Pedro García Espinosa Romero

Graduated from the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes de "San Alejandro" as a plastic artist (1952). Graduated in Film Set Design from the Centro Experimental de Cinematografía in Rome, Italy and from the Instituto de Altos Estudios Cinematográficos (IDHEC) in Paris, France (1961). Licensed in Art History from the Universidad de La Habana (1978).

He is founder of the Instituto Cubano del Arte y la Industria Cinematográfica ICAIC and taught Film and Television courses at the Escuela Nacional de Arte de La Habana. He has worked as Art Director, Set Designer, and Costume Designer in more than thirty fiction films, feature-length and short films. He studied under Virgilio Marchi, set designer of the film Umberto D. and others from Italian Neorealism. He worked on the film "La Ciociara" by Vittorio de Sica as assistant to the award-winning architect Gastone Medin, set designer of all the films by screenwriter Cesare Zavattini.

He has also developed as a plastic artist, participating in approximately 15 solo exhibitions and 20 group exhibitions, within and outside of Cuba.

The name of Pedro García Espinosa appeared for the first time in the credits in El joven rebelde (1961), the third fiction feature produced by ICAIC and the second directed by his brother Julio García Espinosa, who studied at the Centro Sperimentale de Cinematografía in Rome, where years later Pedro completed his training. The fleeting exhibition on Wednesday, November 8, 1955 of the short El Mégano, made by García Espinosa with other members of the Film Section of the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo—to which both belonged—prevented many spectators from appreciating the set design elements created by Pedro in that "first essay of neorealist cinema in Cuba," he who served as set assistant ready to direct the sun reflectors, made in the carpentry workshop of his father's furniture business.

Pedro García Espinosa recalls in these Memorias de un director de arte, published by Ediciones ICAIC, his journey as an architect of set design in the new Cuban cinema born from 1959. He preferred to title them as those of an art director because, in his view, he exercised as such in times when this specialty did not yet appear in the credits of Cuban film productions. The expression "The rest is history" could not be more accurate: Pedro García Espinosa is an unavoidable name in the evolution of ICAIC since its founding years.

The García Espinosa brothers filmed in the turbulent 1961 the vicissitudes of a young peasant determined to join the rebel troops in the Sierra Maestra. Pedro later joined the team of the medium-length film Realengo 18, which Dominican Oscar Torres did not complete and Eduardo Manet gave the final touches. Pedro faithfully reproduced in both films the atmosphere of the bohíos of mountain inhabitants. How much pride he felt on August 4, 1961 when he attended the premiere of Realengo 18, his first professional film!, at the capital theater Arte y Cinema La Rampa. That of El joven rebelde would be there on March 2, 1962 when the budding set designer turned the indoor pool of the Estudios Cubanacán into the jail cell of the police station where the young revolutionary is tortured in "Año Nuevo," a story directed by Jorge Fraga that would be part of the feature Cuba 58. He remodeled the locations and selected the residences where the protagonists of Las doce sillas move, Titón's first comedy.

El Mégano, the direct predecessor of the new Cuban cinema, Realengo 18 and El joven rebelde marked the beginning of an impressive filmography. He was part with Roberto Miqueli and Irma Alfonso of the set design team for Crónica cubana (1963), by Uruguayan Ugo Ulive. He assisted French designer Hubert Monloup in the complex set design conceived in studios for the delirious Franco-Cuban co-production El otro Cristóbal (1963), directed by Armand Gatti. He designed the sets for La decisión (1964), José Massip's first feature film, with locations in Santiago de Cuba, where he selected the interiors.

In those times of feverish activity, Pedro was not credited in two co-productions in which he participated in 1963: Preludio 11, by German Kurt Maetzig, and Para quién baila La Habana, by Czech Vladimir Cech. With the considerable amount of work this set designer had, attention to the departments of set design, makeup, pyrotechnics, props, costumes, and special effects at the Estudios Cubanacán, very active at that time, and simultaneously the films he was working on, he had no time to think about being credited. Perhaps out of modesty he does not mention that these studios were under his direction during an intense period.

El encuentro (1964), a fiction short directed by Manuel Octavio Gómez destined for the collective feature Un poco más de azul, was his first experience with this filmmaker, repeated in other very important titles: La primera carga al machete (1969), which required deep study for the designs, selection and adaptation of locations, and Los días del agua (1971), the first in color for both the director and the set designer. But Aventuras de Juan Quinquin, premiered in 1967 by Julio García Espinosa, is one of those in which the set design conceived by Pedro García Espinosa played a leading role for the different environments traversed by the two rogues outlined by writer Samuel Feijóo. That year he also designed the sets for the comedy El bautizo, filmed by Roberto Fandiño on Isla de Pinos.

Next, he appears in the set design credits of Lucía (1968), by Humberto Solás, a classic of Ibero-American cinema for which he designed the coffee plantation used as a camp where the combat between insurgents and Spaniards occurs in the first story set in 1895 in the vicinity of Trinidad. He collaborated in the effort to set the locations chosen in Cienfuegos for the second story set in the nineteen thirties, and the humble dwelling of the Lucía from the nineteen sixties.

A very important year in the career of this designer is 1971. In addition to participating in Los días del agua, filmed in numerous distant places across the island with unusual color treatment by cinematographer Jorge Herrera, he collaborated with José Massip on a film as complicated as Páginas del diario de José Martí. In the recreation of various passages from Martí's Campaign Diary through different formal elements, García Espinosa shared the credit with Roberto Larrabure. With this same creator and together with Víctor Garatti, Pedro sketched the set design for Una pelea cubana contra los demonios by Gutiérrez Alea. Due to the demands of the plot, set in Remedios in the seventeenth century, the team of designers transformed the locations chosen in that city and in Trinidad in addition to reproducing some sets at the Estudios Cubanacán.

Pedro García Espinosa conceived in collaboration with Carlos Arditti, the set design of the biographical film Mella (1975), by Enrique Pineda Barnet. They had to work hard to select the capital locations and others that would recall the stay in Mexico of the founder of Cuba's first Communist Party. He worked again with Arditti on La última cena (1976) by Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, for which he decorated the entire house of an old coffee plantation that they later used again in Cecilia. One of the most enriching experiences of this set designer was being part of the filming crew in Cuba of several sequences of El recurso del método (1977), by Miguel Littin, an ICAIC co-production with Mexico and France. The imaginary Latin American country where Alejo Carpentier sets the plot of his novel was remodeled based on landscapes from Mexico and our Island.

The superproduction Cecilia (1981) demanded enormous efforts of all kinds, filmed over more than a year by Humberto Solás in a free version of the original customary classic by Cirilo Villaverde. Pedro García Espinosa headed the trio responsible for the set design work together with José Manuel Villa and Enrique Tamarit. The adaptation of locations in buildings and residences of the historic district was essential. A major achievement is the sugar mill built near Campo Florido, the largest of the constructions made for the film and one of the most ambitious since ICAIC was established. In Amada (1983), co-directed by Nelson Rodríguez and Solás, he set the interior of the residence chosen on Calle Línea to create the suffocating atmosphere of the protagonist.

Cecilia, Una pelea cubana contra los demonios and Amada, constitute three of the most important productions entrusted to Pedro García Espinosa, who works closely with the cinematographer and the director in his mission to achieve the atmosphere, environment and climate of the film in function of the dramatic action. Reina y Rey (1994), directed by Julio García Espinosa, also culminates the work of Pedro García Espinosa on the big screen, as he also worked on television serials.

Amid his multiple occupations, Pedro found time to teach workshops and lectures on his specialty and on Cuban cinema in different countries as well as having several exhibitions of his plastic work.

Reading the pages of his book in which he seeks to synthesize his extensive career as a genuine set designer turned art director, which made him worthy of the distinction Por la Cultura Nacional, is to approach film by film the interiority of his creative processes. The condition of classics of some of them was contributed to by the work of Pedro García Espinosa, one of the many anonymous heroes in the history of Cuban cinema created by ICAIC, of which he has been a privileged first-hand witness.

Pedro as a plastic artist has executed more than three hundred works of various formats and techniques. He has participated with works in exhibitions in different countries and galleries: Círculo Latinoamericano de Roma, Italy (CLAR), Círculo Latinoamericano de París, France (CLAP). In galleries in Venezuela, Mexico, USSR, Nicaragua, Italy and Cuba, specifically in: El Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Casa de la Cultura Plaza, Unión Nacional de Artistas y Escritores de Cuba, Galería "La Acacia", Galería de la Cinemateca de Cuba, Gallery of Ecuadorian painter Guayasamín, Salón de Arte Digital de la Fundación Pablo de la Torriente Brau, Galería "Casa de la pintora Carmen Montilla Tinoco", Sociedad Cultural "Nuestro Tiempo", Sala transitoria del Palacio de los Capitanes Generales, Galería Hotel Vedado, Galería de la Comunidad Hebrea, Galería Salvador Allende, Galería Hotel Presidente, Galería Hotel Sevilla, Galería de "La Casa de Francia", Galería Hilton on Park Lane (London), FERIA ALAF de América Latina at the Kensington Town Hall (London), Galería Lowry (Manchester), Galeria "L' Ariete" (Bergamo, Italy), Café Literario (Bergamo), Galería Hotel Nacional De Cuba, Sala de la Provincia de Bergamo, Casa de la Cultura (Mérida, Venezuela), Hotel "Don Juan" (Merida, Venezuela), Centro cultural "Santos Michelena" (Maracay, Venezuela), Casa de La Cultura Valencia (Venezuela), Galería del Ateneo, (Tovar, Venezuela), Galería del Ateneo de Caracas (Venezuela), Casa de La Cultura, Maracaibo, (Venezuela). Works by García-Espinosa exist in Germany, Slovakia, Hungary, Russia, France, Italy, Spain, Mexico, United States, Canada, Nicaragua, Brazil, Chile, Venezuela and United Kingdom.
Pedro García Espinosa has dedicated his life to the artifice of simulating contexts, details, circumstances.

Pedro has left his mark as a set designer in more than thirty films (Baraguá, Lucía, Aventuras de Juan Quinquín, Cecilia), as well as in television and theater, and has been part of some of the most important projects in the country's cultural history such as the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo and the founding of the Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC).

Member of a family of four siblings, where according to what he tells us, "all, except the female, became artists", García Espinosa has also ventured into plastic arts with approximately 15 solo exhibitions and about 300 works.

For him plastic arts came first, from the age of seven when I made a drawing for my mom exactly like her, the next day his father, who was self-taught and also a poet, showed up with sheets, pencils, crayons, watercolors, and something that would be very useful to me over time: a big eraser.

"With a friend of my father I learned about famous painters, Italian Renaissance, and the rest of artistic styles; later I entered the San Alejandro school, where my first political activities began, we threw furniture into the street and once we burned a doll that represented the education minister of President Carlos Prío Socarrás".

After finishing at San Alejandro he could not enter the University because he had to work to help support his family in a small furniture store his parents had, he worked as an upholsterer.

"At the same time he started in Television as a designer, and inaugurated Channel 4, then called Unión Radio. In those years, his brother Julio (Julio García Espinosa) and Titón (Tomás Gutiérrez Alea) returned from studying cinema in Europe, they joined Alfredo Guevara and founded the film section in the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo, to which he joined and where those who would later form ICAIC were trained.

"In that period I went to Italy to study where my brother had also studied, at the Centro Experimental de Cinematografía in Rome. There I received classes from professor Virgilio Marchi, the most important set designer of Italian neorealism, and I met Venezuelans Daniel Oropeza, Alfredo Lugo and Argentine Alejandro Zaderman".

"Also, I had the opportunity to do my graduation thesis as assistant to set designer Gastone Medín on La Ciociara, a film directed by Vittorio De Sica, in which I designed the set of the coal yard and worked with Jean Paul Belmondo and Sophia Loren, who later won the Oscar for best actress for that work".

Upon returning to Cuba, in 1961, he then worked on the film Realengo 18 and later with his brother Julio on El joven Rebelde. In the middle of filming the invasion of Girón surprised them, but they did not stop production. They were years in which the world was shown that in the country there was a true film movement on an international scale.

"Like everything that begins, at first much sense of invention had to be developed, especially for an art director; in the film Lucía, for example, he designed a device to simulate hanged people that is still used. Before this, the person was tied below the arms and it looked fake because people ended up with their shoulders up; a hanged person never puts their shoulders up, on the contrary, they fall and the head rises.

"Another important project was the wings of the film Un señor muy viejo con unas alas enormes, by Argentine Fernando Birri, who chose his design from five other projects. For those wings he watched several films where this type of work could be seen, he studied the composition and order of the feathers, he was even at the zoo analyzing a heron with its wings open, because an art director must investigate a lot, about textures, colors, the era in which the plot develops and the image in general".

To speak of the beginnings one must refer to the Cineclub and the work of cultural organizations like the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo and its film section, from which the idea arose to carry out the postulates of Italian neorealism and also El Mégano.

"El Mégano was filmed in 1956 and its production lasted the whole year, they went on weekends to the Ciénaga de Zapata on some boats and except for the actors who played the role of tourists, the rest of the actors were coal workers and their families.

"My work on the film consisted of designing a Dolly that Julio needed to make a shot of a forward movement to Pastor's face, the protagonist, and using handheld camera was not appropriate, and he also designed some scaffolding with which filming would be done from above.

"The documentary could only be shown once in a room in what was then the Odontological building, in front of Coppelia, because Manuel Valdés Rodríguez, the director of cinema at the University, said it compromised him politically. The next day the police came, took the film and imprisoned his brother.

"We always lived with the uncertainty of whether they had destroyed or lost the film. Fortunately, that same January 1, 1959 with the triumph of the Revolution El Mégano could be rescued in the Columbia camp archives, sound and music were added and the peasant protagonists were brought to ICRT for recording. Today, it is preserved in the Cinemateca del ICAIC".

In the last stages of life where he spends most time is painting, the last film he made as art director was Reina y rey, directed by Julio García Espinosa, and then he made two documentaries, one about the Sociedad Cultural Nuestro Tiempo and another about the personality of Octavio Cortázar, together with my other brother Humberto.

"I have had several exhibitions in the Fresa y Chocolate room, at UNEAC, and held one titled Caminos, at Hotel Vedado, which goes through the three stages of my painting" he said in an interview with the Agencia Cubana de Noticias.

"Also in the editing process by Ediciones ICAIC is an anecdotal book about my experience as a set designer that should be ready before the end of this year. I only hope, if health helps me, to continue producing artistically", he expressed in one of his last interviews.