The newly born Soviet state eagerly embraced the new technology of cinema as a tool to forge the New Soviet Person, though a process that Drieu dubs cinefication. In this book, first published in French in 2013, Drieu documents the struggle to harness film to the task of social transformation in Central Asia, whose 6 million inhabitants were overwhelmingly illiterate, mostly living in villages whose lifestyles had not changed for centuries. The challenge was to decolonize the image, by enabling audiences to see themselves on the screen, engaged in narratives that involved the destruction of the old and creation of the new. The problem was that both the medium and the message was coming from Moscow, so despite initial efforts to respect local identity and autonomy, the modernization project involved Russians imposing radical change on Uzbek society.
The nascent Soviet film industry faced extraordinary challenges, not least of which was the shortage of trained staff and equipment and general lack of resources (erratic or nonexistent electricity, shortage of generators, shortage of fuel for generators, lack of funds to import equipment, bureaucratic hurdles to import foreign equipment, etc.). On top of these technical limits, there were also political struggles, including the tussle over the drawing of boundaries within Central Asia, which saw the traditional political units of Bokhara and Khiva give way to the newly demarcated Soviet republic of Uzbekistan in 1924. Uzbekistan was the only Central Asian republic to have its own film studio, created in 1925. The system was totalitarian, but still left some scope for local initiative and nuance, within Stalin’s famous formula of “national in form, proletarian in content.”
Drieu reconstructs these struggles based on extensive archival work. She analyzes the 14 films produced in Uzbekistan between 1919 and 1937 (some of the original films have been lost, in which case she relied on script notes). She analyzes the content of the films (including 35 still shots), the process by which the films were made, and their reception by Uzbek society. Evidence for the latter is thin, especially once repression intensifies in the 1930s, and she relies mainly on reviews in newspapers.
Some movie theaters were built in the towns, but most showings were open-air, with mobile units taking projection equipment into the countryside. In the early years special screenings were arranged for women and children, since women were not comfortable sharing a darkened public space with men (110). This practice decreased after the mass unveiling campaign got underway in 1927.
Drieu does a good job of locating the film industry in the broader debate about Soviet modernization strategy and the shift from relative pluralism in the 1920s to increasing centralization after the creation of a unified Soyuzkino in 1930 (127), culminating in a wave of arrests in 1937. Despite the ideological commitment to “nativization” (korenizatsiia), as of 1931 only 10.5 percent of the 11,500 state officials in Central Asia were indigenous, and only 6 percent of the Russian officials spoke a native language (166).
There were just two Uzbek directors: Nabi Ganiev (1904–1954) and Suleiman Khodjaev (1892–1937). Most of the directors and crew were imported from Russia. They often had disinterest or contempt for local culture, and in 1924–1928 especially resorted to Orientalizing stereotypes to attract the viewer’s attention, as in The Minaret of Death (1925), directed by Dmitri Basalygo, which also had international distribution (59). Some of these Orientalist themes were drawn from global tropes: Rudyard Kipling’s writings were in circulation in translation, and the 1928 film The Leper took its plot from a novel by Ferdinand Duchene set in French Algeria (78).
Many of the scripts seem to follow a Romeo and Juliet theme of love across ethnic lines (though it was Russian actresses playing all the female roles, until 1937). Jackals of Ravat (1927) was the first feature made in Uzbekistan (whose director was a Soviet Pole, Kazimir Gertel); it tells the story of the Red Army freeing a village from the bandits (basmachi) (90). Khodjaev’s anticolonial film Before Dawn (1933), about the 1916 revolt in Central Asia, was never released: the director was shot in 1937. Ganiev managed to avoid being purged, despite his bourgeois class origins. He fought back, accusing his director of photography, Fridrikh Verigo-Dorovskii, of disrespecting Uzbek culture by referring to plov, the national dish, as “shit” (132).
The films were intended to discredit religion, but they had to tread carefully to avoid alienating the audience. Initially the emphasis was more anticlerical than antireligious, but this changed in the 1930s. The films also included a strong element of class analysis, with the prerevolutionary wealthy class of bais serving as the arch villains, oppressing the peasants but also cheating the Russian colonists.
A pioneering work, Dreiu’s book is a most valuable contribution to the history of Soviet cinema and the dilemmas of Soviet modernization in Central Asia.
