They should be popping a magnum at the offices of Milestone, which is today releasing definitive DVDs of two of the most important films it has rescued from obscurity. The first, Charles Burnett’s sublimely astringent ballad of Watts, “Killer of Sheep” (1977), includes his 1983 feature, “My Brother’s Wedding,” and four shorts. The second, Mikhail Kalatozov’s “I Am Cuba,” is the object of veneration in a cleverly simulated cigar box, supported — along with interviews, slide shows, and a pamphlet — by two exceptional feature-length documentaries that provide context while raising as much dust as they settle: The only resolved opinion about “I Am Cuba” is that it did for filmmaking bravado what, say, Fred Astaire did for dance — and it’s just as pleasurable.

Never has antique agitprop proved more intoxicating, and the DVD format offers an ideal way to experience “I Am Cuba.” The viewer is now empowered to stop and replay the big moments, of which there are far too many to properly absorb in one sitting. The star performer, in this instance, is Kalatozov’s camera, which, though almost exclusively handheld, seems at times to have a mind of its own as well as supernatural means of mobility.

The accompanying documentaries — Vicente Ferraz’s “The Siberian Mammoth” (2005) and the fastidiously titled “A Film About Mikhail Konstantinovich Kalatozov in Two Parts” (2006), by Kalatozov’s grandson, Mikhail Kalatozishvili — explain some of the magic and demonstrate that much of it is presaged in Kalatozov’s earlier films, made at the dawn of sound. This detracts not at all from the emotional satisfaction of the film’s visual beauty, wit, and power. “I Am Cuba” may represent a feat of engineering, in which scrupulous planning and rehearsal allowed the running camera to be passed from one operator to another, or from a crane to a cable, yet the technique almost always serves the substance — an idea that was fiercely contested when the film was first shown in Cuba and in Moscow, in 1964.

Of course, we aren’t looking at the film with the same eyes — but then whose eyes was “I Am Cuba” intended for, anyway? It was made to solidify the relationship between Cuba and the Soviet Union, as a generously financed collaboration between Mosfilm and ICIAC (Cuba’s national film industry). Yet the Soviets didn’t offer the Cubans financing to document their revolution. Instead, they sent two celebrated figures in Russian cinema: Kalatozov and his despotic, virtuosic director of photography, Sergei Urusevsky, who had opened the international market to Soviet films in 1957 with the hugely successful “The Cranes are Flying.” Kalatozov put together a Cuban-Russian crew, spent a year studying the island, and shot “I Am Cuba” for 14 months.

Unlike “The Birth of a Nation,” “Battleship Potemkin,” or “Triumph of the Will,” “I Am Cuba” is not a nationalist call to arms. It is the work of foreigners, misty-eyed with naïve romanticism, determined to glorify what they presumed to be a relatively bloodless revolution that was nevertheless souring before their eyes. In 1962, while they scouted locations, recruited crew members and actors, and prepared a script (by Yevgeni Yevtushenko and Enrique Barnet), America was buzzing them with low-flying planes, amid threats of a naval quarantine in response to the installation of Soviet missiles. Kalatozov was reportedly appalled by American attempts to stifle the new Cuba, and saw the film as his personal protest. By the time he started shooting, in February 1963, the victories of 1958 were dimmed by ongoing summary executions and the expropriation of land.

When the film debuted a year later, Cuban newspapers ridiculed it as “I Am Not Cuba.” The constant refrain of “soy Cuba,” spoken by a woman with a childlike voice, generated laughter in the theater, as did the deliberate tempo and the outlandish camera moves. Urusevsky, in particular, was blamed for subordinating content to image. In “The Siberian Mammoth,” a Cuban participant, looking back, says, “Maybe we didn’t understand their temperament. They sure didn’t understand ours.” It fared no better in Moscow, where the filmmakers were attacked for their formalism and for showing Americans having a good time in Havana. The screenwriters agreed, to a point: Mr. Barnet was disappointed that the project had grown artificial and condescending; Mr. Yevtushenko conceded, in a TV interview, that the script was the weakest aspect of the film. It was buried in the archives (one print in Russia, one in Cuba) and forgotten for nearly three decades.

In 1992, Tom Luddy, of the Telluride Film Festival, tracked down a copy and showed it as part of a Kalatozov tribute. Milestone secured rights from Mosfilm, and with Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola lending their names as co-presenters, the film made its American premiere in 1995. The reviews were ecstatic, despite a bit of thumb-sucking about whether it is permissible to bask in the erotic gleam of thrilling filmmaking when the themes are sentimental, simplistic, even jejune: The “Waiting for Lefty” finish, impressively staged with 5,000 soldiers massed in a victory march, invites us all to join the revolution — we won’t actually be killing any people, just the past. The most amusing episode in “The Siberian Mammoth” occurs toward the end, when the director informs the Cubans who had worked on “I Am Cuba” that it has been rediscovered and acclaimed a masterpiece in America. The crewmembers remembered Kalatozov with great affection, but considered the film a dead letter; they find its resurrection astonishing, baffling, bemusing, and pleasing. Even so, the veteran head of ICIAC can’t help but note that when the film might have meant something to Cuba, it was ignored; now that it is an artistic heirloom, it is treasured.

Yet if the overall perception of this heirloom was transformed from superfluous formalism, in 1964, to rousing innovation, in 1995, perhaps it has changed once again in 2007, when it would be even more simplistic to mistake “I Am Cuba” for history or politics or naturalism. Revolution is a legitimate, universal theme, and in “I Am Cuba,” it is treated with four sequential tales that could not be more familiar: A young woman is exploited by capitalism into a life of prostitution; a sugar cane farmer is rudely kicked off his land by a landlord; a young revolutionary student is shot down in cold blood by a police assassin, and a farmer who wants to live in peace joins the revolution after his home is bombed. In other words, agitprop isn’t far removed from melodrama, and melodrama’s only defense resides in the power of the telling.

The astonishing tracking shots are like great Faulknerian sentences that continue lucidly for hundreds of words. The one that begins on a hotel rooftop with a rock ‘n’ roll band and a bikini contest, and a swimming pool way off in the distance, is as funny as the material it encapsulates, as the camera descends the side of the building, makes its way through a deck party, and follows a sashaying doll into the swimming pool, diving in after her as the music goes glub-glub. By contrast, a funeral cortege begins on the ground and ascends to the top of a building, tracking through a cigar-making shop where a flag is hung out on the balcony, and continuing out past the balcony, looking down at the crowd like an omniscient yet helpless god.

It fades to black; the revolution follows. Kalatozov and Urusevsky didn’t look for realism: They filmed an unmusical old man as a singer because of his looks (Carlos Fariñas wrote his famous “Canción Triste” for that scene). They diverted a waterfall because it didn’t fall in the best light. They refused to film on days when the sky was cloudless and dull. Everything they did intensified the feeling of the story, and the story requires no apology.

Mr. Giddins is the author of “Natural Selection: Gary Giddins on Comedy, Film, Music, and Books.”