Four vignettes in Batista's Cuba dramatize the need for revolution; long, mobile shots tell almost wordless stories. In Havana, Maria faces shame when a man who fancies her discovers how she earns her living. Pedro, an aging peasant, is summarily told that the land he farms has been sold to United Fruit. A university student faces down a crowd of swaggering U.S. sailors and then watches friends shot by police when they try to distribute a pro-Castro leaflet. The war arrives on the doorstep of peasants Mariano, Amelia, and their four children when Batista's forces bomb the hills. Mariano wants peace, so he seeks out the guerrillas to join the fight.

This Soviet-Cuban hymn from 1964 to the Castro revolution has more than its fair share of agitprop naivety - but for its sheer dazzling technique, and the glorious beauty of its monochrome cinematography, it deserves impregnable classic status. Director Mikhail Kalatozov follows the progress of the revolution from the poolside decadence of Batista's Havana, the pauperisation of the tenant farmers, through to the student agitation, and finally the arrival of Castro's troops from their mountain stronghold in the east.

To the accompaniment of narration co-scripted by Yevgeny Yevtushenko, the story is achieved in a series of superbly choreographed single-take sequences, with a drama-doc vérité effect. The first scene is a breathtaking hand-held travelling shot that moves sinously through the partygoers and bikini-clad women by a penthouse hotel pool, winding up underwater with the swimmers. Did cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky have his camera readied in a tiny goldfish bowl? Later, in the epic funeral scene, his camera soars up past the Havana balconies, noses through a cigar factory and then appears to float over the rail looking down on the giant procession as if suspended from a cloud. And this decades before Steadicam technology arrived.
It is really miraculous work from Urusevsky. Why do film buffs not jabber endlessly about these astonishing sequences? Why are they not endlessly quoted and pastiched in other movies? I Am Cuba is a gripping, if stylised, historical document. The drinking song of bullying US sailors has a strange modern resonance: "The gals here in old Guantanamo/They give us all we want and never say no." The corruption and prostitution of Batista's capital finds a grim echo in the Havana of 2002, which El Commandante has allowed to become the Bangkok of the Caribbean.

I Am Cuba combines the high-minded severity of Russian cinema with the exuberance of Vigo or Fellini, and even anticipates the conspiracy-fear of Oliver Stone. A remarkable re-release.
Peter Bradshaw
Friday November 22, 2002