I Am Cuba

I AM CUBA   ***1/2

Mikhail Kalatozov

1964

IDEA:  Four long vignettes illustrate a picture of pre-Revolutionary Cuba.

BLURB:  I Am Cuba is a curious object; a maximalist piece of pro-Castro Soviet propaganda made in partnership between the USSR and Cuba and roundly rejected by the publics of both upon its release, the film is simultaneously preposterous and exhilarating. Preposterous because its sociopolitical rhetoric - crude and unsubtle in a kind of Grand Guignol way – rarely feels grounded in the actual lived experiences of the Cuban people for whom it breathlessly advocates. As a predominantly Soviet production, the film rests on the often touristic and exoticizing gaze of Kalatozov. In particular, he shows little interest in the country’s darker-skinned inhabitants, who mostly appear as signifiers of poverty or sensational Otherness. The characters that emerge as protagonists – a farmer, a student revolutionary, a rural family man –  are generic archetypes that could easily be transposed from any of the 1920s Soviet films from which I Am Cuba derives its spirit, although Kalatozov’s narrative and visual privileging of these figures pointedly departs from the emphasis on a non-individuated collective in something like Eisenstein’s Strike. While the social messaging is at once watery and ham-handed, I Am Cuba nevertheless endures for a reason: it’s a truly astonishing feat of formal ingenuity and immersive sensory spectacle. The film is a swollen sizzle reel of kinetic cinematographic technique, from its raucously expressionistic camera movements to, most famously, the elaborate sequence shots that crane, dive, and soar through space with acrobatic agility. Unshackled from the strictures of habitual human subjectivity, Sergey Urusevsky’s camera acts as its own enchanted, free-floating consciousness. It may not assert the identity of Cuba itself, as the title implies, but it does declare itself as pure cinema. 

Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood

APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD   ***

Richard Linklater

2022

IDEA:  A young boy in Houston, Texas circa 1968-69 dreams of himself being recruited by NASA to fly to the moon.

BLURB:  For much of its runtime, Apollo 10 ½: A Space Age Childhood tends to play like your garden-variety Baby Boomer nostalgia trip. Linklater wastes precious little time getting to (and through) the requisite hits of late-60s American culture, with major sociopolitical events and pop-cultural artifacts alike condensed into rapid-cut montages. Attended by the ubiquitous narration of Jack Black as the adult version of our prepubescent protagonist, these parts of the film evoke the digestible, somewhat didactic historical summarizing of The Wonder Years, including that show’s distinctly white, middle-class perspective. And yet, without completely dispelling the sense of banality, Linklater makes Apollo 10 ½ into a uniquely affecting, often startlingly tactile memory piece, overflowing with a reverence for the physical details and sensations of a time and place long gone. While his cultural reference points are contemporaneous television shows, movies, songs, and sites - all conjured with the awestruck thrill of rediscovery - other elements resurrect more timeless childhood pleasures, such as the infantile contentedness of being carried to bed after falling asleep in the backseat of the car. As in Linklater’s Boyhood, these moments accumulate into a bittersweet portrait of youth as a fleeting dream, an idealized mirage that never quite existed the way it does in memory. The rotoscoped animation enhances the quality of vague unreality, real life literally embellished in retrospect. Linklater may view the past with a certain measure of melancholy, but he doesn’t fall prey to reactionary eulogizing. His emphasis on the promise of the once-thriving American space program reveals his thesis: that the seemingly lost excitement of the past is merely dormant, waiting to be reignited in new forms.

Slacker

SLACKER   ***1/2

Richard Linklater

1991

IDEA:  In Austin, Texas near the UT campus, a succession of variously eccentric individuals discuss politics, philosophy, history, popular culture, relationships, and much more.

BLURB:  The characters of Slacker are trapped in discourse. Just as the camera roves digressively from place to place, failing to sustain narrative momentum, the assortment of bored, garrulous misfits who populate those places amble through conversations and speeches before hitting rhetorical dead-ends. A large portion of them simply pontificate to the nearest set of ears, hardly expecting a response; their thoughts and ideas, although often expressed with enthusiasm and eloquence, are discharged into space with nowhere in particular to go. For Linklater, this is the burden of a certain breed of intellect, the putatively indolent but really over-qualified and restless who struggle to find productive outlets for their passions and knowledges within the labor economies of late capitalism. The young adults of Slacker seem to have internalized the deflated countercultural dreams of their Boomer parents; the Boomers, too, run on the fumes of hoary government conspiracies and unrealized revolutions, uniting Linklater’s various layabouts in a trans-generational, ideologically Leftist condition of disillusionment and anomie. At the same time, Slacker palpably marks a series of inflection points for its specific era, at once capturing a fading way of bohemian living in Austin, Texas; embodying, by example, the efflorescing American independent film scene; and auguring the forthcoming explosion of the Internet, seen most presciently in the film’s proto-hyperlink-cinema structure. For all of Slacker’s foreboding - and for all the past and present historical traumas that lurk around its margins - Linklater ends the film on an invigorating note of optimism in the form of a kinetic 8mm film shot by a group of amateur media-makers. As the camera is tossed over a cliff, the image dissolving into an abstract whirl of light and color, the discursive inertia of Slacker is supplanted by an ecstatic release into an unwritten future of possibility.