La muerte de un burócrata

Tomás Gutiérrez Alea (1966)

Because of where and when it was made, I was interested to see Death of a Bureaucrat – of which I’d never heard until this month’s BFI programme was announced.  Google AI and Ketty Rodriguez from the London Latino Film Festival, who introduced the screening, agree that Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s black comedy (shot in black and white) is a classic of Latin American cinema.  It seems politically remarkable – a satire of communist bureaucracy made in Cuba within a few years of the start of the Castro regime.  Seeing the film can’t detract from that historical significance, yet I soon found Death of a Bureaucrat unbearable.  Only eighty-five minutes long, it prompted my first walkout of this year.

I feared the worst from the opening title sequence.  The clack of a manual typewriter and short bursts of Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’ alternate as the accompaniment to film credits in typewritten text.  These take the form of vintage committee minutes, with all the bureaucratic trimmings – abundant ‘therefores’ and ‘whereases’, occasional rubber stamps to reinforce the official quality of what’s on the screen.  The first English subtitle to appear is ‘Resolved:  you will now watch the film’ – a reasonable joke that’s then rapidly flogged to death.  It’s virtually repeated several times – officialese precedes the actors’ names, the behind-the-camera credits, the film’s music, and a list of those the writer-director Gutiérrez Alea wishes to thank.

That long list – ‘Luis Buñuel, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, Ingmar Bergman, Harold Lloyd, Akira Kurosawa, Orson Wells [sic], Juan Carlos Tabío, Elia Kazan, Buster Keaton, Jean Vigo, Marilyn Monroe, and all those who in one way or another have been involved in the film industry from Lumière [sic] to the present day’ – may be one reason for Death of a Bureaucrat‘s high standing among cinephiles, many of whom love watching movies replete with references to other movies, that the cinephile can then congratulate themselves on spotting.  There are only five critic reviews to account for the 100% fresh rating of Gutiérrez’s film on Rotten Tomatoes but the fivesome include Vincent Canby, Dave Kehr and B Ruby Rich.  Rich duly checks off ‘the boss’s night out with his secretary that recalls a moment of Monroe … a cemetery scene out of Laurel and Hardy … a nightmare out of the Buñuel/Dali Un chien andalou … [the deceased man who] impersonates Wild Strawberries on a merry-go-round’.  (Whatever that last phrase may mean.)

The title character, Francisco J Perez (‘Paco’), was no pen- or paper-pusher but an inventor of sorts.  Paco designed a machine to mass-produce busts of José Martí, a (real) Cuban renaissance man and national hero.  A series of animated images show how Paco met his untimely end by falling into his own invention.  In the film’s first live-action sequence, he’s a bust atop his grave.  Paco has been buried with his labour card in recognition of his exemplary standing in the workplace.  When his wife, accompanied by a nephew, visits officials to claim her widow’s pension, she’s told she must produce Paco’s labour card to do so.  The nephew and others break into the cemetery under cover of darkness to exhume the corpse and retrieve the card.  When the family then applies to have Paco re-interred, they can’t because, as far as the authorities are concerned, there’s been no exhumation so – despite visual evidence to the contrary – there is no body to bury.

This is approximately where I parted company with Death of a Bureaucrat and I can’t resist noting that, most unusually, even the Wikipedia plot synopsis ends at this point with ‘…’ – as if it’s not worth going on.  The protagonist is Paco’s nephew (droll, long-faced Salvador Wood), whom B Ruby Rich describes as ‘a bewildered, hapless Everyman, a Keaton-Lloyd-Chaplin rolled into one’.  Chaplin is soon very conspicuous by his absence from the list of names in the opening credits:  even I can spot that the animated sequence that follows them references the famous factory sequence in Modern Times (1936).  (More interestingly, the animation makes you wonder if Terry Gilliam somehow managed to see Death of a Bureaucrat pre-Monty Python.)  The influence of silent cinema is also tediously in evidence in bits of speeded-up action, which Gutiérrez uses to make things even less funny than they already were.

The late Vincent Canby’s capsule review on Rotten Tomatoes reads as follows:  ‘Even when the comedy is strained, Death of a Bureaucrat should work on the gut responses of anyone who has ever stood in lines at bureaus dealing in driver’s licenses, rent control, gas, water, electricity or – perish the thought – complaints’.  The man delivering a tribute to Paco at the opening burial ceremony repeatedly praises his ‘proletarian’ qualities.  It’s true that bureaucratic excess is traditionally associated with the political left – promising a ‘bonfire of regulations’ is, at any rate, a tiresomely familiar battle cry of the right.  And it’s both understandable that in the mid-1960s Gutiérrez’s film went down a storm with Cuban audiences and no surprise that it annoyed the Castro government.  But Vincent Canby hints at one of the film’s most disappointing features.  This absurdist satire ridicules red tape rather than Red tape:  as such, it’s less extraordinary than it might have been.  Although grateful that BFI screened a piece of film history that I’d known nothing about, I would rather just have read about Death of a Bureaucrat than tried and failed to sit through it.

13 June 2026