I Am Cuba, Siberian Mammoth
no stars (Worthless)
I Am Cuba, Siberian Mammoth is a 2004 Brazilian documentary about the making of the legendary 1964 Russian-Cuban production I Am Cuba, a preposterous, beautiful, mannerist epic of Marxist agitprop celebrating the Cuban revolution. Early on the documentary–which, like the other two films reviewed here, is showing this week at the Chicago International Documentary Festival–focuses on one of the key sequences in the original film. The coffin of a radical student slain by Batista’s police during a mass uprising is carried by his comrades through downtown Havana, surrounded by a crowd that swells to Cecil B. De Mille proportions. In a delirious, breathtaking two-and-a-half-minute shot, the camera moves ahead of a young woman and past a young man–catching him in close-up as he turns around, hoists the front of the coffin onto his right shoulder, and walks away with the other pallbearers–then cranes up the five floors of a building, past people watching from balconies and parapets. The camera moves to the right across the street and through a window into a cigar-rolling factory, where it follows workers as they hand a Cuban flag one to another, eventually unfurling it from a window. The camera moves out that window and over the flag, then follows the funeral cortege from above for what seems like a quarter of a mile.
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The man was the most prominent individual in one of the most spectacular shots in film history, and his inability to remember that 40 years later speaks volumes about what it means to be inside a revolutionary movement. That the funeral was either fictional or restaged for the camera is secondary, because we learn that for this man in the 60s, being part of the Cuban revolution and being part of I Am Cuba were separate aspects of the same experience. He makes clear that it was the collective moment that mattered then, not his individual participation in it.
The original Golub, which was directed by Jerry Blumenthal and Gordon Quinn, essentially shows the production of a single painting in 1985, from its conception through its execution, followed by its reception at a gallery in Ireland. Golub himself offers commentary during all stages of the process, and gallery attendees record their reactions.
