To rail against director Mikhail Kalatozov's masterful, delusional slice of post-Bay of Pigs agitprop for its unapologetic ideological commitment would amount to artistic heresy and a short-sighted emphasis on the political over the artistic if the film would not be such a bold and brazen reclamation of that age-old fact that art is innately political, no matter what. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay Immerse yourself in the revelry of a fantasy space as obviously euphoric as Lang's city of Metropolis was demonic and as vibrantly animated as Lang's vision to boot, Yo Soy Cuba is first and foremost an aesthetic vision. But with these aesthetics, the proof is in the proverbial politics to begin with. Separating this distant vision of a largely fictional representation of Cuban life from its animated muse – its Soviet morality – is on some level impossible: like Eisenstein's use of montage to stage ideas of collective conflict, cinematographer Sergei Urusevsky's aesthetic revolutions are not apolitical. .Yo Soy Cuba is a lively workout, a communist experience evidently affected by the wave of political revolution that it presumed (or hoped) was on the horizon, a film awash with all the passions that genuine faith can muster, and a work that marshals immediate and even crazed support for Cuban life into a catalyst for unbridled cinematic experimentation that runs wild with unbridled charisma. Revolutionary cinema, Yo Soy Cuba is not simply a communist propaganda narrative or a neutered, neutral-style narrative of social upheaval that still turns (like almost all politically “radical” American films) to the largely individualistic cinematic style it purports to correct . Cuba is instead a unilaterally adventurous, fiercely aestheticized, and stylistically controversial refutation to the staid capitalist style of mass-produced American cinema. It is a glove in the face not only of American politics but also of American cinema, which fluidly intertwines and mixes people, places and objects without privileging anyone in a decidedly anti-capitalist environment. Ironically anthropomorphizing the angry island itself with a deadpan, melodramatic voiceover from the island's perspective (a voice that brazenly pays homage to Columbus and then throws him to the wolves within seconds) is one of the first keys to understanding desire of the film to explore space rather than simply depict it like most Hollywood films. From there, the lush swirl of mise-en-scène and cinematography suggests a subjective, rewatchable sense of place that challenges and defeats the Hollywood understanding of a stable world sitting so that only people can focus our attention. The camera shows the exhilaration of a runner, except he doesn't run so much as slide and stroll through a place he views as if the camera were one of the edges of the island. Ultimately, the ever-moving camera adopts an ecstatic search for new meanings more akin to a documentary's active and present search to challenge the unexplored caverns of the world in every frame. Unlike most American films, where places and material objects are props - manufactured objects used only to be won over by the protagonists or to which they pay no attention - the shots of Yo Soy Cuba cannot be easily divided into "fire" and “backdrop”. The camera does not focus on lonely people, individualized in the frame as foreground subjects for whom the rest of the world is simply a.