From Sergei Eisenstein to Andrei Konchalovsky, Russian filmmakers perfected a formula for manufacturing social reality out of highly concentrated mixes of activist outrage and artistic chutzpah. Political hindsight overshadows their unparalleled toying with film language, but it also deepens great works of art like Aleksandr Dovzhenko’s Earth and Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba. These two enthralling synergies of sight and sound were made with the support of a communist machine that would eventually fail the people of the Soviet Union and Cuba, but they’re first and foremost exaltations of the rebel spirit, hurled at audiences with a fierce conviction and belief in cinema as a propagandistic vehicle for change.
For the Soviet Union, I Am Cuba was an opportunity to promote socialism abroad during de-Stalinization in the Khrushchev era, and for Cuba it was a way of staking out a cinematic presence. So it is that the...
For the Soviet Union, I Am Cuba was an opportunity to promote socialism abroad during de-Stalinization in the Khrushchev era, and for Cuba it was a way of staking out a cinematic presence. So it is that the...
- 4/19/2024
- by Ed Gonzalez
- Slant Magazine
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