Cuban photographer and filmmaker Herman Puig dies in Spain, another great one

January 28, 2021

Cuban photographer and filmmaker Germán Puig Paredes, founder in 1948 of the Cine Club de La Habana, later the Cinemateca de Cuba, passed away in Spain at the age of 92, reported filmmaker Carlos Antonio González Arenal this Tuesday on his Facebook wall.

Germán Puig, with the artistic name Herman Puig, was born in Sagua la Grande on February 25, 1928, and was considered an important figure in the Cuban intellectual scene of the 1950s.

After returning to Cuba following film studies in Paris, he directed Carta de una madre alongside his friend Carlos Franqui (journalist), and Sarna with Edmundo Desnoes (writer). Likewise, throughout the 1950s he directed other short films.

He founded the Cinemateca de Cuba in 1951 together with Ricardo Vigón, and counted on the support of Henri Langlois, director and co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française along with George Franju. However, the institution was expropriated by the state-run Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry (ICAIC), created in 1959, and by its director, Alfredo Guevara.

It was not until 2004, following the publication of the article "Germán Puig, Ricardo Vigón and Henri Langlois: pioneers of the Cinemateca de Cuba," that the names of the true founders of this institution came to light. Emmanuel Vincenot's article is "required reading if one wants to understand the true origins of that cinematographic institution, a history that, for obscure reasons, was hidden," according to what Zayas reported in his interview.

The background lay in the sessions of the Cine Club de La Habana, located since 1948 at the corner of Consulado and Trocadero streets, where much of the Cuban intelligentsia of the time would gather.

After leaving Cuba, Germán Puig developed a successful career as a fashion photographer and advertising filmmaker in Spain in the 1960s and 1970s. His work was notable for his male nudes.

Due to the persecution he suffered under Francoism, which arrested him and accused him of pornography, he went to Paris, where he became a pioneer in publishing the history of the male nude in photography.

"I set out to take photographs of the male nude, not only because I could be interested in beauty, which has been the driving force of my life, but because I started to think that it was what had not been done in the history of photography [...]. I thought that if I treated it I would break a taboo. I would be a pioneer," he said on one occasion.

"In the New York of the sixties, through Langlois, he met Fritz Lang and Zina Voinow, Eisenstein's sister-in-law. In Barcelona, he became friends with Pere Ginferrer, Roman Gubern, Juan Marsé, Terenci Moix and Vicente Molina Foix; in Madrid, with Lucía Bosé, whose image adviser he was when the actress returned to cinema with Fellini's Il Satiricon (1969)," Zayas recalled.

The news is sad and represents a significant loss for Cuban art. His death adds to that of other prominent figures who have recently passed away, who contributed outstandingly to dignifying and enhancing island photography. The works of Enrique de la Uz, Mario Díaz, Iván Cañas, Rogelio López Marín (Gory) and Jorge Valiente, along with those of Puig, have nourished Cuban photographic imagination in the twentieth century and beyond into the present.