An introduction to this movie can be found in I Am Cuba 1.
This clip comes from the second half of the film — a massive funeral procession through the town with hundreds of people honoring a fallen revolutionary. Watching the activity from different angles, the puzzle becomes, “Where is the camera?” View the clip and then read the explanation below it.
This clip comes from the second half of the film — a massive funeral procession through the town with hundreds of people honoring a fallen revolutionary. Watching the activity from different angles, the puzzle becomes, “Where is the camera?” View the clip and then read the explanation below it.
(from Wikipedia) In this scene “the camera follows a flag over a body, held high on a stretcher, along a crowded street. Then it stops and slowly moves upwards for at least four storeys [sic] 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 an early, crude version of a Steadicam—and the camera operator also wearing a vest with hooks on the back. An assembly line of technicians would hook and unhook the operator’s vest to various pulleys and cables that spanned floors and building roof tops.”
(Note: If you look carefully out the window when the cigar workers drape the flag, two very thin wires can be seen strung from above this window toward a distant building. Hats off to those who realized this setup but even more to the courageous cameraman who floated a hundred feet above the crowd with a camera strapped to his body.)