L.B.J.

One of the best known short films by the Cuban filmmaker Santiago Alvarez is L.B.J.. The visual and musical edit has a very high quality. The film is a satire on the history of socio-political corruption in the U.S. Lyndon B. Johnson's presidency from 1964-1968 is portrayed as a period in which this corruption reached a height. Alvarez shows this first of all with the title of his film. L.B.J., an acronym that is charged with death, corresponds to Johnson's three initials. They also refer to three assassinations that were coincidentally committed in the days when Johnson rose to power. 'L' for Luther of Martin Luther King, 'B' for Bob Kennedy, and 'J' for his brother John Kennedy. Although Alvarez gives free rein to his mockery of Johnson, his film is not meant as a personal attack. Every comment that tends to an accusation of Johnson as a murderer is absent and would indeed annul the point of the film. Individual corruption is a phenomenon that was still to come, then.
In the second place, Alvarez makes Johnson into a symbol of the American desire for heroes - as expressed in numerous Hollywood movies (westerns and historical adventure-movies). The essence of the satire lies in the really existing cartoon of Johson as a cowboy in Texas, taming a wild horse. The hypocrisy of the American popular culture is presented by a wonderful associative series of images from Hollywood scenes alternated with Johnson as a cowboy, and even as a medieval knight. Alvarez lacked the material to edit the Hollywood scenes in their actual form. By re-shooting the optical images of scenes, he analyzes the Hollywood myth even more sharply. Alvarez has joined art and document into an organic unity which gives the film a suggestive charge.