“Hailed as revolutionary Cuba’s first feature-length comedy, Julio García Espinosa’s picaresque, parodic and hugely popular adventure film offers a giddily inventive mix of classic movie genres and styles: war, Western, slapstick, musical, gangster, Buñuelian satire, Soviet-style Socialist Realism, and more. The Adventures of Juan Quin Quin is set in pre-revolutionary Cuba, where the flim-flam, jack-of-all-trades hero lives by his wits and ekes out an existence as, variously, a farmer, altar boy, bullfighter, and circus act (as Jesus on the cross, no less). Godardian intertitles, animated sequences, and comic strips further enliven the anarchic proceedings.
An encounter with cartoonish imperialists ultimately turns the hero into an anti-government guerilla. Director Espinosa conceived of the film as an accommodation between ‘serious’ and ‘popular’ art, as an attempt to combine movie entertainment with a subversive critique of old forms of movie entertainment. The result was one of the most widely seen films in Cuban history.” —Pacific Cinémathèque
THE ADVENTURES OF JUAN QUIN QUIN / LAS AVENTURAS DE JUAN QUIN QUIN
(Julio García Espinosa, Cuba, 1967, 113 min. In Spanish with English subtitles)
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