Her move to Los Angeles was in part motivated by her husband’s Ricardo Méndez Matta’s work as a DGA director and because of a lack of endowment for cultural promoters. In an interview with Maria Cristina Rodríguez for Sargasso: Caribbean Film 8, published in 1993 she explains her reasons for leaving the island: Puerto Rico would realize that if money is distributed in an intelligent way and filmmakers were required to really produce film and if they’re trained to do quality work, they could have a moneymaking industry here. But they never really wanted to put the effort and the money that it requires. It makes filmmakers really frustrated. They go abroad, they study, they have all these ideas accumulating dust for years and they have no way to get that film produced because it’s so hard.20 Joaquin ‘Kino’ García (b.1953) also contributed the strengthening of Puerto Rican cinema. He published, with a fervent pace, articles and tomes on the history of Puerto Rican film. His archaeological research retrieved a history that was, up until then doomed to be discarded. His documentary work focused on the development of influential key figures in the island’s cultural and political landscape. He directed Imagen de Albizu (1983), a documentary short on Puerto Rico’s most symbolic independence fighter, El Goce de Crear (1990), a feature length documentary of Jack Delano’s
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to explore how drawing could relate or transfer veracity on complex phenomena. On Isla Postal (1982) she meditates on Puerto Rico’s political status through the layering of traditional Bomba music and governmental speeches. With Underwater Blues (1981), she examines the contradictions of the psychopathology of colonization. “Inside/Out, Think big/Now small” are scrawled on the screen while a tune is hummed in an erratic, but soothing fashion. In Coffee Break (1987) she incorporates a range of materials; ink, coloring pencils, watercolors and graphite to narrate a story about a woman who is transformed into a cat while she drinks the celebrated beverage of the island; coffee. Conclusively with Blues Tropical (1983), Marichal does in fact espouse an overtly political position. Employing popular sayings to connote the resentment of the times, such as: “Ay, bendito, Puerto Rico, USA (Oh, poor thing, Puerto Rico, USA)”, “A mal tiempo, Buena cara (For bad times, a good expression).” Marichal holds all of her original work; VHS copies are held at the National Archives in Puerto Rico. The films Underwater Blues and Guernica (a Claymation reanimation of Pablo Picasso’s painting Guernica) were selected to be exhibited on a super-8 film retrospective at MOMA in 2000. Marichal, like many other women directors came for other disciplines, mainly the visual arts and incorporated film as an extension of their craft. Comparable cases can be found in Frida Medín, Teresa Prévidi and Mari Mater O’neill, who all came from contrasting disciplinary backgrounds. She currently works as a printmaker and scriptwriter in Los Angeles.
Rodríguez, María Cristina. “Sargasso: Caribbean Film.” Interview with Poli Marichal,1993. http://humanidades.uprrp.edu/ingles/pdfs/sargasso/Marichal.pdf (accessed 2013). 20
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