I Am Cuba · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Watch the camera at the rooftop party. It drifts over a poolside crowd, past a woman in a white swimsuit, follows the bathers down — and then, without a cut and without apology, it slides under the surface of the swimming pool and keeps going, peering up through the water at the legs of the people it just left. Nobody is holding it. Nobody could be holding it. That single shot is the key to the whole film, and it is also the cleanest way into what Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher who wrote two books on cinema, can hand a viewer who has never read a page of him.

Usually a camera is somebody's eye. It stands where a person could stand; it sees what a character sees. Here it belongs to no one. Deleuze has a precise name for vision cut loose from any human center: the gramme, the camera-eye as pure matter, the world filming itself rather than a person looking at it. The pool dive is not a stunt about water. It is a demonstration that the seeing in this film has no body and obeys no gravity. Sergei Urusevsky — the cinematographer, and as much the author of I Am Cuba as the director Kalatozov — built custom pulleys, platforms, and waterproof housings to engineer that weightlessness in-camera, a full decade before the Steadicam existed. The impossibility is real. It was rigged by hand.

Give that drifting, currentlike motion its own name too. Deleuze calls flowing, unanchored perception the reume — vision as water, slipping rather than aiming. Watch how often the film reaches for it: the submersion, the long glide above a street, the handheld lurch through the cabaret. The camera doesn't cut between things; it pours through them.

Then there's the voice. A woman speaks in the first person as the island: I am Cuba. This is the film's boldest move, and Deleuze gives it a name worth keeping — free-indirect-discourse-political, where the camera stops belonging to any one character and starts speaking for a collective that isn't a single person and isn't quite the author either. The voice is not a narrator describing events. It is the land claiming them. And here Deleuze's idea of political cinema becomes genuinely useful: he argues that the modern political film begins from the fact that 'the people are missing' — that there is no ready-made 'Cuba' to film, only scattered sufferers who do not yet know they are one body. So the film invents the people it claims to represent. Deleuze calls this fabulation: catching subjects in the act of legending themselves into existence. The prostitute, the cane farmer, the student, the peasant never meet. The voice is what stitches them into a single 'I.'

This is why the crowds matter so much, and why the actors don't. The dossier is blunt that performance is the most subordinated element — figures function as types, bodies posed against sky and sea as emblems. Deleuze would say the film has traded the individual for the dividual: a crowd rendered as one affective unit, a mass that feels as a single thing. The funeral march, the burning cane, the mobilized peasantry — these are not groups of people. They are one body shot from below so it looms.

The grammar for that comes straight out of Soviet montage, and naming the debt is half the pleasure. The choreography of the crowd-as-protagonist and the cutting between emblematic faces is Eisenstein's Odessa Steps from Battleship Potemkin, reworked — what Deleuze calls dialectical montage, shots colliding to strike a third meaning the individual frames don't hold. The low-angle rapture of peasants against a black infrared sky is Dovzhenko's Earth. The casting of non-actors as social types is the typage of October. The autonomous, rig-mounted camera that goes anywhere is Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera, where the camera first declared itself a kinetic participant rather than a witness. And the vertiginous spiraling mobility is Kalatozov and Urusevsky's own — first found circling Veronika in The Cranes Are Flying, then pushed into the fire and wilderness of Letter Never Sent, and here extended until it leaves the ground entirely.

So what did the film actually do to the art? It pressed two opposed instincts together and refused to choose. The unbroken take wants immersion — it asks you to float, to feel time as duration with no cut to rescue you. The montage wants argument — it cuts to persuade. Most films pick one. I Am Cuba holds both, and the strain is the point: a propaganda film so intoxicated with the moving image that neither Moscow nor Havana could read it as propaganda. It failed on release and vanished for thirty years precisely because it had subordinated its message to the kinetic and tonal possibilities of the camera more completely than almost any film before it.

Watch it again with that in mind. When the camera lifts up the face of a building, passes through a cigar workshop, and sails out over the marching crowd, you're not watching a director show off. You're watching a film try to become the consciousness of a whole country — to film itself into being a people that did not yet exist. It is the most beautiful overreach in the history of the long take, and the fact that it doesn't entirely cohere is exactly why it's alive.