VIDEO : Rediscovering ‘Cuba’s’ Artistry

‘I Am Cuba” had an unprecedented effect on director Werner Herzog. When he saw it in 1992 at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, he sought out the film’s camera operator, Alexander “Sasha” Calzatti, and gave him a kiss.

Arguably the cinematic find of the decade thus far, “I Am Cuba” has that effect on audiences too. At the San Francisco Film Festival, the film received a standing ovation while it was still running. Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese were moved, for the first time, to jointly “present” the film’s theatrical release earlier this year, and the National Society of Film Critics honored it with a special archival award (it came in second for best cinematography).

Not bad for a 1964 black-and-white celebration of revolutionary Cuba that for decades languished virtually unknown in Soviet archives. Its distributor, New York-based Milestone Film & Video, has now released the movie on videocassette. An ecstatic Herzog recommended: “Buy it, steal it, but get hold of it.”

“I Am Cuba” was directed by Mikhail Kalatozov, who gained international acclaim for “The Cranes Are Flying” (the 1958 winner of the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival) and “The Letter Never Sent.” “I Am Cuba” was a joint production of the Soviet Union and Cuba, and Kalatozov, then 61, envisioned it as a “Potemkin” for the Cuban people, a cinematic poem that would glorify their country’s liberation from the Fulgencio Batista regime.

The lyrical script was co-written by world-renowned Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Cuban novelist Enrique Pineda Barnet. The film unfolds in four stories that have the same propagandistic intent as Frank Capra’s World War II “Why We Fight” series. In the first story, Cuba’s downtrodden are cheered and loutish Americans are chastised: “For you I am the casinos, the bars, the hotels, the brothels, but the hands of these [peasant] children and old people are also me.”

But what distinguishes “I Am Cuba” are the astonishing visual set pieces. Influenced by Russian film director Sergei Eisenstein, Kalatozov sought to create a new cinematic language, which is expressed in several bravura visual sequences. Ninety-seven percent of the film was shot hand-held with an ultralight French Eclair camera.

One extraordinary single shot begins on a rooftop deck, where a beauty contest with bikini-clad women is underway. In one take, the camera winds through the crowds, proceeds over the edge of the roof, tracks downward to another deck and finally follows a tourist into a swimming pool and ends underwater.

The funeral of a freedom fighter is another celebrated sequence, in which the gravity-defying camera rises from street level, travels up the side of a building, crosses the street, enters a window, moves through a room where workers are rolling cigars, flies out another window and proceeds down a street filled with mourners.

“Wild. Genius,” Herzog marveled in a phone interview. “It’s totally demented. I talk to film students, and I say to them, ‘If you have not seen and studied this film, you don’t deserve to be a cinematographer.’ That’s my attitude.”

Tom Luddy, co-director of the Telluride Film Festival and a producer at American Zoetrope, is credited with rescuing “I Am Cuba” and bringing it to the United States.

“In my festival work,” he said, “I am used to rediscovering things, but this was different. This was rediscovering something that was never discovered. It was never appreciated in its own time or its own countries.”

Luddy first read about “I Am Cuba” in a 1967 article in Film Quarterly, in which author Steven P. Hill called it “the most brilliant Soviet film since the 1920s” and wrote that Kalatozov and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky’s technique of the “emotional camera . . . has to be seen to be believed.”

The governments of the Soviet Union and Cuba disowned the film, and it was considered lost. But, Luddy said, “I always made it a point to try and get it.”

Perestroika finally made it possible for Luddy to obtain a print, and he took the film, sight unseen, to Telluride. He later brought the film to the attention of Scorsese (“I knew it would blow him away”) and Coppola, for whom “The Letter Never Sent” influenced the visuals of “Apocalypse Now” and was screened often during production.

Film curator Edith Kramer acquired a print of “I Am Cuba” for the Pacific Film Archive and showed it at the 1993 San Francisco Film Festival. She called the film “delirious cinema.”

Milestone has carved itself a niche on the art house circuit by acquiring and distributing undiscovered classics never before released in the United States. Recent releases, also available on video, include Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Mamma Roma” and Alfred Hitchcock’s wartime shorts “Bon Voyage” and “Adventure Malgache.”

Co-founder Dennis Doros was alerted to “I Am Cuba” by friends who witnessed the film’s rapturous reception at the San Francisco festival. The film has since played to further acclaim in more than 150 cities and brought at least one of its creators unexpectedly into the limelight.

Camera operator Calzatti, who lives in Los Angeles, was profiled on National Public Radio and has met with, among others, directors Scorsese, Coppola, Oliver Stone and Paul Mazursky. Seeing the film for the first time since its original release, Calzatti said, was “like finding something from ‘Jurassic Park.’ ”

Scorsese has been quoted as saying that the film “puts to shame anything we’re doing today.”

Luddy agreed: “This film comes out of a time that reminds people when cinema could be and should be a much more visual medium than it is. Most films don’t exploit the full visual potential of cinematography.”

Calzatti also bemoaned how film grammar has stagnated through the years and expressed the hope that now that the film is readily accessible, students might be inspired by it and further expand on the film’s stylistic innovations.

Luddy said this has already happened. As executive producer of “My Family/Mi Familia,” he made a tape of “I Am Cuba” for cinematographer Edward Lachman. The film’s influence can be seen in two Steadicam sequences that Luddy referred to as “our ‘I Am Cuba’ sequences.”

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“I Am Cuba” retails for $79.95 and is available for rental in video stores or from Milestone Film & Video, (800) 603-1104.