10 Visual Movie Masterpieces You've Probably Never Seen

6. Soy Cuba

Ugetsu Monogatari's international reputation wasn't built upon an endorsement from Martin Scorsese (although it certainly helped) - the same can't be said for Soy Cuba, a movie which might never have reached a wider audience were it not for Scorsese's tireless campaigning in the early 1990s to get it restored and released. It's perhaps ironic that a movie shot on behalf of the Soviet and Cuban authorities was largely rejected by its intended audience, only to resurface thanks to an American filmmaker. We should be eternally grateful to Scorsese for his efforts, since Soy Cuba is a bold, visually arresting work of cinema which is hard to forget. Depicting life inside Cuba, from dancers in a casino to farmers toiling the land, director Mikhail Kalatozov practically reinvented the tracking shot, with extreme wide angle lenses performing miraculous feats, constantly gliding around the scenes and, in one jaw-dropping sequence, elevating from street level up to the fourth floor of a nearby building before drifting in through the window and into a room. Technically innovative in a manner which has to be seen to be believed, the excellent documentary I Am Cuba: the Siberian Mammoth examines some of the ingenious camera tricks used by this nearly-forgotten masterpiece.