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FILM COMMENT
May/June 2003
Lone Wolves at the Door of History
Tucked away between hotspots and flashpoints, the former Soviet Asian republics have been quietly turning out handcrafted masterpieces since the Sixties.
by Kent Jones
Above: The Fall of Otrar
The many and various parallels and divides between films, filmmakers, and regions are fascinating, instructive. Kazakhstan, which boasts a land mass greater than Europeās, is the youngest of the five countries, a national construct only a little over 100 years old. I kept hearing that this was a nation of loners with no sense of history, a despairing diagnosis delivered in optimistic tones. The charismatic Serik Aprimov, with his infectious giggle, gave me the most poetic description. He told us that ćKazakhä means ćthe people who wandered away from the center.ä I checked this out with a few other people, and after a knowing laugh most of them grudgingly agreed that even if it was not absolute fact, the sentiment was right.
This loner mystique accounts for the singular devotion of Kazakh filmmakers to rendering the textures of anomie and disquiet on the screen. Serik Aprimovās The Last Stop (89), a landmark in the valiant heyday of the Kazakh New Wave, hones in on activities and states of mind that most filmmakers donāt bother with: what itās like to sit around with your friends and kill time on a Saturday afternoon, the feeling of being outside at the end of a nothing day, right around sunset (photographed with patient exactitude by Murat Nugmanov, a secret hero of Kazakh cinema), the slow buildup to violence in a town where thereās too much alcohol and not enough to do. Amir Karakulov covers similar territory in Last Holiday (97), about a group of delinquents on a downward spiral during the May holidays of 1979, but from more of a distance. Where Last Stop has a raw, present-tense immediacy, Karakulovās compact masterpiece is sadly elegant, a tragedy of lost adolescents viewed from a calm remove. (Karakulovās underrated new film Jylama [03], shot on DV and improvised with non-actors in a rural setting, is rougher but similarly hypnotic in its concentration on simple actions in their full measure of time.) Omirbaev also deals with anomie but nails it from the inside, using the most precise cinematic language since Hitchcock and Bresson (both names came up when we talked) to illuminate the mental landscape of his troubled heroes. The young man from the steppe in Kairat (92), the family man forced to commit murder in order to pay back his debt in Killer (98), the dissatisfied filmmaker in 2001ās The Road (played by Tadjik director Djamshed Usmonov) are all silent in the face of life, awestruck by its complexity. Iām not sure if any other director has ever gotten at the strange sense of dislocation that hits at the instant when the interior world meets the exterior world. By contrast, Ermek Shinarbaev, who has to be one of the great storytellers in movies, takes the finest psychological threads and traces them down to their frayed ends. By the time you get to the end of My Life on the Tricorn (92), about a severely disaffected young man in the process of negating himself, or the altogether astonishing Revenge (87), in which the urge to wreak vengeance for the murder of a child is followed across two generations and three countries, you feel like vast amounts of ground have been covered and an enormous slice of experience has been contained in one movie. Even Amirkulovās handmade, sepia-toned, four-years-in-the-making epic, The Fall of Otrar, a pageant of medieval delirium in which the great Khan extinguishes an entire civilization the way a CEO would downsize a corporation, is shot through with the strangest kind of melancholy, brought on by the knowledge that an entire way of life is going to disappear, to be replaced by something monumental, faceless, mysterious.
You can feel variants on this disquiet in the films from Tadjikistan and Uzbekistan, countries with longer histories and more Middle Eastern cultures. In Usmonovās The Flight of the Bee (98) and his more recent Angel on the Right (02), ancient traditions butt up against the lawless world of the new capitalism. Usmonovās films describe a bleak reality with good-humored clarity. They are genuine folk art without being folksy: artisanal, anecdotal ćlittle villageä stories with bite, such as Mairam Yusupovaās The Time of Yellow Grass (91), which concerns a mountain village coping with the mysterious appearance of a dead body (of an infidel!) in the wilderness. Like Bachtiyar Hudoynazarovās lyrical Brother (91), a train travelogue through a wasted modern Tadjikistan, Yusupovaās poem of a movie is more landscape-based than the Usmonov films. Yellow Grass is as geared to the mountain community and its pathways as Kiarostamiās Where Is the Friendās House?, but the presence of that corpse gives the movie a fascinating overtone: it upsets the order of an ancient way of life, and colors the action with an odd sense of foreboding.
Uzbek cinema is informed by a similar tension ÷ cultural history vs. Soviet past vs. a possibly westernized future. Of all the cities we visited, Tashkent is closest to a western metropolis, but a western metropolis where inflation is such that people have to walk around with stacks of currency and the marketplaces suggest the 19th century more than the 21st. Zoulfikar Musakov is the great popularizer of Uzbek cinema, and his Boys in the Sky (02) has reportedly been playing to packed houses in one of Tashkentās few standing cinemas for months now. An antic, intermittently charming variation on Amarcord (complete with the boys taking a first, forbidden look at porn), thereās an unexpectedly sad undertone to Boys, an unnameable feeling of growing up in an undefined and unsure present. Itās the beauty of these boys and girls that gives the movie its charm÷their freshness feels like an echo nearly 40 years after the fact of Elyer Ishmukhamedovās Uzbek New Wave classic, Tenderness (67). The source of this sadness is made explicit in Rashid Malikovās allegorical The Mystery of Ferns (92). The specter of Tarkovsky doesnāt exactly hang over Asian post-Soviet cinema, but when itās there itās really there (as in Musakovās cheeky homage to Stalker in his 1991 ćscience fictionä satire
Dedicated to Steven Spielberg). In Malikovās film, an old professor loses his memory and goes wandering through a series of increasingly fragmented landscapes. The director builds from Tarkovskyās key move of slow overhead tracking shots surveying stray objects, and makes it pay off: deteriorating individual consciousness is linked to a similarly deteriorating cultural consciousness in a powerfully visceral manner.
If there is a giant who sits astride the history of Uzbek cinema, itās Ali Khamraev, one of those rare talents like Welles or Godard or Scorsese whose love for the medium is so intense that his best films burst with criss-crossing energies and insights, like a fireworks display. His overly soft last feature Bo Ba Bu (98) aside, Khamraev is a towering figure, a wizard with landscapes (they all seem charged, often enchanted) and an instinctual genius with actors. Anyone interested in the Brechtian idea of the social gestus should study Khamraevās ferocious 1972 masterpiece Without Fear, which deals with the Soviet modernization of a Muslim village in 1927 and the shock waves caused by the sight of unveiled women. Khamraevās bravura talent isolates just the right gestures, merging the physical, the visual, and the dramatic with perfect precision. Itās impossible not to see Yusup Razikovās mordantly funny Orator (00) as a corrective to Khamraevās Soviet-era knockout: in the Razikov, a gentle Muslim man who just wants to be left alone with his three adoring wives is given the Soviet seal of approval by virtue of his gift for on-the-spot political oratory. Meanwhile, his wives and the peaceful world around him are systematically and unthinkingly ćmodernized.ä
Khamraev and Razikov both work from visual ideas central to Uzbek culture: the patterns of vibrant textiles one sees throughout the country go hand in hand with Razikovās ornate compositions and the swirling, nearly abstract visual forms of Khamraevās Man Follows Birds, a mind-bending story of a young thiefās progress in medieval Uzbekistan. In Kirghiz cinema, or in the work of a Turkmen filmmaker like Khodjakuli Narliev, ancient cultural forms are incorporated into the structure and tone of the work itself. Aktan Abdikalikov has gone on record as saying that the rhyming images and movements in his The Adopted Son (98), one of the only films from the region to garner a worldwide audience (and the only one currently in distribution in America), are based on patterns in Kirghiz art (you can see the same kind of pride and care with form in his nearly wordless 1993 film Selkinchek, which may be an even greater achievement than Son, and in the films of Marat Sarulu). In Narlievās The Daughter-in-Law (72), a film built around the longing of a young woman attached to the memory of her dead husband who is unwilling to give up her solitary life of service to her kindly father-in-law, memories and associations, flashbacks, and wish-fulfilling fantasies continually punctuate the minimal action. But unlike, say, Point Blank or a Resnais film, the temporal shifts are gently lulling, and the net effect is the filmic equivalent of the warm harmonic complexity found in regional rug or fabric patterns. Tolomush Okeev takes on the question of cultural heritage from another angle. The best films of this magnificent artist are as rooted in the rural Kirghiz landscape as Catherās novels are rooted in the American west. In 1974ās The Fierce One (written by the omnipresent Andrei Konchalovsky, who also wrote Without Fear, Abbasovās 1961 Uzbek classic Tashkent, City of Bread, and whose 1965 debut The First Teacher is a landmark in Kirghiz cinema), The Skies of Our Childhood (66), and his breathtaking debut short There Are Horses (65), Okeev appears to know every twist, every turn, every rock, every crevice of the mountainous Kirghiz countryside, and every facet of the traditional life lived there, human and animal. Horses, wolves, and dogs have presence and power in Okeevās movies as they do in no one elseās. Like Khamraev, Okeev is a giant to be reckoned with. He is so revered that Kirghiz Film Studio was renamed in his honor after his untimely death in 2001.
Why bother with yet another slew of films from yet another corner of the world? Why indeed. Peter Bart may be a fool, but heās not the only one asking such questions. So, why bother? Firstly, because weāre told we donāt have to, since we make the best movies here. Examine the logic and transfer it to global politics÷it leads all the way to Freedom Fries, Colin Powellās U.N. charade, and the numbing arrogance thatās led us to Iraq. It all adds up to the kind of bill of goods that can be sold only to a people who jump at the chance to believe in the myth of their own moral and cultural superiority. Secondly, these movies speak from the corner of the world we now dread most, which is why it behooves us to watch them. Thirdly, Iām here to report that there are things in these movies that take my breath away, and that remind me why I fell in love with the cinema in the first place.
Kent Jones is Film Commentās Editor-at-Large. With thanks to Alla Verlotsky.
© 2003 by the Film Society of Lincoln Center
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