I Am Cuba (1964)
The beauty of propaganda.
Presentation:
The 50s and 60s are what I sometimes like to call the era of Cold War cinema since it seemed as though they were using the theatrical medium to battle out their political ideologies. Soy Cuba is a nationalist independent art house film with a communist doctrine. Its critique of western capitalism is not easy to take seriously with laughably cartoonish capitalism villains in contrast with the exploited noble farmers. There is a certain pleasuring seeing this film’s DNA in all of Spanish cinema. Visually this film is incredible and has a significant influence on Emmanuel Lubezki through its use of handheld ultra wides and dutch angles. I think there may even be more tilted shots than there are leveled ones. This aptly conveys the guerilla style of the revolutionaries and the indie presentations make you want to cheer for the underdogs. I just wish there was a better restoration of this film because as beautiful as some of the framing is, the low resolution image quality is difficult to appreciate.
Conclusion:
I like that there is some continuity with the interlinking stories, but to be honest I found my attention and empathy spread thin across the several short characters. It was a visually noisy film that glazed me over, but might hold over better for Gen Z’ers. For a film as visually tastefully as this I found the dogma in this film to be not subtle at all on par with Chinese films. If you hate capitalism, I don’t think there is much to hate about this film. And if you are a proponent of it, I think you can still enjoy the artistic cinematography of this film. As beautiful as the film is, there’s no point not stating the fact that this is an artistic nationalist film disguised as propaganda piece.
Recommendations
The beauty of propaganda.