I am Cuba

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Movie
German title I am Cuba
Original title Soy Cuba
Country of production Cuba
Soviet Union
original language Spanish , English
Publishing year 1964
length 135 minutes
Rod
Director Mikhail Kalatosov
script Enrique Pineda Barnet
Yevgeny Yevtushenko
production Bela Fridman
Semyon Maryakhin
Miguel Mendoza
music Carlos Fariñas
camera Sergei Urusevsky
cut Nina Glagoleva
occupation
  • Sergio Corrieri: Alberto
  • José Gallardo: Pedro
  • Raúl García: Enrique
  • Luz María Collazo: Maria / Betty
  • Jean Bouise : Jim

Ich bin Kuba (Original title: Soy Cuba ) is a Soviet - Cuban propaganda film from 1964 ,directed by Michail Kalatosow . The film shows, in four episodes with independent content, set in pre-revolutionary Cuba, how the resistance against the regime of Fulgencio Batista is formedout of the suffering of the population. It was not well received by either the Cuban or Russian public and was almost completely forgotten until it wasrediscovered by US filmmakersin the 1990s. The acrobatic tracking shots and the striking staging helped the film to achieve late fame, especially in the Anglo-American region.

action

The film consists of four separate stories about the suffering of the Cuban people and their reaction to it, ranging from passive tolerance in the first to armed resistance in the last. Between the episodes there are poetic monologues of a female lyrical self that calls itself Cuba.

In a kind of prologue, the camera first follows a wooden boat on a narrow waterway through a poor village. The lyrical I speaks about the admiration that Christopher Columbus felt for Cuba, and the sweet sugar cane that brought the country many tears. This is followed by a cut to the roof of a hotel where a rock 'n' roll trio is playing and a beauty contest for women wearing bikini is taking place. In a long plan sequence , the camera then moves down the side of the building to a lower level where many tourists cavort around a swimming pool. The camera follows a brunette woman in swimwear into the pool and below the surface, where she shows her swimming and diving alongside other bathers.

After this opening the first story begins, which revolves around the young woman Maria. She is forced to work as a dancer and prostitute "Betty" in one of Havana's nightclubs , which is particularly frequented by rich Americans. Maria's friend Rene, who works as a fruit seller, doesn't know anything about her job. At the urging of a customer, Maria takes him to her little hut in a poor district of Havana. The next morning he tosses her a few dollars and takes her most valuable asset, a necklace with a crucifix pendant. As he is about to leave, Rene comes in and sees his embarrassed fiancée. The American says goodbye to "Betty" without feeling and simply leaves the stunned Rene standing there. On the way back through the slums he is surrounded by hungry children.

The next story is about the farmer Pedro who has just grown his largest sugar cane harvest to date . As Pedro has just started harvesting, his landlord rides to his farm to tell him that he has sold Pedro's land to United Fruit and that Pedro and his family must leave immediately. When asked, he explains that Pedro is not allowed to keep the harvest either, and rides away. Pedro pretends to his children that everything is fine. He hands them all the money and tells them to have fun in town. After they leave, Pedro sets the harvest and the family home on fire. He collapses and dies.

The third story describes the suppression of rebellious students at the University of Havana , led by a character named Enrique. Enrique burns down a drive-in theater that is showing footage of the dictator Batista and saves Gloria, a young woman harassed by American sailors in the street. He defies party discipline and sets out to shoot a brutal police chief from the roof of a skyscraper, but when he sees him through the scope in the circle of his family, he cannot pull the trigger. While Enrique is away, his colleagues print leaflets. The house is searched and the students are arrested. One of the revolutionaries began tossing leaflets from a balcony at the crowd below and was shot by a police officer. Enrique then leads a protest rally at the university. The police use water cannons to break up the gathering. After the demonstration turns violent, Enrique is shot dead by the same police chief he previously targeted. His body is carried through the streets of Havana during a great funeral march in which Gloria also takes part.

The last part shows Mariano, a typical farmer, who rejects a revolutionary soldier's invitation to join the rebels. The soldier appeals to Mariano's desire for a better life for his children, but Mariano just wants to live in peace and insists that the soldier leave. Immediately afterwards, however, government planes began bombing the area indiscriminately. Mariano's hut is destroyed and his young son is killed. As a result, he joins the rebels in the Sierra Maestra mountains and heroically fights a rifle from the enemy. The film ends with a triumphal march of the guerrilla army to Havana to proclaim the revolution.

Emergence

Shortly after the Cuban Revolution overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 , the Cuban Film Institute ( ICAIC ) turned to other socialist states in search of support in the film sector, in particular to address the problem of a lack of skilled workers. The film project began at the second Moscow International Film Festival in 1961, where Alfredo Guevara, director of the ICAIC, signed co-production agreements with the Mosfilm studios. The Soviet Union then provided the most important people in the film crew (including the director, a screenwriter, the cameraman and the film editor). The Soviet cooperation partners also brought the technical equipment for the shooting themselves, and after the shooting they left it in Cuba due to an informal agreement. The budget of the film amounted to 600,000 US dollars .

The shooting lasted from October 1962 to June 1964. The film was shot exclusively with an Éclair Cameflex CM3 camera. The shooting locations in Havana included the Hotel Habana Libre and H. Upmann's cigar factory . The filmmakers made use of innovative technical aids. For the shooting of the hotel sequence at the beginning of the film, they built a primitive wooden elevator that could be lowered by hand. The first camera operator filmed on the upper level and then handed the camera over to a second, who was in the elevator and drove down with her. Once at the bottom, the third surgeon took over the camera and carried it over the lower level and into the pool. The camera was waterproofed by putting a plastic bag over it. When shooting the funeral scene, the film crew used equipment that was attached to two ropes and specially constructed for the occasion. The device, on the underside of which the camera was attached with a magnet, could be moved by hand about 100 feet (the equivalent of about 30.5 meters) out of the window. To film the final triumphal march, Raúl Castro brought about 5,000 Cuban soldiers from the Oriente province to a remote location.

Publication, oblivion and rediscovery

The premiere of Ich bin Kuba took place on July 26, 1964 at the same time in the Teatro Cuba of Santiago de Cuba and in Moscow. Despite the great support, the film was received negatively by the public and press in both production countries. The Cuban press complained that the cameramen and their dancing cameras were showing "circus scenes" in which the Cubans were not interested. In the USSR, I am Cuba was seen as naive, not revolutionary enough, even too benevolent, towards the life of the bourgeois class that had ruled Cuba before Castro. Soviet censors feared the film because it was too idealistic and showed the Soviet people American life in Cuba. The film was therefore canceled after a week in the USSR and after two weeks in Cuba and disappeared in the archives. When it was first published, it did not reach any western countries because it was a communist production.

When the USSR fell apart in the early 1990s, I Am Cuba was practically unknown. In 1992, Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante had an unsubtitled copy of the film shown at the Telluride Film Festival as part of a Kalatosow retrospective. The San Francisco International Film Festival showed the film in 1993. With the support of directors Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola , the distributor Milestone Film & Video, which specializes in lost and neglected films, released the film on DVD in the USA in 1995. In Europe, the film was first shown at the 2003 Cannes International Film Festival. In 2004 the Brazilian filmmaker Vicente Ferraz completed a documentary entitled Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano , for which he interviewed people in Cuba who had worked on I am Cuba . The only DVD release in German-speaking countries was released in 2005 by the Swiss distributor trigon-film .

Reception after the rediscovery

Anglo-Saxon area

The reception of the film after its rediscovery was largely positive in the Anglo-Saxon region. Roger Ebert still considers it to be an impressive “example of lyrical black and white cinema”. For Richard Gott of The Guardian I am Cuba remains one of the great films of the 1960s. God recognizes in him "an epic and poetic account that [surpasses] its subject". The film "[conjure] brilliantly the vibrant atmosphere of the island and of the extraordinary decade when the Cubans left the American sphere and began to shape a new world order according to their imaginations". Stephen Holden of the New York Times recognizes that I am Cuba is “much more than a relic of communist kitsch” due to the visionary camera work. For Holden, the one-dimensional characters are particularly negative. The fact that the film constantly monumentalizes heroes and enemies may be visually impressive, but at some point it gets tiring. For Jonathan Rosenbaum ( Chicago Reader ) the film eludes an evaluation, it is at the same time "undeniably monstrous and breathtakingly beautiful, ridiculous and awe inspiring". Paul Julian Smith praises the film in Sight & Sound as "a remarkably eccentric and lyrical hymn to the transformative powers of cinema".

In season 3, episode 5 of the American series The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel , a scene from the first story of Ich bin Kuba , which takes place in a nightclub, is adopted almost one-to-one.

German-speaking area

The German-speaking critics were also impressed. According to Ekkehard Knörer ( Die Tageszeitung ), the form of Ich bin Kuba infallibly takes the viewer's breath away . Knörer recognizes the actual protagonist of the film in the camera, which hardly ever seems to stand still. For Geri Krebs from the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , the film is a “fascinating cinematographic hybrid”. It is a matter of "Soviet revolutionary cinema in the tradition of a Pudowkin or Eisenstein , but transplanted into the tropical ambience of a country that has just freed itself from the neo-colonialist yoke". The Lexicon of International Films recognizes Ich bin Kuba as a "film [impressive] because of its visual design", whose pathos "[goes beyond] the framework of socialist realism because of its warmth".

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Michael Chanan: Cuban Cinema. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis / London 2004, ISBN 978-0-8166-3424-8 , p. 166.
  2. ↑ Alexei Konovalov: Sur le tournage de Soy Cuba. Lettres de Sergueï Ouroussevski à son épouse Bella Friedman (1961–1962) In: 1895. Revue d'Histoire du Cinéma. No. 77, 2015, ISSN  0769-0959 , p. 107.
  3. ↑ George Turner: The Astonishing Images of I Am Cuba. In: American Cinematographer. July 1995, ISSN  0002-7928 , p. 77.
  4. ↑ Alexei Konovalov: Sur le tournage de Soy Cuba. Lettres de Sergueï Ouroussevski à son épouse Bella Friedman (1961–1962) In: 1895. Revue d'Histoire du Cinéma. No. 77, 2015, ISSN  0769-0959 , p. 107 f.
  5. ↑ George Turner: The Astonishing Images of I Am Cuba. In: American Cinematographer. July 1995, ISSN  0002-7928 , p. 80.
  6. ↑ Alexei Konovalov: Sur le tournage de Soy Cuba. Lettres de Sergueï Ouroussevski à son épouse Bella Friedman (1961–1962) In: 1895. Revue d'Histoire du Cinéma. No. 77, 2015, ISSN  0769-0959 , p. 110.
  7. ↑ Raúl Rodríguez (camera assistant), in: Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano , 2004, TC: 0:02:00 - 0:02:32.
  8. ↑ Alexander Calzatti, quoted from George Turner: The Astonishing Images of I Am Cuba. In: American Cinematographer. July 1995, ISSN  0002-7928 , p. 80.
  9. ↑ Alexander Calzatti, quoted from George Turner: The Astonishing Images of I Am Cuba. In: American Cinematographer. July 1995, ISSN  0002-7928 , p. 82.
  10. ↑ Juan Varona (machinist), in: Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano , 2004, TC: 0:57:05 - 0:57:42.
  11. ↑ Raúl García (actor), in: Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano , 2004, TC: 1:01:49 - 1:02:44.
  12. ↑ Alexander Calzatti, in: Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano , 2004, TC: 1:08:16 - 1:09:44.
  13. ↑ Alexander Calzatti, in: Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano , 2004, TC: 1:08:16 - 1:09:44.
  14. ↑ Alexei Konovalov: Sur le tournage de Soy Cuba. Lettres de Sergueï Ouroussevski à son épouse Bella Friedman (1961–1962) In: 1895. Revue d'Histoire du Cinéma. No. 77, 2015, ISSN  0769-0959 , p. 107.
  15. ↑ Jonathan Rosenbaum: Visionary Agitprop. In: Chicago Reader. December 8, 1995, ISSN  1096-6919 , p. 44 ( PDF file ).
  16. ↑ Alexei Konovalov: Sur le tournage de Soy Cuba. Lettres de Sergueï Ouroussevski à son épouse Bella Friedman (1961–1962) In: 1895. Revue d'Histoire du Cinéma. No. 77, 2015, ISSN  0769-0959 , p. 107.
  17. ^ Roger Ebert: Review. In: RogerEbert.com. December 8, 1995, accessed October 9, 2018 .
  18. ↑ Richard Gott: From Russia with love. In: The Guardian. November 12, 2005, accessed October 9, 2018 .
  19. ↑ Stephen Holden: A Visionary Cuba, When Believers Still Believed. In: The New York Times. March 18, 1995, accessed October 9, 2018 .
  20. ↑ Jonathan Rosenbaum: Visionary Agitprop. In: Chicago Reader. December 8, 1995, ISSN  1096-6919 , p. 44 ( PDF file ).
  21. ^ Paul Julian Smith: Review. In: Sight & Sound. August 1999, accessed October 9, 2018 .
  22. ↑ Michael Cumming: The Marvelous Soy Cuba. December 8, 2019, accessed February 9, 2020 .
  23. ↑ Ekkehard Knörer: The hallucinations of a camera. In: The daily newspaper. July 13, 2006, accessed October 16, 2018 .
  24. ↑ Geri Krebs: Revolutionary anthem of a "Siberian mammoth". In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung. December 17, 2004, accessed October 16, 2018 .
  25. ↑ I am Cuba. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed November 21, 2018 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 

Web links