04 - I Am Cuba
The immaculately shot, gonzo Soviet fever dream of Cuban revolution.
There is always a strange alchemy at play when a director and team travel to a foreign country and construct a film with the support and cooperation of a local government. There is Dersu Uzala, when Japanese director Akira Kurosawa made a film in Soviet Siberia. Or when West German, Wim Wenders shot in the American West in Paris, Texas, or French director Jean-Pierre Melville in the American South for The Magnet of Doom. We will be tempted to exclude the various globe trotting blockbusters from this list, for these films tend to bring Hollywood with them more than they observe their new surroundings, but there is something we can learn even from these films. Common to all these, the director cannot help but bring their own culture, their own unique ways of seeing the world along with them just as much as they observe a new one. These films are rife for opportunities for offense and stereotyping, but if we can look past the ways in which a stranger in a strange land might fail in subtlety, we can learn a something about both cultures. One of the strangest clashings of worlds in this little genre must be the film I am Cuba, or Soy Cuba.
I am Cuba was a Soviet film made with the cooperation and the personal approval of Fidel Castro and his regime. It was captured in the tempestuous year of 1960. As such, there is no escaping its origins as a propaganda film, aspiring to the so called “Social Realist” style, it is at times, the motion picture equivalent in nuance and complexity to the heroic statues in North Korea or Communist China of workers in revolution — with rifles and hammers in sickles raised in perpetual rebellion.
But if we stopped here in our characterization of this film we would be missing a great deal, for there are more voices involved, that of director Mikhail Kalatozov, his cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, and their entire creative team. Those less acquainted with Soviet Cinema may think only of montage theory and early camera experiments. They would be then unaware of the constant clash between artist and the state, director and censor, that so characterized the push and pull mechanism of art within the Soviet Union. The filmmakers, often drawing on the Russian tradition of literature, painting, and poetry, at odds with the cold, politicizing censor, who looms over the fate of every film. We can imagine the nightmare scenario of facing the censors as if uneducated film critics in Hollywood had the power of studio executives in deciding the fate of a film. In spite of the needs to satisfy propaganda requirements, many a director in this system worked hard to capture true humanity, sometimes with unforgettable results.
Kalatozov and Urusevsky in this film achieve unparalleled cinematic results that are literally had me dropping my jaw. Immense, wide lens handheld camera moves through, around, and above crowds of people, surging forward and backward in chaos. It is unimaginable to think of this achieved on 35mm with no digital extensions, stabilizers, footage playback, or modern conveniences. The camera shakes and moves with intentionality. It goes wherever it wants, almost a character, through slums, over the the sides of buildings, over streets, into close up, into proscenium wide shots, all with total freedom and boundless energy. That Kalatosov, who was at the time sixty-one, could preside comfortably over so daring a camera, with such youthful fearlessness should encourage all of us.
We should also take notice of that lost art, so synonymous with direction of yore, the movement of crowds. I hope a film like this could inspire younger filmmakers as to the possibilities of working with extras. We modern filmmakers so often can think of nothing to do with extras but have them sit out of focus in the background, walk aimlessly back and forth, or have them shoved out of the way on overloud dance floors.
This makes the film a fascinating case study. It is a picture in life in Cuba, however distorted and constructed, at a vital turning point in its history, yet also filtered through personal eye of Kalatozov and his team. We can imagine why such a collaboration would be of interest to both parties. For Cuba, this might have represented a chance to lean on the cinematic talents of the Soviet system when it was in its most fruitful era of artistry; to import a suitably socialist aesthetic in the construction of a mythical identity for a modern Cuba. For the Soviets, it was a chance to pontificate to the world on the superiority of their worldview and to shepherd a young ally into existence.
The first casualty in this exercise was of course, Americans, who are painted here as nothing but the sex-tourist enablers and sponsors of all that is corrupt, decadent, and destructive in pre-revolutionary Cuban life. We, looking back now, can probably see some element truth there, but we can only laugh and cringe as the “Americans,” comically dubbed, quote the Declaration of Independence between trying and failing to seduce prostitutes at the club. It is a portrayal of Americans by someone who has clearly never met one before, the dubbing sounds like someone stumbling through reading phonetic English in Cyrillic text. Hollywood is known for its ham-fisted portrayals of cultures the world over. It is nice to know that the favor can be equally returned.
The scenes with “Americans” all fall completely flat and stand in such contrast to the rest of the film which has a simultaneous poetic and almost documentarian reality to it, especially when compared to Western films of the same era. I suppose this too is a matter of perspective, Cubans for instance, may disagree on the semblance to reality.
The nationalist fervor and optimism for the future of Cuba in this film will strike a modern audience far differently than it was originally intended. Some of the later scenes of students in revolution can strike us as treacly. The violence of students in revolt, as I hope we have learned from the example of the Red Guards — and so many other revolutions of the last century — should strike us as a great danger, not a cause for optimism.
Regardless of its revolutionary fervor, the resulting film ended up satisfying to no one. Not to the Castro regime, who felt the film to be overly patronizing, insufficiently Cuban, and an overlong slog without a clear story. Nor to the censors in Soviet Russia, who found the film insufficiently critical of capitalism, a claim that is hard to imagine, if you see the film. They leveled the amusing charge of excessive “naturalism” against it, which I suppose is to say that a film spends too much time groveling in the dirt and despair of reality and not enough time idealizing the socialist vision of the future. As such, in both Cuba and the Soviet Union, the film was barely screened and quickly forgotten. I can only hope that our own flirtations with censorship will one day seem as quaint and petty.
If only Kalatozov and his team could have looked at each other, shrugged and said “censors gonna cense,” and moved on, knowing that they had achieved an immensely powerful work that, regardless of its flaws would influence generations of filmmakers. But they had no knowledge that in the 90s, with the help of those veritable patron saints of cinema, that are Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, the film would be seen in the West for the first time, and ironically, meet a highly receptive and sympathetic audience in Western filmmakers, who were completely floored by the gonzo bravery and assurance of Kalatosov and Urusevsky’s eye.
Their collaboration over three films, The Cranes are Flying, Letters Never Sent, and I am Cuba certainly must be one of the most fruitful director-cinematographer collaborations of all time. All three are must-sees for filmmakers and are suitable for any list of greatest cinematography of all time, and indeed their influence can be clearly seen in world cinema. In the West, perhaps most of all in Emmanuel Lubezki, the much emulated, handheld, wide lensing, long taking, cinematographer of Tree of Life, Children of Men, The Revenant, Birdman, Gravity and many other of the most lauded cinematic works of the last two decades. Yet one can identify in much of this style clear origins in these films, most particularly I am Cuba. This should not take anything away Lubezki’s work. Artists do not exist in a vacuum and there is no need to stigmatize inspiration from forebearers when this is properly integrated into a concept. When we understand artists not as radical individuals but as participants in an artistic tradition this becomes the most natural thing. On that theme we should substitute the popular and shameless word for this process, “stealing,” with the much more neutral, “influence,” and save the former for instances where there is something more akin to plagiarism going on. However, I suppose that a book titled “Get influenced by great artists who came before you” wouldn’t sell as nicely as “Steal like an Artist.” The subtlety of this distinction is not always a black and white matter and is perhaps a topic worth revisiting at another time.
Surprisingly, I find myself actually sympathizing with the censors and with Castro in their complaints about this film. Running at roughly two hours and twenty minutes, it really is an overlong film, one feels the concept being strained by the run time. This is in spite of Kalatozov cutting whole sequences from the released version. Almost every sequence, despite having a good deal of thematic potency, and powerful imagery, feels drawn out and overstays its welcome. One has a sense that they fell in love with the pure visceral power of image making at the expense of moving the plot forward, and when the edit arrived, each and every image was too precious to cut or trim. I can imagine that they might have met a completely different response had Kalatozov been willing to indiscriminately trim forty additional minutes from this film. Perhaps the knife of a good editor could have done this with minimal negative effect to his message or purpose. There is another lesson here. The censors, being political agents, see the films flaws in a political light, which to my eyes are mere ultimately technical problems of execution that bear no relation to ideology (in this context). However biased a film is, we cannot avoid bringing our own baggage with us and projecting our ideas onto that thing we are witnessing. Even if our own purpose is accuse a film of bias, we cannot escape our own.
Right, wrong, or indifferent, I am Cuba is a film that aims at both an earthy naturalism and a uniquely Soviet version of Poetic Realism. Yet this is impossible for it to achieve, for it is not natural assembly, but a supreme construction. It is impossible to escape the authorship of a film like this, that of Kalatozov and cinematographer, Sergei Urusevsky. Nor should it.
Where can I watch it?
I am Cuba can be seen on Soviet Movies Online, sister site to Eastern Europe Movies, which we previously mentioned, and all the same things apply here.
There is also a documentary about the film’s production and the retrospective of some of the surviving cast and crew, but I have not been able to find it anywhere digitally.
Milestone Films has already years ago announced its 4k restoration of the film, but it hasn’t arrived anywhere yet on Blu-Ray or streaming that I have been able to find. They released a nice press kit about the film which has some great behind the scenes stories for those interested.