Just days after the Cuban Missle Crisis, Mikheil Kalatozishvili and company began shooting the remarkable film "Ya Kuba" on location. According to IMDB this was the director's twentieth film in a twenty one film carrer that began in the silent-era 1920s. The director died in 1973 and the film was not released for distribution until the 1990s.
(Cineaste v22, n2 (Spring, 1996):52.)
I saw a new (and beautiful) 35mm print of this film last night at the NWFF. http://nwfilmforum.org/
This film has some of the most remarkable cinematography I have ever seen - The entire film is shot with, what appears to be, one wide angle lens. The tracking shots are some of the most visually stunning that I have ever seen - lots of really long takes. The landscape photography was recorded on infrared film so the tabacco fields, suger cane and palm trees are all bright white.
If you are in the Seattle area - check out the new print at NWFF.
Interesting - is this 'fiction' (staged) or a 'documentary'? The description kind of reminds me of Jacopetti and Prosperi's "Africa Addio," also a document of a region in turmoil in the '60s. Fantastic cinematography, as well.
...this is widely considered to be a communist propaganda film and that is what it is. If I understand correctly, this company recruited non-actors, dancers, musicians etc. to play the characters and this is evident in the film. The sound is roughly dubbed and the dialogue scenes are a lot like watching acting students learning to act.
It is the camera work - the remarkably imaginative camera work that makes this film an important benchmark in Russian cinema history. The choreography is totally over the top. Some of the takes run ten minutes without a cut. The camera crew was strategically placed for camera hand-offs. In some instances they would follow a subject with a hand-held camera then attach the camera to a cable and pully and pull the camera up a five story building without a cut and then - still without a cut - the camera explores a bourgeois swimming pool party complete with a bikini beauty contest then - still without a cut - the camera enters the swimming pool and explores the pool party under water. 8O
Here is an interesting development:
Source: Variety, Jan 3, 2005 v397 i7 p25(1)
I Am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth. (Movie Review) Deborah Young.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2005 Reed Business Information
I AM CUBA, THE SIBERIAN MAMMOTH
(SOY CUBA, O MAMUTE SIBERIAN0)
(DOCU--BRAZIL)
A Tres Mundos Producciones production. (International sales: Grupo Novo de Cinema e TV, Rio de Janeiro.) Produced by Isabel Martinez.
Directed, written by Vicente Ferraz. Camera (color/B&W), Tareq Daoud, Ferraz. editors, Dull Janiel, Mair Tavares; music, Jenny Padron; sound (Dolby Digital), Cesar Fernandez, consultant, Enrique Pineda Barnet. Reviewed at Brazilia Film Festival (Market), Nov. 27, 2004. (Also in Sundance Film Festival--World Cinema, competing.) Running time: 90 MIN.
(Spanish, Portuguese dialogue)
More than a making-of docu, "I Am Cuba, the Siberian Mammoth" focuses on a delirious time during the Cold War when Russian director Mikhail Kalatosov ("The Cranes Are Flying") and crew shot an epic celebration of Castro's revolution. The result, "I Am Cuba," the first Russian-Cuban co-production, disappointed audiences in both countries. Pic's rediscovery in the capitalist U.S., and its reappraisal as a masterpiece of visual pyrotechnics, gives Brazilian documaker Vicente Ferraz's tale an upbeat final twist--after some mid-film doldrums. Apart from brisk "IV sales, docu could enlighten auds in a double bill with the recently restored Kalatosov film.
For the record, although Ferraz strongly implies that "I Am Cuba," shot in 1963, reemerged from the Soviet freezer due to the efforts of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola, who endorsed Milestone's 1993 DVD release of the film, credit for rediscovering the film belongs to Tom Luddy, who spirited an unsubtitled print out of Moscow's Goskino and showed it at Telluride in 1992. The Telluride screening and a subsequent one by Peter Scarlet at the San Francisco film fest, both received standing ovations.
After the festival showings, Milestone bought the film from the Russians, who had forgotten Cuba's ICAIC owned all North American rights--a dispute the co-producers eventually settled.
Full Size PictureFilmed in Cuba, "Siberian Mammoth" saves the pic's revival as the final plum at the end of an exhaustive and sometimes overly detailed reconstruction of how "I Am Cuba" was made. Interviewing every aging dolly grip, sound recordist and production secretary was probably not necessary amid the wealth of material available, including plentiful excerpts from the original film.
Knockout opening sequence of a student's funeral on a crowded street illustrates Kalatosov's breathtakingly intricate long takes. Film's most famous tracking shot, aimed at showing the decadence of pre-Castro capitalism, snakes through a hotel to end on a rooftop swimming pool and dives underwater with a bevy of bikini-clad girls. Amusingly, Ferraz reports that this sequence's popularity with Russian viewers is one reason the authorities so quickly withdrew the film from release.
Another fascinating thread is the political background of the time including the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba and the subsequent naval blockade in October 1962. This heightened Cold War tension brought sympathizing filmmakers Cesare Zavattini, Joris Ivens and French New Wavers Jean-Luc Godard and Agnes Varda down to Cuba. Docu ably captures the atmosphere of excitement behind the script by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Enrique Pinedo Barnet, and the visuals by d.p. Sergei Urusevsky and camera operator Sasha Calzetti.
After the adventurous 14-month shoot, the audiences' negative reaction came as quite a cold shower. Cubans in particular thought pic's stylized images, huge crowd scenes and acrobatic long takes failed to reflect Cuban reality, and took to calling the film "I Am Not Cuba." They preferred Brazil's Cinema Novo and home-grown product like "Lucia" and "Memories of Underdevelopment," judged closer to the Cuban temperament.
For Ferraz, even "I Am Cuba's" reevaluation and the influence of its bold visuals on contemporary directors and cinematographers hold a sad irony. Calling "I Am Cuba" a fossil unearthed by film archaeologists, he mourns its missed chance to affect the politics of its time.
And a review from the films first distribution in 1995
The Nation, March 20, 1995 v260 n11 p394(4)
I Am Cuba. Stuart Klawans.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 1995 The Nation Company L.P.
The strangest film to be released this year, and perhaps the most exciting as well, turns out to be a thirty-year-old tribute to the Cuban revolution. Recently sprung from the archives of the former Soviet bloc by Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Milestone Film, I Am Cuba is a work of cinematic delirium and great political ambition, of political delirium and great cinematic ambition--a fabulous beast of a movie, part white elephant and part fire-breathing dragon. Useless to say that such a film could not be made today. The point is, it shouldn't have been possible to make back then.
Co-produced by Mosfilm and the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), I Am Cuba went into pre-production in the latter part of 1961. Whether the planning began a few weeks or a few months after the Bay of Pigs remains a subject for research; all we know is that officials in Moscow and Havana must have been newly keen on investing in a big feature film in support of the revolution.
ICAIC, which was founded in March 1959, until then devoted its resources mainly to making newsreels and documentaries and to expanding the exhibition circuit. (Among its initiatives was the "mobile cinema"--a projector loaded onto the back of a Soviet truck, sent to roam the villages.) Feature, film production would not take hold decisively, until 1966, with Tomas Gutierrez Alea's of a Bureaucrat; so for ICAIC in 1961 the project of making a 140-minute fiction was extraordinary. The subsequent evolution of the project into an art film would be flat-out inexplicable, were it not for two factors: the context of Havana itself, and the personality of Fidel Castro.
Havana had for years been a moviemad city. Under Batista, Hollywood product had crowded out most other fare; but for the curious, there were opportunities to see all sorts of films, opportunities that expanded in the years right after the revolution. This rich film culture had its effect on those Cubans who longed to make films themselves. By mid-1961, when the proposal for I Am Cuba would have been floating about, there had been just enough production beyond the aesthetic limits of the news-reel to elicit a landmark speech from Fidel Castro, "Words to the Intellectuals." This was the occasion when he put forth the formula "Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing." Given its timing--two months after the Bay of Pigs--this doctrine was not so much a threat as a daring promise. Despite the all-too-credible prospect of destruction by a vastly superior force, Castro pledged that non-revolutionary (as distinguished from anti-revolutionary) artists would find in Cuba "a place to work and create, a place where their creative spirit ... has the opportunity and freedom to be expressed."
It was this proposed wonderland of personal expression (newly established on an island where northerners had long been accustomed to letting go) that greeted Mosfilm's production team, headed by director Mikhail Kalatozov. A few years earlier, Kalatozov had scored an international hit with The Cranes Are Flying; he also had enjoyed a successful bureaucratic career, having served, at various times, as a studio head, Soviet consul in Los Angeles and Deputy Minister of Cinematography. On the face of it, he would not have seemed a man to run wild in the tropics. But Kalatozov's tastes had been formed during the Soviet Union's era of heroic experimentation, under the influence of Dziga Vertov and Esther Shub, and his career since then had been marked by frequent gaps, the result of official disfavor over his chronic "formalism." Even while he was readying IA m Cuba for the camera, in October 1962, Kalatozov came under attack from Mosfilm's Art Council on the grounds that he had irresponsibly. subordinated the subject matter and characters of his latest film, The Letter Never Sent, to the pleasures of direction and cinematography. By the time of this attack, of course, the screenplay for I Am Cuba had been finished (written by Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Enrique Pineda Barnet) and the casting was set; everything was in place to make a rhapsody, rather than a manifesto. Still, we may guess that the Art Council contributed something of its own to I Am Cuba, inadvertently digging a spur into Kalatozov just as the starting gate clanged open.
He began shooting in late November 1962--immediately after the missile crissis-assisted by cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky and camera operator Alexander Calzatti. At once, Kalatozov plunged into the sort of death-, convention- and gravity-defying camera excursion that characterizes I Am Cuba. To show the corruption of the bad old days in Havasna, he had his camera wander among the participants in a bikini contest, staged on the rooftop of a fifties Moderne hotel; then descend as if by elevator to poolside level; then snake through the tables of well-moneyed cocktail-sippers; then take a side trip onto a terrace overlooking the beach, and then (this is all happening in one continuous take, by the way) become fascinated by a woman in a leopard-skin bikini, tracking her as she gets up from her chaise longue and following her into the pool, to dive at last beneath the surface. Seal-like capitalists swim by, accompanied by bubble-breathing pimps and bimbos, while the soundtrack modulates into a glub-glub version of the hotel band's jumpin' jive.
This is damn near a normal sequence in I Am Cuba. The film's different sections may vary somewhat in style, incorporating a gauzy flashback here, a bit of suspense-building cross-cutting there. (The four main episodes, which are linked by theme rather than character or plot, concern the people's misery in the city and in the country, the students' revolt in Havana and the peasants' uprising in the mountains. But whatever the episode, you're constantly being hit by a sense of hallucinatory rapture, conveyed by the black-and-white cinematography (which transforms palm trees into giant white feathers and the sea into molten lead); a willful dizziness, implied by the framing (with its nonstop tilts); and above all a breakneck daring, boasted of by the long, hand-held takes. Again and again, Kalatozov invites you to marvel at a never-before-seen shot; he even gives you onscreen cues, in case you're slow to react. When the camera descends to poolside during the hotel sequence, for example, some of the extras stand and applaud. Ostensibly, they're clapping for the participants in the bikini contest; but they might as well be congratulating Kalatozov. Immediately after, as his camera glides past the poolside tables, you see a Batista-era tourist making his own movie with a little Bolex. Miserable capitalist! Can he hope to achieve a socialist camera movement like this?
Here's where I begin to wonder if the Mosfilm Art council had a point. Had I been hauled before the Council in 1964, when I Am Cuba was released, I hope I would have defended Kalatozov's direction, perhaps by invoking Shklovsky and his principle of alienation: By making the world seem strange, the artist shows that reality is mutable, thereby encouraging viewers to understand that they, too, have the power to change their lives. I might also have appealed to Malevich's Suprematism as a precedent; like the painting White on White, Kalatozov's look-Mano-hands camera movements demonstrate the triumph of human will over brute fact. But then, Kalatozov is an equal-opportunity alienator. He makes everything look strange and wondrous, so that you feel as thrilled by the decadence of a Batista-era nightclub as you do by the exuberance of an anti-Batista street demonstration.
Considering the fortunes of the Cuban revolution since 1964, this all-purpose thaumaturgy now can have the effect of underscoring the film's dramatic clumsiness, while at other times it allows viewers to forget the subject matter altogether. Surely most audiences will chortle over the film's nightclub sequence, in which a chinless, bow-tied American geek (played none too steadily by French actor Jean Bouise) takes sexual advantage of Downtrodden Cuban Womanhood (Luz, Maria Collazo). Less funny, though no less kitschy and stiff, is the episode about an old, illiterate sugarcane farmer (Jose Gallardo) who loses his land to the United Fruit Company. In these sections of I Am Cuba, the too-muchness of Kalatozov's style works against any attempt to exercise ones historical imagination, to think oneself back into the core of lived experience that might once have animated what is now a lump of propaganda. But in a more dragiatipally vivid section of I Am Cuba--the episode about a student activist named Enrique (Raul Garcia)--the style winds up being equally inimical to meaning. You often ignore the subject for example, the outpouring of popular emotion that results from Enrique's self-sacrifice-because you're busy screaming in astonishment at a crane shot you know was impossible.
Why not go all the way, then, and try looking at the film from the Castro-has-failed point of view? Let's say for the sake of argument that nothing was ever worthwhile about I Am Cuba, except for its flamboyance. By effecting that divorce between style and subject matter, we would be treating Kalatozov more or less as certain critics treat Leni Riefenstahl. Are the two in fact equivalent? Would we have any valid reason--other than a belief in the good intentions of one and the bad of the other--for justifying Kalatozov's propaganda but not Riefenstahl's?
Actually, I think there's something to be said for good intentions. Put the worst possible construction on Kalatozov's film. Claim that it promoted a dictatorial regime that betrayed and bankrupted the Cuban people; you will still have to admit that I Am Cuba was meant to defend the Cubans' right to govern themselves, in conditions that would allow the poor to become a little less wretched. Judged in that way, Kalatozov's faults are essentially aesthetic misdemeanors--sentimentality, overstatement, tone-deafness. (He did not commit the graver crime of hero worship; Castro is mentioned a couple of times in I Am Cuba, and that's it.) Now put the best possible construction on Triumph of the Will. Claim that Riefenstahl was improbably naive and failed to foresee the ends of Nazism; you will still have to admit that Triumph of the Will was meant to praise the force of arms, the glories of regimentation and the inherent goodness of the Aryan race, all embodied in the figure of the Great Leader. Unlike Kalatozov, Riefenstahl was so deft that she committed almost no aesthetic missteps; but politicallly, h0r masterpiece is one giant felony.
It's all the more telling, then, that Triumph of the Will was useful to its producers, in a way that I Am Cuba was not. Upon the film's release in Havana in 1964, audiences reportedly had a good laugh, then unofficially changed the title to I Am Not Cuba. I would guess they cringed at the "poetic" voiceover narration, murmured in alternating lines of Russian and Spanish, and at the Soviet crew's tireless interest in floor shows and hot babes. Besides, it must have rankled that the job of telling about the revolution had fallen to a bunch of Soviets. Meanwhile, on the Moscow end, there was even less enthusiasm for the film. Mosfilm struck only a few prints, and the picture seems to have quickly dropped out of sight--helped into oblivion, no doubt, by the contemporaneous disappearance of Khrushchev. It was not a moment for eccentricity.
Now the film re-emerges, into a world that is likely to feel no ardor for its politics, nor even much nostalgia. How strange, strange and sad, that I A m Cuba will at last be appreciated, but probably for its technical trickery. Or is that strange? In our post-everything era, people pretend to talk politics by discussing Clinton's weight problem versus Newt's; they rave over the special effects in Forrest Gump or the editing in Natural Born Killers and ignore the rancid content. This seems to me an ideal situation for the restoration of Leni Riefenstahl's reputation. Perhaps it's not so good for Kalatozov's.
I Am Cuba is a film that still has not found its historical moment. We can enthuse over its multitudinous wonders; we can, and should, give thanks to all the people who have fetched back this cinematic hippogriff. But I suspect audiences today will fail the film, and do so in a way that oddly parallels its own worst failure.
At the very end, as the guerrillas in the Sierra Maestra advance toward victory, the soundtrack offers a final poem--by Yevtushenko, I would guess, rather than Pineda Barnet, judging by the characteristic note of tin-plated bombast. "Now a rifle is in your hands," the voiceover says, apostrophizing Cuba. "You are not shooting to kill. You are firing at the past." As if real people don't get killed in a revolution; as if the murder of the past would somehow be guilt-free.
And in our era? We don't poeticize bloodshed; we just laugh it off, with the same arrogance we use to mock the past. Maybe today's audiences will surprise themselves and discover through I Am Cuba that. the past is: more than a payground. of irony. Then again, maybe they won't; in which. case, I Am Cuba is destined to be this year's artiest roller-coaster ride (opening March 8 at Film Forum in New York).
I saw part of "Soy Cuba" on the Sundance channel today... also most of the "Siberian Mammoth" documentary. Astonishing cinematography. The sequence of the old man with the burning house, and the unforgettable crane shot, was striking. I thought the dark skies were achieved through a strong red filter, but in the documentary at some point it was remarked that the film was either infrared or specially treated to be partially infrared-sensitive.
Evan Kubota wrote:I saw part of "Soy Cuba" on the Sundance channel today... also most of the "Siberian Mammoth" documentary. Astonishing cinematography. The sequence of the old man with the burning house, and the unforgettable crane shot, was striking. I thought the dark skies were achieved through a strong red filter, but in the documentary at some point it was remarked that the film was either infrared or specially treated to be partially infrared-sensitive.
...not sure how I ended up in this thread again, but yes, they did use infrared film on this production.
