Capital Celluloid 2017 - Day 53: Wed Feb 22

I Am Cuba (Kalatozov, 1964): Regent Street Cinema, 7.30pm


Don't miss this 35mm presentation of a long lost film now recognised as a world masterpiece. This screening is part of the Kino Klassika Foundation’s A World to Win programme.

Here is the Kino Klassika introduction to the season:
Marx proclaimed that throwing off its chains, the proletariat had a world to win. Kino Klassika will host a season of screenings, talks and events with Regent Street Cinema to mark the centenary of the October Revolution. The season opens with Sergei Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin on February 17th, the iconic film the revolution inspired, and goes on to examine a century of revolution on film. Bringing together provocative films by directors such as Eisenstein, Kalatozov, Shepitko and Smirnov,  Godard, Rocha, Wajda, Bertolucci and Loach, the season offers a touring programme to reach audiences across the UK. You can find the full details here.

Chicago Reader review:
Some of the most exhilarating camera movements and most luscious black-and-white cinematography you'll ever see inhabit this singular, delirious 141-minute communist propaganda epic of 1964, a Cuban-Russian production poorly received in both countries at the time (in Cuba it was often referred to as "I Am Not Cuba"). Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov—best known in the West for his 1957 The Cranes Are Flyingfrom a screenplay by Yevgeny Yevtushenko and Enrique Pineda Barnet, this multipart hymn to the Cuban communist revolution may be dated to the point of campiness in much of its rhetoric, but it stands alongside the unfinished masterworks of Sergei Eisenstein and Orson Welles about Latin America, Que Viva Mexico and It's All True, two parallel celebrations from foreign perspectives. (The constructivist shack occupied by a Havana prostitute in the first episode is one example of stylization run amok here.)
Jonathan Rosenbaum


Here (and above) is the trailer.

No comments: