远取其势，近取其质”是写意人物画写生过程中观察和表现对象的两个方面。“远取其势”就是作画者要有从整体造型着眼的自觉意识，对审美客体进行远距离整体观照，获得整体性概括印象，“近取其质”则是作画者对审美客体进行近距离的细部观察，深入研究和表现对象，两者都是建立在以对象为依据的基础上，是与写意人物画意象造型特征相适应的。
I am Cuba (Spanish: Soy Cuba; Russian: Я Куба, Ya Kuba) is a Soviet/Cuban film produced in 1964 by director Mikhail Kalatozov at Mosfilm.The movie was not received well by either the Russian or Cuban public[1] and was almost completely forgotten until it was re-discovered by filmmakers in the United States 30 years later.[1] The movie's acrobatic tracking shots and idiosyncratic mise en scene prompted Hollywood directors like Martin Scorsese to begin a campaign to restore the movie in the early 1990s.
The film is shot in black and white, sometimes using infrared film obtained from the Soviet military[2] 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.
Contents [hide]
1 History
2 Story
3 American Presence in the Film
4 Documentary
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
[edit] 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. They made use of innovative filming 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 a thousand 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 stories 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 in an early, crude version of a steadicam - and the camera operator also wearing a vest with hooks on the back. An assemble a 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 rather stereotyped view of Cubans, whilst in Moscow it was considered naïve, not revolutionary enough, even too sympathetic to the lives of the bourgeois pre-Fidel classes. Also, upon its original release, the movie never reached Western countries largely due to it being 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 Kalatazov. 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 watched 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 35 mm restoration of I am Cuba without the Russian overdubbing in September 2005.
[edit] Story
200pxThe movie consists of four distinct short stories about the suffering of the Cuban people and their reactions, varying from passive amazement in the first, to a guerrilla march in the last. Between the stories, a female narrator (credited "The Voice Of Cuba") says such things as, "I am Cuba, the Cuba of the casinos, but also of the people."
The first story (centered on the character Maria) shows the destitute Cuban masses contrasted with the splendor in the American-run gambling casinos. Maria, who lives in a shanty-town on the edge of Havana, hopes to get married to her fruit-seller boyfriend, but instead falls into hanging around the bars filled with rich Americans, and from there falls to prostitution. The next story is about a farmer, Pedro, burning his sugar cane when he learns he is going to lose his land to United Fruit. The third story describes the suppression of rebellious students led by a character named Enrique at Havana University (featuring one of the longest camera shots). The final part shows how Mariano, a typical farmer, ends up joining the rebels in the Sierra Maestra Mountains, ultimately leading to triumphal march into Havana to proclaim the revolution.
