In October of 1968, the first Tashkent Film Festival of Cinema of Africa and Asia opened to considerable fanfare. Bringing to the spruced up Uzbeki capital socialist filmmakers from a wide array of countries generating film ignored or undervalued in the west, this international festival amplified the global scope of socialist-oriented cinema while moving Central Asia and Central Asian cinema to the ideological fore. Attended by such distinguished guests as film historian Jay Leyda and his wife, the dancer Sylvia Chen, along with such notable filmmakers as Ousmane Sembene, Souleymane Cissé, and K. A. Abbas, it presented a sociopolitical retort to the west and western cinema. As the central focus of Masha Salazkina’s World Socialist Cinema, the Tashkent Film Festival arose in the wake of the Soviet Thaw and reflected a fleeting post-Stalinist Soviet idealism. This inaugural festival of 1968 and subsequent iterations in the 1970s, Salazkina argues, captured the anticolonial, international spirit of socialist cinema. And Salazkina’s readers, much like attendees at a bustling international film festival, have the opportunity to sample animated discussion of films from around the world and to take in the vibrant ideological issues on display in Tashkent, issues still resonating to this day.
Ideology was indeed front and center at the Tashkent Festival. The Uzbek writer Sarvar Azimov, chairman of the festival’s Organizing Committee in 1968, would become Soviet ambassador to Lebanon and conduct the first official Soviet meeting with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Anticapitalist sentiments, let alone Pro-Palestinian ones, resonated in Tashkent, Salazkina emphasizes, as did an internationalist and humanist universalism of a socialist variety. Although world socialist cinema would peter out in the 1980s as the Cold War ended and global cinema came to terms with capitalism, analysis of the Tashkent film festival and the films featured there provides a useful prism through which to explore the era and its left-leaning cinema. Salazkina does concede that the quality of films shown in Tashkent were uneven, yet she also notes that the festival allowed for ideological and aesthetic positions to fuse, whereby “a different kind of world cinema began to take shape” (8). And what emerges in World Socialist Cinema is a compelling, well-researched study of not only the film festival, but also the era and its socialist ethos. Salazkina aspires to create an “alternative to the established narrative of film history” (21) that might push back against “neoliberal, racial capitalism” (22) as well as the market-based cinema that dominated in the west. The politics of World Socialist Cinema may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but it is hard to deny that Salazkina has gone some way toward expanding the scope of world cinema scholarship while offering an important Soviet-oriented contribution to present-day postcolonial studies.
In her opening chapter, Salazkina explores the structure and workings of the Tashkent Film Festival, emphasizing its heterogeneity. No demand was made, Salazkina contends, that films shown at the festival display a pro-Soviet bent or serve as a projection of the Soviet state; rather, organizers aimed to foster nationalist cinema within a postcolonial context and to highlight manifestations of nationalist culture beyond what was “imposed by the colonial or neocolonial gaze” (25). The 1955 Afro-Asian Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, which put forward an anticolonial, anti-western pan-Asian platform, had laid the groundwork for the festival, as had the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR, where in 1956 Nikita Khrushchev, in addition to denouncing Iosif Stalin’s cult of personality, signaled a return to the early Soviet notion of global historical development. Following in the footsteps of Czechoslovakia’s Karlovy Vary Film Festival, the first festival organized in the Soviet bloc, which included films from across the world, Tashkent proved a setting of great geopolitical significance as it “placed Central Asia at the crossroads of Asian civilization” (41) to underscore the USSR’s cultural, historical, and sociopolitical connections to Asia and elsewhere within the Soviet sphere of influence.
As Salazkina accentuates in Ch. 2, the types of films shown at the Tashkent festival proved largely antithetical to art house cinema. Many were “considered overly didactic and dogmatic” (81) and landed somewhere between “low” popular culture and formally adventurous art cinema, thus often overlooked in film scholarship and film histories. Yet Sub-Saharan African art cinema did have a forum to shine in Tashkent, thanks in part to its close ties to Soviet cinema: showing their work in Tashkent were the Senegalese Sembene, who trained in Moscow under Mark Donskoi at the Soviet film school VGIK; his compatriot Paulin Soumanou Vierya, a regular contributor to the Tashkent festival and frequent visitor to the Soviet Union; the French, African-based filmmaker Sarah Maldoror, who also worked under Donskoi at VGIK; and the Malian Cissé, yet another African filmmaker who studied at VGIK.
Due to a cholera outbreak no Tashkent Film Festival was held in 1970, yet the biennial festival resumed in 1972 and, as Salazkina explains in her third chapter, the geographical scope of the festival expanded to Latin America, even as they held off on showing many well-known Latin American leftist films, since these were films already being touted in the west. Meanwhile, the festival began to include some commercial cinema from Asia and other non-western countries, much to the dismay of leftist critics and filmmakers present in Tashkent. Nevertheless, 1970s Tashkent emerged as “a rare space” (111) that reinforced a socialist solidarity among nations, whereby a film such as Med Hondo’s Soleil O (1969), which probed the racism faced by Africans immigrating to France, featured as “a political meditation on colonialism and imperialism” (101), while Patricio Guzmán’s soon-to-be-celebrated Battle of Chile: Part II, shown in Tashkent in 1974, shed important light on Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-backed overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile.
Despite the lofty ideals of the festival, conspicuous concessions continued to work their way into the Tashkent program, as socialist filmmakers featured in Tashkent tempered their radicalism to fit the demands of audiences. Salazkina arguably goes a bit easy on the quality of the festival, for instance chalking up in Ch. 4 the aesthetic conservatism of participants from Africa, Asia, and Latin America to their having an artistic approach “formed by a different conception of film culture, one that understood cinema as a cultural and social form and activity” (119). At the same time, Vladimir Baskakov, deputy head of Goskino from 1963 to 1972, pushed for socialist realist cinema over “ultra-leftist” western filmmaking, while the Kyrgyz writer Chingiz Aitmatov, who appeared at the festival in 1972 and 1974, promoted this prescriptive side of socialist culture as “humanist” (127) realism.
As a matter of principle, Salazkina shies away from auteur cinema so as to avoid “a narrative continuous with the dynamics and developments within the cinemas of Western Europe” (14), yet she nevertheless draws upon examples of auteur cinema in her study to give the discussion more weight and significance. In Ch. 5’s exploration of women’s cinema at the Tashkent Festival, Salazkina provides a revealing look at Malik Kaiumov’s Parandzha (Veil, 1978), a five-minute documentary shown in Tashkent on the emancipation of women in Soviet Uzbekistan, but she then sets aside her aversion to auteurism by delving into three films not shown in Tashkent: Assia Djebar’s La Nouba des femmes du Mont Chenoua, Algeria (The Nouba of the Women of Mount Chenoua, 1977), Larisa Shepitko’s Krylˊia (Wings, 1965), and Lana Gogoberidze’s Neskolˊko intervˊiu po lichnym voprosam (Some Interviews on Personal Matters, 1978). In a probing analysis, Salazkina discusses how the female directors of these three well-known films navigated between tradition and modernization and between war and peace despite state mechanisms of repression.
In subsequent chapters, Salazkina explores how the cinematic themes of socialist industrialization, state planning, cultural heritage, and armed struggle provided essential counterpoints in Tashkent to the neoliberalism on the rise in the west. In Ch. 6, for instance, an illuminating look at two versions of Youssef Chahine’s People on the Nile (1968/1972), the first Soviet-Egyptian co-production, reveals how Chahine had to balance his cinematic vision with Soviet demands. Closer to home, Uzbek filmmaker Boris Kimiagarov’s popular Rustam Trilogy from the 1970s provides Salazkina a useful point of entry into cultural heritage cinema of the Soviet Central Asian Republics. Evoking the radical link of the film camera to a Kalashnikov, Salazkina probes how a “fight for peace” resonated in Tashkent, for instance in Zahir Raihan’s Stop Genocide (1971), a short Marxist vision of liberation in Bangladesh.
The films of the Tashkent Film Festival do not always provide enough ammunition for Salazkina, thus prompting her to shift away sporadically from Tashkent, yet her overall conception of the festival as the basis for her monograph is an inspired one. Salakina engages with colonialism in a way that proves both illuminating and refreshing, even for those who do not necessarily subscribe to the study’s underlying political orientation. And regardless of ideology, one cannot help but feel a slight sense of nostalgia for the Soviet period in question, when the ideals of the era had not yet dissipated, and the Soviet Union provided a counterbalance to global capitalism and western cinema. Going some way toward placing Soviet cinema within the framework of postcolonialism, World Socialist Cinema radically—and insightfully—expands the reach of Soviet film studies.
