It was late March, 1972, and at the Olympia Theater on Broadway, New York film fans were eagerly anticipating a series of Cuban movies, kicked off by Humberto Solas’s historical epic Lucia. The screening was interrupted by a stink bomb – and by the appearance of rats – both reportedly the work of anti-Castro protestors. Only in a movie, right?

The following day, United States Treasury agents seized prints that were scheduled to play as part of the festival, and effectively shut the entire thing down. According to New York Times film critic Vincent Canby, the federal government was enforcing the Trading with the Enemy Act which required extra licensing for anything coming from Cuba. Only in the Land of the Free, right?

Thus it was that American audiences (at least the ones in New York) were deprived of the right to see one of the best movies of 1968, Tomas Gutierrez Alea’s Memories of Underdevelopment (Memorias del subdesarrollo). Astute readers may notice that I said 1968, which makes Gutierrez Alea’s masterpiece 50 years old. But it wasn’t until a year after the truncated Cuban Festival in NY, 1973, that it made its debut in America. The Times included it in its ”10 Best” of that year, along with American Graffiti, Last Tango in Paris, and Sleeper.

With that historical context out of the way, let’s take a moment to reconsider Memories…, among the most important and least remembered movies from the 1960s. When I say “least remembered,” I realize that may ruffle feathers amongst Marxist film critics. The now defunct CineAction alone must have published a half dozen pieces on it. But how often do you hear other film scholars talk about Memories…, or of Cuban cinema in general, when discussing the great movies of the ‘60s and ‘70s? It is a glorious period for Cuban film and Memories… stands at its center, no less compelling fifty years later than it was when it first appeared.

There are several reasons for that, and to understand them, it is helpful to understand a little bit about how Cuba’s particular brand of communism viewed cinema. Obviously, there were some parallels to Soviet cinema of the 1920s. A strong measure of state control. The establishment of state-sponsored film academies. The co-mingling of the filmmaker and the film theorist. But Cuban cinema, at least at the beginning, avoided some of the issues that would hamper the development of Soviet film in the ‘20s. A lot of the credit for that goes to the Cuban Institute of Film Art & Industry (ICAIC) and its first director, Alfredo Guevara.

Less than three months after the conclusion of the revolution, on March 24, 1959, the new Cuban government established the ICAIC. Guevara made it very clear from the outset that the Cuban film industry would be a supporter of the new communist movement, but would also allow its film artists a great deal of freedom in making their movies. Thus the charges of “formalism” (elevating artistic form over socialist messaging that plagued the careers of many of the early Soviet pioneers) did not materialize in a significant way in Cuba.

The other crucial element in Gutierrez Alea’s body of work derives from the fact that he, along with countryman Julio Garcia Espinosa, and other Latin American filmmakers like Fernando Berri and Nelson Pereira dos Santos, apprenticed at Rome’s Centro Sperimentale, and were therefore exposed to the finest neo-realist traditions. The hallmarks of neo-realism, particularly on location shooting, are on display in many Cuban movies from the 1960s.

Yet Memories… does not feel like Rossellini or DeSica. The Italian director that Gutierrez Alea most closely resembles is Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was forever chafing under the restrictions of neo-realism. You can sense the influence of early documentary theorists like Dziga Vertov and John Grierson in the way Gutierrez Alea employs documentary footage, archival as well as contemporary shots documenting in the most Grierson-like terms the state of Havana in the aftermath of revolution. But in the shifting of time frames and the creation of a genuine sense of things remembered, you can at times feel like you are watching Alain Resnais, or perhaps a younger man’s version of Wild Strawberries. Out of these diverse influences, Gutierrez Alea builds a style of cinema that feels new.

One of the many fascinating scenes in Memories… is a panel discussion, attended by the effete hero Sergio (marvelously realized by Sergio Correiri, whose handsome impotence recalls any number of Marcello Mastroianni characters), in which modern Cuban intellectuals debate the state of the arts in a time of revolution. Gutierrez uses actual authors and thinkers in this panel, playing themselves. One of them is Edmundo Desnoes, on whose novel the movie is based. And these thinkers, Desnoes included, do not come off in a particularly good light. They spout a lot of theory, but in the end are challenged (by Jack Gelber, an American playwright, no less) about their relative timidity as artists. Gutierrez Alea makes explicit in this scene one of his movie’s primary observations – that true revolution does not merely require new subject matter. It requires new artistic forms to engage audiences in a different way. Gutierrez Alea is constantly mixing elements and styles in an effort to find such a structure.

Sergio is a well-off, middle-aged dilettante. He fancies himself a writer, but he never actually writes. He merely opines about the state of the country (suffering through its economic, intellectual and cultural underdevelopment). At one time, he appears to have managed a store which was given to him by his father-in-law, but when asked what he does now, Sergio answers, without the slightest embarrassment, “nothing.” He wife and parents have fled the country for America, but Sergio has remained behind. Part of him seems genuinely sympathetic to the ideals of the revolution, part of him seems very curious about how his country will rise or fall. But mostly, he appears to simply be too lazy to leave. He goes about his life, recalling his past (he had one true love, but his timidity kept him from building a life with her), bedding impressionable young women, and simply watching the world move past him. Oh, and whining. He does that a lot. At one point, he observes that he was either born too early or too late. (Had he been born toward the end of the century, he probably would have become a successful blogger.)

During the course of the narrative, which runs from the Bay of Pigs to the Missile Crisis, Sergio does almost nothing other than defending himself in a breach of a “promise to marry” lawsuit brought against him by the family of the teenage girl he has seduced with a few of his wife’s leftover dresses. His is a bemused ennui that drifts between feelings of superiority and feelings of worthlessness.

In the hands of a less skilled director, such a character and such a mishmash of styles would grow dull and confusing. But Gutierrez Alea is forever offering us something new and intriguing to look at, some absurdity to laugh at, some gem of insight to ponder. It is a style that often defies analysis beyond observing that the real kernel of genius here is that the movie is constantly challenging itself. In form, the director has a splendid sense of when to puncture a depressing sequence with a jolt of wit. Or when to punctuate revelry with a profound image.

And therein lies the genius of Gutierrez Alea, and when it was at its best, the genius of early Cuban film. Gutierrez Alea supported the communist government, but he would criticize it in his films. This is not someone from the outside taking shots at a target. This is an insider looking out. There is nobility in the footage of Fidel Castro’s defiance at the onset of the Missile Crisis. And there is condemnation of a population that, in Sergio’s mind, has remained in the hot sun too long and has overripened to the point of rot. Memories… uses its multiple cinematic techniques to offer multiple sides of a complex nation. In the most self-reflexive moment of all, Gutierrez Alea appears on screen as a film director, making brief mention of his latest project, which could very well be the one we are currently watching.

I don’t mean to paint too rosy a picture of artistic life in Cuba under Castro. Even with its relative autonomy, the ICAIC was still beholden to the government, and artistic freedom could wax and wane with the times, particularly the economic times. Gutierrez Alea’s two movies after Memories… were historical reinterpretations, and not critical contemporary stories like Memories… and its predecessor, The Death of a Bureaucrat (1966), a pointed comedy about the way in which bureaucracy, even socialist bureaucracy, can deaden all that it touches. Artists often turn to historical stories to comment on current conditions when the climate calls for a bit more obfuscation.

And I know better than to venture into a discussion involving economic deprivation and the multiple forms of repression experienced by significant parts of the Cuban population in the wake of revolution. I am talking about cinema here, and offering a reminder that there were some truly outstanding movies made in Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s, with Memories of Underdevelopment standing at the center. It is a special movie that recalls the energy and the depression, the excitement and the terror, the sight and sound of an island in transition. Even the smell. No stink bombs required.