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Monthly Archives: May 2018

I Am Cuba (1964)

Posted on May 3, 2018 | Leave a comment

I Am Cuba
Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov
Written by Enrique Pineda Barnet and Evgenniy Evtushenko
1964/USSR/Cuba
Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industrias Cinematograficas/Mosfilm
Repeat viewing/my DVD collection

[box] The voice of Cuba: [Slums of Havana] I am Cuba. Why are you running away? You came here to have fun? Go ahead, have fun! Is this a happy picture? Don’t avert your eyes. Look! I am Cuba. For you, I am the casino, the bar, the hotels. But the hands of these children and old people, are also me.[/box]

Sergey Urusevskiy’s amazing camera work in this propaganda piece renders it art.

The movie was made to celebrate the Cuban Revolution and consists of four vignettes. The first concerns the effect of American tourism and capitalism on the people of Havana. First we witness a beauty contest at a Havana hotel. Â Then we move to the bar where some very ugly Americans treat the Cuban bar girls as objects. Â The sequence ends with an encounter between an American tourist and a poor young Cuban who has been forced into prostitution.

The second vignette begins with some poetic shots of Cuban peasants harvesting sugar cane only to find out that the land they have been farming for years has been sold out from under them to the United Fruit Company.

The third vignette moves back to Havana where idealistic university students seek to spread the revolution and squelch false rumors of Fidel’s death. Â The sequence ends with the awesome funeral march through the city shown in the first clip below.

Finally the film moves to the Sierra Maestra where Castro’s guerrillas have captured the province and are recruiting peasants to join them in securing the Revolution.

This movie might be pure propaganda and with some pretty bad acting at that if not for Kalatozov and Urusevsky’s (both of The Cranes Are Flying) amazingly mobile camera work. Some of the shots defy explanation. Â The lighting too is stunning. Â Surely something any film buff should see before shuffling off this mortal coil.

Ignore the “drone” reference which is nonsense

more amazing camera work

The Red Desert (1964)

Posted on May 2, 2018 | 4 comments

The Red Desert (Il deserto rosso)
Directed by Michelangelo Antonioni
Written by Michelangelo Antonioni and Tonino Guerra
1964/Italy/France
Film Duemila/Federiz/Francoriz Production
First viewing/Netflix rental
One of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die

[box] Giuliana: There’s something terrible about reality and i don’t know what it is. No one will tell me.[/box]

For his first color film, Antonioni turns Italy into a colorless industrial wasteland matching his heroine’s fragile state of mind.

The story is set largely in and on the margins of bleak, polluted factories. Guliana’s (Monica Vitti) husband Ugo manages one of these. Early on, he tells colleague Corrado Zeller (Richard Harris) that she had a traffic accident in which she suffered minor physical injuries but mental shock that necessitated hospitalization for a month. She still has not fully recovered from her mental problems. Ugo is not really aware of the extent of Guliana’s malaise. Ugo and Guliano have a son, who is around five or six years old.

During the course of the story, we see Guliana try and fail to find some meaning in her life. Eventually, she has a brief affair with Corrado but that doesn’t help either. Still Antonioni gives us a glimmer of hope in the final moments when Guliana is able both to look at her environment and walk away from its poison.

I feel like I missed a lot on this first viewing. The film is so spectacular to look at and Vitti is so awesome, however, that I feel like I will give it another try at some point.