I Am Cuba
With Luz Maria Collazo, Jose Gallardo, Sergio Corrieri, Maria Gonzalez Broche, Raul Garcia, and Jean Bouise.
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Auteurism is as much of a problem here as star ratings; it’s not clear that Kalatozov is the individual most responsible for the film’s distinctiveness. Judging from its unique, shimmering black-and-white look and the recent testimony of its cowriter, Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the film belongs mainly to its cinematographer, the extraordinary Sergei Urusevsky (1908-1974), but I have no way of confirming this impression. (Urusevsky shot the only other Kalatozov films I’ve seen, The Cranes Are Flying from 1957 and The Letter Never Sent from 1960, the second a hallucinatory tale about four geologists hunting for diamonds in the Siberian taiga that’s said to have influenced Andrei Tarkovsky and the Coppola of Apocalypse Now; The Letter Never Sent was roundly criticized by its production unit as formalist, though it still packs a punch.)
A couple of other oddities about I Am Cuba are worth noting–one linguistic, the other visual. The dialogue and narration are mainly in Spanish, apart from a few lines in English (coming mainly from characters designated as American tourists and sailors). There’s also a Russian voice-over that translates the Spanish and English, and English subtitles that translate the Russian and Spanish, with the result that most of the English lines you hear are different from the ones you read: when an American tourist in a decadent Havana nightclub says “I’ll take a limeade,” this is duly translated into Russian, and the Russian line is then subtitled “A soft drink for me.”
We next move to the nightclub, where Ignacio–the falsetto lead for the Platters during the 50s–is singing in Spanish about “this crazy love in my blood.” A den of iniquity where bamboo poles suggest prison bars and large wooden idols make us think of barbaric rites, this nightmarish cavern with its elaborate Afro-Cuban floor show and prostitutes at the bar introduces us to three male tourists implausibly identified as Americans. The most prominent of these, Jim, who has a fetish for crucifixes, is played by French actor Jean Bouise, later known for his performances in La guerre est finie, The Conformist, Out 1, and Z.
In Havana we follow the adventures of Enrique, a radical student who saves a woman from a band of drunken American sailors, reads in the paper that Fidel Castro is dead, meets with his comrades, and prepares to assassinate a fat police officer who killed many of his friends, though he loses his nerve at the last minute. Then the police raid a room where students are printing pro-Castro leaflets, and one of the protesters is shot. A crowd gathers, and Enrique addresses it until another shot rings out and a white dove falls. Holding the dead bird aloft like a flag, Enrique leads the crowd, now singing the Cuban national anthem, into the street, where they’re met with water hoses. Shot by the fat cop, Enrique becomes a revolutionary martyr, and as a funeral cortege follows his body through downtown Havana, the camera, in one take, cranes all the way up the side of a building, crosses the street, passes through a cigar-rolling factory, returns to the street through another window, and then continues to follow the cortege from an aerial view for what seems like a good quarter of a mile. (A partial explanation of how this astonishing shot was achieved is offered by the cameraman, Alexander Calzatti, in the July 1995 issue of American Cinematographer; it required a “special cable device” that Calzatti built in Moscow before coming to Cuba.)
He could have been writing about I Am Cuba–a triumph of art over humanity, he might have said, except that it wasn’t regarded as any sort of triumph when it appeared in Cuba and Russia 30 years ago. Given that art is a human activity, how can it be said that it triumphs over humanity? Perhaps what he meant was that a film like I Am Cuba aestheticizes (and therefore disrespects) human suffering. But then in what way could Hollywood celebrations of human slaughter–routinely accepted as entertainment–be regarded as morally preferable?
