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Island in the Stream

Scenes From a Revolution: "I Am Cuba" follows a diverse group of characters to tell of the tumult that brought Fidel Castro to power.

The 1964 'I Am Cuba' silhouettes stereotypical characters against brilliant camerawork

By Richard von Busack

Hackneyed and masterful at the same time, the 1964 I Am Cuba is something of a lost classic. Soviet filmmaker Mikhail Kalatozov started shooting I Am Cuba, a Russian/Cuban co-production, only a month after the Cuban missile crisis. Kalatozov, whose sensibilities were refined enough to get him into occasional disfavor with the Russian authorities, directed The Cranes Are Flying, a romance about civilian life in Russia during World War II, one of the best films ever to come out of the USSR. One official critique of Kalatozov's work reads that man, with a capital "M", had been overshadowed by the quality of the direction and the photography. This is certainly the case in I Am Cuba, in which the mostly flat and stereotypical characters are silhouetted against brilliant compositions and camerawork.

The stories in I Am Cuba overlap; they tell of the revolution that toppled the dictator Batista and installed Fidel Castro in his place. Kalatozov and his collaborators follow the fates of different sectors of Cuban life: a reluctant prostitute, a farmer about to be pushed off of his land by speculators, a student slaughtered during a demonstration against the government, and finally a poor man blasted out of his home by government bombers, who ends the picture by joining Castro's rebel army in the Sierra Maestra at the end of the movie.

In the student segment, there is a short-lived moment of ambiguity when the student, about to shoot a secret policeman from a sniper's perch, holds back his hand because his target was at his breakfast table. Closer to Kalatozov's heart is the kind of stereotyping where a seemingly Jewish gangster asks an undressing prostitute to keep wearing her little crucifix, presumably so he can symbolically desecrate the cross. (The film loves the nightclub where Maria the prostitute works, decrying its decadence while studying the place with satisfying thoroughness.)

The scenes of rural life--a pungent comment is made about how sweet sugar is, even though it's made from tears--have a handsomeness that suggests tropical Edward Weston, with palm fronds whited out by the sun and silvery skies. And the camera, twirling around dens of iniquities, shanty towns and riots, amazes the viewer. The movie's climax is free of any drama but the visual: the climax of Kalatozov's invention is an extraordinary shot that begins with the camera scaling the side of a four-story building to watch the funeral of a martyred student. After many twists and turns, the camera follows the procession (without a helicopter, mind you) down the street from 100 feet high, as if the student's spirit was watching the procession as he hovered in the air.

To people who prefer dramatic unity, story and character development, I Am Cuba is sort of a waste of time. But to those interested in the mechanics of filmmaking, in the art of direction and photography, I Am Cuba is a phenomenally well-made movie, loaded with beautiful and brave compositions and audacious tracking shots that beggar Welles' famed opening sequence in Touch of Evil.

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