Russian Film Symposium 2002:
Global Amnesia 3. Central Asian Cinema and Film Genres

The Symposium is supported by the Carnegie Museum of Art, the University of Pittsburgh Center for Russian and East European Studies, and the Graduate Program for Cultural Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Carnegie Museum of Art and the Russian Film Symposium will screen a series of four films by contemporary Central Asian filmmakers, in culmination of the series Global Amnesia organized by the symposium in 2002.

All films will be shown at the Carnegie Museum of Art. Saturday screenings begin at 7.30pm, and Sunday screenings at 5pm. Admission to all screenings will be free with a valid Pitt ID.

Repeat screenings

Alternate high-resolution image (180kb)
Our poster due to Petre Petrov

The three events of Global Amnesia have all examined the cinema of Central Asia, but the focus has been continually shifting.

Central to the first part of the series, Global Amnesia 1: Central Asian Cinema, 1990-2001 (Pittsburgh), was the West's periodic re-discovery (most evident in the international film-festival circuit) of the region's film industries: the Kyrgyz and Uzbek "waves" from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s, the "new Kazakh wave" of the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Tadjik "wave" of the mid-1990s, and now the Kyrgyz and Kazakh "wave" of the late 1990s and beginning of the 21st century. In their attempts to make sense of the bursts of innovative energy in this region, Western film critics have consistently moved the Soviet or Russian presence into the deep background, where it remained unexplored and all but invisible.

The second part of the series, Global Amnesia and the Politics of Cultural Space: Contemporary Central Asian Cinema (Moscow), was dominated by the mutual exchange of gazes between the film community from the Russian Federation and that of Central Asia–that is, between a former center and a former periphery. Within this exchange, "national identity," "Russianness," and "the Soviet experience" moved into the center of the examination. On the most basic levels, generations of Central Asian filmmakers had received virtually all of their professional training in Moscow, at the State Institute for Filmmaking (VGIK), where they studied, spoke, and produced work in Russian; where master classes were run by major Soviet (read "Russian") directors, scriptwriters, and cameramen; and where the dominant ethnic values and aesthetic traditions were at odds with those of the periphery.

The final part of the series, Global Amnesia 3: Central Asian Cinema and Film Genres (Pittsburgh), reverses the direction of the gaze entirely. Central to this part is the appropriation of Western (and Eastern) film genres–film noir, the road film, the samurai film and the spaghetti Western, the magic journey–by a new generation of Central Asia filmmakers. Some Western and Russian critics argue that mastery of the film industry's dominant genres is proof that recent Central Asian films are directed primarily at a international film-festival audience, not a domestic one, either regional or national. Others claim, citing the same visual texts and textual evidence, that recent Central Asian films present one of the clearest demonstrations of the ability of the local to integrate into and transform the global.

The four films in this third part of the series–three Kazakh and one Tadjik (all made between 1991 and 2001)–have been selected because each of them openly acknowledges and celebrates a film genre not traditional to the region, while at the same time transforming that genre with its innovative–i.e., non-Western–tropes, editing rhythm, and cultural references.