The New Cult Canon: I Am Cuba

When Mikhail Kalatozov's I Am Cubaa long-lost, phantasmagoric

Cuban-Soviet propaganda film from 1964 was rediscovered and
reissued in late 1995 by Milestone (with the prominent support of Martin
Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola), critic Terrence Rafferty wrote the
following in his New Yorker review: "They're going to be carrying ravished
film students out of the theaters on stretchers."
That's about right. Personally speaking, I certainly needed medical
assistance to reattach my jaw, which had dropped permanently to the
floor during one of the film's famed tracking shots. Though I Am Cuba is
fascinating enough as an historical footnoteand I'll get into that in a
secondthe reason it endures is almost exclusively cinematic: Given the
virtually unlimited resources of two countries at their disposal, Russian
director Kalatozov (The Cranes Are Flying) and his cinematographer
Sergei Urusevsky turned the newly Communist Cuba into a lush
playground where they could experiment with wide-angle lenses,
whooshing camera moves, and towering crane shots held for minutes at
a time. Their assignment was to affirm the revolutionary spirit that had
just given birth to a new Cuba, but within those broad parameters, they
were free to pull off all the technical wonderments they could dream up.
After all, in a movie where the country itself serves as voiceover narrator,
there's no danger in getting bogged down in the particulars of character.
Why did it take a film as striking as I Am Cuba so long to get rediscovered
in America? Partly because nobody knew to discover it. By 1964, the U.S.
had severed all diplomatic and trade relations with Fidel Castro's
government, and in doing so, severed the cultural exchange between the
two countries as well. (A shot of a "Cinerama" theater in a city backdrop in

I Am Cuba suggests the impact Hollywood movies once had there, as

does a sequence set in a Batista-era drive-in.) Always eager to partner
with its new comrades as the contemporaneous Cuban Missile Crisis
would attestthe Soviet government swooped in to co- produce a movie
about the Cuban revolution, and I Am Cuba was the strange, beautiful,
misbegotten lovechild that resulted from the marriage.
Unfortunately, the completed film tanked with both the Cubans and the
Russians. The 2005 documentary I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammotha
solid primer on the film, if not a particularly distinguished onetracks
down some of the crew members on the arduous 14-month shoot, many
of whom are baffled that the project they remember as a total disaster
has any appreciators at all. Basically, the Cubans thought the camera
pyrotechnics overwhelmed and distorted the realities of the uprising, and
leaned heavily on clichd, simplistic portraits of their people. On their
end, the Soviets didn't care for the inadvertently seductive portrait of
Western excess in the film's early section. I'd argue that both camps were
completely rightand yet I Am Cuba is still magnificent.
Maybe the problem is that revolutionary cinema probably plays better
before the revolution than after it, when people are done dreaming of a
new, idealistic world and have started living in the one that they've got.
As such, I Am Cuba is a bit like a car salesmen who keeps making his
pitch after a customer has driven the lemon off the lot. Granted, a
generation of Soviet silent filmmakers produced masterpieces like
Potemkin and Earth after the Russian Revolution, but those films were
homegrown; Kalatozov, Urusevsky, and Yevgeni Yevtushenko, the poet
who co-wrote the script, were coming to Cuba as outsiders to the culture,
and the natives likely didn't appreciate the condescension.

Nevertheless, the four vignettes that comprise the film have a poetic
simplicity, building from personal hardships and tragedy to the
triumphant movement of the collective. The first and most affecting
segment takes place in a decadent Havana, where Westerners indulge in
casinos, luxury hotels, and barsand exploit desperately poor locals
willing to do anything to get by. This includes Maria, a virginal beauty
(with a giant crucifix around her neck, no less) who's destined to marry a
fruit vendor, but joins the legions of exotic prostitutes at a Western bar.
When a john insists they go back to her placea tin-roofed shack in a
sprawling shantytownwe catch a glimpse of how Havana's other half
lives.
From there, the other three segments depict Cubans taking action: The
second features a sugarcane farmer who takes drastic measures after
losing his land and his home to a fruit company. The third follows a
student revolutionary who fails to carry out a political assassination but
summons the courage to rally the people to disbelieve false reports of
Castro's death and march against the authorities. The last heads into the
mountains, finding a farmer who leaves his family behind to join the
revolutionaries as they battle in the countryside and forge their way, armin-arm, to a triumphant new day in the capital.
As the opening shot gently descends upon the Cuban coast via helicopter
and tracks along palm trees rendered almost silver by the black-andwhite photography, I Am Cuba immediately lulls you into a hypnotic state
intended, no doubt, to make you more receptive to its ideas. Most of the
segments end with Cuba herself narrating, and here she talks about how
Christopher Columbus once called the island "the most beautiful land
ever seen by human eyes." "Gracias, Seor Columbus," says Cuba, before
adding that the explorer's ships "took my sugar and left me in tears."

Then we get to the film's most famous shot, which begins with the
Western revelers gathered for a beauty contest on a hotel rooftop, then
descends several floors down to the pool, then goes into the pool and
shoots the action underwater. Kalatozov and Urusevsky reportedly had a
special submarine periscope cleaner made available so they could dip in
and out of the water without any drops screwing up the lens. (Paul
Thomas Anderson was so impressed that he lifted the shot wholesale for
Boogie Nights.) Here are the two clips side- by-side, the first from I Am
Cuba and the second from Boogie Nights:
I Am Cuba is filled with extraordinary long takes like these, but the shots
are never static: Kalatozov and Urusevsky believed in what they called the
"emotional camera," a handheld technique that uses constant movement
to express the characters' feelings. (It's also utilized in Kalatozov's equally
wonderfuland far less kitschyWWII romance from six years earlier, The
Cranes Are Flying, which is available on Criterion DVD.) Since the film
traffics in symbols more than flesh-and-blood people, the camera
provides much of the drama, and there's hardly a shot that isn't striking
or purposeful. When the farmer in the second segment takes out his
anguish on the sugarcane, for example, the camera takes the point-ofview of his machete, slashing furiously up and down. Then later, when he
sends his grown children to town to spend his last peso, the camera
becomes a blissed-out extension of his daughter as she dances to a song
on the jukebox. We know these characters as types, and the film does
nothing to complicate themwhich is proper, because that's how
propaganda works. But where a run-of-the-mill propaganda film might
drive home its Communist sentiments with, say, a hammer and sickle,
Kalatozov and Urusevsky's technical acrobatics carry them across with
dazzling, unceasing sensuality.

Loving I Am Cuba does come with a few caveats, however, since its
politics are nave at best, and more often just laughable. (Another
quibble: The dialogue is spoken and then immediately overdubbed in
Russian, which takes some getting used to.) International productions
like this one are notoriously tone-deaf anyway, but whenever anyone lifts
their voicebe it a character or "Cuba"it breaks the spell cast by imagery
that speaks far more eloquently. For example, having a soulless
Westerner offer to buy a young woman's crucifix ("I collect crucifixes")
after despoiling her the night before is absurdly predatory, yet the
subsequent sequence of the man getting lost in the endless Havana
slums has breathtaking power. Then there's the purple narration from
Cuba herself, with leaden passages like this one: "Sometimes it seems to
me that the sap of my palm trees is full of blood. Sometimes it seems
that the murmuring sounds around us are not the ocean but choked-back
tears. Who answers for this blood? Who is responsible for these
tears?" (Cut to: Batista!) When I Am Cuba finally premired in the United
States, there was 30 years' safe distance from the revolutionary ideals
that summoned it into existence. Though it remains a fascinating
accident of history, the film lives on as the ultimate expression of what
great filmmakers can do when they have the world at their disposal.
(Canny of me to follow up Cult On The Cheap month with its opposite,
huh?) This is cinema with a capital "C," and the budding freshman-year
socialist in many of usthe one that signed up for some newsletter that
will no doubt quash any later bid for public officemight find our hearts
swelling a bit at times. When faced with shots like the following bird'seye view of a martyr's funeral procession, what else can you say but "Viva
Cuba!"?

I am Cuba / Soy Cuba

Soy Cuba (I am Cuba) is an amazing Soviet/Cuban propaganda film from

1964, directed by Mikhail Kalazatov. It was made to celebrate the Cuban
revolution. The Cubans didnt like it because they thought it
misrepresented their revolution (it did). The Soviets thought it made preRevolutionary decadence look rather too attractive (it did). So it remained
virtually unseen for decades until its rediscovery in the 1900s by
enthusiasts including Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.

Whats so great about it?

Certainly not the script. Its crude and simplistic propaganda despite
being partly written by the great Russian poet Anna Akhmatova. But
cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky turned it into a dazzling visual poem.
The black and white (and sometimes infrared) photography is startlingly
beautiful, and the sound design is great as well.
Uresevky and Kalazatovs extraordinary long take emotional camera
technique uses continuous camera movement, rather than editing, to go
from wide shot to closeup to wide shot.
One scene contains probably the most remarkable tracking shot ever: the
camera starts among the mourners at a revolutionarys funeral
procession, ascends vertically several floors to enter the window of a cigar
factory, tracks across a room, and then leaves through another window
and flies slowly along the street at roof level several stories up.
Theres another scene at the beginning of the film which is almost as
spectacular: the wandering camera tracks between musicians and
fashion models on a hotel roof, descends several floors to mingle with
revellers, and finally sinks into a swimming pool.
The film wasnt shot with a Steadicam they werent invented for another

ten years but the ultrawide 9.8mm lens (roughly the equivalent of
10mm on an APS-C SLR camera) kept camera shake to a minimum.
Cameraman Alexander Calzatti used the revolutionary lightweight Eclair
Camflex camera, a favourite of French New Wave directors.

What you can learn from it

You can learn a lot about how to use an ultra wide lens, how to shoot
scenes as long takes rather than separate shots, using dramatic high
angle, low angle and canted angle shots, and creative use of natural
light. Theres some great use of diegetic sound and silence, particularly in
the scene where a revolutionary is killed during a demonstration.
(Diegetic sound is sound thatseems to be a natural part of whats
happening on screen; but in several scenes you can see how the
soundtrack has been carefully constructed.)
Its in Spanish with English subtitles. The Spanish voiceover is quite clear
and easy for Spanish learners to follow.

I am Cuba (1964)

FILM REVIEW; A Visionary Cuba, When Believers Still

Believed

By STEPHEN HOLDEN
Published: March 8, 1995
The island of Cuba has never looked as fantastically exotic as it does in "I
Am Cuba," a nearly 2 1/2-hour swatch of cinematic agitprop that aspires
to be the "Potemkin" of the Cuban Communist Revolution. Completed in
1964, during the headiest days of the romance between the Soviet Union
and Cuba, this Russian-Cuban co-production is a feverish pas de deux of
Eastern European soulfulness and Latin sensuality fused into an unwieldy
but visually stunning burst of propaganda. Supervised by the great
Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov, who is best known for "The Cranes Are
Flying," it suggests Eisenstein filtered through "La Dolce Vita" with an
Afro-Cuban pulse.
"I Am Cuba," which opens today at Film Forum, is structured like a social
realist mural with five panels, each of which illustrates a different aspect
of the revolution. After surveying the fleshpots of tourist Havana with a
leering disapproval, it moves into the sugar cane fields, then returns to
the city to follow the leftist student movement. From there it journeys to
the country to show the bombing of the innocent peasants' hillside
dwellings. It ends in the mountains marching with Fidel Castro's ragtag
army.
Although the movie has a cast of hundreds, its characters are little more
than stick figures on which to hang the movie's revolutionary rhetoric.
The heroes include Betty (Luz Maria Collazo), an exploited Havana bar girl
who lives in a seaside shack; Pedro (Jose Gallardo), an impoverished
cane cutter whose land is sold out from under him; Enrique (Raul Garcia),

a militant student leader, and Alberto (Sergio Corrieri), an indefatigable

freedom fighter. With their shining, idealistic faces, they are picturepostcard revolutionaries working against a government run by cigarsmoking, sour-pussed monsters.
Leading the list of enemies are the fat-cat American businessmen
(including one grotesque Jewish caricature) who draw lots for the favors
of Havana bar girls forced by poverty into prostitution. In one of the film's
most inflammatory scenes, American sailors singing a jingoist anthem
chase a frightened young woman (Celia Rodriguez) through the city's
deserted streets.
Threaded through the screenplay, written by the Russian poet Yevgeny
Yevtushenko and the Cuban novelist Carlos Farinas, is an oratorical
narration by a woman representing the anguished soul of the nation. "I
thought your ships brought happiness," she tells the ghost of
Christopher Columbus. "Ships took my sugar and left me in tears." The
oratory escalates, as she describes the trunks of palm trees filled with
blood and finally exhorts the nation's farmers to exchange their tools for
rifles. "You are firing at the past," she declares. "You are firing to protect
your future."
What makes "I Am Cuba" much more than a relic of Communist kitsch is
Sergei Urusevky's visionary cinematography. The film's high-contrast
black-and-white photography, which renders palm trees and sugar cane
fields a searing white against an inky sky, illustrates the revolution's
explosive polarities and burning passions.
The frequent use of a distorting wide-angle lens enhances the surrealism,
lending the scenes of Havana nightlife an ominous, fishbowl artificiality.
In a spectacular sequence set on the deck of a luxury hotel, the camera
follows bikini-clad tourists from poolside to underwater. The influence of
New Wave cinema is felt in several scenes shot with a hand-held camera.

In a scene that recalls Fellini's "La Dolce Vita," the camera frantically
gyrates on the dance floor of a fancy nightclub. Tame by contemporary
standards, these depictions of capitalist decadence remind one that
nothing looks more dated than yesterday's depravity.
Urusevky's photography ennobles the revolutionaries by gazing up at
them like living statues. As student revolutionaries are gassed and shot at
by henchmen of the Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista, they become
mythological figures advancing heroically through parting veils of
smoke. The film's relentless monumentalizing of heroes and villains may
be visually impressive, but it eventually becomes wearying.
"I Am Cuba" is finally more than just a celebration of a revolution. It is a
dream of life in which everything is reduced to black and white. Or as the
rhetoric used to go, you are either part of the problem or part of the
solution. Nothing was ever quite that simple. I AM CUBA Produced and
directed by Mikhail Kalatozov; written (in Spanish, Russian and English,
with English subtitles) by Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Enrique Pineda
Barnet; director of photography, Sergei Urusevsky; edited by N.
Glagoleva; music by Carlos Farinas; released by Milestone Films. At the
Film Forum, 209 Houston Street, South Village. Running time: 141
minutes. This film is not rated. WITH: Luz Maria Collazo (Maria/Betty),
Jose Gallardo (Pedro), Sergio Corrieri (Alberto), Mario Gonzalez Broche
(Pablo), Jean Bouise (Jim), Raul Garcia (Enrique) and Celia Rodriguez
(Gloria).

URUSEVSKY, Serg
Cinematographer. Nationality: Russian. Born: 1908. Education:
Institute of Fine Arts, Moscow. Military Service: Front-line cameraman,
World War II. Career: Worked as a graphic designer and photographer in
the 1930s; cinematographer, Mosfilm Studios, after World War II;
directed two films toward the end of his life. Awards: Special Award,
Cannes Film Festival, for Sorok pervyj , 1957; Golden Palm, Cannes Film
Festival, for Letyat zhuravli , 1958; Archival Award, National Society of
American Film Critics, for I am Cuba (1965), 1995. Died:In Moscow,
1974.
Sergei Urusevsky will be remembered as one of the most innovative and
resourceful figures in the history of cinematography, a proponent of a
filmmaking in which a subjective camera narrates the film. He advocated
a camera technique that would edit the film with its own movement and
make montage obsolete. Urusevsky was influenced by the other main
figure of Soviet cinematography, Eisenstein's cameraman Eduard Tisse.
While celebrated internationally, at home he was often blamed for his
obsession with form.
Urusevsky studied under graphic artist Vladimir Favorsky and other
Russian constructivists in Moscow. In the 1930s he worked as a graphic
designer and photographer. He was a Picasso admirer, and was
particularly proud that he visited with Picasso once and received some
ceramic pieces from the painter. During the war he was mobilized and
worked as a combat cameraman. He became a DP only later, and worked
with directors Mark Donskoy and Yuli Raizman, as well as on the last
picture of veteran Vsevolod Pudovkin. Little of Urusevsky's formalist
philosophy is to be seen in his earlier work. His best-known film from that

period is Grigoriy Chukhrai's Sorok pervyi (1956), a conventionally shot

studio-set adaptation of a popular short story by Boris Lavrenyev,
recounting a doomed love affair unraveling in the background of Russia's
civil war. Urusevsky's interest in cinematic form found its adequate
expression only after he began working with director Mikhail Kalatozov.
Their first collaboration was the war-time romance drama Pervyi eshelon
(1955), but it was not until the triumph of Letyat zhuravli (1957) that
Urusevsky's innovative approach to film narration was recognized.
Besides receiving the top award at Cannes, the film marked a decisive
turn in Soviet war cinema: for a first time the experience of war was
discussed through the utterly personal anxieties of the protagonists.
Hand-held camera shots were used as often as technology allowed. There
was even a scene where the protagonist, Veronica, runs away in a
moment of trauma, surrounded by a shaky background of trees and
buildings, reflecting her state of mind. For this subjective shot Urusevsky
is said to have asked actress Tatiana Samoilova to hold the camera herself
while running.
Kalatozov and Urusevsky then collaborated on Neotpravlennoye pismo
( The Letter Never Sent , 1959), a romantic story of geologists facing a
hostile nature. Elements of the cinematography of this film are believed
to have influenced some scenes in Francis Ford Coppola'sApocalypse
Now. Urusevsky's masterpiece remains his last picture as
cinematographer, Ya Kuba ( I Am Cuba , 1965). It was an important and
lavishly financed joing project of the Soviet Union and newly socialist
Cuba, meant to further the iconography and mythology of the
revolutionary aesthetic, and to become the cinematic cornerstone of the
"Cuban craze" that characterized the Soviet Union in the mid-1960s.

The film runs close to three hours and consists of four unrelated stories,
recounting the fates of ordinary Cubans involved in situations of class
confrontation that in the end lead them all into revolution. Otherwise an
ordinary propaganda feature, I Am Cuba is outstanding for its
extraordinary cinematography and design influenced by the work of
Cuban painter Jose Portocarrero. Urusevsky chose to make the film in
lush black and white, as he believed that the powerful emotional impact
of contrasting shadows was crucial in cinema. For I Am Cuba , he used
special infrared stock to achieve a fairy effect of the white island and
palms on the dark background of sea and sky. Most of the film was shot
with a 9.8 lens that slightly distorts the proportions and gives the images
a dizzy, engulfing feel.
The shots in I Am Cuba are long and elaborately composed; many consist
of a single take that runs over two minutes. In order to secure the
changes in angles and the twists in the point of view the camera had not
only been hand-held most of the time, but at times had to be handled by
two operators. The nearly three-minute- long complex single-take
opening scene on the hotel roof had to be shot 17 times; it involves
vertical and horizontal movement of the camera operator, a combination
of panoramic shots and extreme close ups, as well as the coordination of
more than 100 extras.
The innovative cinematography of I Am Cuba was also influenced by the
presence of young and inventive camera operator Aleksander Calzatti on
the set. Calzatti, who eventually emigrated to Israel and the United
States, had spent long hours discussing the film with Urusevsky and
Kalatozov. He had seen Hitchcock's Psycho , and described to them its
opening shot where the camera moves from a panoramic view of the city
to a close-up of the window behind which the action of the film begins to
unravel. Urusevsky was impressed by this description, and planned some
of the long takes in I Am Cuba around the concept of combination of far

and near. In the famous funeral scene, in one unbroken take the camera
moves over a street overlooking a funeral procession, then enters a room
through a window, travels over the heads of the workers in a third floor
cigar factory, then goes out of the window again and continues
wandering over the top of the procession. The shot was made possible
with a system of cranes and an elaborate cable system.
Upon its release, I Am Cuba was accused of formalism. In an extensive
discussion organized by Iskusstvo Kino in 1965 various filmmakers and
critics shared their admiration for its experimentation with cinematic
form, but noted that excessive attention to form had led to neglected
character development and psychological complexity of the protagonists.
The overtly aesthetic approach was considered inappropriate since it had
subjected content to form. The filmmakers were accused of misleading
viewers into enjoying the beauty of the images instead of sympathizing
with the sorrows of the disinherited protagonists. It seemed that the
cameraman had taken over directing, and was rather preoccupied with
demonstrating the means of expression he had at his disposal while
forgetting the goal these means were supposed to serve.
Urusevsky defended himself: "There cannot be art beyond form," he
insisted, alluding to Eisenstein. "It has never interested me, as
cameraman, to just register what is going on in front of the camera." On
the contrary, Urusevsky claimed that his goal had always been to "make
the image very active."
I Am Cuba was rediscovered at the Telluride Film Festival in 1992, and
screened to a standing ovation at the 1993 San Francisco International
Film Festival. It was then restored, released in the United States as a
presentation of Martin Scorsese and Francis Coppola, and enjoyed
enthusiastic reviews and acclaim in the arthouse circuit.

Toward the end of his life, Urusevsky turned to directing. In 1969 he

adapted for the screen the popular short novel by Kirghiz writer Chingiz
Aitmatov Farewell, Gulsary! , and in 1971 he worked on a film based on
the works of Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, who committed suicide in
1925. After Urusevsky's death, an exhibition of his paintings was
organized in Moscow.
Dina Iordanova

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 (centered on the character Maria) shows the destitute
Cuban masses contrasted with the splendor in the American-run
gambling casinos. Maria lives in a shanty-town on the edge of Havana
and hopes to get married to her fruit-seller boyfriend, Rene. Rene is
unaware that she leads an unhappy double- life as "Betty", a bar
prostitute at one of the Havana casinos catering to rich Americans. One
night, her client asks her if he can see where she lives rather than taking
her to his own room. She takes him to her small hovel where she
reluctantly undresses. The next morning he tosses her a few dollars and
takes her most prized possession, her crucifix necklace. As he is about to
leave Rene walks in and sees his ashamed fiance. The American
callously says, "Bye Betty!" as he makes his exit. He is disoriented by the
squalor he encounters as he tries find his way out of the area.
The next story is about a farmer, Pedro, who just raised his biggest crop of
sugar yet. However, his landlord rides up to the farm as he is harvesting
his crops and tells him that he has sold the land that Pedro lives on to
United Fruit, and Pedro and his family must leave immediately. Pedro
asks what about the crops? The landowner says, "you raised them on my
land. I'll let you keep the sweat you put into growing them, but that is
all," and he rides off. Pedro lies to his children and tells them everything
is fine. He gives them all the money he has and tells them to have a fun
day in town. After they leave, he sets all of his crops and house on fire. He
then dies from the smoke inhalation.
The third story describes the suppression of rebellious students led by a
character named Enrique at Havana University(featuring one of the

longest camera shots). Enrique is frustrated with the small efforts of the
group and wants to do something drastic. He goes off on his own
planning on assassinating the chief of police, however when he gets him
in his sights, he sees that the police chief is surrounded by his young
children, and Enrique cannot bring himself to pull the trigger. While he is
away, his fellow revolutionaries are printing flyers. They are infiltrated by
police officers who arrest them. One of the revolutionaries begins
throwing flyers out to the crowd below only to be shot by one of the
police officers. Later on, Enrique is leading a protest at the university.
More police are there to break up the crowd with fire hoses. Enrique is
shot after the demonstration becomes a riot. At the end, his body is
carried through the streets; he has become a martyr to his cause.
The final part shows Mariano, a typical farmer, who is rejects the requests
of revolutionary soldier to join the ongoing war. The soldier appeals to
Mariano's desire for a better life for his children, but Mariano only wants
to live in peace and insists the soldier leave. Immediately thereafter
though, the government's planes begin bombing the area
indiscriminately. Mariano's home is destroyed and his son is killed. He
then joins the rebels
Page 5 of 11
The New Cult Canon: I Am Cuba 12/01/2016, 17:39
in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, ultimately leading to a triumphal march
into Havana to proclaim the revolution.

I Am Cuba (Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964)

The supreme masterpiece of the poetic documentary form

Three recent views of Cuba: the repressive, fragmented, poverty-stricken
last gasp of modern Communism offered by the U.S. media; the
wonderland of repudiated gay and counter-revolutionary culture in
movies like Strawberry and Chocolate, a 1993 feature film set in preMariel 1979; and the glittering pleasures social and spiritual of the
reclaimed island shown by what is surely the supreme masterpiece of the
poetic documentary form, Mikhail Kalatozovs 1964 Russian-Cuban
coproduction I Am Cuba.
This unforgettable reconstruction of the life of the island, from the jazzy
rhythms of the decadent Batista era to the heroics of the Revolution and
its aftermath, recalls the work of Leni Riefenstahl and Eisenstein in its
transformation of agitprop into art. The Eisenstein connection is no
accident the Russian team that created I Am Cuba were attempting the
same kind of aesthetic treatment of history as Eisenstein, and they
worked with some of his collaborators. But the filmmakers of I Am Cuba
differed from their mentors in perhaps the most fundamental aspect
the visual. Whereas Eisenstein used cutting and dynamic composition in
films like Potemkin, Kalatozov and his visual collaborators use a moving
camera a handheld Eclair to bring their story to scintillating life.
The first draft of I Am Cuba was a scene-by-scene re-creation of the Cuban
revolution. Kalatozov and his screenwriter, the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko,
wisely scrapped this in favor of a more aesthetic approach. The finished
film divides roughly into five episodes that chronicle the islands recent
colonialist and revolutionary periods.
The first is a look at Batistas Cuba, with settings in nightclubs and palatial
hotels overrun by American businessmen and the submissive workers,

singers, and prostitutes they exploit. This sequence contains the films
most famous shot where the camera starts atop a high-rise, where a
group of musicians and bikini-clad women perform, then descends down
the side of the building to a crowded swimming pool and finally
without a cut underwater, where it follows the movements of the
swimmers.
According to the press notes, the filmmakers had to make a watertight
box out of sheets of DuPont plastic with three handles so the camera
could be passed between Urusevsky and Calzatti [cameramen] at crucial
moments. On the first take, the camera box refused to dive beneath the
water surface, and Calzatti had to adapt the box with a hollow steel tube
running through it so the air could escape the box, but no water would
enter the camera.
This sequence, which in its overwhelming power makes mincemeat of
most such bravura camerawork in films like Citizen Kane, is also notable
for its portrayal of the creepy, unattractive Americans who exercise their
manifest destiny in the crudest ways imaginable against the desperate
inhabitants of the sugar-cane rich island. In an alarming scene, a
beautiful young woman named Maria is shoved from one man to
another across a dance floor. The camera follows her unwilling
movements in radical jerks, perfectly visualizing the loss of control she
and by inference the island is experiencing under U.S. domination.
The visual pyrotechnics continue throughout the film. The second major
episode, about a peasant family whose meager living as sugar cane
cutters is brutally ended by a coopted native landowner and the United
Fruit Company, has an elaborate scene in which the grief-stricken father
burns down the cane fields. The filmmakers devised a closed-camera
video system that let them view this complicated, crane-shot sequence
while it was being filmed.
The unforgettable images of the old man cutting what appears to be

luminous sugar cane against a black sky point up another of I Am Cubas

breakthroughs the use of infrared film to obtain jaw-dropping levels of
black-and-white contrast. These shots, featuring ordinary people played
by amateur actors, emphasize the dazzling primacy of the land over those
who briefly inhabit it, and reflect the filmmakers idea that complex
characterization must be subjugated to the struggle by real people to
maintain the land against corrupt influences.
Later sequences detail with equal power the rise of the worker and
student movements, and the physical conflicts particularly the
disastrous invasion of the Moncada army barracks that culminated in
the overthrow of Batista and the destruction of U.S. interests in the
island.
The soundtrack of I Am Cuba features a female narrator who ties together
the episodes with Yevtushenkos poetry, which plays on Cubas split
identity: Dont avert your eyes. Look! I am Cuba. For you, I am the casino,
the bar, hotels and brothels. But the hands of these children and old
people are also me. The music in the film continues this motif; peasant
folk tunes and African rhythms compete with raucous early 60s rock
tunes, exotic jazz, and nightclub ballads (Amor Loca).
In spite of its extraordinary power, the film was denounced by Cuban
authorities as counterrevolutionary and in a fit of revolutionary
bitchiness informally dubbed I Am NOT Cuba! The kind of pure art
approach represented by the film has always been problematic to the
Marxist mentality, but I Am Cuba is truly revolutionary in every sense.

Incredible long-take cinematography from "I Am Cuba" (1964)

- a Soviet propaganda film utilizing pulleys that give the
appearance of modern drone footage.
Pretty fascinating to read how cinematographer Sergey Urusevsky
achieved this shot, given the technology that was available over 50 years
ago:
These shots were accomplished by the camera operator having the
camera attached to his vestlike an early, crude version of a Steadicam
and the camera operator also wearing a vest with hooks on the back. An
assembly line of technicians would hook and unhook the operator's vest
to various pulleys and cables that spanned floors and building roof tops.
(source: I Am Cuba Wikipedia page)
Sergei Urusevsky and I am Cuba's director, Mikail Kalatazov, also made a
subsequent movie called Letter Never Sent (or The Unsent Letter) which
has some pretty mind-blowing camera work, too. That one's complete on
youtube, I'd recommend it as well.
They should have filmed the process, it's almost a performance piece at
that point.
At first I thought it was something that could have easily been done with
a boom truck and then it started getting higher and higher and I started
thinking "hmm, maybe not" and then it went into the building and I
went "yeah, definitely not.".
Heh you can actually tell it's being yanked up now that you said they
used pulleys

I think this movie also has the shot of the camera entering and exiting
the pool. The same shot PTA took for the pool party scene in Boogie
Nights.

MOVIE REVIEW : 'I Am Cuba': Epic of Poetry and

Daring
Mikhail Kalatozov's 1964 "I Am Cuba" is a great poetic epic that blends
the stirring visual daring of Russia's cinema of revolution with an
intoxicating Latin sensuality.
It is a triumph of collaborative strategy, with Kalatozov and his dazzling
cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky in perfect rapport with each other and
with their writers, renowned poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and eminent
Cuban novelist Enrique Pineda Barnet. It is said that Kalatozov, best
known for "The Cranes Are
Flying" (1958), a World War II romance of uncommon passion and
candor (and a big art-house success in the United States), wanted to
make a "Potemkin" for Castro's revolution and for the people of Cuba,
and he certainly succeeded.
"I Am Cuba," composed of four episodes set in late 1956, when Castro
was raising an army in the Sierra Maestra, had apparently not been
shown outside the Soviet Union or Cuba until it was presented at the
Telluride Film Festival in 1992.
It is a major discovery, and the long delay in its U.S. release has resulted
in its impact compounding irony within irony. That's because the
revolution that was to wipe away the corruption of the Batista regime is
now, three decades later, mired in economic catastrophe and marked by
a bleak history regarding human rights.

The film inescapably confronts American audiences with our own sorry
role in Cuba's misery, past and present, in that it reminds us that if the
United States was to such a large extent responsible for Batista, it is also
responsible for Castro. The creative decision to go for a poetic narrative,
giving the film the shape of a shimmering fable, pays off in two ways: It
allows the film to transcend the level of propaganda, and in Urusevsky's
restless, probing camera, it also allows us to share the filmmakers' sense
of continual discovery. "I Am Cuba," which has a glorious, emotioncharged score by Carlos Farin~as, is a superb example of imaginative
planning yielding an effect of constant spontaneity.
*
Punctuated by stanzas of the poem that gives the film its title, it most
resembles in style, not surprisingly, Sergei Eisenstein's incomplete "Que
Viva Mexico" in its folkloric passages. In its immediacy and passion, it
brings to mind the volatile cinema of revolutionary Cuba itself and of
Allende's Chile as well as the films of the Russian masters. It is at its most
Soviet in spirit in its stirring but doctrinaire finish.
In the opening stanza of that poem, Columbus' fateful remark, "This is
the most beautiful land ever seen by human eyes," accompanies a
Fellini-like helicopter shot over the Cuban coast, capturing images of
poverty before settling on a Havana hotel rooftop, where a beauty contest
is in progress.
Soon we're swept up in a swirl of driving Afro-Cuban music and dance as
the least boorish of severalAmerican businessmen (noted French actor
Jean Bouise) spends the night with a beautiful, reluctant prostitute (Luz
Maria Collazo) only to awaken in a vast makeshift village of far greater
poverty than he had ever imagined.
Kalatozov next acquaints us with a worn peasant (Jose Gallardo), who, as
he looks out into a rainstorm, recalls how he lost everything when he was
duped into leasing his sugar cane land only to have it sold out from

under him to the United Fruit Co.

The camera then picks out a young man (Raul Garcia), part of a group of
students who throw Molotov cocktails at a drive-in screen showing a
newsreel celebrating U.S.-Cuba relations; this sequence, depicting the
ever-widening student-led anti-government demonstrations, culminates
with one of the most bravura tracking shots ever attempted.
Appropriately, "I Am Cuba" concludes in the ruggedly beautiful Sierra
Maestra with tremendous cumulative power as a peasant casts his lot
with Castro's guerrillas. In this post-Soviet era, however, the idealistic zeal
that fuels all of this fiery film takes on a cast that's truly tragic.
* Unrated. Times guidelines: The film has some street demonstration
violence, some strong language, complex style and themes; not for
preteens.

SOY CUBA (I AM CUBA)

DIRECTED BY MIKHAIL KALATOZOV
SOY CUBA (I Am Cuba)
Chale Nafus
Director of Programming, Austin Film Society
One of the most kinetically exhilarating films in the history of cinema was
almost lost forever. Premiering in 1964 in Cuba and the Soviet Union,
SOY CUBA was removed from distribution after only one week in both
countries, both with state-run film industries. I AM CUBA was not shown
in the US until a festival screening at Telluride in 1992, only made
possible by the knowledge and perseverance of Pacific Film Archives
Edith Kramer, who tracked down a print of the virtually unknown film.
Even without English subtitles, the Russian- Spanish language film and
its jaw-dropping cinematography became the talk of the festival. Newly
formed Milestone Films, created by the husband and wife team of Amy
Heller and Dennis Doros, secured an original camera negative of SOY
CUBA from Russias Mosfilm and struck 35mm prints with English
subtitles. Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola offered to present
the film, a credit which would heighten awareness of the unknown
treasure. Sold-out screenings at New York Citys Film Forum in 1995 led
to distribution of SOY CUBA across the US, generally accompanied by
rave reviews and incredulity that this film was made in 1964 and only
seen 30 years later. Aspiring and even veteran cinematographers were
especially amazed by the acrobatics of the camera in a pre-Steadicam era.
How on earth did this joint Soviet-Cuban film production come to be?
One of Fidel Castros first decrees after taking the reins of the Cuban

government in January 1959 was the creation of the official government

film office, ICAIC. Just like Lenin in the Soviet Union in the 1920s, Fidel
knew that the best way to spread awareness of the ideals and missions of
his Revolution was through motion pictures. Many farmers in the Cuban
hinterlands were virtually illiterate and television was still out of the
question, so the cinema would be the best means of educating people to
the dramatic changes brought by revolution. But, unlike Mexico and
Argentina, Cuba had a relatively insignificant film industry, so a lot would
have to be learned and fast. Under Premier Khrushchev, the USSR was
offering film production assistance for any country friendly to the ideals
of Communism. Cuba must have been at the top of the list.
Soviet Georgian filmmaker Mikhail Kalatozov (1903-1973) was very
interested in the changes in Cuba. He had enjoyed international success
with his World War II romance THE CRANES ARE FLYING (1957), made
during the Khrushchev Thaw, the post-Stalinist period of greater
openness in Soviet society and the repudiation of Stalins repressive
regime. The director felt that going to Cuba to make a film about
revolution was his opportunity to equal the success of Sergei Eisensteins
BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN (1925) and OCTOBER (TEN DAYS THAT SHOOK THE
WORLD, 1928), films which had also shaken the world and proven that a
new style of filmmaking had arrived on the worlds cinema screens.
Besides an agenda of creating a new film language to express his
political beliefs and personal vision, he wanted to celebrate and
promote the Cuban revolution. And there was already much to celebrate
the beginning of a massive drive toward education with brigades of
young people going into the remote areas of the island to teach literacy,
as well as providing medical care and housing for everyone. Nothing like
this revolution had ever happened in Cuba, for centuries a Spanish
colony and then an economic colony of the US. Cuba was quickly
becoming the model for social change in Latin America and Kalatozov

wanted to be the one to show the world what Cuba had suffered and why
a revolution was necessary and inevitable.
But since Kalatozov and his crew were outsiders, they must first do some
research. The director took his trusty director of photography Sergei
Urusevsky, who had filmed Kalatozovs THE CRANES ARE FLYING and
LETTER NEVER SENT (1960), to Cuba in 1961. Joining them were Belka
Fridman Urusevskys wife and eventual casting director for the film
and Alexander Calzatti, a camera operator whose technical skills would
liberate the camera to do hitherto unseen maneuvers. Calzatti later
reminisced: When we got there, we didnt know much about the history,
about the culture, nor about the language spoken in Cuba. The Cuban
revolution seemed more human than we had imagined. He learned that
it had shed less blood than other revolutions. Certainly far less than the
Russian Revolution which turned into a bloody civil war in its first few
years. The Soviet filmmaking team was not alone in its admiration for the
early years of the Castro revolution. Writers and intellectuals of the world
flocked to Cuba to see this revolutionary greenhouse. Everybody was
moving towards hope for a New World. Many of us in the US were
equally affected with optimism for radical change in the Old Order. The
Cuban Revolution undeniably played a great role in the political
demonstrations of the 1960s and early 70s. The people of Cuba were
involved in a great social experiment of conquering underdevelopment
through State-planning. We were nave in not understanding the full
ramifications of such centralized control. But no one was thinking about
that in the early stages of euphoria and optimism.
Another member of Kalatozovs team was the world-renowned Soviet
poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko (1933 - ), who was already familiar with Cuba,
after working there for awhile as a correspondent for the official Soviet
newspaperPravda. It also helped that he had become a friend of Fidel.

Even though he had no experience in screenwriting, Yevtushenko

became Kalatozovs first choice to create a script. Soon, they enlisted the
aid of Cuban writer Enrique Pineda Barnet (1933 - ).
Before writing a word, this team of writers joined Kalatozov and his
camera crew in tours around Havana and the countryside. They visited the
scenes of the battles in Oriente Province, where the Revolution
successfully began in January 1957. Pineda Barnet became their tour
guide into Cuban folklore and regional customs. They took photos and
even shot some film footage to record what they were seeing and
learning. Barnet later commented that his guests seemed most
interested in the moral fallout of Cubas colonial past. To that end, they
also visited the few Havana night clubs still managing to hang on.
Kalatozov tape-recorded interviews with many who had participated in
the rebellion in Oriente Province and in the student demonstrations and
assaults. Likewise they watched documentaries, which were becoming
the first manifestations of the new Cuban film industry. Ironically, they
often crossed paths with Fidel who also visited the ICAIC screening
rooms. But instead of documentaries idealizing his revolution, the Cuban
leader more often watched classic Hollywood movies. Che Guevara and
Ral Castro also told their stories to Kalatozov. Meticulous research
provided lots of information and ideas for scenes in the future film.
As pleasant as it may be, research has to finally end. Back in Havana
Kalatozov, Urusevsky, Yevtushenko, and Pineda Barnet began regular
meetings to discuss subjects, ideas, characters, situations. Once
agreement about a particular scene or sequence was achieved, the two
screenwriters would go their

separate ways to write their own version Yevtushenko in his 17th floor
room at the Havana-Libre Hotel [formerly Havana Hilton] and Pineda
Barnet in his home near the waterfront. Meanwhile Kalatozov and
Urusevsky wandered around Havana, trying out camera filters and
natural lighting in a variety of locations, and doubtlessly still visiting
those nightclubs.
What was clear to the two writers was that Kalatozov did not want a
traditional 3-5 act script, but instead an epic cinematic poem about the
revolution. The main heroine would be the revolution the hero would
be the people. No individual, even Fidel or Che, would be elevated to
heroic stature, but that was already traditional Marxist film propaganda
masses, not individuals, change history. The director also wanted to
present the Revolution as an historic inevitability, brought about by
oppressive forces such as decadent American tourists, arrogant American
sailors, and brutal American corporations such as United Fruit Company
(the Octopus). The Cubans who sided with the dictator Batista would be
represented by corrupt police officials and avaricious landowners.
Once Yevtushenko and Pineda Barnet had fleshed out the first portion of
the film (a prologue and the Havana nightclub scenes), they submitted it
to the board of ICAIC, along with synopses of the four other proposed
sections involving sugar cane harvesting, student rebellion, Fidels attack
on Moncada Barracks in 1953, and the final success of guerrilla warfare.
The ICAIC board included filmmaker Toms Gutirrez Alea, who would
soon find his own success directing MEMORIES OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT
(1968). After listening to the boards observations and suggestions, the
three Soviet members of the team returned to Moscow. After being
joined there by Pineda Barnet, they completed the script.

The film would be divided into four stories. The one about Castros
failed first revolution in 1953 was scrapped. Wisely so, for that failure,
though heroic, would have down-shifted the movement toward the
successful rebellion. The four sections would be:
1) a young woman lured into prostitution during the Batista regime,
when Havana was world-renowned as the Latin Las Vegas
2) the struggle of an aging tenant farmer trying to maintain dignity and
feed his family, while suffering the arrogance and power of landlords
3) the Havana-based university student fight against the dictatorship,
torn between heroic but futile efforts of individuals and an organized
mass movement
4) the successful rebellion in the mountains of Eastern Cuba, exemplified
by a non-combatant peasant who loses one of his children during a
Batista bombardment and takes up a gun After May 1962 Kalatozov
returned to Cuba to assemble a cast with the help of Belka Fridman.
Together they looked for people whose faces Kalatozov liked for their
cinematic qualities: I think that cinema doesnt really require
professional actors, because what counts more than anything is the
human presence. Naturally there were some semi-professional actors
with experience on stage. Some of these were also recruits from Pineda
Barnets acting classes.
All this pre-production activity was suddenly interrupted in October 1962
with the Soviet-US confrontation over the unexpected placement of
missiles (with nuclear warhead capabilities) in Cuba. The Cold War was
distressingly on the verge of heating up all the way to the unthinkable
nuclear war. The infamous Bay of Pigs (Playa Girn) invasion of Cuba had
failed a few months before, and an understandably angry and
legitimately paranoid Castro needed to make a show of power. Already

forging an economic and military alliance with the Soviet Union, he had
welcomed Soviet missiles onto the island, all pointed at locations within
the US. After a tense 13 days, cooler heads prevailed and JFK and Soviet
premier Khrushchev agreed to back down. Missiles and bombers were
removed from Cuba, and the US secretly removed its own missiles from
Italy and Turkey. More importantly to Castro, the US agreed not to invade
Cuba.
After four more months of preparation, the production of SOY CUBA got
underway on 26 February 1963. No one could have guessed that it would
be another 14 months before filming ended.
The crewmember who doubtlessly would have had the most headaches
would have to be Alexander Calzatti, who worked as camera operator
under the direction of DP Urusevsky, described by many as dictatorial. It
was Calzatti who would solve the technical demands for the amazing
mobile shots proposed by the director and DP. He had to translate his
bosses dreams Wouldnt it be great if we could.... into how to
suspend the camera from wires in dangerous places in order to follow the
actions out windows and along streets. An astounding 97% of the film
was shot with a handheld camera, generally by Calzatti. There were no
Steadicams yet. Martin Scorsese would later say that a Steadicam would
not have achieved the same level of tension as seen in SOY CUBA. The
Steadicam glides smoothly, while Calzattis handheld camera places us
right in the action and betrays our nervousness through the subliminal,
minute shaking at the edges of the frames. Fortunately for Calzatti he was
holding the relatively light-weight clair camera, beloved of the French
New Wave directors, and capable of holding a 5-minute magazine of
35mm film, critical for the continuous, long takes sought by the director.

From the very opening shot along the coastline, something about the
palm trees looks other-worldly. Using infrared film, acquired from East
German film labs usually reserved for spy work Urusevsky and Calzatti
turned the foliage into a brilliant silver-white. Filters and wide-angle
lenses which distorted perspective in various shots also added to the
dreamlike (even nightmarish) quality in the look of the film.
For the crane shot of the farmer Pedro burning his cane field and hut, the
crew devised a video system which allowed them to watch on a TV
monitor while shooting film. This, a full 20 years before such a system
came into use in Hollywood, should have revolutionized world
filmmaking techniques, but few people would hear about it. A special
underwater container for the camera had to be devised to facilitate the
swimming pool scene.
Once he had all the footage in the can, Kalatozov returned to the Soviet
Union to begin the huge undertaking of editing the film with Nina
Glagoleva.
To celebrate the opening of the Cuban Revolution (the failed first
attempt), SOY CUBA premiered in Santiago de Cuba on 26 July 1964. A
Russian premiere took place at the same time. The 140-minute film
closed after only one week not because of poor box office (a capitalist
concept), but because neither the Soviet nor the Cuban government liked
it. The shelving in the Soviet Union is more understandable Khrushchev
was on his way out of power, soon to be replaced by a very repressive
Breshnev. Certainly images of a people rising up against an oppressive
government would be dangerous for Soviet people to see, no matter
what the nominal politics of the day. They were also concerned that the
nightlife scenes in the early part of the film would look too beguiling to
Soviet audiences who had never seen any such lifestyle and might very

well envy it. Our present-day knowledge of post-Soviet Russian oligarchs

and gangsters partying should lend weight to that 1964 paranoia.
More confusing is the repudiation of SOY CUBA in Cuba. One Cuban
crewmember later said: Many Cubans didnt feel that the film reflected
national characteristics. It is the Cuban reality seen through a Slavic
prism. Fidel, who was planning many great projects for his country while
also instituting repressive measures to guard the Revolution against
enemies, both internal and external, perhaps felt that SOY CUBA might
suggest reopening the Revolution.
I havent found any discussion of the film in interviews with Castro. Its
unfortunate that for whatever reason, he caused it to disappear. It is such
a stirring film, one which shows the inequalities of the Batista years in
both city and countryside, that it certainly cant be branded reactionary.
And it is a sterling example of pure cinema, told primarily through the
camera with little reliance on the spoken word.
Kalatozov died in 1973, followed one year later by Urusevsky, who
reportedly spent his final years sorely distraught over the failure of SOY
CUBA. Fidel is still alive.