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''I Am Cuba'' ((スペイン語:Soy Cuba); (ロシア語:Я Куба), ''Ya Kuba)'' is a 1964 Soviet-Cuban film directed by Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm. The film was not received well by either the Russian or Cuban public〔(The New Cult Canon: I am Cuba ). AV Club, May 1. 2008.〕 and was almost completely forgotten until it was re-discovered by filmmakers in the United States thirty years later.〔 The acrobatic tracking shots and idiosyncratic mise en scene prompted Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese to begin a campaign to restore the film in the early 1990s. The film is shot in black and white, sometimes using infrared film obtained from the Soviet military〔2005 Brazilian documentary ''The Siberian Mammoth''〕 to exaggerate contrast (making trees and sugar cane almost white, and skies very dark but still obviously sunny). Most shots are in extreme wide-angle and the camera passes very close to its subjects, whilst still largely avoiding having those subjects ever look directly at the camera. == History == Shortly after the 1959 Cuban revolution overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, the socialist Castro government, isolated by the United States after the latter broke diplomatic and trade relations in 1961, turned to the USSR for film partnerships. The Soviet government, interested in promoting international socialism, agreed to finance a film about the Cuban revolution. The director was given considerable freedom to complete the work, and was given much help from both the Soviet and Cuban governments. The film made use of innovative techniques, such as coating a watertight camera's lens with a special submarine periscope cleaner, so the camera could be submerged and lifted out of the water without any drops on the lens or film. At one point, more than 1,000 Cuban soldiers were moved to a remote location to shoot one scene—this despite the then-ongoing Cuban missile crisis. In another scene, the camera follows a flag over a body, held high on a stetcher, along a crowded street. Then it stops and slowly moves upwards for at least four storeys until it is filming the flagged body from above a building. Without stopping, it then starts tracking sideways and enters through a window into a cigar factory, then goes straight towards a rear window where the cigar workers are watching the procession. The camera finally passes through the window and appears to float along over the middle of the street between the buildings. These shots were accomplished by the camera operator having the camera attached to his vest—like an early, crude version of a Steadicam—and the camera operator also wearing a vest with hooks on the back. An assembly line of technicians would hook and unhook the operator's vest to various pulleys and cables that spanned floors and building roof tops. Even though it had such great support, the movie was given a cold reaction by audiences. In Havana it was criticized for showing a stereotypical view of Cubans, and in Moscow it was considered naïve, not sufficiently revolutionary, even too sympathetic to the lives of the bourgeois, pre-Castro classes. Also, upon its original release, the movie never reached Western countries largely because it was a communist production. When the USSR collapsed in the early 1990s, ''I Am Cuba'' was virtually unknown. In 1992, Cuban novelist Guillermo Cabrera Infante, the guest co-director of the Telluride Film Festival, screened a print of the film at the festival as part of a retrospective on Kalatozov. The San Francisco International Film Festival screened the film in 1993. Shortly after the festival, three film professionals who had screened ''I Am Cuba'' at the San Francisco screening contacted friends at Milestone Films in New York. The tiny film distributor had released several lost or neglected older films (as it continues to do). Milestone screened a slightly blurry, unsubtitled VHS tape of the film and then went about acquiring the distribution rights from Mosfilm in Russia. In 1994, a friend invited Martin Scorsese to a private screening. Scorsese was amazed by the film, and when Milestone approached him to lend his name to the company's release of the film, he was happy and enthusiastic to do so. Milestone's release was also co-presented by another fan of ''I Am Cuba'': director Francis Ford Coppola. Milestone's release opened at New York's Film Forum in March 1995. For the tenth anniversary of the film, Milestone debuted a new 35mm restoration of ''I am Cuba'' without the Russian overdubbing in September 2005. Milestone released an Ultimate Edition DVD boxset at the time as well, with a video appreciation from Scorsese.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.milestonefilms.com/products/i-am-cuba-the-cigar-box-edition )〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「I Am Cuba」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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