I am Cuba

I am Cuba (Soy Cuba) is a 1964 Soviet-Cuban propaganda film justifying the Cuban revolution through four stories set at the end of the corrupt Batista regime. Emotional socio-political lessons, they portray poverty and repression effectively, but the movie's real strength lay in the astonishing parade of bravado cinematographic art displayed by its Georgia-born director Mikhail Kalatozov.

He'd won the Golden Palm at Cannes (1957) for The Cranes Are Flying, but his melodramatic and episodic Cuban saga gained few viewers after it was first screened in Havana or Moscow. Party leaders and authorities had given the Mosfilm crew some three years of financial support, and thousands of extras, but they shelved the end product. Fortunately, it wasn't destroyed.

"Re-discovered" in the USA in the 1990s, its re-mastering and distribution championed by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, the black-and-white film gained audiences and professional recognition more than two decades after Kalatosov's death in 1973. [It was his penultimate film; the last was a 1969 Soviet-Italian co-production, The Red Tent, starring Sean Connery and Peter Finch (and nominated for the 1973 Golden Globe).]

Few would watch his Cuban epic just for its sentimental fables. It is watched per se, its long, frenetic, weaving, flying, wide-angle camera-work more than compensating for infrequent dialogue and ponderously poetic interlude comments voiced-over by a feminine "Cuba".

In the first tale, featuring a novice Havana prostitute, the remarkably acrobatic photography, accompanied by brash period jazz and rock, leaps up and down hotel storeys, back and forth in a nightclub, circles with dancers, slithers through a shanty slum, soars over white-tinted coconut forests, and more, all intoxicatingly. In the film's first bravura wide-angle non-stop tracking shot, when the camera dances above a hotel rooftop beauty contest and dives down through many levels to join American tourists beside and then in the hotel's swimming pool, it feels as if the Russian crew had been determined to out-do the aerial wizardry of Orson Welles in 1958's Touch of Evil.

The interplay of filtered light and shadow is spell-binding, especially for close-ups where each sweaty face's spot glisten and characters' glinting eyes project passionate emotions. All is contrast, and not just the expected rich-poor divide. The young woman is sad, until she dances; her fruit-vending beau sings his wares and grins exultantly, until he learns her secret trade; her better-than-average American customer is a politely curious intruder in her slum, until he experiences its menacing poverty the next morning.

In the short second tale, a sugar-cane farmer and his teenage children are reaping the rich crop from their rented land when then are told by its Cuban landowner it's been sold to United Fruit. The weather-aged man sends the youngsters away with the family's last peso, burns down his cane and shanty, and dies. This time, the cameras hover over and swirl around the cut cane and fire, again using Russian army infra-red film to give the landscape a snowy whiteness set against a darkly tinted sky (as for the movie's opening aerial vista of palm trees).

The third episode follows a group of dissident Havana university students, torching a drive-in movie screen, meeting a group of drunken American sailors, preparing revolutionary pamphlets (thereby introducing the names of Lenin and Fidel Castro), kind-heartedly failing to assassinate a police chief, who later kills two of the students during street protests. Cinematic spectaculars for this tale include long tracking shots past shops, up and down a university block's staircases, and through marching masses bombarded by police water hoses. There's even one crowd scene on city steps that looks like a tribute to Eisenstein and Russia's own post-Revolutionary cinema.

Most memorably, a continuous roof-level shot tracks a funeral procession, the camera turning to the right to pass through a rooftop cigar-rolling workshop, whose workers unfurl a revolutionary flag down the side of the building beneath the camera which steadily progresses far above the middle of another packed street the procession has turned into, exhibiting remarkable preparatory work, perfect timing and cinematographic daring.

In the fourth and final episode, a lone revolutionary soldier hobbles into a subsistence farmer's hillside shack. Fed, but scorned, by the farmer, he leaves and the hillside is subjected to an intense bombing raid that kills the farmer's oldest son. He tells his family he must go and join the guerrillas, and the camera follows him as he's led through their mountainside encampment. Acquiring his own rifle through battle, he joins thousands of other flag-bearing happy peasants marching downhill to war.

In this episode too, it's the complex choreography - of cameramen and their technical rigging and equipment as well as the massive cast of small-part actors - that is the marvel to behold. The second time round, because the film's imagery first, and truly foremost, tells its stories without overwhelming them. Whatever a viewer may feel about Castro's revolution, the film's vitality and exuberance - and attempt to express the Cuban temperament - are joys to behold.

[Martin Scorsese's 20-minute set of enthusiastic comments in a DVD extra are helpful reminders of key scenes' special qualities. Scorsese does not include the reference to Russian army film, noted in Wikipedia; he ascribes the white-on-black effect to filters.]