I won’t get into what’s a real steadicam shot, blabla, this movie was made before Shining so before the real “birth” of steadicam shots. But I wanted to share this vid cause the movie is AWESOME, technically would be one of the best movie made in a Welles influence. Scorsese and Coppola saw it in 1993 cause it was forbidden till 1992 in the USA (you can read stuff about it on the net) and Scorsese said that if the movie has been seen in the sixties when it was originally released, it’d have changed the whole cinema hsitory.
So here you are, the movie is called I Am Cuba, or Soy Cuba. It’s one of the first opening scene after the opening credits, totally stunning :
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=GFrHPcKiXaQ
From wikipedia :
What most amazes cinephile audiences about this movie are the long takes (cf. the much later Russian Ark). Initially a three minute aerial shot of rural tropical landscape is disrupted by an infamous jumpcut to the top of a hotel building where a beauty contest is going on accompanied by raucous pop music. The camera, using a wide angle lens, moves among the contestants, goes out of the building, moves downwards for two stories into a club then circles around the bartenders. It then enters the pool and actually goes underwater, where the shot ends. In fact, the original scene went on for longer: the camera actually left the water (special submarine lenses cleaned off water droplets), but Kalatozov decided to cut this scene from the final movie. This scene was appropriated by Paul Thomas Anderson in his film Boogie Nights, when the camera is tracking around a pool, and then goes under water, and the sound changes, just like in I Am Cuba.
There is also a remarkable four minute scene of a slowly retreating long shot of a burning sugar cane field and house. This scene was later appropriated by Tarkovsky in The Sacrifice (1986).
In another scene, the camera follows a coffin between a crowded street. Then it stops and slowly moves upwards for at least four stories until it is filming the coffin from above a building. Without stopping it then starts panning sideways and enters through a window into a cigar factory, then goes straight towards a window where the cigar workers are watching the coffin. The camera finally passes through the window and, still following the court, appears to float over the street between the buildings. These shots were accomplished by assembling a line of technicians, and passing the camera down the line, from hand to hand.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Am_Cuba
The other scene they’re mentionning :
http://fr.youtube.com/watch?v=ayhC2q3A8bU
