By Shahim Sheikh
Translator: Qin Tian
Proofreading: Easy two three
Source: High On Films (June 2, 2021)
Like other art forms, cinema has gradually become a vassal of politics, and I am afraid it will continue to do so in the future. From a historical perspective, the rise of cinema collided with the earliest stages of the rise of authoritarianism in the 20th century, arguing that the populist appeal of cinema spread its ideology faster than written words. However, it turns out that in the face of changing social and political trends, the lifespan of propaganda works of art will eventually be short.
Although the propaganda film lost its social and political connection over time, it contributed enormously to the development of the film itself, even more than any other type of film. Lenny Riefenstahl's depiction of the 1934 Nazi Party Congress through telephoto, low-angle lenses, and Eisenstein's creative use of montage and metaphorical images have made them an intrinsic part of the language of cinema.
Triumph of the Will, Triumph of the Will
Their creations, which do not associate with tradition, are creeping above the national identity, and these works are the product of nationality and ideology. In other words, the soil of creation is the key to the existence of these filmmakers, not their artistic appendages.
In 1964, three years after the U.S. government severed diplomatic relations with Cuba over the Bay of Pigs, the Moscow Film Studio and the Cuban Institute of Arts and Industry Films (ICAIC) collaborated on a film in which the Soviet Union tried to win over Cuban hearts and minds. The purpose of the film was to portray the splendor of the Cuban Revolution and the legitimacy of the subsequent socialist government.
Mikhail Karatozov, the pride of the Soviet film industry before Tarkovsky, was chosen as the director of the film under the title I Am Cuba. In essence, the film's purpose is to show the establishment of Cuban social classes and the poverty of most of the population under the exploitation of the United States. This is a typical "socialist realism" film, which is a means of disseminating socialist information internationally.
"I Am Cuba"
The film opens with a bird's eye view of the Cuban forest, followed by a view of a fishing village, followed by the metropolitan havana. A voice calling itself the "Voice of Cuba" tells in poetry how the rest of the world, through the lens of U.S. imperialism, sees Cuba as an exotic holiday destination, rarely as an independent country that truly belongs to the locals.
"I Am Cuba" shows from the beginning that the central characters of the film are the Cuban people of this land. Subsequently, it tells four stories of independence, all related to the above-mentioned exploitation of the Cuban people by the United States. There is a "Voice of Cuba" in every story, which echoes at the end of every story.
In order to show this Cuban locality, the natural scenes in the film have been treated with unique visual treatment. Karatozov purchased a special infrared photosensitive film from the Soviet Defense Forces, which gave the image a "woody feeling" - the leaves were bright as snow, they could reflect light, and the trees and other plants emitted fluorescence, which was especially the "woody feeling" of the opening shots of fishing villages and boatmen.
In the first scene in Havana, the camera descends from the rooftop all the way down to the pool. In I Am Cuba, there are countless such difficult shots that take place in a matter of minutes, and they show a fluidity that will stunned the audience and the most experienced filmmakers. In another difficult shot, a farmer decides to burn down his crops and house because they are about to be taken away by his employer, who has sold the land to Union Fruit. The camera follows the farmer, who sets fire to the house and falls into the farmland, focusing on the smoky sky.
In the film's most iconic language of shots, the camera moves from a crowded street all the way up to a cigar workshop, through a room, and then leaves through a window, hovering over the street for a bird's-eye view of the martyr's funeral taking place beneath. Another memorable scene is the protest on the steps of the monument, reminiscent of the passage of the Odessa Steps in Battleship Potemkin: the chaos of smoke, water and fire ensues, and the chaos of the moment is deeply rooted in every frame. This technique was unforeseeable until the release of I Am Cuba; it ignored the angles, compositions, blocks, and movements of traditional shots, and exhibited an Orson Wells-style mirror movement in its radicalism.
Because each shot in I Am Cuba is long and so complex, it's hard to spot the beauty of each shot as a complete whole, and if we press the pause button, each frame looks like a fascinating landscape. The film's depiction of the beauty of Cuba as an inherent part of its narrative ignited national fervor, and while igniting national fervor, the use of wide-angle lenses began to make more sense.
Karatozov's idea was to show cuba from all angles in its entirety, not skipping anything ordinary and ugly, and covering the world as much as possible, so that the audience could discover its beauty from time to time, rather than being overwhelmed by complicated shots.
"Poetic films" are films that rely entirely on audiovisual, they can tell stories in a self-consistent and harmonious manner, without subtitles or voiceovers to explain anything, and they can also present a sensitive lyricism. It is not an objective genre, its original intention is that film as a medium, pure and flawless presentation to the audience, because it is often considered to be the purest, the most able to express the human instincts of the art form.
"Adjectives" are probably the highest honor a poetic film can be given because it delves into the most fundamental issues of the medium itself. Directors who make poetry films all have their own unique ways of doing so, but they all have one thing in common, which is to tell stories visually, visually, and musically.
I Am Cuba is particularly good in this regard, because its greatest merit is its own style and Karatozov's uncompromising perspective. The voiceover "I am Cuba" may seem a bit tough, but given the film's ideological purpose, it must contradict some of the claims of poetic cinema and use the voiceover to enhance visual poetry.
Unlike Eisenstein, who was clearly a strict formalist, Karatozov's style was never limited by technical details. The characters move through the space of the film, no different from reality, and their movement is almost unrestricted by the camera. The film has a spontaneity, which makes it more like Godard's early black-and-white films than Karatozov's Soviet peers.
Yet the facts themselves are enormously persuasive. Every shot of the film was carefully planned and filmed. Somehow, they have an energy of modernity in them, and the joy of revolutionary triumph and the dynamism of the youth contributed to the revolution, thus reducing the technical complexity of those lenses.
When I Am Cuba was released in 1964, it was immediately banned, and it wasn't until the '90s, when Martin Scorsese rediscovered it and showed the film to the world with Coppola, acknowledging its enormous artistic value, that it was able to reappear.
The Soviets thought its message was too mild, the stereotypes of Cubans in the film offended cubans, and the West ignored it because of the tensions in international relations at the time. Karatozov's social body made him, but it was through his rebellion against this system that he inadvertently created a unique work like "I Am Cuba".
The film's free, independent character may well have been a great threat to Soviet propaganda. The film opens with a shot looking down on the Cuban forest so serene, and the last story breaks that serenity.
We can also see that with a deeper understanding of extremism, authoritarian governments can suppress even works that propagate their own ideologies, and that these contain the most personal aspects of art—poetry.