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.