AM CUBA I Movie Review

Soy Cuba
Ja Cuba

In 1964, Soviet director Mikhail Kalatozov (The Cranes Are Flying) collaborated with poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and writer Enrique Pineda Barnet to create a propagandistic portrait of an oppressed Cuba—one that was ripe for a rebellion against decadent, imperialist enslavement of the Cuban people's bodies and minds. The film consists of four “chapters” that show us different aspects of the same problem—the human misery caused by colonialist influences, primarily American. I Am Cuba has the broad caricatures you'd expect—noble but degraded peasants, contaminated by American corruption; sexually decadent American businessmen, their women, and their armed forces; valiant, committed, revolutionary youth. But simply calling I Am Cuba advocacy filmmaking is like calling The Godfather a movie about rival mobsters—it is, but that's not the half of it. The creators of this film set out to make an epic, visionary fantasy about liberation, and they succeeded to a staggering degree. When I tell you that I've never seen anything like the images in I Am Cuba, it's not just hyperbole. This is a movie so visually inventive and audacious that about halfway through the picture I actually realized that my mouth was open out of a combination of astonishment and disbelief—astonishment at the inventiveness of the visual scheme, disbelief because I couldn't figure out how it was achieved. There are acrobatic camera movements in this movie far too complex and sinewy to describe, but which sound unbelievable anyway—until you see them. And when you do see them, they're still unbelievable. A unique, insane, exhilarating spectacle. Kudos to Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese for helping to make the American release of the restored version possible.

NEXT STOP… Memories of Underdevelopment, Improper Conduct, The Battleship Potemkin

1964 141 m/B CU RU Luz Maria Collazo, Jose Gallardo, Sergio Corrieri, Jean Bouise, Raul Garcia, Celia Rodriguez; D: Mikhail Kalatozov; W: Yevgeny Yevtushenko, Enrique Pineda Barnet; C: Sergei Urusevsky; M: Carlos Farinas. Nominations: Independent Spirit Awards ‘96: Best Foreign Film. VHS MIL, FCT