The Development of Cinema in Soviet Central Asia

It is well-known that cinema in Central Asia was influenced by the Soviet state’s deployment of non-Central Asian filmmakers to the region. One might assume that this process was more or less the same across Soviet Central Asia. As this talk will show, however, that was not the case.

In Kazakhstan, during the 1930s–1950s, mostly Soviet propaganda films were made by secondary directors such as Moisei Levin, Yefim Aron, Karl Gakkel, Pavel Bogoliubov, and others. Kyrgyzstan was luckier: in the early 1960s, young non-Kyrgyz filmmakers arrived to shoot films there. They belonged to the so-called Thaw generation—Larisa Shepitko, Andrei Mikhalkov-Konchalovskii, Irina Poplavskaia, and others. They were already making a different kind of cinema, and the directors of the so-called ‘Kyrgyz Miracle’ absorbed this positive experience. Uzbek cinema was the earliest in Central Asia; feature films had been made there since the 1920s. As a result, directors from the pre-revolutionary and silent film era, such as Iakov Protazanov and Mikhail Averbakh, came to work there. This style was sometimes referred to as Oriental cinema. The situation in Tajikistan and Turkmenistan was altogether different. This talk will highlight the different influences – some good, others less so – and assess their impact in each of the five Central Asian Soviet republics.

Image credit: Poster for Larisa Shepitko’s Heat (Znoi, 1963), filmed on location in Kyrgyzstan