This is a stunning work, simply great. I had this DVD for a few years now and I just managed to watch it. I remember I was reading about Tarkovsky back then, who cited -more than once- a Russian cinematographer (Sergey Urusevsky) as a big influence on his visual style. In fact Tarkovsky made the first scene of his first major movie (the opening dream sequence in Ivan's Childhood) with Urusevsky in mind. This is the sequence
I Am Cuba was done in 1964 and was sponsored by both the Cuban and the Russian regimes, hence the fact it's a pro-Castro shouldn't be a surprise. The director M.Kalatozov and the cinematographer Urusevsky both did a successful work in 1957 (The Cranes Are Flying, I'm planning to watch next) and were chosen by the soviet regime to evoke moments similar to Eisenstein's Ivan The Terrible. I Am Cuba was hated by both Cubans and Russians for years, only to be restored some 30 years after by Scorsese and Coppola who loved it after seeing some scenes of it and decided to join effort to restore it.
The movie's narrative is simple: four simple independent stories from Cuba in the period of revolution, all stories connected by a narrative by a young female voice, Cuba. What puts this work on a separate level from any other Russian (or European) movie I've seen from the mid-60's is its stunning visuals. The cinematography is incredibly challenging: an uninterrupted scene starts from the top roof of a building and tracks random people (camera going through ground floors) only to end tracking a random young lady into a pool (under the water). According to the press notes, the filmmakers "had to make a watertight box out of sheets of Dupont plastic with three handles so the camera could be passed between Urusevsky and Calzatti [cameramen] at crucial moments. On the first take, the camera box refused to dive beneath the water surface, and Calzatti had to adapt the box with a hollow steel tube running through it so the air could escape the box, but no water would enter the camera."
The movie features another unforgettable scene (shot in extreme infra-red!!!) that features a burning field of sugar canes under a cloudy sky, the infra-red turned the flames into a "black" cloud that was contrasted with a gray/moody sky. Most of the camera work is hand-held yet has a great stability. A lot of tracking shots ascend many feet in the sky and descend abruptly in seconds (like Tarkovsky's shot).
another shot (NOT the actual sound track)
The best "story" is -in my opinion- the farmer's story, it had few dialogue and almost the whole story is told through superb visual sequences (reminded me of Malick's but replace the colors with dominant black shadows and gray light). The strength of the movie is that it is told visually.
Dan I highly recommend this experience, try to get it. It's the best movie I've seen since ages... reminded me (at least form-wise) of great visual moments of great directors (Tarr, Tarkovsky, Jancso, Angelopoulos, Malick).
Wassim
