Paul
Goble
Staunton, March 16 – Most people in
most countries form their images of the past not from personal experience or
learned historical discussions but from popular culture and in recent decades
from popular films. Many Americans, for
example, have an image of World War II drawn more from The Longest Day or Saving
Private Ryan than from any historian’s work.
The same thing is true for those who
live in Russia. The Battleship Potemkin
and Ten Days that Shook the World form
their views of the revolutionary period than do learned tomes. Lenin and the
Bolsheviks understood this and made good use of it as Rene Fulop-Mueller
documents in his classic The Mind and
Face of Bolshevism.
But since perestroika times, the
center has lost control over films that can determine the narratives people
actually have in their heads whatever state propagandists say, and now as
Russians and non-Russians alike march through the centenary of the Russian
Civil War, some non-Russian directos are producing films likely to change how viewers
see the world.
One such film, The First Republic, to be released tomorrow is likely to be among the
most prominent and transformative of this kind. (1republic.ru/). It is devoted to the
centenary of the founding in 1919 of the Autonomous Bashkir Soviet Republic,
the first such autonomy in Soviet history, and to what happened to those
involved in the following decades.
The film’s official website declares
that “this was a fantastic time! The young Soviet country became a land of
unique opportunities, labor and cultural victories. Bashkortostan, as the first
republic entering into the composition of the new Russia experienced this
flourishing. Science and culture flourished.” But then came the purges (1republic.ru/).
The film’s director Bulat Yusupov
spoke with Artur Asafyev of Radio Svoboda’s IdelReal
portal in advance of the premiere and talked about both how the film came to
happen and what he hopes viewers will take away with them after they have seen
it (idelreal.org/a/29824029.html).
Yusupov said he
began thinking about the film when he considered the roles of the 44 leaders of
the Bashkir intelligentsia who had done so much to promote the flourishing of
Bashkortostan in the 1920s but one on one day, July 10, 1938, were shot. Their deaths should never be forgotten but
neither should what they tried to do and accomplished.
Some people may be troubled by the
film’s title because there is much controversy about what was really the “first”
Bashkir republic, Akhmet Zaki Validi’s proclamation in December1917 or the formal
promulgation of the Bashkir autonomy in May 1920. But Yusupov says that in a
work of art, absolute precision isn’t the point.
The director says he is proud of
what he and other non-Russian film makers are doing with history now.
Unfortunately, he points out, Moscow and Petersburg filmmakers are following
the Hollywood model of seeking to make blockbusters rather than more serious
films. But those “in the rest of Russia” are pursuing a different and better
path.
The Bashkortostan government funded
the film, and Yusupov says he hopes to show it not only throughout the republic
but everywhere in Russia where Bashkirs live and elsewhere, including Tatarstan
and the Middle Volga, where there is a strong interest in the Bashkirs and
revolutionary times.
With this film, the director
continues, “we have attempted to show people our history both tragic and
beautiful. People must know who stood at the origins of our republic, who
created its ideals and affirmed its values.”
They must also know what happened to those people and why. “I hope,”
Yusupov says, “we have been able to do that.”
No comments:
Post a Comment