of subverting the dominant mode of cinema as spectacle.
The accounts were filmed at the actual locations and the film reconstructs the stories behind their protagonists as they speak. The difference between documentary and staging is not hidden; instead it is almost highlighted, and the result is a deconstruction of the image-base of war cinema.
Screening of 'Girón' by filmmaker Manuel Herrera, in the last session of the season 'For an Impossible Cinema. Documentary and Avant-garde in Cuba (1959-1972)'.