I am Cuba, The Siberian Mammoth (Soy Cuba, O Mamute Siberiano) Vicente Ferraz Brazil 2004
The Siberian mammoth of the title is Soy Cuba, a film made between 1960 and 1964 by Soviet director Mikheil Kalatazov. Released, panned and forgotten, it was “discovered” in the mid-Nineties, like a fossilized pachyderm in the warm Caribbean, and re-released to great critical acclaim. Ferraz’s film goes in search of the Cubans who helped track and shoot the mammoth with Soviet assistance, funding and equipment. Some background to the film is helpful. The Cuban revolution had just taken place in 1959 and one of the new regime’s first acts was to set up ICAIC – Instituto Cubano del Arte e Indústria Cinematografica. Woodrow Wilson once claimed that American cinema was the most important ideological weapon the United States possessed, and time has not belied this claim. In many newly communist countries the first priority was to establish some sort of centrally controlled institute of cinema as a counterbalance. This was a time of rapprochement with the USSR, and amongst the Soviet money and know-how that poured into the country, came feted Soviet director Kalatazov, leading Russian poet Yetvushenko and others. These leading lights of the Soviet intelligentsia were given carte blanche to make a film celebrating the Cuban Revolution. Together with some of Cuba’s foremost writers, actors and ordinary citizens and swept with revolutionary enthusiasm they set about making Soy Cuba. In spite of all their efforts, the film was an abject failure at the Soviet and Cuban box offices, receiving a critical panning. The film lay all but forgotten until its "re-discovery" by no lesser personages than Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.
Director Vicente Ferraz’s film goes in search of the original cast and crew of Soy Cuba. Mixing talking heads, archive news reels and sumptuous clips from Soy Cuba itself, what it finds within these people’s stories (the lively story of Soy Cuba’s production and the sorry story of the film’s reception) is a crystallization of the Cuban experience. Soy Cuba’s production coincides with the events of the Cuban missile crisis. Incensed at America’s imperiousness, Kalatazov wanted Soy Cuba to be his definitive response to American Imperialism. Instead what he produced was a hallucinatory mixture of Caribbean fervour and Soviet Socialist Realism taken to its most bombastic, tragic, Slavic degree. It is in the unlikeliness of this melding, nonetheless a historical reality, that Soy Cuba’s interest lies: in the clash between two nations utterly separated by temperament and geography, yet yoked by political events and political doctrines. Making Soy Cuba seems to have been an incredible journey. In cinematic terms the astonishing, coldly passionate artistry that went into the lighting and into the set with its amazing tracking shot set pieces (the march scene where the camera slides from the start of the march through a cigar factory to rejoin the march and the marchers has to be one of the most incredible in history). Yet the result is too "Slavic" for Cuban tastes, the interviewees testifying to their growing interest in more Latin forms of cinematic expression, such as the experiments under way at that time within the Brazilian "Cinema Novo" In the film’s voice-over, Ferraz comments on how reminiscent Yo Soy Cuba is of the Soviet Avant-Garde cinema of the 20s. Some aesthetic points aside, this is true. It is interesting to compare the environment of Soviet cinema in the 20s with Yo Soy Cuba. Films made in the post revolutionary period, such as those by Vertov, Eisenstein and Pudovkin were filled with the same type of frantic lyricism and bright-eyed hopefulness as evinced in Yo Soy Cuba. These qualities, however, were all crushed by Stalinism and the dogma of social realist film ushered in during the 30s. It is almost as if in Yo Soy Cuba the Soviet intelligentsia, or at least a raft of its representatives, could re-discover the same ardent fervour in this Caribbean revolution. By the time Castro took power and Soy Cuba was made, however, the USSR had brutally put down challenges to its hegemony in East Germany, Poland and Hungary and were shortly to send their tanks into Czechoslovakia. The age of idealism was long dead.
Soy Cuba was an abject failure on its release, sinking without a trace. The Cuban press disowned it with the disdainful line "yo NO soy cuba". It was suppressed in the USSR as, despite its vehement anti-Capitalist rhetoric, it showed Americanised aspects of Cuban life such as luxury hotels and drive-in movie theatres which the Soviet authorities didn’t want their cinema-goers to see. Years later it was re-discovered by the Yankees. This re-discovery went unknown to the original cast and crew. Ferraz’s film doesn’t touch on the reasons why, perhaps he considered it outside his film’s scope. Now, the inference for the viewer is again one of North American exploitation. Could the hermeticism of the island be the reason? It is not discussed. A fascinating Marxist analysis of the recuperation of Communist iconography and Social Realist art is given by one of the interviewees; that now Communism is no longer a threat, its whole field of artistic and iconographic production, so long vilified, is now a fresh seam of consumable art to mine. Kalatazov’s film has many delights to offer modern film viewers, the luminous black and white photography achieved using soviet army infrared filmstock not least amongst them. Yet the question remains, why is it only being re-assessed now? This and many other questions are hinted at, skirted around but not tackled head on. Whether this is due to the interviewees or the interviewer we cannot know. A neat, and not unfair, comparison for Ferraz’s film would be a political, cinematographic Buena Vista Social Club. It leaves you curious and nostalgic, newly aware but ultimately uninformed about both the era and the film.. There is in Ferraz’s film an understandable sympathy for what the makers of Soy Cuba were trying to achieve, one that perhaps prevents him from winkling out some form of auto-criticism from the interviewees. This film, produced in a period when films were made with passion and belief, left me with one burning question. Are films like it still being made, or is making documentaries about them the best we can achieve and all that is left?
