Film

The 1964 film I Am Cuba isn’t quite like anything you’ve ever seen. Filmed during the early years of Castro’s reign, the 160 minute black-and-white epic opens with the camera descending from the heavens to tag along as a barefoot peasant slowly makes his way downriver in a small boat. A female voice on the sound-track is soon revealed to be the title character, and she addresses her thoughts to the Genoa-born explorer we all know as “Señor Columbus”: “I waved the fronds of my palms to greet your sails. I thought your ship brought happiness.” Instead, the ships “took my sugar, and left my tears.”

Soon we cut to the roof of a building in Batista’s Havana, where some musicians who look like they’re straight out of a college production of the absurdist play “Ubu Roi” are blasting away, while women in bathing suits are having their flesh appraised by decadent Americans in sunglasses conducting a beauty contest. The camera then slowly pans down, passing floor after floor filled with cheering tourists, until it reaches the swimming pool and follows a woman as she rises from her lounge chair, walks to the pool’s edge and dives in. The camera plunges in after her, continuing to track underwater. By now, the viewer has probably figured but two things about I Am Cuba: it is a virtuosic blast, and it’s not a movie that’s likely to be taken in quite the way the filmmakers intended.

Meant as a portrait of the soul of the country, the movie incorporates four unconnected storylines that are meant to demonstrate the need for the revolution. After the opening section, which is full of roistering Americans taking sinister advantage of Cuban b-girls (one of whom has some kind of seizure on the dance floor after apparently being overcome by the wild jungle rhythms of the jazz band), we’re taken to the farming country, where an old sharecropper burns down his fields and shack rather than allow them to fall into the hands of the capitalist United Fruit Company octopus.

Here, as in the rest of the film, the editoralizing matters less than the awesome visual effects achieved by the director, Mikhail Kalatozov, and his cinematographer, Serguey Urusevsky. The tilted camera angles on the face of the old farmer and the glistening images of cane fields under blackening skies dotted with silver clouds suggest the tension of a science fiction movie, while later in the film, when the people take up arms and engage in jungle warfare against government soldiers, the violent imagery isn’t horrifying, and it isn’t stirring in the way Kalatozov must have wanted it to be. It’s strange, beautiful and moving because it’s an abstract visual poem on conflict and chaos.

I Am Cuba casts a spell, and once the film ends, you’ll immediately want to know what the filmmakers thought they were doing, and how the hell they did it. That’s why the new “Ultimate Edition” three-disc DVD set is such a prize. Besides the movie itself and a documentary about Kalatozov, it includes Vicente Ferraz’s 2005 making-of documentary I Am Cuba: The Siberian Mammoth. The movie grew out of the first flowering of the love affair between Castro’s Cuba and the Soviet Union, when the two countries agreed that a Russian-Cuban co-production celebrating the revolution would be just the thing to cement their partnership, and might also help spread the Socialist message around the world.

Kalatozov, who had recently had a major international success with The Cranes Are Flying, was appointed to head the project, and he and his crew embarked on a tropical location shoot that would go on for years. They spent a great deal of money, and they also poured an incredible amount of creative energy and technical innovation into the project, applying themselves to such problems as how to bring off the long, complex tracking shots the director wanted and how to keep that camera going as it was submerged in the pool.

They intended both a great propaganda epic and a love letter to Cuba, and in the end they delivered a movie that bombed at both its Moscow and Havana premieres. The Cubans felt that Kalatozov had made a stereotyped cartoon of their people and culture, while the Russian authorities thought that the depiction of the vulgar decadence and hedonism of the Batista years looked overly inviting. After the dual premieres, the movie was filed away in the vault and forgotten.

It wasn’t until 1992, after the fall of the Soviet Union, that I Am Cuba began to turn up at Western film festivals, nudged back into the spotlight with the help of such admirers as Guillermo Cabrera Infante. In 1995, the movie had its belated New York premiere, in a commercial release “presented” by new fans Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. By now the movie’s failure as propaganda worked to its advantage viewers could appreciate it for its technical and visual dazzle without being distracted by the silliness of the political content, or even appreciating it as period camp.

Part of the fun of The Siberian Mammoth is getting to see the expressions on the faces of Cubans who were involved in the filming and who, until the documentary crew came calling, had no idea that the movie they remembered as a failure was now regarded by Western movie lovers as a rediscovered classic. (One of them examines the video case and mutters, “Scorsese had something to do with this?”) Sadly, Kalatozov himself was never to know of his artistic rehabilitation he died in 1973, having made only one other movie—the exciting 1969 Italian-Russian co-production The Red Tent with Peter Finch and Sean Connery. The unlearned lesson of his career might be this: Revolutions may turn sour and governments may come and go, but a vertical tracking shot wild enough to make Martin Scorsese’s eyes pop is a thing of joy forever.