On 'Soy Cuba'

Auteurism is as much of a problem here as star ratings; it’s not clear that Kalatozov is the individual most responsible for the film’s distinctiveness. Judging from its unique, shimmering black-and-white look and the recent testimony of its cowriter, Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the film belongs mainly to its cinematographer, the extraordinary Sergei Urusevsky (1908-1974), but I have no way of confirming this impression. (Urusevsky shot the two other Kalatozov films I’ve seen, The Cranes Are Flying from 1957 and The Letter Never Sent from 1960, the second a hallucinatory tale about four geologists hunting for diamonds in the Siberian taiga that’s said to have influenced Andrei Tarkovsky and the Coppola of Apocalypse Now; The Letter Never Sent was roundly criticized by its production unit as formalist, though it still packs a punch.)

A couple of other oddities about I Am Cuba are worth noting — one linguistic, the other visual. The dialogue and narration are mainly in Spanish, apart from a few lines in English (coming mainly from characters designated as American tourists and sailors). There’s also a Russian voice-over that translates the Spanish and English, and English subtitles that translate the Russian and Spanish, with the result that most of the English lines you hear are different from the ones you read: when an American tourist in a decadent Havana nightclub says “I’ll take a limeade,” this is duly translated into Russian, and the Russian line is then subtitled “A soft drink for me.”