Nonindifferent Nature: Reading Nadezhda Zubova’s 'Arabi' (Uzbek SSR, 1930) against the Grain

• In Event: Nature, For and Against I: Marx, Nature, Cinema

Abstract

Combining both fiction and documentary, Arabi (Uzbek SSR, 1930) was meant to celebrate Stalinist collectivization in Uzbekistan. Russian-born director, Nadezhda Zubova (1898–1968), combined Soviet propaganda with instructional-technological displays to showcase the collective’s success in cultivating the highest quality Karakul sheep. Yet, the film’s images of nature, ecology, and the Uzbek land work against the imposition of Soviet power. The tension produced by the film’s explicitly pro-Soviet message and its implicit anti-Soviet pastoral nostalgia may partly explain why the film was most likely never released. But the film’s attitude toward nature might also be partly explained by Zubova’s own biography: she had worked as an assistant to Olga Preobrazhenskaya, both on set and in class at VGIK. We might, therefore, read Zubova’s Arabi alongside Preobrazhenskaya’s And Quite Flows the Don (Soiuzkino, 1930), to explore how land, nature, and ecology are treated in each film, and how we might understand this treatment in the context of the larger conversation about Marxist ecologies.

Author

• Lilya Kaganovsky, UCLA