Film Rec: Soy Cuba ( Kalatozov, 1964 )

In an attempt to maintain the degree of obscurity of my previous book and film recommendations, I've got a great one for you: Soy Cuba ( I am Cuba ) by Mikhail Kalatozov, 1964.

This 144 minute epic is constructed of several vignettes that each portray a different facet of the Cuban revolution. Because it was a co-production between the former U.S.S.R and Cuba, the words 'socialist propoganda' are the quickest way to describe it.


The film is not intended to be a documentary. The struggle of the Cuban working class is romanticized by both Kalatozov and his cinematographer Sergei Uresevsky through each elaborately lyrical sequence.
( Visually: Uresevsky would not film without clouds in the sky. In many scenes he used infra-red film to enhance the darkness of the sky and the lightness of the foliage. )


The most memorable and impressive sequences in the film are often due to Uresevsky's dynamic cinematography. The opening sequence is one of the most impressive, in which the camera descends from a rooftop party at a hotel to the pool deck many stories below. It then moves through the party and follows a woman into the pool, submerging and filming the swimmers below the surface.
Apparently the actors and crew would sometimes rehearse these scenes for days before filming. Here Kalatozov blocks out the rooftop party scene with a directors viewfinder:


And the resulting scene:


The film didn't receive much of a premiere in either the Soviet Union or Cuba despite over a year in production and a budget that is probably unable to be calculated for political reasons. The film was never premiered in the United States due to the embargo. It wouldn't have been a big success anyway...

I don't think the Cubans felt accurately portrayed by Kalatozov, but I don't blame him for his approach. His goal was to capture the revolutionary spirit of the Cubans, and he saw that in the liveliness of their music, culture and character. He was attempting to depict them as a romantic underdog, which I imagine made them feel like they were being used as a character on a larger world stage.

Soviet audiences didn't like it, I hear, because it, "wasn't revolutionary enough." I'm not going to pretend like I know what it means to say that, all I know is that they weren't impressed. People literally forgot about this film for 30 years.

A Russian historian dug up a copy of the film for a series on Kalatozov in 1992. By the next year the film was screening at the San Francisco International film festival, and in 1994 copy of Soy Cuba was screened for Martin Scorsese. In 1995 it was being distributed by Milestone with both the Scorsese and Coppola names attached to it.
I guess these guys were just so enamored with the film, they spent whatever it cost to bring it back to life.


Reasons to watch this film:
1. You like black and white cinematography
2. You have a sense of humor about propaganda and it's historical context.
3. You have a talent for reading Portuguese subtitles while listening to overdubbing in Russian and trying to guess what the hell is going on in English.