“They’re going to be carrying ravished film students out of the theaters on stretchers,” wrote Terrence Rafferty in the New Yorker when this astonishing Soviet-made portrait of Castro’s Cuba was rediscovered in the mid 1990s. Featuring some of the jaw-dropping camerawork ever filmed (and decades before the invention of the Steadicam), the movie is a euphoric celebration of Cuba, the Revolution, and (most potently) revolutionary cinema.
In the early 60s Fidel Castro welcomed radical filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard, Chris Marker and Cesare Zavattini to witness his new socialist Cuba, but it was the Russian Mikhail Kalatozov and his collaborators who produced what now looks like the revolution’s most extraordinary art work.
Infused with a palpable love for the country and a righteous anger at the injustices of the Batista era, I Am Cuba is a propaganda picture in four narrative sections. In the first, three ugly American businessmen carouse with prostitutes in a bar; in another, a tenant farmer torches the land that has been sold out from under him; a third features a radical student protester; and the fourth shows a peasant farmer take up a rifle after his son is killed in a air strike on the rebels.
The stories are simple polemic, but they assume real power from the spare script by poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and especially from the lyrical, sensuous traveling shots composed by cameraman Sergei Urusevsky, probably the real genius in the team. Using infrared stock, elaborate systems of cranes, cables and pulleys, a wide-angle lens and a blindfold (which he would remove shortly before filming to keep his eye fresh) Urusevsky conjured a fluid, floating dream of Cuba – and a unique aesthetic experience decades ahead of its time.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 20-minute introduction and talkback.
Sept 21: Intro by Mike Archibald, writer, editor and filmmaker
A classic… absolutely astonishing! I Am Cuba is that rarity of rarities, a genuine hidden treasure. It puts to shame anything we’re doing today.
Martin Scorsese
One of the most deliriously beautiful films ever made.
Manohla Dargis, LA Weekly
Some of the most exhilarating camera movements and most luscious black-and-white cinematography you’ll ever see.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Presented by
Mikhail Kalatozov
Sergio Corrieri, Salvador Wood, José Gallardo, Raúl García
Cuba/USSR
1964
In English and Spanish with English subtitles
Indigenous & Community Access
Also in This Series
Les Enfants du Paradis (Children of Paradise)
The crowning glory of classical French cinema, this sumptuous melodrama brings to life the early 19th century Boulevard du Crime in Paris, where popular audiences for mime shows and carnival rub shoulders with wealthy patrons of classical theatre.
The Wild Bunch (Director's Cut)
The Mexico/Texas borderlands, 1913: Pike (William Holden) leads his gang of aging outlaws on a foray south for one last hurrah. Peckinpah's masterpiece, a savage lament for men who believe in nothing but find respect by dying in vain.
The Ascent
During the darkest winter of WWII, two Soviet partisans venture through the backwoods of Belarus in search of food, always at risk of falling into enemy hands. In her masterpiece Larisa Shepitko zeroes in on profound spiritual and philosophical themes.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire
Céline Sciamma's queer costume drama -- about a painter covertly studying a young noblewoman who refuses to sit for her portrait -- was voted 30th Greatest Film Ever Made in a 2022 poll, the highest ranking film of the past decade.
I Am Cuba
Infused with a palpable love for the country and a righteous anger at the injustices of the Batista era, I Am Cuba features some of the jaw-dropping camerawork ever filmed. A euphoric celebration of Cuba, the Revolution, and revolutionary cinema.
The Colour of Pomegranates + The House Is Black
This month's Pantheon screening is a double-bill, Sergei Parajanov's extraordinary evocation of the life and work of C18th Armenian poet Sayat Nova, and, The House is Black (22 min), the only film directed by the great Iranian poet Forugh Farrokhzad.
Fantasia
Walt Disney pushed the boundaries of animation and sound recording when he put together a movie concert: eight classical pieces by Bach, Beethoven, Stravinski et al, each animated in a different style. It's playful, sometimes cute, other times inspired.
Image: © Disney, 1940