I am Cuba plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, July 28th, through Tuesday, July 30th. Visittrylon.org for tickets and more information.
Propaganda is a funny thing to be afraid of because it’s uniquely man-made, and therefore not real. It only exists along the periphery of chasing omniscience—an impossibility that grants salvation, the liberation that keeps us from killing each other. At its most fundamental, it is merely an attempt at communication. Its meta-textual nature plays like a greatest hits of the human condition: convoluted, oxymoronic, irrational, and ultimately, unnecessary. It’s nothing more than a semantic funhouse of mirrors, bits of debris we’re able to patch together from our ephemeral memory. So how unfortunate is the conspiratorial disdain Americans harbor towards the wonderland of propaganda, subject to one of the most lovingly crafted, uniquely fanatic crusades the U.S. government has socially engineered and disseminated to its population. The government’s motive behind scandalizing the term is far less interesting than the psychological factors that have made their prerogative of pacifying their citizens so effective. Its overwhelmingly negative connotation looms so definitively in the American disposition because it breaks the fourth wall of receiving information. A binary fallacy is presented in which certain information is objective while other information is subjective. The fallacy isn’t that objective truth doesn’t exist, but that human nature allows us to perceive our reality as so; the “purest” forms of truth or information still exist on a spectrum of subjectivity.
Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 Cuban-Soviet co-production I Am Cuba is somewhat infamous for dissatisfying all parties involved in its formation (with the exception of the crew). The Soviets found it too artful—too abstract—to be particularly effective international socialist propaganda. The Cubans did not feel accurately represented in its anthological structure. While I would never dismiss the feelings a native population has towards a depiction of their community, I would posit that not only is the film aware of this cultural disparity, but actively leans into its inherent tourist point of entry. It’s slightly baffling that the Soviets found this too ambient for their more direct intentions. While the film certainly operates in a languorous, almost metaphysical register, it also rings as hyper self-aware, from the title to its formal presentation. For a crew of non-Cubans titling their film about Cuba, I Am Cuba is funny, very tongue-in-cheek.
Nothing about the film’s formal or structural presentation suggests that Kalatozov is attempting to render an authentic portrayal of Cuban society; his role as a foreign visitor serves as the opening scene. The first shot opens from the point-of-view of plane passenger, looking down at the Cuban landscape as they prepare to land. The music attached is spiritual, serene, in a way that feels like church. The first story in the anthology features Maria, a woman living on the fringes of poverty who moonlights as a bar prostitute under the far more Anglo-friendly moniker “Betty.” This segment continues the religious overtones from the opening in the form of unmoored, hovering camerawork, following Maria’s exploits in long, continuous takes. As rich, white, American men cavalierly sit in this bar-turned-casino, picking out their company for the night, they leer at Maria, as does the camera. The sensory visual effect achieved by the uninterrupted long take in this context is a tremendous grotesquerie. The filmic grammar of the ‘cut’ is the same as to how we blink our eyes. So, to fix upon Maria without blinking, to just stare at her, unnervingly accentuates her dehumanization. These men, visitors in a foreign land, wear their God complexes on their sleeves—proudly so, as they import their Christian faith as a civilized commodity. The unwavering surveillance of the camera follows Maria into the kinetic, whiplashed next scene on the dance floor as she is thrown from man to man with rag-doll physics. As a form of resistance to the unblinking long take, Maria smashes her eyelids tightly shut, inhabiting her own privacy for the first time that night. If she cannot see these disgusting cretins, then she may as well be dancing with anyone, people she’s comfortable around, people from her own community. As Maria relinquishes herself to the music and the movement, the moment alludes to this passage from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, when the colonized subject uses the ecstasy of dance and possession as a means of survival:
The colonized’s way of relaxing is precisely this muscular orgy during which the most brutal aggressiveness and impulsive violence are channeled, transformed, and spirited away. The dance circle is a permissive circle. It protects and empowers. At a fixed time and a fixed date men and women assemble in a given place, and under the solemn gaze of the tribe launch themselves into a seemingly disarticulated, but in fact extremely ritualized, pantomime where the exorcism, liberation, and expression of a community are grandiosely and spontaneously played out through shaking of the head, and back and forward thrusts of the body. Everything is permitted in the dance circle. (Fanon, 19-20).
I can’t imagine why the Soviet government thought that a filmmaker as idiosyncratic and visionary as Kalatozov, with works such as The Cranes Are Flying and Letter Never Sent, would be the right person to deliver what was essentially the audio-visual equivalent of a public service announcement. At the time of its release, I Am Cuba may have been considered an example of failed agitprop but that’s merely a matter of where one falls on the spectrum. The issue with governments weaponizing propaganda in their manifestation of omniscience, of touching God, is that they lack the infinite scope, the cosmic delusion required to transcend their own false borders.
References
Franz Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.
Mind Your Manners: I Am Cuba
| Nazeeh Alghazawneh |
I am Cuba plays on glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema from Sunday, July 28th, through Tuesday, July 30th. Visit trylon.org for tickets and more information.
Propaganda is a funny thing to be afraid of because it’s uniquely man-made, and therefore not real. It only exists along the periphery of chasing omniscience—an impossibility that grants salvation, the liberation that keeps us from killing each other. At its most fundamental, it is merely an attempt at communication. Its meta-textual nature plays like a greatest hits of the human condition: convoluted, oxymoronic, irrational, and ultimately, unnecessary. It’s nothing more than a semantic funhouse of mirrors, bits of debris we’re able to patch together from our ephemeral memory. So how unfortunate is the conspiratorial disdain Americans harbor towards the wonderland of propaganda, subject to one of the most lovingly crafted, uniquely fanatic crusades the U.S. government has socially engineered and disseminated to its population. The government’s motive behind scandalizing the term is far less interesting than the psychological factors that have made their prerogative of pacifying their citizens so effective. Its overwhelmingly negative connotation looms so definitively in the American disposition because it breaks the fourth wall of receiving information. A binary fallacy is presented in which certain information is objective while other information is subjective. The fallacy isn’t that objective truth doesn’t exist, but that human nature allows us to perceive our reality as so; the “purest” forms of truth or information still exist on a spectrum of subjectivity.
Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 Cuban-Soviet co-production I Am Cuba is somewhat infamous for dissatisfying all parties involved in its formation (with the exception of the crew). The Soviets found it too artful—too abstract—to be particularly effective international socialist propaganda. The Cubans did not feel accurately represented in its anthological structure. While I would never dismiss the feelings a native population has towards a depiction of their community, I would posit that not only is the film aware of this cultural disparity, but actively leans into its inherent tourist point of entry. It’s slightly baffling that the Soviets found this too ambient for their more direct intentions. While the film certainly operates in a languorous, almost metaphysical register, it also rings as hyper self-aware, from the title to its formal presentation. For a crew of non-Cubans titling their film about Cuba, I Am Cuba is funny, very tongue-in-cheek.
Nothing about the film’s formal or structural presentation suggests that Kalatozov is attempting to render an authentic portrayal of Cuban society; his role as a foreign visitor serves as the opening scene. The first shot opens from the point-of-view of plane passenger, looking down at the Cuban landscape as they prepare to land. The music attached is spiritual, serene, in a way that feels like church. The first story in the anthology features Maria, a woman living on the fringes of poverty who moonlights as a bar prostitute under the far more Anglo-friendly moniker “Betty.” This segment continues the religious overtones from the opening in the form of unmoored, hovering camerawork, following Maria’s exploits in long, continuous takes. As rich, white, American men cavalierly sit in this bar-turned-casino, picking out their company for the night, they leer at Maria, as does the camera. The sensory visual effect achieved by the uninterrupted long take in this context is a tremendous grotesquerie. The filmic grammar of the ‘cut’ is the same as to how we blink our eyes. So, to fix upon Maria without blinking, to just stare at her, unnervingly accentuates her dehumanization. These men, visitors in a foreign land, wear their God complexes on their sleeves—proudly so, as they import their Christian faith as a civilized commodity.
The unwavering surveillance of the camera follows Maria into the kinetic, whiplashed next scene on the dance floor as she is thrown from man to man with rag-doll physics. As a form of resistance to the unblinking long take, Maria smashes her eyelids tightly shut, inhabiting her own privacy for the first time that night. If she cannot see these disgusting cretins, then she may as well be dancing with anyone, people she’s comfortable around, people from her own community. As Maria relinquishes herself to the music and the movement, the moment alludes to this passage from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, when the colonized subject uses the ecstasy of dance and possession as a means of survival:
I can’t imagine why the Soviet government thought that a filmmaker as idiosyncratic and visionary as Kalatozov, with works such as The Cranes Are Flying and Letter Never Sent, would be the right person to deliver what was essentially the audio-visual equivalent of a public service announcement. At the time of its release, I Am Cuba may have been considered an example of failed agitprop but that’s merely a matter of where one falls on the spectrum. The issue with governments weaponizing propaganda in their manifestation of omniscience, of touching God, is that they lack the infinite scope, the cosmic delusion required to transcend their own false borders.
References
Franz Fanon. The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2004.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon