Early in director Hubert Sauper’s new documentary, Epicentro, a Cuban man stands on a map of the world set in the floor of a building. “Small but marvelous,” he says while pointing at Cuba on the map, later calling it a “utopia.” Sauper asks if the man knows what the word means and though he explains that he doesn’t know its exact meaning, he does know that Cuba is one. Sandwiched between images of decaying buildings and relative poverty, it’s unclear whether Sauper means for the moment to read as ironic and that tension between critique and praise carries throughout Epicentro.
A lot of Sauper’s examination is focused on Cuba’s history—particularly Spain and America’s involvement with the island. In one remarkable early scene, a group of school children watch a film about the explosion of the USS Maine in Havana in harbor in 1889 that helped incite the Spanish-American War. It’s genuinely surprising to see the children, previously watching the screen with slack-jawed amazement, boo at the implication that America in some way helped liberate Cuba from Spanish rule. However, Sauper is just as willing as his subjects to criticize America’s influence in Cuba. Whether it’s interviewing an old man outside of a now-defunct sugar refinery which used to be the top supplier for Coca-Cola or quizzing Habaneros on whether they know the origin of the name of Havana’s Roosevelt Hotel, Sauper is constantly highlighting the influence American imperialism had in Cuba during the first half of the 20th Century and what was left behind after that relationship became antagonistic.
Though Epicentro spends a lot of time on the longterm effects of the USS Maine explosion and the ensuing war, perhaps the most fascinating way Sauper interrogates that history is through its depiction on film. Part of what makes the children’s reaction to the silent film about the Spanish-American war so incredible is how easily they identify it as propaganda. As Sauper later highlights, the images of Spanish soldiers executing Cuban people or the itself are fake and filmed after the fact. However, because they are presented as realistic and true, they are part–perhaps even the most convincing tool–in America’s imperialist influence in Cuba.
While moments like that where Sauper makes his critique explicit are impressive, just as powerful are the ways he uses editing to reinforce those points. In once scene, we watch a young Cuban girl who is one of the film’s primary subjects playing with the camera on Sauper’s phone. While there’s obvious beauty in a slow motion video of her dancing on a roof, it’s a sped-up image of another boy walking away that Sauper uses to devastating effect. As we watch the video, Sauper intercuts brief shots of Charlie Chaplin walking the exact same way and as the children laugh as they too make the connection between the boy’s movement and Chaplin’s, Sauper’s point about film as the ultimate tool of American imperialism seems undeniable. However, by juxtaposing that moment with subsequent scenes where Charlie Chaplin’s granddaughter, Oona, plays with, acts and even watches The Great Dictator with the young girls, Sauper makes his meaning even more potent. As a Spanish-American actress who is descended from Hollywood royalty, it’s surreal to watch Oona Chaplin as this embodiment of all the ideas Sauper explores living comfortably in the same space as these very outspoken Cuban girls.
Still, the most repellant display of that idea comes in a scene where an American photographer takes pictures of the locals. Where Sauper’s camera feels intimately involved with his subjects, this photographer feels almost perversely detached. As a little boy poses and performs for the camera, the photographer shoots him and the other people in a deteriorating building like inanimate objects—even lightly pushing the boy to keep him back and posed in the right place. When the boy requests payment for his work, the photographer hands him a pen–from New York he emphasizes, as if that makes it somehow precious–and then congratulates himself to Sauper’s camera for how happy he thinks he’s made the boy. As the photographer smugly says while talking about refusing to pay a woman he photographed earlier, “to be photographed by me, it’s an honor.” He means it as a joke, but it also perfectly proves Sauper’s point about American tourists’ privilege.
However, while there seems to be a clear difference between Suaper and the photographer’s work in that moment, the longer Epicentro goes on, the harder it is to separate Sauper from the colonizing filmic eye he critiques. Certainly Sauper seems to view his subjects with empathy, but he also never names them. So, the people he films never feel like full people to his camera, but rather ideas of revolution or imperialism or utopia he deploys to make his points without fully acknowledging their humanity. Why, in a scene where one of his adult subjects rants against Trump, does he refuse to remind her of his name? Is he preserving some idea of a documentarian’s detachment or is he just being a dick? Sure, his behavior feels distinctly different from the tourists who come to Cuba to drink and carouse in vintage cars, but he and a fellow white, tourist filmmaker also treat that same adult woman to one of those same expensive rides in a vintage car. And when she explains that they can’t drive through her neighborhood because being seen with them will lead to her being shunned as a prostitute, they essentially make a joke of it. Sure, the fellow filmmaker only hollers and waves his hands in the air in parody of the obnoxious tourists, but in the end, is the effect really that different?
The tension between Sauper’s activism versus his possible exploitation is perhaps encapsulated best by his ultimate determination that, despite the ravages its imperial history have wrought, Cuba represents some sort of utopia to him. Certainly, it’s fascinating to see his child subjects speak so articulately about their country’s history and current world affairs, but that he sees them as “little prophets” rather than products of a country where the language of revolution and anti-imperialist sentiment would have been taught to them from a young age feels like fetishization. Likewise, Sauper’s entire point of painting Cuba as this utopia forged on a naturally beautiful island despite capitalism and imperialism feels not that different from the tourists who view Cuba as a playground. He’s privileging his experience of Cuba as a beautiful place of promise over his subjects’ struggles just as much as those tourists.
Still, problematic as Sauper’s relationship to his subjects may be, it’s also unclear how aware he is of his own privilege. Perhaps he knows he comes off just as poorly as the tourists he mocks and keeps that footage in anyway. And really, regardless of his self-awareness, Epicentro is a really thought-provoking study of modern day Cuba and its history. It may in fact be a jarring or even upsetting watch for American viewers, but it also feels like a vital step in continuing to reexamine America’s racist history both internally and abroad.
