I Am Cuba (1964)

 Mikhail Kalatozov's "I Am Cuba"

Because the 1959 Cuban Revolution overthrew the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, relations between Cuba and the U.S. were at an all-time low. The Soviet Union took this opportunity to build a rapport with the state. One of the ways they did this was through a collaboration through the arts, so that they may spread Communist propaganda. Mikhail Kalatozov, the revolutionary Soviet filmmaker responsible for 1957's "The Cranes are Flying," was tasked with going to Cuba and making a film about the Cuban revolution.

Kalatozov was given considerable freedom to make his film, even receiving as much assistance as he wanted from both governments. He was inspired by Sergei Eisenstein's unfinished "Que viva Mexico" project, using it as a springboard for this creative venture. The resulting film, 1964's "I Am Cuba," was met with considerable coldness from both the Cubans and Soviets. The Cubans were turned off by a more stereotypical view of Cubans, while the Soviets considered it not sufficiently revolutionary. 

Because these reactions were so dismissive, and because the relations between the U.S. and Cuba were so tenuous, the film fell into obscurity. It wasn't until the collapse of the USSR in the early 1990s that the film came back into the light. After a screening of the film at the 1993 San Francisco International Film Festival, directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola caught wind of the film and were so impressed by its technical innovations, they championed a full restoration. 

What caught the attention of both filmmakers was how utterly visionary Kalatozov's vision is, along with his uncompromising visual prowess. One of the most notable aspects of the film is how completely untethered the camera is, allowing to freely roam in the three dimensional space around the characters. As the action takes place, the camera (presumably handheld) seems to float around its subjects, even moving from location to location filming various subjects in a vast landscape of terrain. 

The sheer creativeness and the lack of limitation with the camera usage will make any aspiring filmmaker's mouth agape. Kalatozov would often use infrared film to exaggerate contrast in the black and white imagery, making the trees and sugar cane appear almost white against the darkly sunny skies. He used extreme wide-angle shots with the camera passing very closely to its subjects. He coated a watertight camera's lens with a special submarine periscope cleaner, allowing the camera to be completely submerged and lifted out of the water without any drops on the lens or film. 

There is one singular shot/scene that every film scholar and filmmaker gush over, though. It is the funeral scene: as the streets are crowded with onlookers observing a covered body being carried on a stretcher, the camera suddenly stops and moves upwards at least four stories until it is almost above the building, still watching the body being carried. Without stopping, it then tracks sideways and enters through a window, through a cigar factory, then goes straight towards a rear window as the cigar workers watch the procession. The camera finally passes through the window and appears to float along over the middle of the street between the buildings. These shot were accomplished with a cable device, but in execution, the camera almost seems like it is magically and perhaps omnisciently floating, free from any constraints to filmmaking practices or even physics itself. 

As far as the thematic muses of the story, despite the 'propagandic' nature of the film, it still feels patriotically fervent in its attempt to depict a group of people weighed down by colonialist oppression and capitalist corruption. Its people are in a constant struggle to deal with the American tourists using their landscapes as vacation spots and their people as servants. They deal with classist issues like their land being taken away from them by corporate entities. Their own government (which depicts the pre-Revolutionary dictatorship) violently and fatally suppress any retaliation. 

"I Am Cuba" is not simply a Communist propaganda film that should be disregarded. It is a work of art that destroys any notions about creative restraints in filmmaking. It speaks to the disenfranchised, the oppressed, and the belittled people of a beautiful nation. More than anything else, it sweeps its viewers away with the magic of cinema in a way that only film can.