Of (Dead) Fish and Birds: Uzbek Eco-Cinema of the 1970s

• In Event: Modernity and Environment in the Literature and Cinema of Uzbekistan

Abstract

This paper examines an inter-species imagery that begins to appear in Central Asian cinema in the 1970s. In Ali Khamraev’s Man Follows Birds (Uzbekistan, 1975), for instance, the bodies of adolescent protagonists are visualized as partially plants or birds; similarly, in Kamara Kamalova’s A Bitter Berry (Uzbekistan, 1975) a teenage female protagonist turns into a substitute mother to an orphaned chick. I will consider such images as part of the cultural/ethnic reinvention taking place in Soviet Central Asia during the period of late socialism, imagined through a concurrent turn towards regional mythologies and ideas of natural communion. In contrast to tightly defined Soviet collectivities, these films allow for vastly open forms of community, with non-hierarchical relations between all human and non-human citizens of the earth. I also argue, however, that rather than creating a utopian vision of such collectivity, one that is of the mythological past, these films speak from their present: from a time of unfolding ecological catastrophes, marked by the consideration of how to create affinities with the material, natural world in the face of ongoing environmental destruction.

Author

• Lida Oukaderova, Rice U