Mikhail Kalatozov is an intriguing figure. He confounds the oversimplification that in the USSR after the brief period in the 1920s when avant garde filmmakers like Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov made masterpieces, you could either be a compliant, unimaginative Socialist Realist hack willing to tow the party line, or you could be a true artist, but only at great personal and/or creative cost, notable examples here being Andrei Tarkovsky, Kira Muratova, and Sergei Parajanov. Perhaps Kalatozov is the exception that proves the rule? I’ll leave that for you to decide.

I’m extrapolating a lot from limited data/research here but one might call Kalatozov a “pragmatic visionary”. Exhibit A: his name change. He was born Mikheil Kalatozishvili in Tbilisi, Georgia at the very end of 1903, so he was well into his 50s when he made the first of his best known films, The Cranes are Flying. It’s curious that many of the best known Soviet filmmakers, at least in the west, came from the periphery of the empire and either weren’t ethnic Russians or were of mixed ancestry. Sergei Eisenstein, Kira Muratova, Larissa Shepitko, Sergei Bondarchuk, Dziga Vertov, Marlen Khutsiev, and Sergei Parajanov, were all born and/or grew up outside of the borders of the modern Russian Federation. And the latter three all adopted Russified surnames. Maybe having so many non-Russians represented at the pinnacle of the film industry is an example of Soviet internationalism at its best, but as I’ve already suggested, having strong artistic visions often brought filmmakers into conflict with the Soviet authorities. On the naming thing—of course, the most famous, or infamous, instance of a Georgian taking a Russian-sounding surname is a certain Iosef Dzhugashvili, better known as Joseph Stalin. And speaking of “Uncle Joe”, Exhibit B for Kalatozov’s pragmatism is the fact that he won the Stalin Prize in 1951 for Conspiracy of the Doomed, which, full disclosure, I haven’t seen, but from the plot summary, it sounds a lot like a justification of Soviet domination of central and eastern Europe in the aftermath of World War II. Kalatozov himself said, “A creative worker, Stalin’s contemporary, has to be a philosopher-Stalinist. He has to be a Bolshevik in the form and spirit of his mentality.”

I’m probably not endearing Kalatozov to you here, am I?

There’s definitely a strong irony inherent in I Am Cuba, a cinematic anthem to throwing off the shackles of imperialism, being co-sponsored by one of the most violently coercive political entities in world history, and coming from a director who had colleagues who had been purged by that regime.

So, having established Kalatozov as a far from uncomplicated figure, I’d now like to briefly talk about his undeniable talent.

Filmmaker Mark Cousins has called I Am Cuba “one of the most technically dazzling films of the era”. Shot in 4:3, Kalatozov is proof positive that you don’t need to use a widescreen ratio to make an epic-looking film. On The Cranes are Flying, Letter Never Sent, and I Am Cuba, Kalatozov worked with cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, who combines astonishing, incredibly immersive long takes with breathtaking camera angles and shot compositions. You often get literal as well as figurative pyrotechnics, whether that’s the blazing sugar fields in this film, or the terrifying Siberian forest fires in Letter Never Sent.

The Cranes are Flying, which won the Palme d’Or in 1958, marries the pair’s incredible visual style to more properly developed characters, to create the best of this trio of films, as far as I’m concerned.

I appreciate I’ve given the Cubans themselves pretty short shrift in this article thus far. I’d be very much remiss if I didn’t mention that the film started shooting within weeks of the conclusion of the Cuban Missile crisis.

The cast is mainly Cuban, and it was co-written by Enrique Pineda Barnet, alongside the Soviet and Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko. The score by Carlos Fariñas also deserves a special mention. And here I should also add, as Blake Scott has detailed in his fascinating article on the film for the history website Not Even Past, the film was not at all well-received in Cuba, where audiences seem to have regarded it a romanticised and unrealistic depiction that didn’t bear much relation to what they’d been through. It would seem like a cheap shot to say that while the film’s title proclaimed “I am Cuba”, its Cuban audience responded “actually, no, you aren’t”, but there was in fact a contemporary Cuban review of the film titled “I am NOT Cuba”. It didn’t go over well in the USSR either, as the authorities seem to have decided that its depiction of pre-revolutionary Cuba was too alluring and so it did not get wide distribution there.

Although Kalatozov did make one more film after this, an Italian-Soviet co-production called The Red Tent, I Am Cuba languished in obscurity until it was championed by Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola in the mid-1990s, when the Cold War was over, and its revolutionary message could be put to one side.

This blog post in adapted from a transcript for an introductory talk given before a screening of I Am Cuba Sunday 9th June 2024 by Alastair Pitts, host of the A Russian & Soviet Movie Podcast.