Honoring the Alejo Carpentier`s Centennial

One of the universal movie milestones, the Russian Serguei Eisenstein, not only shaked up Carpentier`s pupil with El acorazado Potemkin, he was also his friend.

That's why, when Carpentier came close to his body of work, he could do it from the affective intimacy and knowledge of a human being that equally dazzled him due to his ''power of psychologic inquiry''.

Both walked around Paris, few years before the Second World War:''I was with him many times sailing, aboard coal scows, along the underground channel joining the Sena with the Oureq River, narrated the Cuban writer.

Indeed, Carpentier's chronicles did not result from abstractions, they came from the live dialogue with culture, sometimes grabbed as a sensible and informed spectator, and in many occasions, as protagonist of the narrated events.

Tempered intellectual, man of his time, Alejo fed his creation on the direct contact with the entire world, arrogating the reality from the rich experience of those years in Paris during the war, which decisively influenced in his creativity, as a journey through time, sometimes shared with the genius of an Eisenstein.

They talked about their passions and fears along the Light City`s streets and avenues, he remembered the Russian`admiration for the James Joyce`s work, ''Ulises seemed to him a fundamental work'', he said.

Involved in testing and searching, both shared also the restlessness of the discovery of reality from other edges, enchanted by the artistic spirit.

Through their journey, they perceived alike ''places where the contrast between shadows and lights could respond to their intense worries''.

While exploring a cinematographic, reformist and substancial language, Eisenstein would find, in Carpentier`s opinion, the Japanese Kabuki Theater, needing another reality to take him through the road of essences, precisely to reality.

He was Russian, a man like Goethe, according to Alejo, devourer of the universal culture, eager to read everything, to live everything: ''a man taking the art very seriously''.

Published on Trabajadores Newspaper and Cubaliteraria Newsletter.

Read more about life and work of Alejo Carpentier in La Peña and in our online Cuban Books Shop.