Soy Cuba
Place on List:
IV. Special Area: Literary
Social Criticism
3. Primary Texts: Film
Mikhail
Kalatozov. Soy
Cuba.
Supporting References:
- Scott Tobias "The New Cult Canon: I Am Cuba” A.V. Club. April 30, 2008
Document
URL
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“I Am Cuba is a masterpiece
from the USSR, co-produced with Cuba in a grand style with a large
Communist Party budget by two of the greatest cinema artists from the
Soviet Union, director Mikhail Kalatozov and cameraman Sergei
Urusevsky. It was the success of Kalatozov and Urusevsky's 1957
classic, Cranes Are Flying (which won the Palme d'Or at Cannes
in 1958), that landed them the film and a prolonged stay on the
island that fascinated so many Soviets in the early 1960s.
“Set in pre-Castro days, I Am Cuba
presents four separate stories of poor and downtrodden victims of
capitalist and imperialist exploitation who are brought, individually
and personally, to revolution. In episode number one, a beautiful
Cuban girl, dressed in white, meets with her fiancé (a handsome
fruit dealer and a political activist) in front of a church, as he
speaks of their upcoming wedding. She subsequently goes off to her
night job—into the dark and decadent space of an exclusive jazz
club catering to tourists, where she works as a prostitute. Her
customer insists on spending the night in her home, where her fiancé
happens upon the morning aftermath of this transaction. In episode
number two, an old sugar cane farmer, a widower, loses his farm to
local barons and the United Fruit Company, and torches all of his
fields. Episode three features a young student revolutionary who
rescues a local girl from a stalking group of inebriated, American
sailors looking for prey and is later killed in a
demonstration—proud, resisting martyr to an evil regime. Episode
four moves to the Sierra Maestra mountains, where a peasant refuses
to join the liberation forces until his hut and his family are hit by
an aerial bombing attack by the Batista regime. While some Americans
may object to the stereotypical depiction of the United States and
U.S. citizens in the film, it should be noted that the film was
labeled "anti-revolutionary" in Cuba and accused of
"idealizing the Yankees" in Russia. Resisting a single
reading, I Am Cuba is a moving testament to the Cold War and
to some of the most dramatic moments of that war—the stand-off
between the United States and the Soviet Union in relation to Cuba.
“It is not the story line of the film
that has caught the attention of cinema audiences world-wide,
however, but its dramatic, passionate, and impulsive cinematic style.
Accused of "formalism" or "art for art's sake,"
and said to lack drama and personal interest, I Am Cuba
received stern criticism in official Soviet publications and was a
boxoffice failure in Russia in the 1960s. It was, however, the daring
cinematic style and technical sophistication of the film that was
responsible for its second birth in the 1980s in the West, where it
has been hailed as "the greatest Soviet film since the 1920s"
by Steven P. Hill, and "a supreme masterpiece of the poetic
documentary form" by Gary Morris. Fascinating film-makers and
professionals with its unbelievable angles and shots, I Am Cuba
uses a bold, reckless, hand-held camera that rises and falls, tips
and sways with a Latin beat to look at the world through a
wide-angle, 9.8 mm lens, flattening and distorting many of the film's
images. The infrared film stock chosen by the director further
heightens the emotion of the film, bringing black and white into
stark contrast. Penetrating into the life of the island, into the
rhythm of a culture for sale, pursuing and following, the film
presents the spectator with elaborate crane shots and extreme long
takes "that make Welles' Touch of Evil seem mild,"
according to one critic. The unusual tilts and unexpected camera
angles recall early Soviet film, especially propaganda films, or
agit-prop, but depart from traditional uses of those angles, hence
undermining simple readings and challenging viewer expectations.
“While much credit for the unusual
camera work has been given to cameraman Urusevsky, many elements of
the film style must be attributed to Kalatozov, who began his cinema
career as a cameraman at the Georgian Film Studio in Tbilisi (Tiflis)
in the 1920s. All of Kalatozov's films are marked by his signature
style—striking, unexpected camera angles, the dramatic use of light
and shade, a freewheeling hand-held camera, perpetual motion shots,
swish pans, and 360 degree horizontal pans. The dramatic sequence so
often cited in descriptions of I Am Cuba—where the camera
descends, slowly, from a bikini fashion show atop a Havana high-rise
hotel, to the swimming pool at the base of the building, and dives
under water, to gaze upon more girls in bikinis swimming with
Urusevsky (who holds the camera?)—was a modernized, technically
improved version of the trip up the side of an ancient tower and a
rushing descent (like a rock, hurled at an invader), in Svanetia,
high in the Caucasus Mountains, from Kalatozov's film of 1930, Salt
for Svanetia. The script for I Am Cuba was written by
Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, with Cuban poet Enrique Pineda
Barnet, and is limited to the voice of Cuba herself, a first person
narration intoning the sad fate of Cuba, invaded, exploited, raped,
pillaged, and sold to the highest bidder. Some of the most
unforgettable sequences in the film include the arrival in Cuba, by
air and by water; the descent of the camera from the sky-scraper
fashion show (mentioned above); the fire in the sugar cane field; and
the escape of the American tourist from the neighborhood where he
took his pleasure from a local girl.”
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