The rise of Central Asian cinema

A few weeks ago I had the privilege of serving as the Chairman of a jury at the 7th Eurasian Film Festival held in Almaty, Kazakhstan. There I was able to watch some of the newest films from Central Asia and have long discussions with film directors and film critics from the region.

One such eminent film personality from whom I learned a great deal is Gulnara Abikeyeva. She is the artistic director of the Eurasia International Film Festival and a noted academic. She is a widely-travelled film critic who has written extensively and perceptively on Central Asian cinema. She has played an active role in the popularization of Central Asian cinema in many parts of the world. Her book, The Heart of the World: Films from Central Asia highlights the growth of, and current trends in, Central Asian cinema with insight and a deep love for films.

Central Asian cinema consists of films produced in five countries. They are Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. While each of these countries has its own trajectory of cinematic growth they also share certain features in common. Among these are the lingering influence of the Soviet rule, a strong ethnic imagination fed by tradition, custom, myth and ritual, a religious mentality shaped largely by Islam and the increasing attraction towards modernization and globalization. The desire to construct a modern democratic polity is one harbored by many residents of the region.

Features

As we examine the cinemas of these five countries certain dominant and readily identifiable features begin to emerge and captivate out interest. Kazakhstan, which in many ways has been leading the charge for a nr Central Asian cinema, displays the contradictory pulls of Russian influence and the enticements of westernization. The filmmakers in Kyrgyzstan, on the other hand, seem to evince a greater interest in a liberated national identity. Uzbekistan, which continues to make significant films displays the collision between the imperatives of the past and the present. Interestingly, the film ‘Lead’ that won the award of the jury I served in was from Uzbekistan and dealt with history and morality in interesting ways. It was a disciplined study of an aspect of the historical reality of Uzbekistan that carries deep political overtones.

Despite severe obstacles and impediments filmmakers in Turkmenistan are determined to create a national cinema. In this effort they look to the past for guidance and inspiration. The four year civil war had a crushing impact on the film industry. However, film directors such as Bakhtiyar Khudoinazarov, who won the silver lion at the Venice Film Festival have been able to gain international attention.

His film Kosh Ba Kosh (Odds and Evens), which won the Venice ward, portrays the way people are struggling to make sense of their meager lives handed to them against the backdrop of the civil war that had such a devastating effect on Tajikistan. Taken as a whole, central Asian cinema, despite numerous challenges it faces, is showing great powers of resilience and creativity. Gulnara Abikeyeva’s book admirably illustrates this point.

Sections

Abikeyeva’s The Heart of the World: Films from Central Asia consists of three main sections.

The first is devoted to three important and highly informative essays on the cinema of Central Asia. These thee essays are titled ten years under the winds of different ideologies, the impact of women in Central Asian cinema and what is the phenomenon of our cinema. The first essay seeks to explore the contemporary cinematic landscape of Central Asia. She begins the essay by asserting, ‘if at the beginning of the 1990s, the moment of the fall of the soviet union, the countries of Central Asia were approximately in the same situation economically and socially and one ideology dominated the whole region, then during the ten years of independence there were many changes, and the destinies of these neighboring countries unfolded differently.’ What Gulnara Abikeyeva is aiming to underscore is the fact that after the fall of the Soviet empire an ideological vacuum was created and artists, writers, filmmakers in their diverse ways and from their diverse vantage points are laboring to come to terms with it. This opens an interesting window onto Central Asian cinema.

The second essay deals with a very important topic – the representation of women in Central Asian films. Countries in Central Asia, as with countries in many other parts of the world, are grappling with the forward march of modernization and this has great implications for the role of women in these diverse societies.

The author perceptively points out the evolution of the image of women in central Asian cinema and this has much to do with the changing social, political, cultural contours of these countries. She specifically discussed the image of respectable mothers, rebellious wives, heroic daughters, romantically inclined lovers an so on. She does so by insightful readings of well-known films.

The third essay addresses an issue that is vitally linked to the identity as well as growth if Central Asian cinema that has deep roots in the soil of the countries and the consciousness if the people. Gulanara Abikeyeva, in this essay, maintains that after the collapse of the Soviet empire filmmakers of Central Asia, through sheer force of circumstances, began to turn towards the traditional well-springs of traditional culture as a way of establishing a newer identity and being re-energized.

The nomadic cultures, settled cultures and mountainous cultures that characterize this region were re-appropriated as a means of invigorating the art of cinematography. The author maintains that this move had the salutary effect of clearing a space for the emergence of newer film aesthetics.

These three essays, then, shed light on some very important aspects of Central Asian cinema. Abikeyeva’s observations and evaluations carry the ring of authority. They enable us to acquire a deeper understanding of the preoccupations, investments, challenges and aspirations of Central Asian filmmakers. It seems to me that the whole question of indigenous film aesthetics that the author alludes to is extremely important.

Indeed this is a topic that has been central to Asian filmmakers judging by the works of such well-known film directors as Yasujiro Ozu, Ritwik Ghatak, Chen Kaige and Im Kwon-taek.

The second section of Gulnara Aibikeyeva’s book is devoted a series of interviews with various Central Asian filmmakers. There are fifteen interviews in all, and they serve to illuminate a broad range of issues relevant to filmmakers as well as the film-going public. In these interviews Gulnara Abikeyeva is able to raise the kind of questions that serve to illuminate the specific works of Central Asian filmmakers as well as the social, political, cultural contexts out of which the films emerge. In this sense, these interviews constitute an act of cultural diagnostics.

The third section of Gulnara Abikeyeva’s book is devoted to an analysis of different films from the five countries that go to form central Asia that she considers to be important and worthy of closer attention in these analyses she is able to provide the reader with valuable background information about the films as well as her own personal insights into their strengths and weaknesses.

New wave

For example, in discussing the Kazakh film The Needle she makes the following observation. ‘The Needle by Rashid Nugmanov was not only the starting point for the Kazakh new wave but also for the entire ‘perestroika’ cinema. The artistic underground of the Soviet Union became ‘legalized’ for the first time in this film. The middle of the 1980s was the period when the non-official and non-conformist arts entered the mainstream.

The rock superstar Victor Tsoy who played the protagonist was the idol of the soviet youth and his songs proclaimed a call to action.’ change, we want change.’ The film director not only declared the beginning of a new era but also declared a death sentence on the old times…….Rashid Nugmanov is a film director who thinks structurally and precisely, on the one hand was making a film for youth and therefore it had to speak the language of youth and describe their youth subculture. He cast Victor Tsoy and Petr Mamonov, the youth music idols, and gave his film the music video aesthetic, with an atmosphere of irony and mockery. On the other hand he exactly recreated the change of the ideological paradigm by using sound tracks and music – songs of different periods, radio and television shows, and also by making artistic space decisions. ‘

Analysis

This is a representative example of Gulnara Abikeyeva’s mode of film analysis. She combines a textual approach that focuses on the intricate weave of the film with a contextual approach that seeks to locate the film in its proper social, historical, ideological contexts.

The combination of these two approaches enables the author to produce commentaries and insights that are compelling and deeply relevant. This idea of context that is crucial to the author’s preferred mode of analysis invites a closer analysis.

She seems to be saying that there is a danger in assuming that the content is uncomplex, transparent and monolithic, thereby under estimating the subtleties associated with cinematic production.

In other words, she is opposed to simplifying the nature of historical imagination in cinema. According to the most widely practiced rhetoric of contextualization, which is a form of documentary reading, the filmic text becomes a little more than a sign of the time and place.

Contrary to this view, Gulnara Abikeyeva suggests that the context of a film has a specificity, density and accessibility that the work itself can never have independently. Therefore, she believes that it is incumbent upon film analysts to pay sustained and focused attention on the complex dynamics of the context. This focus on the context, it seems to me, is one of the real strengths of Gulknara Abikeyeva’s work.

In addition to the salience of the context, Abikeyeva focuses in a number of other important considerations. In the interests of space, I wish to call attention to three of them. The first is the all too significant role played by culture in cinematic production.

The filmmaker is a product of a given culture and draws on it for artistic nourishment; the meaning-system of a film I inextricably linked to the imperatives of culture. Indeed it is culture that invests the images of film texts with their vibrancy; the audiences for films are shaped by their respective cultures while the context in which the film director, the filmic text and the audience interact are demonstrably inflected by the flow of culture. Therefore, culture becomes a crucial variable in filmic communication. Gulnara Abikeyeva is deeply cognizant of this important fact.

Culture is a term that defies unambiguous formulation and it has been defined diversely by various scholars. An approach to culture that comes closest to Gulnara Abikeyeva’s understanding of it is the one advanced by the eminent American anthologist Clifford Geertz. He remarked that culture ‘denotes an historically transmitted patterns of meaning embedded in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and attitudes to life.’

Drawing in the work of the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur, Geertz sees cultures as texts; hence questions of reading, of interpretation, assumes a very great importance in his approach to culture. Geertz perspective on culture represents a careful blending of the writings of Max Weber, Paul Ricoeur, Susan Langer, and Kenneth burke.

Gulnara Abikeyeva’s investigations into Central Asian cinema places a high premium on culture and her approach to culture seeks to emphasize the kind of defining features outlined by Geertz. As she discusses the films from Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, we see how she foregrounds the importance of culture in comprehending these works. she interweaves cultural analysis and film analysis in interesting ways. The following is a representative example selected at random.

The mother of the protagonist is a carrier of the authentic culture. She comes from the countryside to the city in order to spend some time with her children and grandchildren and treat her heart problems after the death of her husband. Instead of a warn welcome and traditional respect, the mother receives a cold estrangement from her son’s family.

According to the Turkic traditions she should sit at the place of honor at the dining table but her son asks her to eat in the kitchen while he dines with important guests. He is afraid that the guests would find out that he is from a village originally and doesn’t introduce the mother to anybody.thr mother is not only a specific character but also an image of Turkmen culture- her behavior, language, appearance and mentality. ….she is an embodiment of the motherland. In a celebrated essay on national culture of Frantz Fanon the second stage of post-colonial development is defined as a reaction to an idealized view of the traditional culture. In cinema, often this process comes around as a translation of re-born national iconography to the careen and the restoration of the lost national past.

Nationhood

Similarly, the idea if nationhood is central to Abikeyeva’s commentaries in cinema. Countries such as Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan that were once under Soviet empire and are now independent countries are seeking to explore their identity through cinema. The idea of nationhood and its problematic implications runs through many of the essays gathered in The Heart of the World: Films from Central Asia.; the relationship that exists between nationhood and cinema is as fascinating as it is complex.

Ant exploration into this topic is bound to being us face to face with such this as power, truth, ideology, colonialism, modernization, post-colonialism and so on, and Gulnara Abikeyeva addresses these issues in her book. Benedict Anderson, whom Abikeyeva cites in her book, observed that nationhood depends on ‘imagined communities’ and sought to emphasize the idea that nationhood exists as a system of cultural signification. He also made the point that his constitutes and irreducible basis for national narrative. Gulnara Abikeyeva recognizes that the consequences of this mode of inquiry for the relationship between nation and cinema are immense; after all cinema has become one of the post powerful and pervasive forms of communal self-expression.

Complexities

When we examine the complexities of nationhood we come to the realization that nationhood, as with all other forms of identity, revolves around the question of difference – how the uniqueness of one nation differs from that of another comparable nation. It is evident that the concept of nationhood is located at the pint of intersection of a multiplicity of discourses related to history, geography, politics, culture, ethnicity, religion, ideology, materiality, economics, globalisation and so on.

The idea of difference and the ceaseless inter-animation of presence and absence are pivotal to the construction of nationhood. As evidenced in the essays collected in this book, the author is deeply sensitive to these themes which have a compelling relevance to the nations comprising Central Asia.

The concept of modernization figures equally prominently in Gulara Abikeyeva’s writings on cinemas of central Asia. She is fully aware of the fact that modernity wears not one but many faces depending on the cultural context to which it is affiliated.

The idea that was widespread some time back that modernity represented a unitary phenomenon that is universal and that forms of modernization associated with Europe will serve as a model to be emulated by the rest of the world has been rightly rejected, and Gulnara Abikeyeva concurs in this rejection.

She demonstrates that the processes of modernization take place in different sites and at different speeds and velocities and intensities dependent upon the cultures that activate it.

In other words, it is cultural modernization that we should be concerned with. This cultural modernity finds strong articulation in cinema, and as Abikeyeva has demonstrated the films of countries such as Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, manifest this in compelling ways.

Closely related to the idea of modernization, in Gulanara Abikeyeva’s work, is the concept of globalization which has emerged as a master concept in social and cultural analysis. One of the most important developments in the past few decades has been the breathtaking speed with which the world has begun to shrink. A far-flung world has been interconnected and brought closer in ways that could scarcely have been imagined three or four decades ago.

As a result o the phenomenal growth of science, technology, mass media of communication, international division of labor, the end of the cold war, relentless spread of capitalism the world I shrinking as never before. This has great implications of Central Asian countries that have moved away from soviet influence and are seeking to modernize themselves y following ever more closely the dictates of capitalism.

Feature

An interesting and paradoxical feature about globalization is that while it has resulted in the shrinkage of the world, this very shrinkage and re-structuring of the world has had the effect of bring into sharper relief the questions of localism, cultural identity, national roots. It is evident that globalism and localism are co-implicated in complex and unanticipated ways producing newer contours of localness.

How do cultural workers in central Asia – writers, filmmakers, artists, intellectuals – respond to this challenging phenomenon? How do they strive to conceptualize it/ what are the prospects and problems offered up by globalization to Central Asian countries/ these and related questions form a part of the broad cultural diagnostics as advanced by Gulnara Abikeyeva in her book.

Mike Featherstone who has written so perceptively on the processes of globalization states that, ‘it is insufficient to assume that local cultures will simply give way to modernity or to regard their formulations of national particularity as merely reactions to western modernity. Rather the globalization process should be regarded as opening up the sense that now the world is a single place with increased, even un avoidable, contact. We necessarily have greater dialogue between various nationalities, blocs, and civilisations as well as a dialogical space in which we can expect not only cooperation and consent but a good deal of disagreement, conflict and clashing perspectives.

Not at participating nation-states and other agents should be regarded as equal partners to the dialogue. Rather, they are bound together in increasing webs of interdependence and power balances.’ This observation of Featherstone has a great relevance for Gulanara Abikeyeva as a film commentator from Central Asia who is deeply invested in the idea of Central Asian cinema. And this leads to another very important theme inscribed in the pages of Abikeyeva;s book, namely, the idea of a Central Asian imaginary.

The concept of the social imaginary as glossed by thinkers such as Charles Taylor and Cornelius Castoriadis is one that is deeply applicable to cinema. As Charles Taylor observes the concept of the social imaginary encompasses a terrain much wider and deeper than analytical schemes and intellectual categories fashioned by scholars and academics to dissent social reality.

He calls attention to the ways in which ordinary people imagine their social existence; how they relate to one another, how they share a common world of understanding, the expectations they have, and the deeper normative values and standards and images which underline these expectations form a part of the social imaginary.

our sense of how things standardly function in society is connected to our notions of how they ought to function Therefore, the notions of collective existence, group identity, shared cultural narratives and normative prescriptions about life are inseparably interlinked in the social imaginary.

This idea of the social imaginary works at two levels in Gulanara Abikeyeva’s book. First cinema is a most appealing and persuasive medium of creative expression that can successfully capture and transmit its social imaginary. She establishes this point through her many discussions of individual films from the Central Asia. Second, she is working towards a Central Asian imaginary by focusing on a commonly shared set of experiences – historical, cultural, religious, political, ethnic and so on.

It is this Central Asian imaginary that the author is keen to uphold and demonstrate that gives Central Asian cinema its distinct identity.

This is not to suggest that there are no differences between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan and Tajikistan; there are clear differences, and the author points to them. But at the same time there is a shared fund of experience as ell that cannot be ignored.

Understanding

All these features that Gulnara Abikeyeva points to in her book allow us to attain a deeper understanding of the cinematic landscape of central Asia. What her book demonstrates most clearly is that the true power of cinema cannot be understood if we reduce it to a mere reflection of reality, in this case that of central Asian reality; it has the power to question the more subjective and less accessible dimensions of that reality. Moreover, in her analyses, she points out how in modern societies cinema through its very compelling images constructs an important aspect of that reality.

These images enable us to understand and make greater sense of how people act and interact in Central Asian societies and under what social and cultural imperatives.

Therefore, according to her, understanding Central Asian cinema permits us to approach the complex realities of Central Asian societies and their cinemas in a more informed and intelligent manner.

‘The Heart of the World: Films from Central Asia’ by Gulnara Abikeyeva, therefore, can be strongly recommended as a book that serves to deepen our understanding of a branch of Asian cinema that is becoming increasingly important.