A RETROSPECTIVE OF KAZAKH CINEMA
The teenager, a new hero in Kazakh cinema

The opening of the first cinema halls in Kazakhstan dates back to the beginning of the XX century. In 1914 they were present on the territory in the number of twenty but they all gathered in the big urban agglomerations; thus, the majority of the population, peasant or even nomad, discovered the seventh art only later.
The first shootings realised in Kazakhstan date back to 1928 and they are propaganda short films, usually known as “agitfilms” that are not realised by local directors but by Russian directors that have temporarily or definitively moved to Central Asia. The first real Kazakh feature film, which is at the same time the first talking film, dates back to 1938: it is Amangueldy by Moisey Levin. This movie, as the majority of the movies at that time, deals with the Reds (Bolshevists) fighting against the Basmachs, the representatives of the old regime, in order to conquer new lands in the east. This narrative pattern has set up a cinematographic genre typical of central Asia, better known as the “eastern”, where strong and heroic characters are central.
Oddly, historical and political events of that time, allowed Kazakh studios to know a substantial success: at the beginning of Second World War, in fact, Soviet Russia decides to move its most important studios to central Asia. The country that will have the most important benefits from this new situation will be Kazakhstan; the principal Mosfilm and Lenfilm technical equipments, in fact, will be moved to Tsoks studios, in Almaty, and it is there that, between 1941 and 1944, 80% of soviet films will be realised and the greatest director of the moment will be received; the shooting of the first part of Ivan the Terrible by Sergei Eiseinstein, for example, have been filmed in Almaty.
When, in 1944, Russian engineers left Kazakhstan, most of the equipments remained there, but the positive effect of this interaction is not to be noticed immediately in the national production; the immediate postwar period is in fact the starting point of the so called “few films” epoch, when, in the period running from 1945 to 1953 only three films have been realised in Kazakhstan.
It is only after the thaw and at the beginning of the sixties that Kazakh cinema, as well as the movie productions coming from its neughbouring republics, eventually knows a real new season. One of the most important personalities of the time is Shaken Aimanov, who began his career by being an actor, a very famous one, and afterwards became a director so renowned that in 1984 Kazakhstan national studios decided to bear his name.
In the movie The Land of Fathers (1966), as in the majority of the productions of that age, we definitively recognize a very strong influence of Italian neorealism, but the most remarkable peculiarity remains the refusal of the concept of the classical hero: the time of the avenger hero, of the resolute and strong man, it is now over. The film starts with the death of the hero: a grandfather and his grandson set out on a journey to find the corpse of their son and father, who died during the war in a foreigner country, in order to bury him in their homeland. The film is then built on this substantial absence. How can, at this stage, a new hero come?
We find a significant common point among the four movies of the retrospective: the hero is a teenager, a guy or a girl, who firstly hesitates and then becomes stronger and build himself up under the eyes of the audience. Choosing this season of life, the adolescence, for the protagonists of the four films is not fortuitous. This new teenager hero confers to the story a greater flexibility: as it happens during childhood, there is a small distance between cryng and laughing, between fighting and dancing (that’s what happens in The Balcony by Salykov). At the same time the first real troubles of adult life start to show up: it is what happens for instance in Aimanov’s film, where the character of the guy who sets out on a journey in order to find the corpse of his father states the matter of the duty, and in The Balcony where the young Aidar feels responsible for the destiny of people living in his neighbourhood. The history of a teenager can be interpreted in many different ways: as an initiatory story about a human being who’s building him self up (it is the birth of a poet in the case of The Island of Rebirth), as a manifest trace of an epoch and of the destiny of an entire generation (it is Aidar’s case in The Balcony) or even as the embodiment of a nation’s destiny (it is Leyla’s case).
To adolescence wavering and weakness it is later on added the concept of social alienation. If Shaken Aimanov’s hero is still an ordinary guy, someone who could be even representative, in The Balcony we already meet a strong picture of a marginalized person that will become afterwards the typical character of Kazakh Nouvelle Vague of which Kalybek Salykov is the immediate forerunner. The character of the painter that crosses his film and whose statements have an important echo, for the audience as for young Aidar, is one of them. The wandering photographer in The Island of Rebirth can be considered as a variation on this marking figure. Finally, young Leyla, Satybaldy Narymbetov’s heroine, shows us an extreme example of marginalised hero: limping, simple hearted and even a little bit magician, she is a character capable of embodying, alone, Kazakh people as well as their sufferings. The adolescence, this age of transition, allows, at the same time, directors to set the matter of cultural and historical heritage, an issue that worries unceasingly Kazakh cinema. These four movies have in fact a further common point: in all of them the action takes place in a former epoch in the history of the country. In The Land of Fathers, in 1966, Aimanov deals with the end of Second World War; in The Balcony, in 1988, Kalybek Salykov talks about the fifties; in Leyla’s Prayer, in 2002, Narymbetov looks at the blows inflicted on Kazakhstan by soviet government; in The Island of Rebirth, in 2004, Rustem Abdrashev openly draws his inspiration from his father’s biography. We don’t go very far back in time, it doesn’t deal with many centuries, only with a few decades, as if Kazakh cineastes were capable of relate about themselves exclusively in a retrospective way and attempted tirelessly to tell their fathers’ history in order to understand their present.
This constant stepping backwards into their history is also emphasized by musics that, being out of date and timeless, create, in The Balcony and in Leyla’s Prayer, for instance, an atmosphere that is immediately recognisable.
“Cinema is extremely precious because it is through it that nowadays our national culture expresses herself in the most perceptible manner” writes great Kazakh poet Oljas Suleymenov.
Central Asia cinema establishes very early a tradition of adaptation for the screen of national literary works that allows several writers and poets to mark lastingly the movie production of the region. It is what happened to Oljas Suleymenov, for example, who has played a fundamental role in the development of Kazakh cinema during the sixties and the seventies. Author of many works adapted for the screen, during the seventies he has been also the secretary of the Kazakh Cineastes’ Union, a position that allowed him to defend a national auteur production.
The fundamental role of poetry as a main vector of national character and culture it is remarkable in at least two films of the retrospective. In The Balcony, whose script is by Suleymenov, not only we often hear Kazakh poetry lines, but also, the equal value of Russian and Kazakh poetry is declared in a scene that is only apparently insignificant: on a track that crosses the scene we see the statues of Pouchkine and Abai, the greatest Kazakh poet, side by side. Concerning The Island of Rebirth, then, Rustem Abdrashev conceived the film as an homage to his father’s biography, the poet Jaraskan Abdrashev, whose texts are included in the soundtrack.

Eugenie Zvonkine