I Am Cuba

Sometimes, when exploring new cinema, I get complacent and begin to think I’ve seen it all; that what may be done with a camera, a roll of celluloid and a pair of scissors, I have seen done. And then every once in a while, a film like Soy Cuba comes along and completely shatters my naïve and narrow-minded ignorance, reminding me of the infancy of the art-form and the mere fractions of its potential power that we currently wield. When I saw that opening shot, the long take that flies over the island and sweeps over its people, I recognised instantly that this was something separate, and moreover something special. It’s not as if I’ve never seen a Kalatozov film. The Cranes are Flying is stylistically similar in many respects. But even so, Soy Cuba is different. You can sense something seismic here, something that shifts your very perception of what cinema is. This is cinema reimagined. Soy Cuba is a film that sweats. The wide angle lens is unrelentingly proximate to people’s faces at all times, there is not a single shot where the camera does not move, and when it moves it moves. The frames hold such a degree of depth and dynamism that you can almost transcend sense with your eyes and feel their texture by merely beholding them. And in this almost unfathomable intimacy, is told a story of such massive proportions, that it’s a miracle it didn’t drown in superficiality. The protagonist of this film is the country of Cuba. And I don’t mean this in some sort of poeticised or figurative sense; the main character is literally Cuba. With a regard for both the intimacy and magnitude in scope, Kalatozov subsequently crafts something indicative of not only the spirit of a nation, and not only the spirit of an ideology, but of the spirit of humanity itself. In the camera that moves with such raw, kinetic, vital grace is captured a constant sense of fervency and national mass movement. In the four separate stories which are told, the only constant that binds them together is this sense of collective kineticism. When one character cries, the nation weeps, when one character chuckles the nation laughs and when one character dies the nation experiences collective outrage. The narrative scope, the technical ambition, the vitality, the emotiveness - it all culminates into the greatest piece of propaganda that has ever been produced. On a number of occasions, this film which is concerned with a very nation itself, manages to still become yet more than the sum of its parts, and to transcend itself, assuming an almost God-like aura. Especially when the camera commits to one of those notoriously Kalatozovian upward cranes, where it simply doesn’t stop moving, rising higher and higher until it gently touches the very ceiling of the heavens, you cannot but experience an intense emotional response. Perhaps the most famous scene of this film is when, during the funeral scene, after one of the revolutionaries has been killed, the camera cranes upwards over his funeral, passing floor after floor, and person after person, watching on from their balconies, and eventually passing over the Cuban flag, as if it were set free unto another realm. I’ve seen this scene a number of times beforehand - it’s a staple of cinema - yet this time it brought me to tears. I have never been so proud to be a socialist as I have when watching this. The intimacy and the scope, coupled with that sense of collective necessity, would rouse even Thatcher from her grave to wave a red banner and march to the Internationale. If Ophüls had an omniscient camera, then Kalatozov had an omnipotent camera, because for a film nearing its 60th anniversary it is still the most technically impressive feat in cinematographical history. On absolutely every metric imaginable, this is pure cinema, actualised to its absolute fullest capacity.