José Massip Ysalgué

Filmmaker, essayist, theater, film and literature critic, founder of ICAIC in 1959. His documentary Historia de un ballet (Suite Yoruba) is considered a classic of post-revolutionary Cuban cinema. He made two important fiction films about Cuban historical figures José Martí and Antonio Maceo: Páginas del diario de José Martí and Baraguá, respectively. In 2012 he received the National Film Prize, the highest award granted by ICAIC and MINCULT to Cuban filmmakers.

He was born on June 27, 1926 in La Habana. His parents were renowned educators Sara Ysalgué and Salvador Massip. He earned a degree in Philosophy and Letters from the University of La Habana and a degree in Sociology from Harvard University, United States.

In 1950, he participated in the founding of the cultural society Nuestro Tiempo, whose magazine he edited. There he met Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Julio García Espinosa and Harold Gramatges. He collaborated in the filming of the documentary El Mégano, a medium-length film about the lives of charcoal workers in the Ciénaga de Zapata that was seized at the time by police forces of the dictatorial government of Fulgencio Batista. With the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, he joined the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, of which he was a founder.

He initially worked as a documentary filmmaker. He was an assistant director on La vivienda (1960) by director Julio García Espinosa and that same year he filmed Por qué nació el Ejército Rebelde, a documentary about the situation of peasants during the government of Fulgencio Batista, how they organized to confront it, and how these resistance groups became a revolutionary army.

Also in 1960 he made Los tiempos del joven Martí, a film of which he was director, screenwriter and producer, about the time José Martí lived in La Habana and his trajectory until his exile in 1871. For the making of the film, Massip used engravings from the era, canvases and drawings that provided a graphic image of the nineteenth-century contexts in which the young Cuban had grown up. The film's music was composed by Harold Gramatges. This cinematographic project had originated in the Cultural Society Nuestro Tiempo in 1954.

In 1962, he made the documentaries Historia de un ballet, Venimos por amor and El maestro del cilantro. The first, subtitled Suite Yoruba, reveals the marvelous rise to theatrical stages of Yoruba ritual dances, previously destined solely for domestic spaces. Choreographer Ramiro Guerra and dancers from the Teatro Nacional approached anonymous popular artists to learn from them the Afro-Cuban dances and bring them to the stage. This documentary, which early on captures the process of change in artistic paradigms brought about by the social revolution, and which stands as a testament to the process of legitimizing Afro-Cuban dances through recognition of their aesthetic values and cultural imprint, received that year the Grand Golden Dove Prize at the Leipzig International Documentary and Short Film Festival, in the former German Democratic Republic.

In 1964 José Massip made his first fiction feature film: La decisión. The film starred Mario Limonta, Miguel Benavides and Daisy Granados, a young enthusiast whom Massip himself had discovered and who would later become one of the most important actresses in Cuban cinema. The film tells the story of two young mixed-race individuals in Santiago de Cuba, Pablo and María, who despite belonging to the middle class are discriminated against because they do not share in the purity of Hispanic origin. Massip's intention was to show the intimate conflicts of two characters in Cuba shaken by insurrection in 1956, where the cultural and social paradigms of the middle class were primarily foreign, and where the mixture of Iberian, African and French components in the eastern part of the country had visible cultural consequences. The film received that year the Award for Direction of Actors at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival in former Czechoslovakia.

In 1971 he filmed the feature-length film Páginas del diario de José Martí. The film has an unconventional structure in which poetry and history, documentary and fiction are mixed. It is based on passages from José Martí's campaign diary, in which the intellectual and independence leader narrates the journey from Cape Haitian to Dos Ríos in the eastern part of the Island. His intention was to cinematically capture the images that come from Martí's prose, with a marked plastic intention.

Another of his feature films is Angola: victoria de la esperanza, a 1976 documentary that won that year the FIPRESCI Jury Prize at the Leipzig International Documentary and Short Film Festival in the former German Democratic Republic, and was also one of the ten most significant films of the year, according to the Annual Selection of Critics in La Habana, Cuba. The film is based on testimony and on the trial held against mercenaries in the Angolan war, to show the history of its people, from the arrival of the Portuguese to the Second War of Liberation.

In 1979 he made La historia de "El Mégano", a film that returned to the contemporary history of filmmaking in Cuba. Massip had participated in the making of El Mégano, so this documentary also represented the recovery of his personal history as a filmmaker. The filmmakers and participants in the documentary by Julio García Espinosa and Tomás Gutiérrez Alea reunited twenty years after the revolutionary triumph to recall past times and record the transformations that had occurred in their community.

One of his most important historical films has been Baraguá, made in 1986. Actor Mario Balmaseda played one of the most important leaders of the Wars of Independence against the Spanish metropolis in the nineteenth century: Major General Antonio Maceo. The film revolves around the so-called Protest of Baraguá, led by Maceo when he refused to sign the Peace of Zanjón, which ended the war without granting freedom to Cubans. The preparation of the film and the actors was extensive and rigorous. It involved extensive historical research, consultation of literary texts and, above all, Maceo's correspondence. Nevertheless, the film sparked heated controversy, as it was considered too didactic, to which Massip responded that the didactic did not exclude artistic value a priori and that when the intention to teach became explicit in art, this did not necessarily mean its devaluation.

José Massip participated as a reporter in the wars of Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam, Ethiopia and Angola. For several years he presided over the Film, Radio and Television section of the National Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba. He developed intense work as a professor at the Higher Institute of Art. For his commendable trajectory as an educator, filmmaker and essayist, he received the Distinction for National Culture and a replica of Máximo Gómez's machete.

Works
1960

La Vivienda (Documentary, assistant director)

Los tiempos del joven Martí (Documentary)

Por qué nació el Ejército Rebelde (Documentary)

1961

Carnet de viaje (Documentary, assistant director)

Cuba, pueblo armado (Documentary, assistant director)

1962

Venimos por amor (Documentary)

El maestro del cilantro (Documentary)

Historia de un ballet (Documentary)

1964

La decisión (Fiction feature film)

Guantánamo (Documentary)

1968

Nuestra olimpiada en La Habana (Documentary)

Madine Boe (Documentary)

1971

Páginas del diario de José Martí (Fiction feature film)

Guinea '71 (Documentary)

1973

Cuando los Tugas regresaron a Kubukare (Documentary)

Laos: cuatro reportajes después de la guerra (Documentary)

1974

XV Aniversario (Documentary feature film)

1976

Angola: victoria de la esperanza (Documentary feature film)

Volibol en Los Ángeles (Documentary) 1977 La sexta parte del mundo (Documentary, co-direction)

1979

La historia de "El Mégano" (Documentary)

1980

Homenaje a Amílcar Cabral (Documentary)

1986

Baraguá (Fiction feature film)

He died in Ciudad de La Habana on February 8, 2014 at the age of 88.

Source: En Caribe.org