List of the Kazakh films screened in 2001

 

 

 

 

 

KAZAKH OLD AND "NOUVELLE VAGUE"
(2001 program)

The Kazakh films shown at the Festival of the 3 Continents are the best examples of films made by the two most important generations of film-makers in Kazakhstan. They worked in the 1960s and at the turn of the 1990s. The "old" and the "new" waves reflect the Soviet period, and the decade that followed independence.

Although Kazakh cinema celebrated its 70th birthday last year, I feel that our national film history only began in 1954 when the first Kazakh fiction film was made, Chaken Aimanov's A Love Poem. Thus Kazakh cinema is only 45-years-old. Our film history is young and we can be proud of it.

The films included in this retrospective were made by first-generation film-makers, trained in the Forties during World War II. They are Chaken Aimanov's The Land of Our Fathers (1967), Aleksander Karpov's A Mother's Epic (1963), Majit Begalin's Footsteps Disappear on the Horizon (1965) and Abdulla Karsakbaev's A Troubled Morning (1968).

At the time, the Mosfilm and Lenfilm studios were relocated to Almaty, the former Kazakh capital city, where Tsoks, the "Unified Central Studio" was established. Masters of Soviet film worked there, such as Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov or Vsevolod Pudovkin... Tsoks had a tremendous influence on the Kazakhs who were just beginning to work in film. It turned into a true film school.

Yet, with the end of the war and Russian film-makers leaving, film production quickly dwindled. Over the nine following years, only four fiction films were made, including three by Russian film-makers. It is only in the 1950s that Chaken Aimanov, the founder of Kazakh national cinema, made his first film.

Overall, Kazakh film-makers were mainly active in the 1960s. Film was particularly successful at the end of the Sixties. Films such as Sultan Khodjikov's Kyz Jibek (1971) and Chaken Aimanov's The End of Ataman (1971) were great popular successes. K. Kassymbekov's children's film Chok and Cher (1971) won the first international award, the Monte Carlo Festival silver award. But Chaken Aimanov and Majit Begalin died a tragic death and Kazakh film was on the decline.

The late 1970s and early 1980s were quite insignificant from an artistic point of view, but they gave birth to great ideological films commissioned by Moscow. Russian film-maker Aleksandr Sakharov's tetralogy The Taste of Bread (1979) can be considered as the climax of Socialist ideological cinema.

In the early Eighties, Sergei Soloviev had the idea of training a special group of Kazakh film-makers at VGIK [the Moscow Film Institute]. This is how the core of the Kazakh New Wave was born. A large number of films from that period are to be shown in Nantes: Serik Aprymov's Last Stop (1989), Ermek Chinarbaev's My Sister Lucy (1985), Abay Karpykov's A Small Fish in Love (1989), Amir Karakulov's Last Holidays (1996) and Darezhan Omirbaev's Jol (2001).

When looking at the films of both generations, comparisons can be made or differences pointed out. By nature, cinema does not only represent a story or an event, it also conveys the spirit of a generation.

The festival retrospective includes three films dealing with travel: The Land of Our Fathers (1967), Last Stop (1989) and Jol (2001). Twenty years went by between the first and the second film, and only ten between the second and the third one. But each film casts a new glance at its own time and expresses a new form of philosophy.

In Chaken Aimanov's The Land of Our Fathers, an old man and his grandson set off on a long journey throughout Kazakhstan. They discover a harsh reality, but their heart is soon filled with love and pride towards their people and their homeland. Serik Aprimov's Last Stop is also about travelling, not so much to go as far as possible but as deep as possible into a typically Kazakh village. After his military service, a young man returns to his home village and discovers with hindsight that people belonging to his generation have turned into drunkards. It is all corruption and theft, women are depraved and no one ever shows respect towards the elders any longer. This is where we stand now! Hence the title: Last Stop. In the third film about travelling, Darezhan Omirbaev's Jol, reality gets tangled up with the hero's visions and imagination. He is obsessed with making a new film while visiting his sick mother. He will eventually arrive only in time for her funeral. The Socialist realism in The Land of Our Fathers evolved into a Kazakh neo-realism with Last Stop, before turning into a contemporary, post-modern road movie with Jol.

From an esthetic perspective, socialist realism has been ruined by the Kazakh New Wave. Last Stop cannot really be considered as a neo-realist film because it thrives on humour, irony and sarcasm. As if all this was not to be taken seriously. A similar lightness can be found in Abay Karpykov's A Small Fish in Love which the French audience will no doubt enjoy because of its impressionist style. The plot does not matter so much as the spirit of the period and the atmosphere of the city, which are no longer Soviet. Almaty is shown as a universal city without frontiers.

What makes this Kazakh film retrospective so fascinating is that it allows us to discover how quickly changes can occur. Whereas Ermek Chinarbaev's My Sister Lucy represents the classical trend of Soviet cinema, a nostalgic film about the Soviet era in Kazakhstan was made ten years later with Amir Karakulov's Last Holidays. Both films are filled with poetry, talent and charm.

To quote Robert Flaherty, "in each people, there is a seed of greatness and the film-maker's role is to find the unique situation, the unique movement which expresses such greatness". Each film of the present retrospective is a piece of mosaic which contributes to an overall picture of the greatness and beauty of the Kazakh people.

Dr. Gulnara Abikeeva,
Film critic