Tag: Uzbekistan

Pordenone from afar (2024, Day 4)

Day 4 and we return to Uzbekistan for “The Leper”. Knowing only the title of this film, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I was prepared from something troubling, and boy did this film deliver…

Moxov Qiz (1928; USSR/Uzbek SSR; Oleg Frelikh). In an old quiet town in Uzbekistan, Colonel Karonin helps oversee the locals with the aid of Ahmed-Bai, his translator. Ahmed-Bai’s only daughter is Tyllia-Oi, who one night dances to entertain Karonin’s guests. She catches the eye of Igor Karonin (the colonel’s son) and of Said-Vali, the son of Said-Murad, the richest trader in town. Said-Vali tells his father that he wants to marry Tyllia-Oi but is told that she is only “copper” compared to the gold and silver of other women. Nevertheless, Said-Vali can buy his way through the problem and the marriage takes place. Tyllia-Oi tries to impress her husband by wearing Russian-style clothing (like him), but he angrily demands if she is a whore or a Muslim – then attacks and (we presume, via an ellipsis) rapes her. Meanwhile, Ahmed-Bai takes a second wife into his home to help manage in his daughter’s absence. His older wife, sad and dejected by her husband’s new bride, visits Tyllia-Oi. Seeing the bruises on her daughter’s arms, she realizes that Tyllia-Oi is being beaten by her husband. In desperation Tyllia-Oi sends a note to the colonel’s wife, but it is intercepted by Igor, who is gleefully delighted by the prospect of her vulnerability to his advances. Igor sneaks into Tylllia-Oi’s room and (again, via an ellipsis) rapes her. Months pass, and Igor must leave for Moscow for a new posting. When Said-Vali tells this news to his wife, he sees her troubled reaction and – accusing her of infidelity – attacks her with flaming brands. The marriage ends up in a religious court, and Tyllia-Oi is forced to leave her husband and return to her father’s home. Ahmed-Bai calls his daughter a slut and blames her for the social shame that ends his job and forces them to move. In their new home, Tyllia-Oi’s mother dies. Ahmed-Bai is now an estate manager, but his authority is mocked by the workers. Tyllai-Oi’s stepmother encourages her husband to beat Tyllia-Oi, but she flees home in search of Igor – whom she finds (eventually) with another woman. Homeless, Tyllai-Oi is pursued by other men and finds herself wandering alone. She eventually reaches an isolated lepers’ “village”: a series of tiny caves in the desert. The lepers surround her, and she flees in terror, only to encounter a party of men who – thinking she is a leper – beat her to death and leave her body in the road. END.

An amazing film. Both brutal and compassionate, it is everything that Santa (Day 2) was not. Having now read the brief essay by Nigora Karimova,  I find that Moxov Qiz is based on a Frech novel by Ferdinand Duchêne, set in Algeria. It was adapted by Lolakhan Saifullina, and her screenplay transposes events to the Uzbekistan of pre-Revolution Russia. The wider context certainly shapes the political drama. This is a small town, with its petty affairs and small briberies, its minor officials who are little kings of their realm. The tension between local (religious) power and central (national) power is everywhere in the film, with Tyllai-Oi at the centre. I wonder how the rivalry between Russian (i.e. outsider) power and the local leaders played to contemporary (especially Uzbek) audiences in 1928? I can easily imagine many of these tensions remaining in place in the Soviet era. Even if the broader political scene was different, people would surely have maintained some of the personal beliefs and behaviours evident here. When Igor asks Said-Vali about his relations with his wife, for example, he replies that their “custom” does not allow any such questions to be asked. How many husbands might say the same in 1928? (Or in 2024…) I admire the film’s willingness, keenness even, to show the male control at every level of society, from the political (the Colonel, the mullahs) to the personal (the father, the husband). The women bear the brunt of much of the manual labour, and we often see Tyllai-Oi’s father lounging around waiting for service from his wife (or wives) or daughter. The political and the personal meet in the Sharia court, where the wider expectations of religious law determine Tyllai-Oi’s fate. The court (rightfully, it must surely seem) grants a divorce to the couple, but in forcing her back to her father this decision ultimately causes even greater harm. (The judgement also gives her condemnation as a woman and a wife the full force of religious taboo.) And beyond the courts, in the wider social landscape, men are only too eager to judge and prey upon Tyllai-Oi once she has left the confines of marriage or family. It’s a grim picture of social stricture.

At the heart of the film is Rachel Messerer as Tyllai-Oi. This is, as far as I am aware, the first time I have seen this actress and she’s superb. She is incredibly striking on screen, and the film knows just how to frame her to make the most of her eyes, her glances over the shoulder, her looking and being looked at. Obviously, the film is silent – but there is hardly any dialogue (i.e. speech-based intertitles) to convey Tyllai-Oi’s thoughts or feelings. Everything therefore relies on her face, her gestures, the rhythm of her body on screen. Her one notable line of speech is that desperate note for help, written on a piece of material. It’s like a title in itself and, ironically enough, it is a message that never reaches its intended destination. She herself becomes a kind of readable text when her mother sees the bruises on her arm. In a film scripted by a woman, it’s interesting that the only people who seem to read each other sympathetically are a mother and her daughter. The men are not willing or able or interested enough to want to understand the women. Superficially, Said-Vali interprets his wife’s troubled look about Igor’s departure correctly: she does have a relationship with Igor. But this “relationship” is itself based on exploitation and abuse. Tyllai-Oi is a victim, not a perpetrator, of a betrayal of trust.

This is all the more moving for the few moments when Tyllai-Oi has a sense of privacy, or solidarity with another. We first see Tyllai-Oi upside-down, laughing, descending a tree, and this rare – even unique – scene of her joy is one shared with her mother, away from Ahmed-Bai. Later, she briefly enjoys the company of children and animals – but it is a fleeting moment of private pleasure, set in the midst of evens that will expel her from family, home, and society. She has no other form of personal expression in the film. Her dance, near the beginning, may make her smile – but it is an activity that is demanded of her by her parents, and it attracts the lusty attention of men, two of whom (Igor and Said-Vali) will exploit and abuse her. The camera seems to shake a little in time with the movements of her dance, as though we are sharing her bodily rhythm – but this, too, is contained within the montage by wider shots of Tyllai-Oi surrounded by the male audience. Later in the film, all her actions are commanded by or interpreted negatively by men. When she tries to dress to please her husband, he beats (and possibly rapes) her. When she is on her hands and knees, dusting his boots before he leaves the house, he doesn’t even look at her. When she writes a letter, Igor uses it to exploit her situation and rape her. All this places our sympathies firmly with Tyllai-Oi, with her mother perhaps being a secondary point of compassion. Everything in the film is geared to expressing the restrictions and limitations being placed on women in general, and Tyllai-Oi in particular.

More broadly, it must be said how good the film looks. Compared to the other Uzbek film this week, Ajal Minorasi (Day 2), Moxov Qiz is much more visually sophisticated and articulate. It also has more to say, and more depth to give to its main female character. Shot on location, it makes brilliant use of the town and the landscape around it. It also makes these spaces mean something. The film opens with a lovely montage of flowers, marshes, trees, streets, sunlight, musicians, people basking in the sun – but this idyll is short-lived, a moment of peace before the intrigues and tensions are laid out. The shady streets become threatening when Tyllai-Oi is fleeing her husband or her family, just as the open spaces of the landscape we see during the falcon hunt become a forbidding wilderness by the film’s end. The last sequence, in the rocky desert far beyond town, is a bleak and forbidding landscape. There is nothing for Tyllai-Oi here, and nowhere else for the drama to go. A sparse, brutal end to this brilliant, disturbing film. A real discovery for me.

Paul Cuff

Pordenone from afar (2024, Day 2)

Day 2 of Pordenone takes us to Uzbekistan for serial-style adventure, then to Mexico for bursting-at-the-seams melodrama. These films were totally unknown to me, and exactly the type of thing you would hope to encounter at a festival…

So, Ajal Minorasi/Minaret Smerty (1925; USSR/Uzbek SSR; Viacheslav Viskovskii). “The Minaret of Death” is a great title. Based, the credits promise me, on an ancient legend of Bukhara from the sixteenth century. Jemal (Nadia Vendelin) from the Khanate of Khiva and her Arab sister Selekha (Valentina Baranova) are travelling from Bukhara to Khiva, sent by Jemal’s uncle Khalmurad. En route, the caravan is attacked by Kur-Bashi, “Ataman of the thieves” (H. Abduzhalilov). The two women are captured, where they encounter Gyul-Sariq (Olga Spirova), who is herself in love with Kur-Bashi – and jealous of his attempts to woo the women. Gyul-Sariq offers to help the women escape, which they do – swapping their horses for camels to cross the desert. Meanwhile, Kur-Bashi is warned against Gyul-Sariq’s involvement in the escape and orders her death. In the desert, the knight Sadiq (Oleg Frelikh) is watching the road to Khiva, where he encounters the exhausted Jamal and Selekha. In Khiva, Jamal gives Sadiq her necklace as a token of thanks. Months later, the Emir of Bukhara (A. Bogdanovsky) arrives with his son Shahrukh-bek (Iona Talanov) to celebrate a raid against Khiva. Among his captured prisoners are Jamal and Selekha. A contest is held to determine the winner of the prisoners. Sadiq is among the horsemen who compete, and he wins Jamal. But Shahrukh-bek fights Sadiq and recaptures Jamal to be “the queen of my harem”.  Selekha manages to get hold of a knife and tries to enlist the help of Sadiq. A Persian love potion is prepared to make Jamal submit, but Selekha goes to the Emir and tells him that Sadiq’s prize woman has been stolen by his son. Shahrukh-bek kills his father and blames Jamal. But the reign of the new emir is unpopular, and Sadiq rallies the local men to rally against Shahrukh-bek. His army attacks Shahrukh-bek’s fort, but it is too strong. Sadiq tries to negotiate, demanding all the prisoners be let free. But Shahrukh-bek sends his enemies to be hurled off a minaret. Happily, the women save the day, rebelling against Shahrukh-bek’s guards – and Sadiq is able to rescue Jamal on the precipice, from which Shahrukh-bek is hurled. END.

What a delightful oddity this film is. It feels like a multi-hour serial condensed into the space of a single episode. Months suddenly disappear in-between scenes. Characters are kidnapped, rescued, kidnapped, rescued, and imprisoned once more. Emirs come and go, armies assemble then vanish. There are traditional dances, harems, sudden accumulations of crowds, glimpses of deserts giving way to rivers and fields, strange buildings, swords brandished, cavalry charges. In the way of many serials, the whole thing veers from stodgy inertia to breathless action. Schemes are enacted before they’ve been properly elaborated, while deaths and betrayal suddenly switch the narrative to new directions.

Redolent of numerous (western-produced) serials set in the east, Ajal Minorasi has the great benefit of being shot on location in Uzbekistan. The towns, landscapes, and people look pleasingly unpolished. Everything has a dusty, sun-bleached reality that contrasts with the highly contrived drama playing out on screen. The film has a charming feeling of being scripted on the hoof and shot on the fly. There are marvellous glimpses of real faces and lives amid the hoopla of villainy and heroism, and though none of the lead performers have characters with any depth the two female leads have real presence on screen. The experience of watching this film was at once exciting, confusing, and confounding. I’m not sure when I would want to sit through it again, but I’m glad that I have.

The second part of Day 2’s programme beings with Abismos (1931; Mx.; Salvador Pruneda), one of Mexico’s first films with synchronized soundtrack – but the latter appears not to survive. The fragment presented here has a piano accompaniment by José María Serralde Ruiz. As such, it is a curiosity: a sound film rendered silent by the exigencies of time, transformed into a new viewing experience in a silent festival. A woman approaches a prostrate figure on a bed. We see a bottle in his pocket. He is drunk. She tries to raise him. Another scene, at breakfast. (Already, we take it that the woman is the mother, the inert boy her son, and here at table an older daughter and the father.) A conversation unfolds, in silence, an awkward confrontation with the son. Another scene, an interior confrontation with a lawyer(?), then a cutaway to paperboys on the street. Something has happened, and the police come to confront the drunken youth. Now the son is behind bars. Flashbacks, fire, drink, guilt – and more conversations unheard. It ends.

Next, a fragmentary short: Como por un tubo o el boleto de lotería (1919; Cl.; unknown). A charmingly ramshackle, mischievous title sequence. The stars awkwardly superimposed behind a production logo, and another man – half-buried in straw – holds up a cardboard sign to credit the production company. On the streets, our main character is knocked out by a villain, who steals a baby and substitutes the unconscious man in its place. There are little groups of onlookers: are they extras or just curious bystanders? Glimpses of the sea, of streets, of the past. A series of peculiar incidents: a political speech, delivered for real then mocked by the comic; a brawl, a blackeye, a bit with a dog. The end.

Finally, our last feature of the day: Santa (1918; Mx.; Luis G. Peredo). The opening title announces the “first part of the triptych: PURITY” with “symbolic installations by Norka Rouskaya”. Wow. Symbolic installations? (“Actitudes simbólicas”) Yes please. Hit me! The film begins, seemingly in medias res. Marcelino, a soldier, mounted, on his way to Mexico City. (The screen warps and wanders in the frame. It’s like we’re viewing the film reflected in the depths of a well.) The girl waits, gestures. The men ride past. “Abandoned!” Four months later, “her sin revealed”, the girl – Santa – is ejected from her home. Her mother lectures her at great length (over the course of two titles) about Santa’s wickedness. Her mother says she is “smeared” with her daughter’s foulness.

Part Two of the triptych: Vice. And here are our first symbolic installations. The dancer, writhing with flowers in a park. It’s a very brief installation, for here we are in the metropolis: Mexico City. And here is Chapultepec. (Touristic views of the park, the streets.) Santa heads to Elvira (whole areas of backstory skipped, missing). Santa behind bars, praying for a return to her home and family. Hipólito the blind man (Alfonso Busson). Months pass. Santa gets close to Hipólito, who tells her his life story. (A single shot of an impoverished home.) Santa and “El Jarameño”, the matador, “make their lives exult”. Plenty of bizarre titles about female inconstancy, and Santa betrays El Jarameño while he is busy mauling cattle. He returns, finds Santa together with a lover, but his knife gets stuck and a painting of the Virgin Mary tumbles into view – triggering “his religious fanaticism”. Oh dear, now Santa is back to her “ways of vice”. Hipólito loves her. He pours out his heart in endless intertitles, says he is a monster to look at. Seconds later, Santa has gone through another lover – Rubio – and “under the attack of an insidious evil, [she] has become an alcoholic”. (We see her sipping wine with a reprobate.) Santa is rotted by sin, by crime, by the kitchen sink, and so the third part of the triptych, “Martyrdom”, begins.

Abandoned by all, sick, miserable, “useless”, Santa turns to Hipólito to help recover “the holy deposit”. (I think the film means her soul, but it sounds rather less sanitary.) He takes her to share his simple home (and boy servant). “We are all your slaves!” he says, to do as she wishes. She has an attack of piety, clutches his knees, has a brief repast, glugs back wine. A doctor calls. Santa has an incurable disease that needs an expensive operation. Oh dear, oh dear. Now she’s in bed, writhing, feeling that someone’s removing her bones, wanting to be buried by her mother in her home in Chimalistac. The operation. Lengthy procedural wrappings. Time passes. Hipólito waits. A crisis, just as she’s being stitched up. Bloody bandages. Oh dear, oh dear, she’s dead. Hipólito collapses over her body. She’s buried in her village. Hipólito tends her grave. The sun sets. Hipólito runs his fingers over the inscription on the tombstone and prays for her soul. END.

Well, what can I say to all that? The film is so rife with melodrama it appears to be coming apart at the seams. The image itself buckles and warps, the frame shifts awkwardly. The copy is fragmentary and hurtles forward at an even greater rate of dramatic velocity than Ajal Minorasi. The intensity of the drama is exacerbated by the state of the print: it’s like the film is fast-forwarding through Santa’s life, racing towards its inevitable conclusion. In this sense, I found it a far more gripping film than Ajal Minorasi, which seems almost stilted by comparison.

Yet I can’t deny that Santa is in many ways a cruder film. The way it’s staged and edited feels utilitarian, awkward, heavy-handed. There are far too many titles, which (when they are not explaining what we have just seen) are overloaded with information that the surrounding scenes do not – or cannot – register. It’s like paragraphs from a pulpy novel have been pasted onto the screen, regardless of the film’s visual world. The tone of these titles, too, veers madly between stilted exposition, religiose moralism, and pretentious verbiage. The “symbolic installations” (or what survives of them) are weird interruptions, failed attempts to elevate or exteriorize feelings that the film simply cannot express.

Elena Sánchez Valenzuela is a beautiful Santa and has a world of emotion in her eyes – but the film has no way of allowing us access to those depths, to the reality of her experience. Indeed, the film goes out of its way to suppress any alternative interpretation to the narrative other than that expressed by the titles. In this way, the whole film feels like some dreadful piece of Catholic propaganda made flesh. The woman is blamed at every stage of the way, condemned by her unalterable nature, an original sinner who must live out the awful consequences of her actions. Santa has a dreadful life, then dies a dreadful death. The film is based on Federico Gamboa’s eponymous novel of 1903. Gamboa is described as a “naturalist”, but I wonder how the tone of the novel compares with the film. Is it as moralistic? Does it judge and condemn Santa in the same way? Where are its sympathies, and what is its diagnosis?

If Santa is a crude film in all these senses, it is – perhaps because of its crudity – absolutely compelling. I was gripped by the mad pace of it, by the intoxicating brutality of its drama, by the ludicrous exegeses of its titles, by the peculiarity of its “symbolic” pretensions, by the textual (and textural) instability of its images and sudden ellipses of the fragmented print. Part of its success for me was the piano accompaniment by José María Serralde Ruiz: full-hearted, sincere, dramatic. Bravo.

So that was Day 2. A well-travelled day. I’m not sure how many silent films shot on location in Uzbekistan or Chile I have ever seen, and I’m very happy to have glimpsed these worlds on screen. Santa, too, offers some amazing views of Mexico City (even though they are entirely unintegrated into the narrative). In all these films, the sense of time and place vividly creeps over the images. It’s there in the faces, in the texture of the locations, in the light and dust of the streets and fields. Even at their crudest, they were interesting to watch. The only film that I didn’t get much from was Abismos, perhaps because of its peculiar status as a sound film without soundtrack. I can see (or assume) its historical value, but next to even the most fragmented of the other films it was oddly lifeless. But it was only a few minutes long, and it fitted with the rest of the programme, so I mustn’t complain. Day 2 took me to places I’d never been, and I’m grateful for the experience.

Paul Cuff