The rise of Central Asian cinema began during this period. At any given point in its prior history, different republics or states have predominated. Not surprisingly, given that it was the region's most densely populated republic, Uzbekistan was the first Central Asian Soviet republic with its own film studio - Buchkino, a subsidary of Leningrad's Sewsapkino studio, was founded in Buchara in 1924; the following year Uzbekistan's "Star of the Orient" film factory opened in Tashkent. Ashehabad, the capital of Turkmenistan, got its own studio in 1926 - the Ashchabad Kinofabrika. In 1929 Kazakhstan got a documentary film unit which was a subsidary of Vostokkino, in 1929 and its studio, in Alma-Ata (today Almaty) in 1934. Tajikkino (later Tajikfilm), Tajikistan's documentary and newsreel-studio, was founded in 1930. And finally Kyrgyzstan got its first film studio (documentaries and news reels, of course) in 1942.

The first Uzbeki features were shot in 1924, among them Pachta-Aral by Nikolai Shtsherbakov and Minaret of Death by Vyatsheslav Viskovsky - exotica for Westerners with strong educational messages aimed at the indiginous audience (resist local insurrectionists, support emancipation, etc.). Turkmenistan's first feature was White Gold (29), a semi-documentary agit-prop tract on collectivisation by hack director A. Vladycuk - but it was too much of a documentary for some, who consider Dmitry Posnansky's Never to Forget (31) to be Turkmenistan's first true feature. The first Tajik feature, Lydia Petshorina's When Emirs Die, which also focused on Kolkhoz-building and collectivization, appeared in 1932. It took seven years for Kazakhstan to finally produce a feature, Moishe Lewin's Amangeldy (31) - although Mikhail Karostin's Dzut (31) should rightfully be considered the first Kazakh film but is usually dismissed because it was produced by the non-local, Central Asian production unit Vostokkino, as part of an initiative from the Western to jumpstart production (disputed patrimony arises with many early Central Asian films). In the rear as usual, Kyrgyzstan was granted its first feature in 1955: Vasilli Pronin's Saltanat - in essence a Mosfilm production with a local subject. The first homegrown Khyrgistanian film, My Mistake, was shot by Ivan Kobyzev in 1957.

Central Asia's film pioneers generally came from the Western republics - Russia, the Ukraine, Belorussia - and were drawn from the second and third ranks of film production: cinematic conservatives like Viskovsky or the simply less talented like Shtsherbakov, Lewin, or Pronin. One initial underlying reason why casts and crews were imported was the locals' reluctance to work with film due to Islamic strictures regarding the practice of image making. It was only in the Thirties that the first local talents finally began to emerge - although that did little to alter the character of the film output.

During WWII the Central Asian film studios became the center of Soviet film production: the studios of Moscow, Leningrad, and Kiev were evacuated and transplanted to the safety of the Union's outer reaches - hence, for example, Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible was shot in Alma-Ata. After the war the western Russian studios left much of their equipment behind in their temporary homes, further-boosting Central Asian filmmaking in terms of facilities. However, in terms of subject matter it remained dependent on the whims of a distant Moscow. The contradictions of this period are probably best exemplified by Uzbeki pioneer Nabi Ganiyev's Tachir and Suchra (45), a fascinating amalgam of high production values, less than brilliant direction, and a strangely obsessive, Romeo and Juliet-ish narrative set against the backdrop of the Mongolian invasion of the 13th century. While the film obviously works as a parable about Germany's invasion of the Soviet Motherland, it takes great pains to achieve a sense of cultural autonomy which conflicts with both Ganiyev's sense of loyalty to the Party and its doctrines on the one hand, and his apparent feeling of cultural inferiority on the other.

Central Asian cinema truly came into its own in the Sixties. The Soviet Thaw cleared away the last remnants of Stalinism and in the arts this meant an end to the official monumental style which resembled a Madame Toussaud's exhibit, only less animated. A more realistic, more personal kind of cinema was encouraged - within the limits of the Party's interests, of course. (Which isn't to say that the Stalinist era didn't produce any interesting or even highly personal cinema, as certain film histories suggest, just that it wasn't officially sanctioned). A great deal of money was invested in the film industry and production grew. The continued development of regional film studios, not only in Central Asia but also in Georgia, the Ukraine, and Armenia was also to the benefit of the lesser republics. Again, this development was accompanied by the advent of Western-USSR filmmakers in Central Asia - young turks this time, like Vladimir Motyl in Tajikistan or Larissa Shepitko and Andrei Konchalovsky in Kyrgyzstan; the latter two filmmakers were the first to adapt the works of Tshingiz Aitmatov - Shepitko's Heat (63) and Konchalovsky's The First Teacher (65), both masterpieces - and basically paved the way for the Kyrgyzstan cinema to come by turning the very poor local production facilities and the republic's strong documentary tradition to aesthetic advantage. This move to the outer edge of the Soviet empire also enabled Shepitko and Konchalovsky to use their respective films to consider the moral limits of the Soviet utopian ideal of progress: here the locals look less backwards than the outsiders, just too far out.

The two probably most important Central Asian filmmakers to emerge during this era were Uzbekistan's Ali Khamraev and Kyrgyzstan's late Tolomush Okeev. Khamraev was a Ghengis Khan-ian giant of genre filmmaking who walked the tightrope of serving the Soviet cause and its dictates while experimenting with a unique, stylized approach to filmmaking. Okeev, by contrast, was a somewhat reclusive master of a discreet pantheistic cinema. Both of them encapsulate the essence of their respective cinematic cultures.

Khamraev's action films, musicals, historical epics, and documentaries (not exactly his forte) depended on the mood of the day. To give just one example: when the "Sov-Eastern" (a kind of revolutionary version of the Western genre, often shot in the Central Asian wilds) became the thing to do after the runaway success of Motyl's White Sun of the Desert (69) and Chaken Aitmanov's Death of the Ataman (70), Khamraev made his classics The Extraordinary Komissar (71) and The Seventh Bullet (72) in the same vein. Khamraev has a great sense of genre, for working with the sheer essence of story, an approach that favours movement instead of reflection. That said, in the contradictory universe that is Khamraev's oeuvre, it comes as no surprise that his first major work, White White Stork (66), is a quiet drama about an extramarital affair in a small town, a subject rarely dealt with directly in Soviet Cinema. And if there is a subject to which he returns to again and again, it's the oppression of women - although, judging by his most recent and absolutely dismissable effort, Bo-Ba-Bu (99) and his treatment of his lead actress, one must doubt his sincerity a little (or is it just that he's incapable of delivering Western-style sex and crime?). His strength is a tangible, restless sensibility with a taste for bold directorial strokes and, later, dense, expressive color. Man Follows the Birds (75), a kind of Uzbekian A Walk with Love and Death, follows an innocent young poet on a quest for beauty in a war ravaged medieval Central Asia - now that's Khamraev's kind of story: the ambiguities of reality threatening a morally stable universe.

If Khamraev is a born storyteller, Tolomush Okeev is a born poet, an auteur of the smallest nuances, of the beauty of details. But to consider Okeev it's important to note that in terms of development Kyrgyzstan is Central Asian cinema's odd man out because it's defined by the work of a single man, writer Tshingiz Aitmatov. His novels and screenplays aren't just the basis for much of the country's film classics but also served as aesthetic examples - even if Aitmatov wasn't directly involved in a film's production, he still exerted a strong and unmistakable artistic influence. Okeev is a prime example of this: Although Aitmatov worked on only a few of his films, his sense of lyricism is omnipresent. Okeev tells his stories mainly through their landscapes, within which people constituted one element subsumed into the whole - a point of view that became even more clear in his later, eco-politics-infused works like The Snow Leopard's Decendant (84). His storylines are usually minimal, with few plot twists - instead he patiently studies the rituals of daily life at decisive moments during seemingly eternal cycles like hunting or harvesting, telling stories that feel like passages even when their nominal dramatic arcs are completed. Okeev is concerned with necessities rather than developments, and the essence of a landscape is reflected in its beauty, its innermost expression of harmony.

The rise of Kazakh filmmaking in the late Eighties proved to be the last major change in Central Asian cinema and the last of Moscow's efforts to encourage filmmaking there - one of the few Five Year Plans that paid off, in fact better than anybody expected. In 1984 the VGIK put together a class of Kazakh film students for a course led by youth film auteur Sergey Solovyov and the theater director Anatoly Wassilyev with the aim of invigorating Kazakh film culture, which was in a dire state. Solovyov and Wassilyev taught their students to work with very little and to trust into improvisation. "Solovyov's Gang," as the class became known, made its debut in 1986: Ya-ha-ha, a now-legendary medium length film directed by Rashid Nugmanov, featuring rock 'n' roll icon Victor Tsoi of the band Kino. Ya-ha-ha was everything Soviet cinema wasn't: visually stark, fast-moving, more or less completely improvised, and unabashedly pissed off-punk had come to the USSR. The following year inspired by the work of his students, Solovyov directed his masterpiece Assa, with Victor Tsoi once again playing the protagonist, while Sergei Bodrov went to Kazakhstan to shoot his cool rock 'n' roll road movie

The Amateurs. The same year, Kazakhfilm offered Nugmanov, who was still a student, his first feature film, The Needle (88): Nugmanov transformed this standard genre material into a manifesto of a new kind of cinema, which went on to become a huge big box office hit. Nugmanov had tapped into the spirit of the times, with the crumbling empire and its human detritus. The film's scenario of drugs and Mafia is very new yet at the same time ancient and archaic, and there's a surreal sense of landscape - far removed from the conquerable space of the Sov-Easterns - indifferent in its magisteral presence to its inhabitant's struggles and failings, twisted madness, and spiritual running-on-empty. Finally, in 1989 three feature debuts confirmed the emergence of the Kazakh New Wave: Serik Aprymov's The Last Station, Abaj Karpikov's A Small Fish in Love, and the somewhat older Talgat Temenov's A Wolf Cub Among Men. In addition, a handful of films by already-established directors were invigorated by the gutsy cinema of their succesors. The wave finally broke in 1991 with the last two important Kazakh debuts: Darezhan Omirbaev's Kairat and Ardak Amirkulov's The Fall of Otrar, one of the great unrecognized masterpieces of the Nineties, which doubtless fell victim to the political turmoil of the day.

Between August and December 1991, the Central Asian Soviet republics became independent states-another new chapter had begun.

Olaf Möller is a film critic based in Cologne and a regular contributor to Film Comment.
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© 2003 by Olaf Möller

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