‘Cuba’ opens a time capsule of film art

Cinephiles who did not catch “I Am Cuba,” Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 agitprop masterpiece, when it was first released in this country 10 years ago will definitely want to get out for the Milestone Films re-release of this visually stunning piece of filmmaking-slash-fascinating historical artifact. The first and only Soviet-Cuban cinematic collaboration, the film began production three years after Castro’s rise to power, during a time of unchecked revolutionary optimism. Kalatozov, writers Yevgeni Yevtushenko and Enrique Pineda Barnet, and cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky (who collaborated with Kalatozov on “Cranes Are Flying”) hoped it would do for the Cuban revolution what Eisenstein’s “Potemkin” did for the Russian Soviet. But the movie, which took two years to shoot, went over like a lead battleship with Soviet authorities and the Cuban movie-going public, falling into relative obscurity until it was rediscovered and screened in 1992 at the Telluride Film Festival and at the San Francisco Film Festival the following year. It has now been stripped of its clunky Russian overdub, and the English subtitles, originally taken from the Russian translation of the Spanish, have been retranslated from the Spanish with the Slavic middleman cut out.

A strange, sinuous and heartfelt tribute to a country of striking contrasts, told with all of the high-handed earnestness of ideologues in the first flush of optimism, “I Am Cuba” is remarkable not for its lessons -- which are valid, but tendentious to the point of kitsch -- but its ravishing technique. It is a film for movie buffs and movie makers; an exhilarating reminder of what can be achieved with a hand-held camera and some black-and-white film..

From the opening shots, in which a helicopter-mounted camera loaded with infrared film stock soars above the island, rendering its surrounding ocean ink-black and turning the fronds of the palm trees into white feathers, the film zeroes in on its subject’s stark contrasts. A place Columbus called “the most beautiful land ever seen by human eyes,” Cuba is shown as a resource-rich paradise riddled with poverty and economic oppression.

The villains of the story, no surprise, are the marauding American businessmen and their various enablers -- roving packs of menacing sailors, wealthy Cuban landowners and the porcine dictator Fulgencio Batista, who is also given a doppelganger in the form of a murderous cop. The heroes are the guajiro peasants, the slum dwellers, the working girls and the students, who endure back-breaking labor, eke out miserable livings and take impossibly selfless, idealistic risks as big city bourgeois fat cats laugh it up on hotel rooftops.

Never have bikinis and cocktails looked more sinister, the poor so richly deserving, nor Americans uglier than in the movie’s nightmarish portrayals of the leisure classes. But it’s Urusevsky’s mostly hand-held camerawork that makes the real impression -- from the five-minute tracking shot that takes in the fashion show and dives into the pool, to the simple but astonishing view of a young revolutionary slinking toward the door of a subterranean garage after having lost his nerve during an assassination attempt. Every moment of the two-hour film pulses with visual ingenuity, giving “I Am Cuba” the odd, time-capsule-ish air of what might have been had cinema not completely given itself over to computer graphics and special effects. In a sense, it’s a movie about looking past surfaces to see what’s in front of you. It takes the time to look around and discovers majesty, beauty and pathos everywhere it turns.

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‘I Am Cuba’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Contains some sexual situations and battle scenes

Milestone Films and Landmark Films present. A Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese presentation. Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. Written by Yevgeni Yevtushenko and Enrique Pineda Barnet. Cinematography by Sergei Urusevsky. Music by Carlos Farinas. Running time: 2 hours, 21 minutes. Black & white. In Spanish and English with English subtitles.