Socialist Surrealism

"You are not shooting to kill. You are firing at the past."

Black and white has a way of taking the most lush, colorfully inviting places on Earth and transforming them into alien wastelands, harsh and foreboding. In Mikhail Kalatazov's I Am Cuba, the Caribbean is tar-black, lapping at a chalky beach studded with bleached-out palm trees; sugar cane rises incongruously out of a gray desert. The monochromatic palette fits the film's political sensibilities: a joint production between the Soviet Union and Cuba, the movie serves as an ex post facto justification for Castro's revolution and subsequent regime. Westerners buy and sell the flesh of the poor for prurient delight; a sharecropper is informed that the lands he has worked his whole life have been sold off to the United Fruit Company and that he and his family must leave; a gang of American sailors accosts a woman in the street; a boy is martyred for distributing pro-Castro leaflets.

Like other similarly situated works of agitprop, such as Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, Sergei Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, and Frank Capra's Why We Fight, Kalatazov's film is a marvel of the artform, a potent mixture of pensive lyricism and technical virtuosity. The camera swoops, soars, pans, and tilts, producing a riot of imagery so bold that it is difficult to believe that it could have been birthed in the confines of the Soviet system. Steven Holden's 1995 New York Times' review (the film, completed in 1964, was not screened in the U.S. until after the Cold War) stated it perfectly when he opined that I Am Cuba "suggests Eisenstein filtered through 'La Dolce Vita' with an Afro-Cuban pulse. " Certainly Fellini and Eisenstein (of course) are two of the touchstones here, but also present are the influences of King Vidor and D.W. Griffith, a potent combination that threatens to subdue the film's overt political content.

Obviously, I Am Cuba's political legacy is a key deterrent to its widespread appreciation, as the Soviet system has since collapsed and Castro remains rightly reviled as a brutal authoritarian. Yet the images of repression and dispossession in the film do not smack of hamfisted falsity, nor are they fatally compromised like Riefenstahl's Nazi-era works. That such a fugue as Kalatazov weaves here could be a poison pen letter rhapsodically proclaiming a new bootheel pinned to the throat of the Cuban people he celebrates is one of the perverse ironies of art and history. Such is the risk the utopian runs.