Unfinished Spaces
IFC Centre, August 16, 2011
Movie #60 for 2011
I find that the best documentaries are these complete, complex stories about intelligent and engaged people who have differing opinions about something surprising - something that you didn’t even know was there. Like, say, the Havana Schools of Art.
In 1961 Cuba, the spirit of the revolution infused everything. Castro and Guevara turned the golf course of Havana’s elite, aristocratic country club over to a group of architects to make an art school complex for the people. It was a dream appointment for the architects and they embraced the unlimited possibilities and the impossible deadline to design five beautiful schools.
As the flush of revolutionary victory turned into something else with the reality of running a country, construction of the schools slowed from fevered to a trickle and then stopped altogether. Students were using the schools - had been the whole time during construction - but now the buildings were not going to be completed.
The unfinished schools were used continuously for forty years (by arts students, squatters, TV makers and a circus) without any maintenance. While still magnificent, they are very much run down. When Castro recently committed to restoring the existing buildings and completing the rest of the complex, the architects involved (now old and frail and many of them in exile) welcomed the news cautiously, retaining some suspicion of the regime’s treatment of the project to date.
The architects are charming, warm and have incredible stories, but the buildings themselves are really the main characters - and they are stunning, all red brick, whitewash and Catalonian vaults. They deserve to be the subject of a documentary - to have people argue about their cultural significance and disagree about their artistic worth - and to be put back to their former glory and then some.
