Really fascinating documentary on the life and work of Cuban writer and artist Samuel Feijoo.
The film tries to tell Feijoo’s life story in the style of his work, combining live footage interviews with animation in the style of Feijoo’s lively, frenetic, tangled illustrations. It allows the surreal to play with the everyday, with two interviews of sedate conversations in chairs being combined with animation of a turtle crawling its way through a disassembled and nonsensical stone structure. It is narrated by a mechanical pufferfish.
I have to say I knew nothing about Samuel Feijoo before seeing this, but now I think it’d be really interesting to read his stuff. He loved nature and folk culture, passions which stayed with him all his life. He saw the centres of culture not as the big cities or institutions, but in the countryside, among communities. There ideas intermingle with history, with mythology, with religion, with knowledge of the natural world, and stories and songs are invented and reinvented continually.
His written and artistic talent brought him to work at the University of Las Villas, and to become surrounded by the important creatives of his time. There he influenced and was influenced by the movements of his day, surrealism, plastic arts, and concrete poetry. He published magazines, first The Island and then The Signs, collecting the myriad artistic, critical and contemplative pieces being created. Essays, poems, illustrations and artwork all cohabited on the pages.
I loved how the film ended, choosing to portray Feijoo’s death as simply a passing into folktale, becoming part of the legends of the island. A really unique portrait of a distinctive artist.