Soy Cuba, Summary, Citation
Analyzing Secondary Sources with Rosalind Galt's Soy Cuba and Revolutionary Beauty
Embedded Files
Consulting relevant secondary scholarly sources is a key part of analyzing and writing about primary sources. In Professor Roberts' unit, and more emphatically in essay 4, we are concerned with the Mikhail Kalatozov's film Soy Cuba (1964). Essay 4 is to cover Soy Cuba's technical and film elements, and how they contribute to its purposes of promoting and revitalizing the global Communist revolution. As part of this research, I've decided upon Rosalind Galt's essay Soy Cuba and Revolutionary Beauty as one my secondary sources I'm researching to build my analysis, so this archive entry will be dedicated to my methodology and findings regarding Galt's essay.
Prety: Film and the Decorative Image, Rosalind Galt
I begin my secondary source analysis by deliberately not reading the essay. The reasoning behind this is that there is a lot of important information about the essay that cannot be found in the essay and requires pre-research to be done. The things to look for are who the author is, specifically what is their field of expertise, and what is their purpose, who are they writing the work for and why? Galt's essay is a special case of this because it isn't a standalone piece of writing. Rather, it is actually one chapter of an entire book titled Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image. In the teaser for the book, Galt writes,
"Film culture often rejects visually rich images, treating simplicity, austerity, or even ugliness as the more provocative, political, and truly cinematic choice. Cinema may challenge traditional ideas of art, but its opposition to the decorative represents a long-standing Western aesthetic bias... Condemning the exclusion of the "pretty" from masculine film culture, Rosalind Galt reevaluates received ideas about the decorative impulse... Galt reclaims prettiness as a radically transgressive style, shimmering with threads of political agency. "
From this, we learn that Galt's individual essay fits within a wider framework of challenging bias against aesthetically pretty artwork, particularly cinema. This is crucial to know because Galt's goals with her essay do not necessarily line up with our own. However, this does not disqualify the essay as irrelevant to what we are doing, it only requires us to keep in mind that the essay's structure and line of reasoning work towards Galt's opposition to anti-prettiness, and our task is to figure what evidence can be used to support a different claim of Soy Cuba's task as it relates to promoting Communis.
Next is the first reading of the secondary source. I like to download the reading as a pdf file, because I find myself on my computer very frequently, and features like searching for keywords make rereading old points that are referenced later on much easier. During the first reading, what I look to do is figure out the general idea of the essay through an process of iteration and decomposition. That is to say, I figure out the general idea of smaller components in the essay, starting at the essay as a whole, going down to individual paragraphs, and then even potentially even subpoints within those paragraphs. By subdividing the problem, I can work incrementally, doing the simple task of figuring out the claim evidence and conclusion of single portions, before piecing those together to identify an overarching line of reasoning and idea.
Another important of the first reading is identifying unfamiliar vocabulary. The first reading is a good point to knock this out of the way because at this step we are skimming but retaining main information which will be used later during the second reading, so getting derailed to figure out the meaning of a word isn't as problematic. When trying to find the definition of a word, it is generally less important to isolate an exact meaning, and more useful to figure out what definitions make sense in context or are adjacent to ideas that would make sense there. A word I had a lot of trouble with was "fantasmatic", which is an alternate spelling of phantasmatic, though that doesn't get us far still. The context though gives us the effective meaning without needing to get exact, which is to indicate that some claims and/or pieces of evidence to back them up is questionable, problematic, and to a certain extent imaginary.
Excerpt from first reading notes above
List of unknown vocabulary
After this is the second reading, which for me tends to be the final reading before I move on to other sources or the writing process. Here the goal is to use the notes and annotations from the first reading to guide our understanding of the essay, figuring out the specifics and nuances to individual paragraphs and claims.
Similar to the identifying of unknown vocabulary in the first reading, the second reading is where I look for quotes that I think would contribute to my essay. The reasoning here is that with the context those quotes fit into established from the first reading, the intention behind a quote's usage is revealed. Looking for quotes during this reading is also beneficial because it allows to pick and choose what ideas are relevant for us. For example, take the following quotes:
"Although few contemporary readers of the film are as vehement as López, the anti-pretty discourses of aesthetic purity and authentic truth continue in more recent scholarship to associate Soy Cuba with both “formalism” and a dangerously feminized foreignness" (Galt 223).
Versus
"Infrared film stock precisely does see more: it responds to light beyond the visible spectrum and thus produces an image outside of what is normally part of human vision. Soy Cuba exploits this quality of light to make visible the growing desire for revolution, figuring powerful social forces in aesthetic form" (Galt 232).
The first quote is an assessment of Marxist-based criticisms of the film, noting the recurring notion of formalism, indulging in excessive aestheticism, and a narrative of foreignness that undermines the standing of the film as a legitimate work as opposed to a foreign exoticization. This quote would work well as evidence of the film's reception, as it provides technical insight into advanced Marxist analysis of art that would complement the overall analysis of the movie's relation to promoting Communis. On the other hand, the second quote concerns itself with the way film elements contribute to its political message. While Galt uses this scene from Soy Cuba to argue against criticisms levied against the film's aesthetics, the same point can be used in isolation to support an argument about the film's promotion of Communism.
Works Cited
Works Cited
Galt, Rosalind. “Forms: Soy Cuba and Revolutionary Beauty.” Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image. Columbia University Press (2011).
Page updated
Report abuse