I Am Cuba: The Ultimate Edition

I Am Cuba is a cinematic revelation that appeared thirty years late and tells the tale of revolution that never occurred. Mikhail Kalatozov's fever dream of a picture is the product of the heady days of the early 1960s. De-Stalinization was the order of the day in the Soviet Union and a popular Communist uprising had broken out ninety miles from American shores. Cuba was the center of attention for the international left. Luminaries like Chris Marker, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Agnès Varda descended on the island to see the revolution for themselves. Arriving along with them were scores of Soviet advisors, bureaucrats, and technicians who brought boatloads of Soviet money to aid the cause.

I Am Cuba was conceived as a coproduction of Mosfilm and the newly created Cuban film organization, ICAIC. Kalatozov headed up the project and brought along his cinematographer, Sergei Urusevsky, who had recently shot the Palme d'Or winning Cranes are Flying for him. The film's writers were the renowned Soviet poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and the Cuban novelist and playwright Enrique Pineda Barnet. The bittersweet guitar songs and score that create so much of the film's atmosphere were the work of Cuban composer, Carlos Fariñas. Sergio Corrieri, who would come to the world's attention in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea's Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), stars in the film. The visual brilliance of the film, its multicultural background, and its strange path from rejection and obscurity to an unlikely twentieth-century rebirth, are beautifully documented in Milestone's new DVD box set, I Am Cuba: The Ultimate Edition.

Kalatozov and his collaborators wanted to capture the revolution as it was happening. It was meant to celebrate Castro's victory, as well as spur his progress and raise the audience's radical consciousness. The style that Kalatazov and Urusevsky use privileges extremely long takes, wide-angle lenses, and hand-held camera work. Their techniques reflect a change of emphasis in Soviet cinema that had occurred since Stalin. Repudiating the montage-heavy style of the great Soviet filmmakers of the Twenties, Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, for whom editing, the dynamic juxtaposition of shots, was meant to replicate the dialectical process that undergirds Marxist thought, Stalin and the Soviet authorities dismissed montage as intellectual formalism. Instead, they wanted to use their state-funded film apparatus as a means of control, enforcing a more direct, linear, and staid film style—Socialist Realism. By the 1960s, after Stalin's death, filmmakers began to stretch and expand this style. Following another line of Marxist philosophy, long takes, mobile framing, and an intense concentration on the contents of the shot reveal the material reality of the world that allows the viewer to see it in a new way, far beyond everyday life.

Floating camera in the funeral sequence

One can trace this history of Soviet images in the work of Kalatazov, who was an active filmmaker since the 1920s, on disc three of the box set, which contains a documentary tribute to the filmmaker by his grandson, Mikhail Kalatozishvili. This is in fact its chief asset. While the interviews of friends and admirers are predictably laudatory and not particularly insightful, Kalatozishvili packs the film with his grandfather's images, often including extended sequences. It is fascinating to note the continuities in his style and approach to particular subjects and ideas. Particularly striking is his dramatic use of long shots to dramatize landscapes and pointed manipulation of the horizon, using cloudy skies and rugged land to illustrate the relationship between the people in his films and their environment. Throughout his work, the camera moves in time to the psychological states of his protagonists. Kalatozishvili ends his film with a flurry of images from all of Kalatazov's films grouped by theme. In one sequence, we see a striking scene from Salt for Svanetia, Kalatazov's 1930 chronicle of a remote Soviet area, where the camera mimics the motion of a laborer's body pounding a salt boulder. The next image is from thirty years hence, from I Am Cuba, where a frantically dipping and twisting hand-held camera follows the frenzied movement of a peasant's machete as he wildly cuts through a field of sugar cane. We see in this sequence that Kalatazov has managed to return to the style of dialectical montage, banned so long ago.

Such sensual, impressionistic, and stirring passages are at the heart of I Am Cuba. Not designed to be a cohesive narrative, but an agitprop, epic poem, the film is divided into four vignettes. The first depicts the moral corruption and exploitation of the Batista years, the second is a portrait of the countryside and the wretched inequities of the sugar trade, the third dramatizes the student protest movement in the cities, and the fourth takes us back to the country and the hills, from which Castro and his guerillas launched their armed rebellion. The simple melodramatic plots that hold the four parts together seem like they are merely an excuse for the elaborate sequences and visual experimentation, which are clearly the film's emphasis.

The most famous and imitated set pieces are the amazingly choreographed sequence shots of the pre-Castro Havana hotel, the endless hand-held shot of the funeral of a martyred student, and the sugar-cane cutting scene described earlier. The funeral scene is a single shot that begins at ground level with the coffin, but then the camera climbs up to the top of a building, moves through a cigar factory on the top floor of a building, and then projects outward over a growing crowd in the street. It keeps moving, ever outward, impossibly suspended over the mourners and the coffin draped with the new Cuban flag. It's a thrilling sight; our emotions are heightened through the style of the shot. The camera's tenuous position, but indefatigable forward progression, mirrors the unarmed students defiance of the armed soldiers and the upward progression of the shot parallels the people's awakening.

The Havana hotel scene is also comprised of a single take. The camera climbs up several stories, passes through a beauty contest and a jazz band, gets drunk with some American tourists, and then cools of with them by diving into a pool. It's a breathtaking shot, meant to capture the crass, dizzy, dream world lived by the colonial exploiters of the island. It is juxtaposed with scenes of the poverty and want of the Cuban people. But you don't remember those scenes quite as well, and it looks like they are having a lot of fun on that roof of that hotel. The life of the oppressors, so stunningly captured by Kalatozov, didn't seem so bad, even if it was morally and politically dubious. This was an objection that the Soviet authorities had as well. The ambiguity of this scene speaks to the film's greatest failing. Kalatozov and his Soviet collaborators had very little feel for Cuba. On a fundamental level the island that appears in the film is a picturesque tropical paradise filled with innocent and simple natives and crudely drawn Anglo oppressors. Coming from the cold, bureaucratized, and oppressive environment of Stalin's Soviet Union, it must have been very hard to comprehend the struggle and challenges faced by the Cubans.

José Gallardo as Pedro, a tenant sugarcane farmer, destroyed by the United Fruit Company

The helicopter shot that opens the film introduces us to the female narrator who is the voice of the island. The camera—filled with infrared film that makes the palm trees appear to be gilded—surveys a completely uninhabited section of the island as the narrator quotes Columbus, praising Cuba's natural beauty. It is disappointing to see Soviet filmmakers reiterating the old saw that history in the Western hemisphere began with Columbus and the all too familiar gendering of "virgin" land as feminine. Melodrama, defined as pitting simple innocence against injustice and evil, is the organizing principle of each vignette. The Cuban characters all have soulful faces and white shirts, while the Americans and wealthy Cubans are all sneering, brutal exploiters. Kalatozov and his collaborators were on the island during the Cuban missile crisis and the experience hardened them towards the U.S. Nevertheless, the politics and characterizations in the film are strident and unconvincing and too typical of run-of-the-mill propaganda films, cheapening the poetry and invention of the images.

The film was poorly received in both Cuba and the U.S.S.R. and was shelved for nearly thirty years. Its rejection is interestingly chronicled on the second disc, The Siberian Mammoth, a Brazilian documentary by Vicente Ferraz, who returns to Cuba to find the actors and collaborators on I Am Cuba. Ferraz captures both the Cubans' disappointment with the film and sympathetically exposes the Soviets' blind spots. Amazingly, the film was so ignored in Cuba that many of the collaborators do not even remember the most basic details about its production. They are genuinely surprised when they learn of the film's 1990 revival. In that year Tom Luddy of the Pacific Film Archive and the Telluride Film Festival showed I Am Cuba to Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola with the hope that they would get it distributed. He was successful in this and the directors, who became strong advocates for the film, are responsible for its rejuvenated status today. Scorsese gives an eloquent disquisition on the film in one of the DVD extras.

The charm of I Am Cuba is that it is like finding a time capsule. The film's optimism, its belief in Cuba and its revolution, hope for Soviet-Cuban cooperation, and desire to spread the Communist word are touching in their sincerity and naiveté. The film and its characters will never see the dark side of Castro, Soviet aid dry up, or the island starved by the U.S. embargo. What remains vital and what inspires audiences when they see the film is the way in which the filmmakers use the language of cinema to make an audience feel and think. The audacity of the long shots, the inventiveness with which each sequence is put together, the very idea of making a filmed epic poem, have lost none of their impact over the years. The film is one long passionate plea in favor of form over content and an affirmation of the transcendence of film style.

Rahul Hamid is a Cineaste Assistant Editor.

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