Narrating Soviet Foundation Myths in the Soviet Western

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

Abstract

In the 1970s, the filmmaker Ali Khamraev turned to the “historical revolutionary” genre, a genre that represents “the Civil War and the consolidation of Bolshevik control in the 1920s and the early 1930s in the Central Asian republics” (Prusin and Zeman, 259), producing several films, including the “Soviet western” box-office hit The Seventh Bullet (Sed’maia pulia) in 1972, and the “intellectual western” The Bodyguard (Telokhranitel’) in 1979. As a Soviet genre, the historical-revolutionary film necessarily seeks to establish the history and values of a Soviet Central Asia, representing Soviet authority and modernization in a positive light, and from a Central Asian perspective. The historical setting allowed Khamraev to consider issues of pressing contemporary importance—including gender equality, land rights, and the role of Islam in everyday life—from a safe temporal distance. But unlike Soviet “easterns” made in Russian studios, Khamraev’s historical-revolutionary films insist on engaging seriously with positions opposed to Soviet power over time and space. This paper argues that in Khamraev’s historical-revolutionary films the mythic, foundational mode of the western’s taming of landscape and a more historical, even documentary-like approach meet, intertwine, and conflict, creating ambiguity and potentially challenging the prescribed myths of Soviet modernity and coloniality.

Author

• Elizabeth A. Papazian, U of Maryland, College Park