Cinema, Nation, and Empire in Uzbekistan, 1919-1937 by Cloé Drieu Adrian Morfee

Author:Cloé Drieu, Adrian Morfee [Cloé Drieu, Adrian Morfee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Asian, Asia, Entertainment, Film, History & Criticism, Russia
ISBN: 9780253037879
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2019-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The Uniformization of Hegemony

The period of the Cultural Revolution, examined in all its complexity, reveals the growing tensions that existed at just the moment the first national filmmakers were starting to produce films. Power relationships transpire on-screen in the realm of symbolism and representation, opposing concurrent pathways through modernity that were not yet completely mutually exclusive. The Red Army as a symbol of Soviet power (in The Jackals of Ravat) provided a means of national liberation, offering military backup and general support (literacy) to combat those (the Basmachi, Muslim clergy, and property-owning classes) presented as stifling a community aspiring toward a policy to emancipate women and promote secularization. But central Soviet power radicalized these tendencies, imposing a clean break with the past and with traditions. In destroying the old social structures and working to delegitimize the old religious and economic authorities, Soviet power created an “identity vacuum” that was partially filled by the new secular components of the emergent Soviet Uzbek identity (ethnogenesis, history, and national culture and folklore). This made ethnic and national referents even more important.

The great structural transformations in the world of cinema bring into focus the imperial nature of the Soviet Union, laying down solid bases for future indoctrination and for controlling any form of subjectivity. First, the restrictive economic framework introduced by the creation of Soiuzkino in 1930, though meeting with some resistance, was backed up by political control, given the increasingly important role played by the All-Union Communist Party in determining the theme of films. Second, the political purges obliged filmmakers to conform to official discourse, or at least appear to do so. Obviously, political injunctions and the reassertion of control in the field were not always enforced down to the last detail, and despite the Bolshevik leaders’ wishes to see everything run smoothly, there were glitches that caused the machinery to seize up. The political and institutional subordination of the periphery was structurally established, but it did not yet weigh down fully on cinematic discourse and was only partly taken up in the cinematic imaginary of the early Uzbek filmmakers, who still enjoyed some room for creativity. It was impossible to totally subordinate them, other than by imprisonment or death or by simply making it impossible for them to work.

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