Historical Film Analysis of Worldbuilding in Kalatozov’s I Am Cuba
Assignment
Select one of the four stories in I Am Cuba and survey the scholarly literature surrounding Kalatozov’s anthology film and the historical context of its production and reception. Construct an interpretive thesis about the critique of pre-communist Cuba and the communist goals and worldbuilding project(s) represented in that story. Your essay should include specific evidence from your technical analysis of the film and sustained engagement with at least three scholarly secondary sources. As a component of your writing process, you will assemble an annotated bibliography of those scholarly secondary sources.
As you research and analyze, consider the following questions: How do specific aspects of mise-en-scène, cinematography, sound, and editing contribute to the effect of the film on the viewer? What historical actors and events, cultural perspectives, and power relationships are being depicted in the story, and how does their depiction relate to the rhetorical and ideological appeals made by the film to its specific audience? How do film scholars and historians interpret the film, its historical context, and its reception? How do those scholars’ disciplinary perspectives inform their use of evidence and their interpretive arguments about the film? How do scholars position their claims relative to the existing scholarly conversation on the film? What communist worldbuilding goals or projects (e.g., anti-imperialism, social equality, economic development, youth rebellion and counterculture, etc.) are thematized in this story and in what specific ways does the narrative and the technical construction of the film advance those goals? What insights does the film offer about how Soviet and Cuban communists were engaging in worldbuilding practices, or reimagining their world toward communist values and ends?
Your final paper will be 6–7 pages in length and will be worth 40% of your writing grade.
Learning Goals
- Make specific, complex, arguable claims
- Produce unified, cohesive body paragraphs that contain arguable topic sentences, well-selected and properly-integrated evidence from the primary sources and scholarly reference sources, and rhetorically-effective introduction, conclusion, and transitions between ideas
- Adopt the appropriate stance, style, and genre conventions of historical and film analysis
- Continue developing the ability to evaluate scholarly claims, identify scholarly conversations, and integrate secondary source material in writing
- Practice process-oriented writing and learn flexible strategies for generating, revising, editing, and proofreading drafts while also reflecting on the process of writing itself
Required Viewing/Reading
Buhanan, Kurt. “Analyzing Film.” Humanities Core Handbook: Worldbuilding 2023–2024, XanEdu, 2023, pp. 194-208.
I Am Cuba (Soy Cuba). Directed by Mikhail Kalatozov. Mosfilm / Milestone Films / Kino Lorber, 1964.
Robertson, James. “Historical Analysis and Archival Research.” Humanities Core Handbook: Worldbuilding 2023–2024, XanEdu, 2023, pp. 183-93.
Accessibility Note: The version of the film on Kanopy does not include captions for the dialogue spoken in English. Please refer to the transcription as PDF or captions as an SRT subtitles file.
Bibliography of Scholarly Secondary Sources
Your essay must engage with at least one of the scholarly secondary sources in the list below. A more extensive bibliography of sources that provide historical context and/or treat specific themes in the film are available in the Zotero library for this assignment. All materials are available online through UCI Libraries. For more information on using library resources, review the Humanities Core Library Introduction Tutorial.
Domínguez, Carlos Espinosa. “The Mammoth That Wouldn’t Die.” Caviar with Rum: Cuba-USSR and the Post-Soviet Experience. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US, 2012, pp. 109-117. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/uci/detail.action?docID=1058217. [via UCI Libraries ]
Galt, Rosalind. “Forms: Soy Cuba and Revolutionary Beauty.” Pretty: Film and the Decorative Image. Columbia University Press, 2011, pp. 213–235. EBSCOhost. [via UCI Libraries]
Gorsuch, Anne E. “‘Cuba, My Love’: The Romance of Revolutionary Cuba in the Soviet Sixties.” The American Historical Review, vol. 120, no. 2, 2015, pp. 497–526. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43696680.
Oukaderova, Lida. “I Am Cuba and the Space of Revolution.” Film & History, vol. 44, no. 2, 2014, pp. 4–21, https://doi.org/10.1353/flm.2014.a562886.
Rogatchevski, Andrei. “Exporting Cinemarxism in the 1960s: The Case of Soy Cuba.” Third Cinema, World Cinema and Marxism, edited by Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020, pp. 25-62. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.5040/9781501348303. [via UCI Libraries]
Thakkar, Amit. “Who Is Cuba? Dispersed Protagonism and Heteroglossia in Soy Cuba/I Am Cuba.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media, vol. 55, no. 1, 2014, pp. 83–101. Project Muse, https://doi.org/10.13110/framework.55.1.0083.
View the complete bibliography as a Zotero library, in which the sources above are tagged as “On the Required List.”
