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Tashkent ‘68: A Cinematic Contact Zone

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Rossen Djagalov  and
Masha Salazkina
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Abstract

This essay seeks to reconstruct the history of the first Tashkent Festival of Cinemas of Asia and Africa (1968). It offers an account of the festival as a highly heterogeneous and productive site for better understanding the complex relationship between the Soviet bloc and the Third World in the crucial moment between the victory of post-colonial independence movement and the end of the Cold War.

Type
Russian Geopoetics
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 75 , Issue 2 , Summer 2016 , pp. 279 - 298
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, Inc. 2016

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References

1. Russian State Archive for Literature and the Arts (RGALI) f. 2944, op. 13, d. 1204, 1.155. This observation is also confirmed by Masha Kirasirova in her recent talk “The Eastern International: Soviet Central Asia and the Afro-Asian Colonial World” (paper, Jordan Center for the Study of Russia at N YU, 2015), at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8JX3SP7nPw (last accessed December 18,2015).

2. Throughout this essay we use the term “Third World” as a historical concept that had particular meaning at the time and was shared by many of the participants of the festivals—if not by the Soviet authorities, as we will explore later in the text.

3. Central Asian cities, factories, kolkhozes, and places of culture served as the main showcase spaces for Third-World visitors to the Soviet Union. Of the cities, Tashkent was the main destination. See Stronski, Paul, Tashkent: Forging of a Soviet City, 1930-1966 (Pittsburgh, 2010), 202–34CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. Chertok, Semion, Tashkenskii festival’ (Tashkent, 1975), 6–7 Google Scholar.

5. For an annotated biography on the whole subfield of international film festival studies, see Loist, Skadi and de Valck, Marijke “Thematic Biography on Film Festival Research—Update: 2009” in Iordanova, Dina and Chong, Ruby, eds., Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities (St. Andrews, 2010), 220-58Google Scholar.

6. Pratt, Mary Louise, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992), 4–5 Google Scholar.

7. Ibid, 4-5.

8. Ram, Harsha, “Towards a Cross-cultural Poetics of the Contact Zone: Romantic, Modernist, and Soviet Intertextualities in Boris Pasternak’s Translations of T’itsian T’abidze,” Comparative Literature 59, no. l (Winter 2007): 63–89 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Sahadeo, Jeff, “Druzhba narodov or Second-Class Citizenship? Soviet Asian migrants in a post-colonial world,” Central Asian Survey 26, no. 4 (December 2007): 26(4), 559-79CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Popescu, Monica, “Lewis Nkosi in Warsaw: Translating Eastern European Experiences for an African Audience,” Journal of Post-Colonial Writings no. 2 (May 2012): 176-87CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

9. The concept of “geopoetics” has undergone numerous expansions and redefinitions since the Scottish poet and philosopher Kenneth White originally proposed it in the late 1970s. The clearest and most generative definition, and the one that the authors of this paper have adopted, was formulated by Dennitza Gabarkova: “The relationship between aesthetic and creative strategies and geographic and geopolitical issues.” See: “A Hole in the Continent’: The Geopoetics East/West of Tawada Yõko,” Études germaniques 259, no. 3 (2010).

10. Pratt, 6.

11. Engerman, David, “The Second World’s Third World,” Kritika: Explorations of Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. l (Winter 2011): 183–211.Google Scholar

12. Woli, Josephine, “The Russian Connection: Soviet Cinema and the Cinema of Francophone Africa” in Pfaff, Françoise ed., Focus on African Films (Bloomington, 2004), 225–28Google Scholar.

13. Shobhan Saxena, “Give comrades Bollywood,” The Times of India (May 6,2012).

14. The prize cancellation was a short-lived phenomenon, though special programs became a significant part of the restructuring of the European festival organization. See De Valck, 63-64.

15. RGALI f. 2944, op. 13, e.x. 1200,1. 81-91.

16. “The Third World was not a place. It was a project” are the first two sentences of Vijay Prashad’s magisterial The Darker Nations: People’s History of the Third World (New York, 2007), xv. In Prashad’s interpretation, the Non-Aligned Movement was the political instantiation of this project while anti-colonial struggle, socialism, and emancipation constituted its ideological content.

17. Solanas, Fernando and Getino, Octavio, “Towards a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World,” Tricontinental no. 13 (October 1969)Google Scholar, a publication of OSPAAL (Organization of Solidarity with the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America).

18. Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) was the first non-Western film to be awarded a major film festival prize (Venice’s Golden Lion in 1951), symbolically marking Japanese film’s breakthrough onto the world stage.

19. RGALI f. 2944 (Soviet Union of Cinematographers), op. 13, e.x. 1200,1. 22-25.

20. RGALI f. 2944, op. 13, e.x. 1202,1. 5-6

21. RGALI f. 2944, op. 13, e.x. 1202,1.118. Archival translation, here and elsewhere, is Rossen Djagalov’s. In fact, Sihanouk’s 1966 La Forêt Enchantée {The Enchanted Forest/Robam Tepmonorom) was entered into the 1967 Moscow Film Festival.

22. Kimiagarov, B., “Novaia glava v istorii kino,” from Ekran 1968 (Moscow, 1969), 220 Google Scholar.

23. Such a solution was typical of Soviet international film policy starting from the 1920s-30s. But what this also meant was that the Soviet films exhibited were not part of the commercial distribution system and could not generate much-needed revenue.

24. RGALI f. 2944, op. 13, e.x. 1200,1. 81-91.

25. Ibid., 1. 27.

26. Rajagopalan, Sudha, Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas: The Culture of Movie-Going after Stalin (Bloomington, 2008)Google Scholar.

27. Rajagopalan, 66.

28. Ibid, 80.

29. RGALI f. 2944, op. 13, e.x. 1200,1. 48.

30. Ibid.

31. For a detailed analysis of this phenomenon, see Rajagopalan, Indian Films in Soviet Cinemas.

32. After 1968, a few more festivals were established such as the short-lived but lavish Tehran International Film Festival (19721979) under the patronage of the Shah, the Pan-African Film and Television Festival in Ougadougou (ran by the government of Burkina Fasso since 1969), and the Cairo Film Festival, which was first held in 1976.

33. Its key participants included Lamine Merbah (Algeria), Santiago Alvarez (Cuba), Ousmane Sembene (Senegal), Jorge Giannoni (Argentina) and Hamid Merei (Syria), all of whom were regular visitors to Tashkent in the course of the 1970s.

34. See Mestman, Mariano, “From Algiers to Buenos Aires: The Third World Cinema Committee,” New Cinemas. Journal of Contemporary Film 1.1 (2002), 40–53 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. To avoid the appearance of Soviet domination, in future festivals Soviet Asian films were listed separately from foreign films.

36. “Pervyi somaliiskii.” Iskusstvo Kino 1 (January 1969): 134.

37. Transcripts of all the seminars except the first were published under the title Kino v bor’be za mir, sotsial’nyiprogress i svobodu narodov (tvorcheskaia diskussia na Mezhdunarodnom kinofestivale stran Azii, Afriki (i Latinskoi Ameriki) a few months after each festival by the Research Institution for the History and Theory of Cinema in Moscow.

38. Semion Chertok. “Kino chernoi Afriki: problemy i nadezhdy,” Zarubezhnoe kino segodnia 3 (1972), at http://www.scepsis.ru/library/id_819.html (last accessed December 18, 2015).

39. Ibid.

40. Eichenberger, Ambros, “The Second World Organizes a Festival for the Third,” Zoom-Filmberater (#13, 1974) in III Kinofestival’ stran Azii I Afriki v Tashkente (Otkliki zarubezhnoi pressy) (Moscow, 1975), 100 Google Scholar.

41. Ibid.

42. Kumar, Devendré, “Tashkent Promises a Cinematic Brotherhood,” Cine Advance (11 July 1974) in III Kinofestival’ stran Azii I Afriki v Tashkente (Otkliki zarubezhnoi pressy) (Moscow, 1975), 85 Google Scholar.

43. Interview with Kiril Razlogov taken in Moscow on May 26, 2012. For more on the role of the translators and interpreters in the Soviet Union, see Razlogova, Elena, “Listening to the Inaudible Foreign: Simultaneous Translators and Soviet Experience of Foreign Cinema,” in Kaganovsky, Lilya and Salazkina, Masha, eds. Sound, Music, Speech in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema, (Bloomington, 2014)Google Scholar.

44. For more on this, see Josephine Woll, “The Russian Connection,” 223-41.

45. Elena Razlogova, “Listening to the Inaudible Foreign,” 168.

46. Hessler, Julie, “Death of an African Student in Moscow: Race, Politics, and the Cold War,” Cahiers du Monde Russe 47, no. 1/2 (2006), 33–64 Google Scholar.

47. The Soviet organizers of the 1958 Congress had assembled a whole folder of articles the participants had written after returning from Tashkent. See RGALI f. 631, op. 2, ex. 6100.

48. Chen, Kuan-Hsing, Asia as Method: Towards Deimperialization (Durham, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.