I Am Cuba: The Filmmakers Who Came In from the Cold

And though each of these episodes contains a beginning, a middle, and an end, it’s via sensory means that the viewer is drawn in. Early in the film’s first part, the camera glides through a Havana rooftop party only to end up immersed in a swimming pool with a number of the revelers; in the next sequence, the camera lulls us into the rhythms of a nightclub performance as it moves fluidly through the space. In other words, I Am Cuba pursues our involvement as does a poem, when we’re struck by a verse’s intensity, which can take our imagination beyond the mundane reality that surrounds us. The poetic language of cinema, however, is not exactly the literary language that we admire in great poets: here poetry arises from the artist’s degree of subtlety in conjugating images and sounds. It’s with good cause, therefore, that much of I Am Cuba’s prestige continues to rest on the shoulders of cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky. A true master of completely free camera movement, Urusevsky was in fact meticulous about working out every scene before filming began.

Ultimately, of all the films produced in homage to the recently initiated Cuban Revolution, none could match I Am Cuba in conveying the mysterious beauty we associate with utopia, above all in its collective dimension. The film’s choreography puts forward its own intrinsic argument: the visual audacity communicates precisely that which is inaccessible to ordinary logic. Here reason gives way to faith, just as it did in the hearts of that motley band of revolutionaries who dreamed of transforming the world and “storming heaven.” Kalatozov and his team translated to the screen what had been the great dream of those years—to give meaning to human tragedy—not through mere political exhortation but from the tribune of art.

To understand the fate of I Am Cuba after its premiere, there’s no better source than Brazilian director Vicente Ferraz’s 2004 documentary, “I Am Cuba,” the Siberian Mammoth (included as a supplement on this release), featuring interviews with many of the film’s contributors, from Pineda Barnet to Alfredo Guevara, then the president of ICAIC. It’s also interesting, however, to return to documents from that time. In an August 20, 1964, letter to Spanish filmmaker Ricardo Muñoz Suay, for example, Guevara states his opinion on the recently finished I Am Cuba:

It’s the best of the coproductions that we’ve done and an artistically important film. The photography and music are exceptional, and the general tone of the film has a great dignity. It’s a poetic film, often moving, with many inspired moments and few low points. In its images, we can recognize ourselves as a people. And as a revolution: which, you’re well aware, doesn’t tend to happen in the coproductions (we’ve now had some experience with them, and I don’t think we’ll repeat them, at least in the coming years).

Meanwhile, the film had begun to make its way before the public, which in just a few months would sentence it to oblivion. On the island, the film’s initial reception was divided. Julio García Espinosa had not yet written his influential essay “For an Imperfect Cinema,” but it seemed clear that such a display of vast economic resources, the near-uncontrollable number of people involved in the shoot, and the filmmakers’ obsession with technical perfection clashed directly with ICAIC’s cinematic agenda, which was then already beginning to have a marked influence on Latin American cinema more broadly. I Am Cuba’s proportions stood in stark contrast to the kinds of “imperfect” but “realistic” stories that would soon define Glauber Rocha’s aesthetics of hunger and Jorge Sanjinés’s indigenist cinema.

Opinions were also varied in the Cuban press. Luis M. López, critic for the magazine Bohemia, wrote a caustic review, titled “I Am Not Cuba,” immediately ruling the film useless. Meanwhile, other critics—including Mario Rodríguez Alemán (who in time would become a furious defender of Soviet cinema), Alejo Beltrán, and Josefina Ruiz—praised the film’s striking formal achievements. They of course all mentioned the sequence shot that follows the student’s funeral, still astonishing today for its originality of composition and the audacious movement of the handheld camera, which begins by showing a public burial in close-up, rises surprisingly to the top of a building, crosses various balconies and enters a tobacco factory, then goes out the window and levitates over the crowd.

Whatever criticisms might be made about the rest of the film, that shot will always be a masterpiece. Kalatozov’s and Urusevsky’s imaginations overflowed the narrowly sociological conception of cinema that ICAIC had yet to move beyond. It’s true that even a sequence as prodigious as this one doesn’t cancel out the unevenness of the film’s script and performances, but such delirious visuals helped Cuban filmmakers see the importance of dynamic images, of the kind that cinematographers Jorge Herrera (Manuela, 1966; Lucía, 1968) and Ramón F. Suárez (Death of a Bureaucrat, 1966; Memories of Underdevelopment, 1968) would develop with true dedication.

Paradoxically, I Am Cuba also helped Cuban cinema become more conscious of what its own identity might be. It was clear that the experience could not be repeated, not only because it was unthinkable to make a rule of something that, within the cinema of an underdeveloped country, could only be an exception, but also because the Cuban filmmakers of the time were forcefully committed to building a true national cinema. That’s why director Tomás Gutiérrez Alea—who, on the heels of Memories of Underdevelopment, became arguably the best-known Cuban filmmaker internationally—commented many years later:

In ICAIC, we agreed that it would be useful to import some directors, because they would also pass on their experience to us . . . The work with those directors did give us an education, but the experience didn’t last long because we realized it wasn’t possible to make Cuban films with foreign directors. We saw we had to make them with our own people and grow together, accepting our deficiencies.

From the perspective of a historian of the nation’s cinema, this explains (though it does not justify) the long absence of I Am Cuba, along with other films directed by foreigners, from the canonical story of Cuban cinema that we’ve come to know. But as newer ideas of transnationality have helped us to see, we must appreciate such films as part of what I’ve previously called “the nation’s audiovisual body.”

In this sense, I Am Cuba becomes a film through which the Cuban nation, understood as an imagined community of the kind that political scientist Benedict Anderson explicated, can reveal itself to us anew—not as something self-contained but as a bundle of connections, stretching out in the most unexpected directions.

Translated from the Spanish by Will Noah