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I Am Cuba Actors: Sergio Corrieri, Salvador Wood Director: Mikheil Kalatozishvili Number of Items: 1 Picture Format: Academy Ratio Format: Black & White Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Running Time: 140 minutes Studio: Image Entertainment Aspect Ratio: 1.33:1 Product Group: DVD Release Date: 2000-01-04 Buy from Amazon |
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From Description A most acclaimed discovery, I Am Cuba will change your view of cinema forever! Filmed by great Russian director Mikhail Kalatozov (The Cranes Are Flying), I Am Cuba is an epic poem to Communist kitsch--a whirling, feverish dance through the sensuous decadence of Battista's Havana and the grinding poverty and oppression of the Cuban people. Presented jointly by master directors Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, I Am Cuba has received universal acclaim and admiration from around the world as a true classic of world cinema. In Spanish and Russian with English subtitles. 140 minutes. |
 "Beautifully Shot--the rest is garbage"This is propaganda at its worst. The camera work is unbelievable. It's a shame, I think the cinematography in this film is the greatest I've ever seen. But the glorification of the "Revolution" is too much to handle. Batista was no saint, but Cuba faired much better under him than Castro. You gotta hand it to the Soviets, they knew how to make beautiful films all the while promoting their disgusting agenda. Don't eat before watching this film--the film's message will make you puke. "Communist trash. Period."Stylish? This must be coming from those who think red stars are pretty. This is absolutely garbage. Required viewing in high school? The good "doctor" is a Noam Chomsky freak (note his email) who, if he believes so adamantly in the revolution, should get the he*l out of the United States, renounce his citizenship, and go live in Cuba. If he thinks it's perfect, go to it. And if there's any doubt where Chomsky's heart lies, just look him up. This will tell you where the good doctor's review comes from in it's take on this piece of garbage - and can give you some insight into why you now have another reason to send your kid to private school. Of course, I on the other know first hand what it is like to have everything taken and be forced to leave as my family did at the end of 1958 (the "revolution" started then, Castro just didn't take over until '59...but it was clear what was coming down the pike) thanks to the man who's image we put on toilet paper here in Miami, Florida. The "success" of the revolution as it pertains to the health of Cuba is clear and well-settled. So is the success of capitalism. Yet there are those who still want to argue the point foolishly. There are also those who somehow miss the point when admonishing the U.S. in it's stance on Cuba, while it, at the same time, somehow, has bestowed "most favored nation" trade status on Communist China. But, this is not something that's going to be changed, or even appropriately addressed within the confines of some meager review at Amazon. The bottom line - this is propaganda trash, pure and simple. No other way around it. If you think it's flashy, so be it. Sugar-coated trash is still trash. Support it if you will, that's your right and choice, but you're a fool if you think you're supporting any form of true artistic beauty (as this supposedly lauded to be) in the process. Unless you want to be one who's in it for the "IGNORANCE IS BLISS" approach and close your eyes to the reality of how things were, are and continue to be, while you wallow in your so-called "style" above anything else, then I suppose this would be the movie for you. If, on the other hand, you want to get a real sense of what went on and how it is still is? Get "NOBODY LISTENED." I recommended it above, so you can link right to it.  "Distortion Well Packaged"Two undeniable facts: First, "I Am Cuba" is a cinematic triumph. Second, it is totalitarian propaganda of the highest and most dishonest order. First, Mikhail Kalatzov comes from the school of Eisenstein, the present work highly reminiscent of the earlier director's films glamorizing the Russian revolts which led to the revolution. Kalatzov outstrips Eisenstein in that he uses a greater economy of movement, lenses and film types having greatly improved by 1964, not to mention directorial technique. Certain of the peasant scenes early in the film are reminiscent of Eisenstein's earlier filming in Mexico, which would lead to the eventual assembly and release of the masterpiece "Que Viva Mexico" ("Mexican Fantasy") in 1979. Could Kalatzov have seen Eisenstein's unedited rushes prior to 1964? No matter how much one may admire Kalatzov's "The Cranes are Flying," it is obvious that he has become incredibly dexterous in this film. The cinematic work is stunning. Second, propagandists need to be more careful so as not to be so transparent in their disingenuousness. In this respect, "I Am Cuba" is an odious example of the fabricated record of how something did not happen. One need only read the works of and interviews with Fidel Castro to know that the movie is largely fiction. For example, he certainly did not have the sympathy of the students upon his landing in Oriente; the students were sceptical, considering Fidel had led scores of students to their certain death only a few years before with his disastrous storming of the barracks at Santiago. Nor did he have the support of Cuba's communists until well after the taking of Havana and the institutionalization of the revolution. As Fidel likes to say the revolution only began with the taking of Cuba, that it continues to this day, one awaits the sequel. For in the present work, one must be amused at the cartoon presentation of the Americans in Havana, when the more sinister aspects of the mafia could have been shown. A "Child of...." follow-up would of necessity have to back up his claim that the Americans are still responsible for his revolution's failure. Another example is that, as Che Guevara had fallen from Fidel's and Moscow's favor by 1964, he is represented only in the penultimate chapter, when shown ever so discreetly in the Sierra Maestra instructing in communism the adolescent boys he so favored. "Child of...." would have to show Che as chief magistrate of the tribunal which executed over a thousand grudge match "criminals" after Fidel's victory. The revolution simply did not happen as the film depicts. Just as Nietzche wrote of the genealogy of morals, so too is there a family tree of indecency masquerading as the moral. The film fails to relate that Fidel, when tried for the barracks disaster, resulting in over 60 immediate deaths and subsequent executions of those innocents, confronted the judges in a long speech in which he used the same declaration given a few short decades before by his hero, Adolf Hitler, proclaiming, "History will absolve me." The film fails to relate how Fidel had carried a worn copy of Mein Kampf during his undergraduate term at the University of Havana. Unfortunately, it is the second aspect which foils the first. The tendency of totalarian regimes to create myths to support their glories, when the fabric of the truth is soiled, can only lead to eventual ridicule by scholars. In this respect, all of this film's cinematic achievements are betrayed by the embarrassing absence of truth and mythical fabrication. It's like that attractive box of cereal at the super market, its glitzy colors gripping the eye, until you read the nutritional panel, revealing it to be but junk food, loaded with calories, sugar and carbs. In this instance, you find a box which fails to tell of how one tyranny replaced another, the latter even more destructive than the former. Finally, just why and how did Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese get mixed-up in this nonsense? One can only admire and thank them for their involvement with Akira Kurosawa years before. Their roles as promoters of this film unfortunately tarnishes their images, making them to appear no more than caricatures of the usual Hollywood leftist camp. Ah, well, just as Prokofiev and Shostakovich were under the thumb of Stalin, so too Kalatzov had to endure Khrushchev in 1964. One can only take heart that this film is not so well known as to besmirch his cinematic finery in "The Cranes are Flying." "3 Stars For The Camerawork"I AM CUBA is a remarkable technical achievement. The camera swoops and dives and flies in ways unheard of before the advent of the steadicam. If you're looking for a visually stunning couple of hours, by all means see this film. Unfortunately, if you're looking for anything beyond stunning visuals, you can pretty much forget about it. I AM CUBA is also a non-stop parade of often laughably simple-minded propaganda cliches. Dr. Goebbels would have loved it.  "Listen, Yankee: Soy Cuba"Many reviewers here want to somehow recognize the technical and even artistic quality of this film while calling it "totalitarian garbage", thereby preserving their hep cat credentials. This is self-contradictory, for I Am Cuba neatly deconstructs the claim that Socialists can't make a case for Socialism or make entertaining films. Sure, Socialists can't make comedy. We have The Three Stooges but it appears that at best the Russians have The Five Stupid Guys Without Culture, perhaps because capitalism, which has the arguable virtue of so diffusing oppression that it becomes a background noise, issuing not in labor camps but in the everyday, generates the very ability to laugh it off. Whereas socialismus, it has to be admitted, generates darkness in concentrated lumps. However, I Am Cuba translates an argument for an actually existing socialism into a good story. As a 56 year old American I found the characterizations of the nightclubbing Americans painfully accurate renditions of the sort of man who circa 1959 was sent by his company to do business in Havana. Far from being a cardboard characterization, the film takes pains to recognize that even within a small group there will be differences and macho pressures to "enjoy the fun" of a mobbed up Havana on members of the "team". As we see in the film, the boozed up and mobbed up will force together the Quiet American and the sad girl and there will be a moment, between the quiet man and sad girl of recognition, which turns into her knowledge that he will fail to follow through. That's why we follow the Quiet American, coded accurately as such by his late Fifties hipster beard, to the *favela* and realize that this might be one Yanqui who might Listen, maybe if the homes whacked him upside the head, which they don't. It may have been illogical for an Anglo Texan, C. Wright Mills, to write Listen, Yankee, a book which identified the failure of recognition in America's insistence that Cuba needed to preserve a mobbed-up free market, since by the "law" of comparative advantage, Cubans were best at shaking their thang for gangstas, and did not need an education or health care to do so. But it was no more logical for a New England Yankee family to move to Texas and claim to be trueblue American cowboys thereby, and able to speak for struggling "real" Americans. But over time it became impossible for a Norteamericano to empathize with Cuba, or Nicaragua, to the degree where he might realize that America is one continent and that most folks on it are just struggling to get by...to the degree where a New England yankee might start rolling his Rs instead of lying with a smirk and a drawl. I Am Cuba has a shot at restoring this ability over time, for I can well imagine guys on oil rigs or fishing boats watching this film with approval; my experience is that the socialist message is received but that American media, systematically, fails to amplify it. In sociology, methodological individualism makes nameless the phenomenon of a guy on an oil rig having a socialist epiphany but being literally unable to speak about it without translating it to a nihilistic grunt easily fed into the hopper of a manufactured consent, as fungible as the oil for which he drills. Io son Cuba is just a start. The next sequence of the film, after the nighclub and *favela* gets to The Heart of the Matter which is you work like a dog cutting cane (one of the most difficult jobs on earth) on land you think you own only to be expropriated. This raises the question as to whether post-revolutionary repression can be justified by slow-motion expropriation...right down to the last uncashable paycheck. Sure, Fidelismo is repressive. In a patriarchal socialism you know where to lay the blame. You have Beard Papa, for even as Shakespeare's Henry V complained, we need somewhere to lay our burden down, our careful wives and children rawly left. The American CIA cynically exploits the family romance as seen most poignantly in the Elian Gonzales case, which the CIA lost. Didn't it. In a mobbed-up Havana the executioner's face is well hid. The girls, dancing parodies of ancient dances in African masks to show off their body, are Adorno's puppet show in which enjoyment is killed once you know why the show must go on, and the rictus of desparation behind the mask. I recommend that Americans including Americans dispossessed by hurricanes or Walmart, living on their brother's couch, check this baby out. If even Warren Buffett can admit that owing to permanent tax cuts restricted by an "alternative minimum tax" to the upper class, excluding even the *haute* bourgeois, America is becoming a sharecropper society, most Americans should be curious about what life might be like for them in a Havanized Miami, and what the alternative might be. I also recommend a Taschen book on contemporary Cubano style, because it contains photographs of apartments today in Havana. The apartments are by the standards of the American *haute* bourgeois complete dumps but they have loads of books in what is supposed to be a "totalitarian" state, whereas the apartments of the rich and famous in Architectural Digest have DVDs and CDs but no books. The high technical quality of this film made it marketable in America. Its black and white photography coincides with the zenith of B & W world wide and shows accurately how "green" palm trees, as I saw in Key West and the Tortugas, register as a kind of white. At the same time, its soundtrack is sufficiently confusing to force the listener to attend. It delivers translations in English, Russian, and Spanish and the effect is incantatory. I am Cuba. Ya Cuba. Soy Cuba. Yeah, well venceremos dude after all these wasted years. The brutal fact is that in the USA, 20% of Americans have gotten significantly rich (often through nothing more than what might be termed The Higher Grab-Ass in corporations and law firms) and 80% have been restored to the lives of their great-grandpappy. |
