Movies - I Am Cuba

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	Movies - I Am Cuba

I am Cuba (Spanish: Soy Cuba; Russian: Я Куба, Ya Kuba) is a Cuban/Soviet film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov.The movie was not received well by either the Russian or Cuban public and was almost completely forgotten until it was re-discovered by filmmakers in the United States 30 years later. The movie's acrobatic tracking shots and rather poetic plot prompted Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese to begin a small campaign to restore the movie to the screens during the early 1990s.

History

Shortly after the 1959 Cuban revolution overthrew the pro-US dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the socialist Castro government, isolated by the United States after the latter broke diplomatic and trade relations in 1961, turned to the USSR for film partnerships. The Soviet government, interested in promoting international socialism, agreed to finance a film about the Cuban revolution.

The director was given considerable freedom to complete the work, and was given much help from both the Soviet and Cuban governments. They made use of innovative filming techniques; including coating a watertight camera's lens with a special submarine periscope cleaner, so the camera could be submerged and lifted out of the water without any drops on the lens or film. At one point, more than a thousand Cuban soldiers were moved to a remote location to shoot one scene — this despite the then-ongoing Cuban missile crisis.

Even though it had such great support, the movie was given a cold reaction by audiences. In Havana it was criticized for showing a rather stereotyped view of Cubans, while in Moscow it was considered naïve and was not revolutionary enough and was even criticised for being too sympathetic to the lives of the bourgeois pre-Fidel classes. Also, upon its original release, the movie never reached Western countries largely due to it being a Communist production.

When the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s "Ya kuba" was virtually unknown. In 1992 Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the guest co-director of the Telluride Film Festival, screened a print of the film at the festival as part of a retrospective on Kalatazov. In 1994 a friend invited Martin Scorsese to a private screening which left Scorsese so amazed by the film that he decided to try to release it to US screens. Since then it has seen growing interest among alternative video stores.

Technical Feats

What most amazes cinephile audiences about this movie are the long shots (cf. the much later Russian Ark). Initially a three minute aerial shot of rural tropical landscape is disrupted by an infamous jumpcut to the top of a hotel building where a beauty contest is going on accompanied by raucous pop music. The camera, using a wide angle lens, moves among the contestants, goes out of the building, moves downwards for two stories into a club then circles around the bartenders. It then enters the pool and actually goes underwater, where the shot ends. In fact, the original scene went on for longer: the camera actually left the water (special submarine lenses cleaned off water droplets), but Kalatozov decided to cut this scene from the final movie. This scene was appropriated by Paul Thomas Anderson in his film Boogie Nights, when the camera is tracking around a pool, and then goes under water, and the sound changes, just like in I Am Cuba.

There is also a remarkable four minute scene of a slowly retreating long shot of a burning sugar cane field and house. This scene was later appropiated by Tarkovsky in The Sacrifice(1986).

In another scene, the camera follows a coffin between a crowded street. Then it stops and slowly moves upwards for at least four stories until it is filming the coffin from above a building. Without stopping it then starts panning sideways and enters through a window into a cigar factory, then goes straight towards a window where the cigar workers are watching the coffin. The camera finally passes through the window and, still following the court, appears to float over the street between the buildings. These shots were accomplished by assembling a line of technicians, and passing the camera down the line, from hand to hand.

Politics

All characters are archetypically simple and plain, either good or evil. Some viewers felt offended by the movie's stereotyped American characters. They appear in almost every scene, in such roles as a wealthy client of a prostitute, drunken mariners chasing after women, or the head of a huge company buying a sugar cane farm. On the other hand, for someone used to seeing American movies from the same time period, in which Russians were often portrayed as evil spies, I Am Cuba is surprising with its mild portrayal of Americans.

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Movies - I Am Cuba

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Technical Feats

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