With Improper Conduct I decided to break my oath of not directing any other film. For this task, I needed a good partner. I have known Orlando Jimenez Leal since my youth in Cuba, when he was fifteen and probably the youngest cameraman in the world. Orlando was working then for the local newsreel Cineperiodico, censured many times by Batista, and eventually closed down by Castro in 1961.
Some of the images of Fidel Castro arriving in Havana as a liberator, which we found in the French archives, had been shot by Orlando himself when he was working at Cineperiodico as a newsreel man. Very naturally, they came back to him like a boomerang for use in Improper Conduct twenty-five years later.
Furthermore, I had already collaborated with Orlando on a short ethnographic 16mm documentary, La Tumba Francesa. We did this in Cuba in 1961 before our exile. Since then, Orlando has become one of the most important Spanish-speaking filmmakers residing in the United States. His admirable film El Super, which was shot in New York, won several awards in international film festivals. When I contacted him to discuss the making of Improper Conduct, he accepted immediately with enthusiasm. Orlando was also very concerned with the question of human rights in his native land. As a matter of fact, he had previously shot for RAI (Italian television) a two-part documentary with similar views entitled The Other Cuba.
Unadulterated Quality
When Orlando Jimenez Leal and I planned Improper Conduct, our main idea in terms of style was that the real documentary film is found in the uncut rushes themselves. Yet rushes are long: When we finished shooting we had about forty hours of screen time. To keep the unadulterated quality of the rushes, we thought that the film should be edited in the simplest, most unadorned way possible. For this apparently easy but really difficult task, we were counting on an exceptional man, Michel Pion. He edited our film with intelligence and elegance. With time, I've come to reject the reconstructed, overedited documentary that I admired in my youth - i.e. Flaherty, Ivens, Reifenstahl - the documentary in which there is too much mise-en-scene; the less editing, the better.
Therefore, the editing of Improper Conduct consisted basically of condensing the rushes. We thought the "seams" should be visible. If audiences perceived that there was a jump cut and that we had eliminated part of an interview, so much the better. When something is abridged in a document, audiences should know it. This is, by the way, a normal procedure in any research work, whether it is in film or any other medium.
Though there were no fireworks in editing, I think we should have been even more severe with ourselves in the matter. The film seeks to be anti-Bela Balasz; our models were modern documentaries by filmmakers such as Jean Rouch, Albert Maysles, or Marcel Ophuls, for whom sound and text are so important, almost more important than the image. This preference might seem like a paradox, coming from a cinematographer. Yet before we started shooting, we told Daniel Delmau, the sound man, and Dominique Merlin, the cameraman assigned to us by Antenne 2, that sound should have the priority.
We told Merlin: If we must get closer to avoid seeing the
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