The Imprint of Time in the Central Asian Historical Film

• In Event: Textures of Memory in Films of the Soviet Peripheries

Abstract

At the beginning of Ali Khamraev’s “historical-revolutionary” film Bez strakha (Without Fear, Uzbekfilm, 1971) about the 1927 Soviet Hujum (“attack”) on traditional Islam, a village Bolshevik activist, Kadyr, measures out the property of a local landowner and apportions it to the villagers. The film’s plot centers on the Soviet campaign to end the practice of women’s seclusion and full veiling, and unfolds as a series of serious, in-depth dialogues between local people with varying perspectives on the issue, including conversations between Kadyr and his wife, Kadyr and a local party leader, and Kadyr and the local Ishan. But the opening act of surveying and measuring space cues a broader formal issue: the importance of mise-en-scène and, more specifically, the use of on-location shooting in Central Asian historical films of the 1960s-70s.

On-location shooting, along with the inclusion of non-professional actors, emphasizes the temporal dislocation between the conditions during filming and the film’s representation of historical events. At the same time, the documentary-like interest in locations and people is accompanied by a shooting style that counters the visual regime of narrative modes (of both the “Hollywood” system of spatial continuity, and the socialist realist style) by refusing to orient the viewer fully in space. This paper considers how the historical and spatial groundedness of location shooting might disrupt the prescribed temporality and spatiality of the Soviet modernization framework, and asks whether the juxtaposition of Soviet historical mythology and on-location shooting might offer alternative modes for expressing the effects of history.

Author

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