October 2- 8, 2003
screen picks
I Am Cuba (Thu., Oct. 2, 8 p.m., $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) With images at once dreamlike and urgently didactic, Mikhail Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba (1964) is an odd fit but a welcome addition to International House’s Festival Cubano weekend, which is otherwise mainly composed of documentary portraits of present-day Cuba. Released not long after the Communist revolution (not to mention the Cuban Missile Crisis), I Am Cuba, with its overlapping Spanish and Russian narration, is framed as a pre-revolutionary incitement to revolt, a reminder of the times so recently left behind. Kalatozov’s four-part story, filmed in limpid black and white, strikes at predictable targets -- drunk, abusive Americans, murderous government thugs, the United Fruit Company -- but the delirious ardor with which Kalatozov and his collaborators (cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky, who also shot Kalatozov’s The Cranes Are Flying, scenarist Yevgeni Yevtushenko) attack their subject results in an orgy of transcendent imagery. Sometimes that imagery backfires on its intended purpose -- in one of the most memorable openings in movie history, the camera moves without a cut through a decadent rooftop party and into the swimming pool (cf. Boogie Nights); the depiction of idle luxury is so seductive you may forget you’re not supposed to be enjoying it.
At times, the imagery dissolves into incoherence: In the third sequence, a pro-Fidel student who earlier balked at assassinating a police captain leads a mass protest down a set of enormous steps, a wounded dove in his hand; later, he advances similarly against an onslaught of police-trained fire hoses, a rock clutched in his hand to beat the captain’s brains in. The parallel between the two actions is aesthetically perfect, but makes hash of the segment’s argument on the necessity of revolutionary violence. Of course, most people will be too overwhelmed by the film’s overheated images to engage in rational thought, but then, that’s precisely the point. It’s no coincidence that propagandists favor images over words, since the former are far less susceptible to rational dissection. On the other hand, the evidence suggests that as propaganda, I Am Cuba was a flop both at home and abroad, which is one reason the film languished in obscurity until it was exhumed under the auspices of Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola several years back. Die-hard red-haters might be advised to stay clear, but for anyone else, I Am Cuba is a poetic masterwork that surpasses ideology, and might even have been intended to. The screening is introduced by Russian film expert John MacKay.
Also part of the I-House weekend: Ruth Behar’s Adio Kerida (Fri., 8 p.m.), a first-person narrative of the filmmaker investigating her Jewish Cuban roots; a shorts program including new work from local filmmaker Cheryl Hess and Agnès Varda’s Salut Les Cubains, composed of 1,500 still photos and a Latin dance soundtrack (Sat., 6 p.m.); and Stephen Olsson’s Our House in Havana (Sat., 8 p.m.), which follows a wealthy (and not particularly self-conscious) Cuban exile back to the palatial house of her childhood. Hess and Olsson will attend the screenings.
Hip-Hop Film Festival (Fri.-Thu., Oct. 3-9, Roxy Theater, 2023 Sansom St., 215-923-6699, www.hiphopfilmfestival.com) With the explosive commercial popularity of hip-hop culture and the ever-decreasing cost of filmmaking technology, a veritable thicket of documentaries on various aspects of hip-hop have flooded the market in the last several years, with the result that the less distinctive ones start to blur together, and even the better ones inevitably end up treading on the same turf. Kool Herc, Mos Def and Medusa are just a few of the figures who make repeat appearances in the eight documentaries spread over the weeklong Hip-Hop Film Festival, which alights at the Roxy beginning this Friday.
Because of the redundancy in hip-hop docs, the best are those that focus tightly on a specific issue, rather than providing yet another generic overview. Tops of the festival’s entries is Freestyle: The Art of Rhyme (Fri., 9 p.m. and Sat., 7 p.m.), conveniently directed by festival founder Kevin Fitzgerald. The hourlong film lays out an ongoing tension between MCs who primarily write their rhymes and those who make them up on the spot, sometimes in the context of a head-to-head battle, or cipher. The debate has its extremists, like The Coup’s Boots, who disdains freestyling in favor of perfecting written rhymes, and MC Supernatural, a frequent victor of freestyle battles to whom rappers with written rhymes are just pretenders, more interested in commercial success than the history of hip-hop culture. Obviously, freestyling is closer to hip-hop’s street-corner roots, and by definition, harder to co-opt: As one unnamed L.A. rapper opines, "The goal of freestyle is to throw something out and you can never do it again. That’s what makes it free." From an interview with rhyming pioneers The Last Poets to a revelatory clip of a 17-year-old Notorious B.I.G. freestyling on the streets of Bed-Stuy, Freestyle is clear enough to offer an easy entry for neophytes, and detailed enough to offer new tidbits to even the most seasoned fan.
Just as good is Joey Garfield’s Breath Control: The History of the Human Beat Box (Sat., 9 p.m.), a reprise from the Philadelphia Film Festival. The festival’s other entries are a mixed bag: Street Legends and Def Jux Dutch Documentary are portraits of life on the road that offer color but not much insight; The Freshest Kids is a disorganized overview that treads on too-familiar ground; Nobody Knows My Name is a well-intentioned but ultimately over-broad look at the plight of women in hip-hop, which would’ve done better to balance its caviling small-timers with a handful of the many woman who have made it despite the obstacles. Not available for review but tempting-sounding is Resistencia: Hip-Hop Columbia (Wed., 7 p.m.), a look at one aspect of the hip-hop diaspora.
Scarface ($26.98 DVD) Tying our focus on Cuba and hip-hop culture together is the release of this much-promoted DVD, with its reported advance sales of a record 2 million copies. Brian De Palma’s bloody-minded 1983 gangster yarn, scripted by Oliver Stone after the fashion of Howard Hawks’ 1932 original, has become a touchstone of rappers from Puffy to Nas, with its proto-bling tale of Tony Montana (Al Pacino), a Cuban exile who goes from disgraced prisoner to obscenely wealthy drug lord. Even on the big screen, though, it’s surprisingly dull filmmaking, with De Palma so determined to make an old-fashioned big-budget picture (and so cowed by the failure of the brilliant Blow Out) that he jettisons the quicksilver logic of his earlier films in favor of a bludgeoning opulence; even the bullet holes look like they were chiseled in marble. Setting the template for the soulnessness of Miami Vice, Scarface is a veritable pornography of creature comforts (thus its attractiveness to the all-about-the-Benjamins set). Though it’s structured as a morality tale, with Montana falling prey to his own appetites in the end, De Palma and Stone’s blaze-of-glory finish is even more hypocritical than the Prohibition-era gangster pictures it apes; perfunctory as their moralizing codas might have been, there was at least half a chance they were somewhat sincere. It’s clear all anyone involved in Scarface wanted, Pacino included, was a chance to go big: It’s like The Godfather as directed by Michael Bay. One happy note: The film’s laughable failure to cast any of the lead roles with Latin actors and the way it contrives to have large groups of recent immigrants speaking English among themselves seems almost unthinkable now. Its shameless elevation of material luxury, sadly, is timeless.
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