DVD Watch

I Am Cuba: The Ultimate Edition

Forty-five years ago, director Mikhail Kalatozov was commissioned by the Soviet government to make a film about the 1959 Cuban revolution, which had turned that tiny island nation into the symbol of communism’s growing influence and the model for Third World populist rebellion. Taking as his model Battleship Potemkin, Sergei Eisenstein’s trumpeting of the fall of the czar in 1917, Kalatozov enlisted the aid of cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky to help him create a different kind of cinema, one that would celebrate the new world that Cubans were waking up to and redraw the artistic boundaries of moviemaking at the same time. The result, I Am Cuba, is a remarkable marriage of technical experimentation, artistic innovation, radical storytelling, and left-wing politics. And without a protagonist at that: In truly socialist fashion, Kalatozov and his screenwriters decided that no one character in their film would be more significant than any other; Cuba, rather, would be the star of the show. (A notion that, in film terms, is as radical as socialized health care or peasants seizing the means of production.) You could argue for days about the artistic merits of this kind of political propaganda and any director who chooses to indulge in it, but there’s no denying the daring at the heart of a film that laughs so loudly at convention. Defying gravity and probability, Urusevsky’s handheld camera snakes its way through crowds of sun-soaked Americans basking decadently by hotel pools, over the waterlogged underworld of Havana’s shantytowns, through the sugarcane fields of exploited local farmers, and finally inside the urban student rebellions and full-scale rural revolution that finally tipped the scales in Castro’s favor and allowed him and his citizen army to march triumphantly out of the mountains. This 3-DVD set is full of bonus features – including interviews with one of the film’s screenwriters, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, and full-time film encyclopedia and sometime director Martin Scorsese and two full-length documentaries, one about Kalatozov and the other about the film he made – that do a convincing job of making the case for I Am Cuba as one of the most important artistic achievements of the last 50 years.

Also Out Now…

Rescue Dawn (MGM/UA, $29.99): Werner Herzog’s fictionalized companion to his 1997 documentary, Little Dieter Needs to Fly, had all the marks of greatness but falls short in its portrait of an American pilot (Christian Bale) shot down during the Vietnam War, who escapes from a prisoner-of-war camp.

Into Great Silence (Zeitgeist, $29.99): Documentarian Philip Gröning’s six-month immersion in the ascetic life of a Carthusian monk at France’s Grande Chartreuse monastery is a bust after he realizes he left his microphone in the car.

This article appears in November 23 • 2007.