Russian Film Symposium 2002:
Global Amnesia 1. Central Asian Cinema, 1990-2001

Five evenings of screenings, lecture, discussion
(films with English subtitles; lectures in English)

When: Monday, 25 March – Friday, 29 March 2002, 6:00 – 10:00pm

Where: Posvar Suite (2K/2M56)

Who: Prof. Gulnara Abikeyeva (Kazakhstan Academy of Arts; Soros Foundation)

Since 1990, the former Central Asian republics of the USSR – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan – have attracted attention from Western business interests and political scientists. More recently, however, international film festivals have discovered Central Asian cinema, both as discrete industries and as a regional cinema. While some of this shared aesthetic practice is rooted in the region's close ties to the Russo-Soviet empire (Russian as the prevailing lingua franca, socialist realism as the dominant aesthetic method, the Soviet establishment of national film industries and training generations of filmmakers, etc.), other basic elements are located in the region's history within non-Western cultural traditions (Muslim, Persian, and Turkic). These traditions are marked, in part, by a different conception of narrativity and the implementation of a competing set of representational codes and systems.

Films

March 25 – Kazakhstan. The Needle, 1988. Dir. Rashid Nugmanov.

March 26 – Kyrgyzstan. Adopted Son, 1998. Dir. Aktan Abdykalykov; Bus Stop, 2000. Dir. Aktan Abdykalykov and Ernest Abdyzhaparov.

March 27 – Tadjikistan. Flight of the Bee, 1998. Dir. Dzhamshet Usmonov.

March 28 – Turkmenistan. Little Angel, Bring Me Joy, 1993. Dir. Usman Saparov.

March 29 – Uzbekistan. Bo, Ba, Bu, 1998. Dir. Ali Khamraev.

Lecture Topics

March 25: Westernization Against Russification. Focus on Kazakhstan.

• New hero in Soviet Screen on the end of 80-s had an Asian face.
• The general characteristics of new style in Central Asian Cinema of last decade.

March 26: Search for National Identity. Focus on Kyrgyzstan.

• Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities" and creation of nationhood by Kyrgyz filmmakers.
• Transforming the realistic text of the film into allegorical.

March 27: Settled and Nomadic Cultures. Focus on Tajikistan.

• Catapult to independence – civic war in Tajikistan: reasons and results.
• Fanon's conception about three stages of cultural change in postcolonial counties.
• Soviet mentality, religious influence, pan-turkism, building of modern Eurasia, etc.

March 28: The fates of the postcolonial countries. Focus on Turkmenistan.

• Cinema in conditions of new totalitarianism.
• National allegory as a postcolonial characteristic of Third World culture and society (Jameson).

March 29: Easternization Against Westernization. Focus on Uzbekistan.

• Self-sufficiency as an announced policy.
• Transforming from Second- to Third-World society.

Gulnara Abikeyeva, author of The Cinema of Central Asia, 1990-2001 (2001) and New Kazakh Cinema (1998), received her PhD from VGIK (the All-Union Institute of Cinema, Moscow), where she worked in East-West cinema with a particular focus on Kurosawa. She is currently affiliated with the Kazakh Academy of Arts, where she teaches film, and Soros Foundation (Kazakhstan), where she is Program Coordinator for Arts and Culture. Prof. Abikeyeva will conduct a weeklong seminar in English that will focus on the region's film production in the past decade. Each meeting will consist of a talk, screening, and discussion. Five films–all with English subtitles–will be screened during the week.