I Am Cuba

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I am Cuba (Spanish: Soy Cuba; Russian: Я - Куба, Ya - Kuba'
Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov
Produced by Bela Fridman, Semyon Maryakhin, Miguel Mendoza
Written by Enrique Pineda Barnet
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
Starring Sergio Corrieri
Salvador Wood
Release date(s) 1964
Country Cuba/USSR
Language Spanish (a Russian translation is heard shortly after the Spanish)
All Movie Guide profile
IMDb profile

I am Cuba (Spanish: Soy Cuba; Russian: Я Куба, Ya Kuba) is a Cuban/Soviet film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm.The movie was not received well by either the Russian or Cuban public and was almost completely forgotten until it was re-discovered by filmmakers in the United States 30 years later. The movie's acrobatic tracking shots and idiosyncratic mise en scene prompted Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese to begin a campaign to restore the movie in the early 1990s.

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[edit] History

Shortly after the 1959 Cuban revolution overthrew the pro-US dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the socialist Castro government, isolated by the United States after the latter broke diplomatic and trade relations in 1961, turned to the USSR for film partnerships. The Soviet government, interested in promoting international socialism, agreed to finance a film about the Cuban revolution.

The director was given considerable freedom to complete the work, and was given much help from both the Soviet and Cuban governments. They made use of innovative filming techniques, such as coating a watertight camera's lens with a special submarine periscope cleaner, so the camera could be submerged and lifted out of the water without any drops on the lens or film. At one point, more than a thousand Cuban soldiers were moved to a remote location to shoot one scene — this despite the then-ongoing Cuban missile crisis.

Even though it had such great support, the movie was given a cold reaction by audiences. In Havana it was criticized for showing a rather stereotyped view of Cubans, while in Moscow it was considered naïve, not revolutionary enough, even too sympathetic to the lives of the bourgeois pre-Fidel classes. Also, upon its original release, the movie never reached Western countries largely due to it being a Communist production.

When the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, I Am Cuba was virtually unknown. In 1992, Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the guest co-director of the Telluride Film Festival, screened a print of the film at the festival as part of a retrospective on Kalatazov. The San Francisco Film Festival screened the film in 1993. Shortly after the festival, three film professionals who had screened I Am Cuba at the San Francisco screening contacted friends at Milestone Films in New York. The tiny film distributor had released several "lost" or neglected older films (as it continues to do). Milestone watched a blurry unsubtitled VHS tape of the film and then went about acquiring the distribution rights from Mosfilm in Russia. In 1994, a friend invited Martin Scorsese to a private screening. Scorsese was amazed by the film, and when Milestone approached him to lend his name to the company's release of the film, he was happy and enthusiastic to do so. Milestone's release was also co-presented by another fan of I Am Cuba, director Francis Ford Coppola. Milestone's release opened at New York's Film Forum in March 1995. For the tenth anniversary of the film, Milestone debuted a new 35mm restoration of I am Cuba without the Russian overdubbing in September 2005.

[edit] Technical Feats

What most amazes cinephile audiences about this movie are the long takes (cf. the much later Russian Ark). Initially a three minute aerial shot of rural tropical landscape is disrupted by an infamous jumpcut to the top of a hotel building where a beauty contest is going on accompanied by raucous pop music. The camera, using a wide angle lens, moves among the contestants, goes out of the building, moves downwards for two stories into a club then circles around the bartenders. It then enters the pool and actually goes underwater, where the shot ends. In fact, the original scene went on for longer: the camera actually left the water (special submarine lenses cleaned off water droplets), but Kalatozov decided to cut this scene from the final movie. This scene was appropriated by Paul Thomas Anderson in his film Boogie Nights, when the camera is tracking around a pool, and then goes under water, and the sound changes, just like in I Am Cuba.

There is also a remarkable four minute scene of a slowly retreating long shot of a burning sugar cane field and house. This scene was later appropiated by Tarkovsky in The Sacrifice (1986).

In another scene, the camera follows a coffin between a crowded street. Then it stops and slowly moves upwards for at least four stories until it is filming the coffin from above a building. Without stopping it then starts panning sideways and enters through a window into a cigar factory, then goes straight towards a window where the cigar workers are watching the coffin. The camera finally passes through the window and, still following the court, appears to float over the street between the buildings. These shots were accomplished by assembling a line of technicians, and passing the camera down the line, from hand to hand.

[edit] Politics

All characters are archetypically simple and plain, either good or evil. Some viewers felt offended by the movie's stereotyped American characters. They appear in almost every scene, in such roles as a wealthy client of a prostitute, drunken sailors chasing after women, or the head of a huge company buying a sugar cane farm. On the other hand, for someone used to seeing American movies from the same time period, in which Russians were often portrayed as evil spies, I Am Cuba is surprising with its mild portrayal of Americans.[citation needed]

[edit] Story

The movie consists of four distinct short stories about the suffering of the Cuban people and their reactions, varying from passive amazement in the first, to a guerrilla march in the last. Between the stories, a female narrator (credited "The Voice Of Cuba") says such things as, "I am Cuba, the Cuba of the casinos, but also of the people."

The first story shows the destitute Cuban masses contrasted with the splendor in the American-run gambling casinos and prostitution in Havana. The next story is about a farmer burning his sugar cane when he learns he is going to lose his land to United Fruit. Third story describes the suppression of rebellious students at Havana University (featuring one of the longest camera shots). The final part shows farmers joining the rebels in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, ultimately leading to triumphal march into Havana to proclaim the revolution.

[edit] Documentary

In 2005 a documentary about the making of I Am Cuba was released called Soy Cuba: O Mamute Siberiano or I Am Cuba: the Siberian Mammoth directed by a Brazilian, Vicente Ferraz. The film looks at the history of the making of the film, explains some of the technical feats of the film and there are interviews with many of the people who worked on it.


[edit] See also

[edit] External links

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