THE GREAT DIRECTORS OF ASIA

The year was 1962, and the film was titled "Heat." In the frame, the boy named Kemel appeared to be 17, though in real life, he was 21. Bolot Shamshiev, a second-year student at VGIK (the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography), played the lead role in the adaptation of Chingiz Aitmatov's novella "The Camel's Eye." This film was a diploma directorial project by Larisa Shepitko and her fellow VGIK students. The film would not just put Kyrgyzstan on the cinematic world map—it would mark the beginning of the "Kyrgyz miracle," the rapid and unprecedented growth of filmmaking in the USSR's most remote republic, which had only started producing its own feature films in 1956, much later than other regions, and where literacy had only emerged in the 20th century.

Kemel will not run away. Instead, he will burn weeds, joyfully turning the nighttime bonfires into a salute to his first love. He will rattle along in the dust behind a tractor, shouting through the kicked-up dust, "Bears rode a bicycle, followed by a backward-facing cat." He will believe that the land will yield a harvest. It is the brigade leader, a Stalinist “shock worker,” who will flee; his resentment over his vanished youth, glory, and honor transformed into cynicism and sadism. Meanwhile, Kemel will stay.

Shamshiev will not flee either—he will remain in cinema as a director, to plow and sow the virgin lands of the Kyrgyz screen with a vibrant array of films that, despite their often stark differences, all originate from "Heat." Each film explores themes of servitude, the seemingly insignificant individual, the subordinate, the younger generation, and how they find their voice. All depict life far from the city and closer to nature. Half of these films are adaptations of Aitmatov's works. Many connect with themes of the road, featuring long-haul truckers, trucks, expeditions, and nomadic life. Many focus on minors, children, or those on the brink of adulthood.

Children, or those barely into adulthood, will not only become the heroes of his films but also his life companions and allies behind the camera—as Shamshiev himself approaches his thirties. He will direct his last film at the age of 47. No, he will live a long and productive life, even serving as the Minister of Sports and Tourism, an ambassador in the Emirates, a daring interpreter of the Kyrgyz epic "Manas" (having constructed a chain of evidence that Jesus was a descendant of the legendary hero), and a promoter of kok-boru—a type of equestrian football where a goat's carcass replaces the ball, and cauldrons replace the goals. But he will not allow himself to become stagnant or outdated in cinema. This is partly because, by the mid-1980s, the cinematic youth of Kyrgyzstan will have changed, no longer capturing his interest—but that's a story for another time. Regardless, we are dealing with a director who remained forever young and never created a magnum opus to which one could point and say, "This is Shamshiev," just as we might easily refer to Fellini's "8 ½." Shamshiev represents a style taken as a model, reborn upon the Kyrgyz soil, which unmistakably revitalizes the entire Central Asian cinematic landscape—yet Shamshiev himself prevents it from becoming his own distinctive signature, frequently shifting directions. It's an attraction to the dream film and a complete change of register, where perfection is just a few tweaks away. Cinema in process, a work in progress—but that is precisely what makes it an eternal engine among the masters of the most enterprising period of auteur cinema—the 1960s to the 1980s.

Understanding Shamshiev outside of his context is not feasible: his creative bouquet is composed of preconditions and mutual enrichment among like-minded individuals, centered around the youngest, poorest, and technically least equipped studio in the USSR—“Kirgizfilm.” Even during its most prolific era in the first half of the 1980s, it had the capacity to produce only 3-4 feature films a year.

The son of a poet, he rushed to the Frunze film studio after school to work as an assistant sound operator, holding a boom microphone. His counterparts in the "Kyrgyz miracle" all gathered there at the end of the 1950s—as carpenters, lighting technicians, and riggers. Only Tolomush Okeev was studying to be a sound operator in Leningrad, and upon his return, he would join the crew of "Heat." The new studio, which had not yet been named (it would be called "Kirgizfilm" only in 1961), became a magnet for all the local boys whose passion for technology overshadowed any desire to herd sheep, as Kyrgyzstan is a country of livestock breeders. The first feature film dedicated to shepherds, shot with local materials and Kyrgyz theater actors by a film crew from Moscow, was "Saltanat" (1955). This film marks the beginning of Kyrgyz cinema.

After its success, the studio for newsreel films, established in 1941 due to the evacuation of Russian filmmakers to Central Asia (with the Central United Film Studio—CUFS—created in Almaty), received authorization to produce feature films. The first film, which was made entirely through their own efforts and aptly titled "My Mistake," reflects its outcome. In contrast, when VGIK students, the Georgian Eldar Shengelaya and the Russian Alexey Sakharov, came to shoot a feature-length diploma film based on a Kyrgyz folk tale, their “Legend of the Icy Heart” (1957), like “Saltanat” successfully combined national uniqueness with cinematic craftsmanship. However, the initial decision to invite directors and screenwriters "from the Center" proved to be unwise: films like "Toktogul" (1959), "The Girl from Tien Shan" (1960), and "Dzhura" (1964) were mere oleographs, primitive art, somewhat like a "Kyrgyzstan as a token gift to Comrade Stalin," whose influence had long since faded, including in Soviet cinema aesthetics.

Two crucial decisions were made. The first was to send the most agile and enthusiastic young men from the studio to VGIK (All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography). This decision led Shamshiev, Melis Ubukeev, and Gennadiy Bazarov, who would later become key figures in the "Kyrgyz miracle," to go off to study. The second decision involved the Union of Cinematographers of Kyrgyzstan, which had only eight members at the time. They elected Chingiz Aitmatov, already the author of "Jamilya" (1958) and the novella "My Little Poplar in a Red Scarf" (1961), as their first secretary. Almost immediately in Frunze, Alexey Sakharov began adapting the latter into the film "The Pass." Aitmatov, barely in his 30s, would not become set in his ways even in the mid-1970s, during the public criticism of Tarkovsky's "Mirror." In the magazine "The Art of Cinema," he cited this film as an example opposite to the formulaic content that studio script committees often demanded from authors at a time when he was young and making waves not just throughout the Soviet Union but internationally as well. After analyzing this experience, he decided to rely on—yes, the cinematographic, professional expertise of the center, Moscow, but—filtered through a student's perception. He proposed "Kirgizfilm" as a platform for VGIK students' feature-length diploma projects and offered his books as bases for the scripts. Shepitko arrived, followed by Konchalovsky and Almantas Grikevicius, a Lithuanian who fell in love with Kyrgyzstan and remained there to become one of the main heroes of that very "cinema miracle”. Their films would go on to be featured at international film festivals.

"The Heat" will be the first. While studying cinema at VGIK, Shamshiev was simultaneously discovering the world and introducing the world to a Kyrgyz representative of the entire gene pool (since Aitmatov had already introduced Kyrgyzstan, its nature, and its soul to the world through his books). First, he made his mark in Central Asia, winning a prize for his acting debut at a regional festival in Dushanbe in 1963. Then, he made an impression on the entire Soviet populace at the first All-Union Film Festival in Leningrad in 1964, where Shepitko won a prize for directing. A few months later, he captured the attention of the socialist camp at the International Film Festival in Karlovy Vary, where "The Heat" received the Grand Prize from the Symposium of Young Cinematographers. Finally, in 1965, he gained recognition from Western audiences when the film received a jury award at the festival in Frankfurt am Main.

After graduating from VGIK in 1966, Shamshiev split his time between the FRG ( The Federal Republic of Germany) and Kyrgyzstan. In 1965, as part of his diploma project, Shamshiev directed the documentary "Manaschi" at "Kirgizfilm," about the 70-year-old storyteller Sayakbay Karalaev, who had recited "Manas," which turned out to be the longest epic in human history.

The widescreen black-and-white film features a montage of Karalaev's performance on a hillside in front of a crowd of hundreds dressed in traditional attire, listening intently, evidently not for the first hour. One of the women is breastfeeding. The off-screen voice and photo documents that appear along the edges of the widescreen, as if inserted into an album, draw parallels between the biography of the manaschi (storyteller) and the plot of "Manas." These include Manas' lament for his fallen friends with a chronicle of the terror that concluded the Kyrgyz national uprising against the tsar in 1916 and the joy of Manas' son, Semetey, raised in Bukhara, discovering the secret of his birth and his homeland, paralleled with the days of the Civil War, when Karalaev uplifted the spirits of the Red Army soldiers between battles by reciting the epic. The film consists of close-ups of the narrator and listeners and wide shots of the crowd, the mountains, and Issyk-Kul, ending with the narrator's return to his aul, where he goes each autumn to winter, meeting with his trained golden eagle and their joint hunt for a wolf. The film opens with a quote from Romain Rolland: "It is not the past that resurrects in us, but rather we cast our shadow into the past—our desires, our questions, our order, and our confusion."

In February 1966, Shamshiev took "Manaschi" to the prestigious short film festival in Oberhausen, where the film won a prize. To gauge the level of competition, consider the other laureates at the event: Shamshiev was listed alongside already established French non-fiction film guru Chris Marker, the then-emerging king of Hungarian avant-garde Zoltan Huszarik, Polish Jerzy Hoffman, already recognized as a leader in commercial cinema, and American Jim Henson, the future creator of "The Muppet Show."

Immediately after, Shamshiev returned to his homeland to shoot another 20-minute documentary, "The Shepherd." He aimed to capture the desperate conditions of the flocks belonging to Rakhmataly Sartbaev, a 30-year-old Hero of Socialist Labor, during the longest winter in thirteen years in the Tian Shan mountains. From March 19 to April 5, he filmed Sartbaev, his wife, their small children, and their sheep trapped in the Chon-Kyrchin area, where the starving sheep resorted to eating snow. The hay dropped by the rare helicopters that managed to reach them during the inclement weather was only enough to provide 200 grams per sheep per day, leading to vultures shamelessly circling overhead. When a shepherd strikes one of the birds, perched on a rock waiting for imminent death, with a stick, it merely lazily steps aside, arrogantly confident in its dominance. This film was edited using extreme close-ups of faces—etched with early wrinkles and deep in somber thought—and wider shots in which the shepherd talks to his wife. Giving a script to non-professionals, especially those in a crisis situation, would make even a well-read text seem inappropriate and insincere on screen. This led the director to avoid medium shots, a technique that he would later incorporate into his first feature film, "Shot on the Karash Pass" (1968), lending it distinctive artistic quality, but more on that later.

By October, Shamshiev was taking "The Shepherd" to Mannheim for an important festival for young cinema prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s. The jury, which included prominent members such as Bertolucci, Peter Schamoni,ia German director and screenwriter known for his films about artistsand Ewald Schorm,ia Czech director and a prominent figure of the New Waveawarded the film a "Special Mention." This was a significant accolade, especially considering that the main prize was won by Jiří Menzel’s feature film "Closely Watched Trains," which would go on to win an Oscar for Czechoslovakia the following year. Among the competitors were Czech avant-garde animator Jan Švankmajer, Belgian cinema pioneer André Delvaux, and Joris Ivens, a Dutch leader in documentary filmmaking. The previous year in Frankfurt, with "The Heat," Shamshiev had presented the West with a portrayal of the Kyrgyz, satisfying a fundamental curiosity about ethnic and genetic heritage, then in "Manaschi," he showcased cultural roots, and in "Chaban," he depicted everyday labor. This labor, even in modern conditions, perpetuates a lifestyle that the Kyrgyz and many other nomadic peoples have maintained for centuries—a nomadic one in which a lone warrior in the field confronts nature and is one with it.

The year 1966 also marks the birth of the Kyrgyz miracle. Okeev created his feature debut with the poetic "The Sky of Our Childhood." Ubukeev released the experimental "White Mountains" to the all-Union audience, altogether rejecting the "cinematic dramaturgy for script committees" against which Aitmatov had protested. Vidugiris's documentary "Turned Towards the Sun" was recognized as the best debut at the Central Asian review in Ashgabat. Bazarov began filming the adaptation of Aitmatov’s "Mother's Field" – the first film directed by a native of Kyrgyzstan. All five would alternate between creating feature and documentary films in a whimsical sequence. After "White Mountains," Ubukeev left feature filmmaking for 17 years, returning in the 1980s with "Provincial Romance," one of the most accurate portrayals of a contemporary Kyrgyz city. Vidugiris, once everyone got used to him as a documentarian, produced an equally precise film about the nature of masculinity, "Men Without Women," in 1981, suggesting that men, through collective efforts, handle any crisis except family crisis. Meanwhile, Okeev and Bazarov would oscillate, at different times preferring either narrative films or documentaries.

Only Shamshiev would settle accounts with documentary filmmaking once and for all with "The Shepherd." Suppose there is a common key to the Kyrgyz miracle. In that case, it is the search for that juncture where the roughness of natural—whether rural or urban—scenery and the spontaneity of reality merge with the play of imagination. The first would serve as a kind of verification of the second, while the second would immortalize the transience of the first. In this sense, this miracle anticipated the core explorations of Iranian auteur cinema of the 1990s and 2000s (Makhmalbaf, Kiarostami). This fusion of myth and everyday life, the timeless and the specific, was noted by critics in "Manaschi" and "The Shepherd"—and Shamshiev has often thanked film scholars for convincing him to undertake feature filmmaking.

"A Shot on Karash Pass" (1968) was based on the novella "The Shot on the Pass" ("Karash-Karash okuyasy," 1927) by the Kazakh classic Mukhtar Auezov and was a co-production with "Kazakhfilm." The story takes place at the beginning of the century; the main character is a servant who spent twenty years tending the flocks of Bay Salmen, "sleeping on ice, sheltered by snow," while his own children still greeted him with hungry eyes at home. The death of his brother by the fault of the Bai causes Bakhtygul’s cup of patience to spill over. Under Salmen, he was not only a shepherd but also a horse thief. Now, he steals horses from his master and prepares to make beshbarmak with them. Salmen and his men burst into the yurt, interrupting the family's meal, which leads to a confrontation, and Bakhtygul goes to seek protection from the local noble, Myrza Zharasbay. The noble makes him his own horse thief, and soon Bakhtygul, well-fed and groomed, proudly rides a horse amidst the apparent prosperity of the Myrza—a servant who has found a wise and kind master.

As previously mentioned, "The Shot," like Shamshiev's documentaries, alternates between extremely wide shots and extreme close-ups. Scenes range from herds, mountains, and raids to crowds swirling around Myrza’s subjects, with a somewhat Felliniesque touch in a borrowed scene where champagne is sipped under the artificial howling of studio-enhanced winter winds. Or, there are faces filled with tension, filled with hatred, as seen in Zharasbay's expression when visiting a friend who had risen to a high rank among the Russians in the city; he sees Orthodox domes directly across from his friend's window; filled with defiant condemnation, as captured in the tragically expressive face of theatrical diva Baken Kydykeyeva, when her character, Zharasbay’s first wife, reluctantly agrees to gift the mother of a boy killed in a raid on Salmen's herd with a silver bar. And towering above all is the wolfish gaze and sharp cheekbones of Suimenkul Chokmorov: the viewer of "The Shot" witnesses the emergence of the number-one star of Central Asian cinema in the 1970s. Kurosawa, casting him in an episode of "Dersu Uzala" (1975), remarked: "In armor and a helmet, he would have looked like a born samurai, and I would have paid dearly to see him duel with Toshiro Mifune".iTOSHIRO MIFUNE (1920–1997) – a Japanese actor and the main samurai of world cinemaChokmorov’s casting in the lead role reflects Shamshiev’s casting principles and embodies the essence of his cinema.

Chokmorov was a professional painter who had never considered a career in cinema. Shamshiev met him while filming "Manaschi" while Chokmorov was painting a portrait of the storyteller Karalaev. The iconic hero's image and Chokmorov's wolfish eyes evoked thoughts of a totemic origin for this Kyrgyz. This image stayed in Shamshiev’s memory and resurfaced when he began planning his first feature film. A director shines when he arrives and lights up his own star. In "The Shot," Shamshiev included repetitive and seemingly non-functional shots, with horses running in circles and crowds milling around theatrically staged scenes around the dastarkhan, where dialogues were layered with theatrical cunning. He also blended Chokmorov's calm presence, bolstered by his masculinity, with the pronounced and thus busy eloquence of great theater actors. The world is abuzz with intrigues and ideas involving bais, myrzas, and Russian generals. Bakhtygul, who had suffered under a bad master, was supposed to become cannon fodder in these intrigues. He had enjoyed the comforts of serving a good, generous, and grateful master. However, when that master decided to secure his peace by betraying Bakhtygul and pinning someone else’s guilt on him, Bakhtygul fled to the mountains and sought revenge. On one side, there is the bustle of games, benefits, daily life, and politics—all mundane; on the other, the natural pride of nature and a man predisposed to live by the laws of honor. Chokmorov grew so fond of his first hero that he named his son Bakhtygul.

The moment of Bakhtygul's escape is eloquently omitted. One moment, he is taken into custody, and immediately afterward, without transition, there's a close-up of a guard shouting, "Hold him, he's escaped!" It remains unclear whether he broke free from their grasp immediately or if he escaped from the prison where he was thrown, as in the book; however, the film does not show the arrest or imprisonment. Shamshiev neglects a crucial component of the adventure plot, not merely abbreviating it but also highlighting its absence with an illogical edit, emphasizing a gap in the narrative where one of the most thrilling, anticipated spectacles of any adventure story might have been.

Looking back with hindsight, now that the Central Asian “Western” —a well-established film genre and even a historical fact—is known, one might think that Shamshiev was shooting one of these for his feature debut. But that was not the case. At the end of the 1960s, this genre did not yet exist. That's precisely the point: Shamshiev, experimenting with what might be called a "horse theater on the slopes of the Tian Shan," was rehearsing a future mainstream and commercially successful genre without setting such a specific goal for himself. Unknowingly, he opened a door through which filmmakers from Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Kazakhstan would later rush, leading to some of their most significant commercial and sometimes creative successes in the 1970s and 1980s.

Interestingly, even after the successful nationwide release of "The Shot" (which garnered multiple awards, articles, box office success, and priority advertising); filmmakers still failed to grasp the vein Shamshiev had tapped into—only he himself understood it. Thus, in his next project, "The Scarlet Poppies of Issyk-Kul" (1971), tackling another adventure novel from 1927—the same year as Auezov's story—with his characteristic thoroughness, Shamshiev studied the literary context in which Auezov's story emerged. This time, he adapted the now-obscure "Smugglers of Tian Shan" by Alexander Sytin, introducing color to vividly depict the scarlet poppies and the ensuing bloodshed. In this adaptation, he fully embraced the Western genre, crafting a storyline about the capture of an opium king and casting Chokmorov as "a friend among foes." It was "The Scarlet Poppies" that cleared the way for Konchalovsky to write the script for "The Seventh Bullet" (1972), directed by Uzbek director Ali Khamraev, which should be considered the first, definitive Central Asian Western. It also influenced the directorial debut of his brother, Nikita Mikhalkov, in "At Home Among Strangers, A Stranger Among His Own" (1974). The neatly aimed "Bullet" attracted twice as many viewers as "The Poppies." In this film, Shamshiev was even more determined than in "The Shot," like a fox on the scent, though not yet wholly sure whose scent it was. Only in 1976, having realized retrospectively that he had invented the Western for Central Asia, did he declare from the podium of the Plenum of the Union of Cinematographers of the USSR: "Real men make American movies—bright, strong."

In "The Poppies," Shamshiev paired the enthusiastic Chokmorov—who, between these two films, had fully embraced his acting career with three leading roles, including an upcoming role in "The Seventh Bullet"—with 13-year-old schoolgirl Aiturgan Temirova. She played a bai's daughter who rescues Karabalt from a fire and follows his horse like a shadow. Temirova, with her magnificent arched eyebrows, would become a superstar like Chokmorov. She also became Shamshiev's wife and appeared in all his future films except "Echo of Love" (1974), she was pregnant at the time with the director’s daughter. However, she would only play the lead role once: in "The Snipers" (1985), produced at "Kazakhfilm," about Aliya Moldagulova, a war heroine who died at 17. Moldagulova's image as the glorious daughter of the Kazakh people had already been celebrated in popular culture, starting with Rozа Rymbayeva's song "Aliya" in 1977. Yet, with Temirova's help, Shamshiev elevated the image to such iconic perfection that one day, a photograph of Temirova, meant to represent Moldagulova, was carried in the "Immortal Regiment" march, causing considerable confusion for the actress: who would want to see their own image on a tombstone?

The case of Temirova playing Aliya clearly illustrates the result that Shamshiev aims to achieve when creating a central character: he wants them to become real. Shamshiev's films are rich with distinctive characters, each having their own storylines and scenes. "The Shot," "The Poppies," and "The Snipers" all feature a multinational cast, including a plethora of Russian stars from two generations. This includes the early thaw-era diva Tatyana Konyukhova, who many thought had long since passed away (although she only died this past spring), and even Juozas Kiselius, the most sought-after actor post-"The Long Road to the Dunes," from Lithuania. Shamshiev often chooses performers who have not been formally trained in acting for the central roles. Chokmorov, Temirova, and Talgat Nigmatulin, though an established actor by the time of "Wolf Pit," was originally a student at a circus school. Unlike the seasoned theatrical actors around them, their sole attributes are their expressive appearances, amplified by a bold trait such as exhibitionism, essential for playing leading roles in cinema. Their characters experience moments of existential crisis—but not a breakdown of character. They resemble rocks gradually eroded by the waves of dozens of acting masks. It is nearly impossible to point to a particular frame during the viewing and exclaim, "Look! Ah, how well played!" However, by the film's end, the waves become foam, and the monumental image they have sculpted remains forever embedded in memory.

Indeed, in "The Poppies," Shamshiev crafted a scene for Chokmorov in which his character bares his soul. However, he chose not to present it straightforwardly but rather subtly embedded within a song. At the dastarkhan, Karabalt is handed the singing bowl—yr-kese. He is overwhelmed by sorrow: that day, due to his actions, eight young Red Army soldiers had perished. Yet, a mocking comment from a wealthy man lounging comfortably—"It's as if a bear stepped on his ear. He strapped a Mauser to his side and forgot all our customs"—instantly sparks a primal rage in Chokmorov’s expression, which could be likened to Mifune's intense performances. Then, he takes up a komuz and sings a song he learned during his travels across the Kazakh steppes, a song where Berzhan, "insulted by human pettiness," shared his bitterness with his son: "I was a father who carried the burden of life like an ox. I leave it now, so you may carry only your own burden, Temirtas." Chokmorov transforms, his eyelashes—which turn out to be strikingly long—pressing together over his weathered cheeks. He spins spirals of pain with each verse, revealing the past of his character in such detail that the following scene, where he, having just laid bare his soul through song to the people, walks into the night to recount the outline of his tragic biography to the Red commissioner, seems superfluous: we have already learned all we need to know about him.

The scene with the yr-kese turned out to be such a powerful directorial discovery that Shamshiev began to use songs in subsequent films when the narrative tone needed to be shifted up an octave—a quality of songs in cinema that Pedro Almodóvar would later discuss. In the film "Echo of Love" (a TV movie based on Aitmatov’s early story "On the Baidamtal River," 1954, in which Shamshiev explored medium shots and theatrical staging), the song is used for a mirror effect. The protagonist found injured, feverish, and unconscious on the riverbank by the residents of the hydro station, is meant to remain a mystery until the finale. However, after a desperate attempt to flee across a mountain river that threatens his life, a dastarkhan is arranged in his honor as he is saved once again. A song performed by his hydrologist girlfriend, Asia, brings comfort and acceptance of any truth (previously, he was viewed with distrust, and he claimed to be a criminal). Essentially, it acts as a declaration of unconditional love. However, by the time of "The White Ship" (1975), Shamshiev realized where his experimentation was leading him. In this instance, amid the green slopes and pines, Temirova performed a song from a Bombay film, accompanying it with corresponding expressions and gestures. The director pulled back, realizing that he was now just steps away from inventing, if not Bollywood, then certainly an Eastern melodrama, which was incomplete at that time—whether in Iran or Egypt—without an inserted song.

In "The Poppies," the episode with songs on the yr-kese lasts almost 10 minutes—an excessive length for any ninety-minute film, especially a Western. However, when Karabalt breaks free from the villains, it's followed by a peculiar shot focusing on a horse's legs actively moving. It's unclear whether Chokmorov has mounted the horse or has grabbed onto the saddle in one of the jigitovka poses. Did he kick out with his legs to knock down the villains, or did he even rear the horse up and direct its hooves at their jaws (since the hooves disappear from the frame for a few seconds)? Yet again, as in the escape scene from "The Shot," we see only the result—the villains fall, and scatter, and Karabalt gallops away—but we are deprived of the actual stunt, a fundamental element of any adventure film. It appears as though Shamshiev understood where the door he had opened led and chose not to become a prisoner of the genre he had inadvertently invoked.

His choice was prophetic—it was about preserving his individuality. Did you notice that when listing the republics where the Eastern “Western” had taken root, we failed to mention Kyrgyzstan? It was absent there, even though it originated there. It was also missing in Turkmenistan, where the cinema tendencies were toward pastoral themes. However, when the Eastern “Western” became mainstream, audiences from the 15 Soviet republics, while consistently providing decent box office returns, could not distinguish whether they were watching a Kazakh, Uzbek, or Tajik film outside Central Asia. They all appeared to be films about a generic Central Asia where Basmachi interfered with the revolution. Even Uzbek director Hamraev, who had firmly embraced the genre, was shooting "The Bodyguard" at "Tajikfilm" with Russian actors by 1980. This film was not only nationally nondescript but also lacking in clever stunts.

Incidentally, all directors of the "Kyrgyz miracle," including Shamshiev himself, recoiled as if scalded whenever their films threatened to acquire the characteristics of an average Eastern spectacle. This made them the subject of criticism and mockery by stunt performers, many of whom hailed from Central Asia. For example, Omurkul Borybaev from Usen Kudaibergenov’s stunt group, a former artist of the Kyrgyz circus, criticized the stunts in "Men Without Women" for their simplicity. He lamented that Vidugiris did not allow him to perform a fall from a 50-meter height in a scene involving a bulldozer crossing a chasm via cables. Kudaibergenov himself was highly critical of Shamshiev’s "The White Ship," a film that did not utilize stunt services: "The script of 'The White Ship' described the extermination of the civilian population by foreign invaders. A costly set was constructed for this episode, which was then burned down in a matter of minutes during filming—the beautiful yurts made of white wool burned like gunpowder. Yet, this fire could have been staged in the background, burning cheap props with pyrotechnic effects. Several impactful stunt scenes involving raids, fights, and massacres should have been developed for the foreground. If the screenwriter (in this case, also the director) had been aware of our capabilities in this area, the episode could have been produced much more cheaply, and the artistic impact of the scene would have been much deeper."

The stunt performers did not realize that they had vividly described the very type of cinema that the creators of the "Kyrgyz miracle" were trying to avoid as if fleeing from the plague. Kudaibergenov's words are an excellent example that proves Shamshiev's method: he avoided any form of cheap fake scenery. However, in "The White Ship" (1975), and even more so in Shamshiev's subsequent adaptation of Aitmatov's "The Early Cranes" (1979), the films were hindered by a different kind of artificiality—a cinematic glossiness. In "The White Ship," the colorful reflections of backlighting were overly sweet, spreading across Issyk-Kul, and the Komsomol songs of the BAM pioneers flowed too smoothly along the neat city streets, singing, "Today I am where the blizzard sweeps. Today, I am where the taiga sings." A boulder that a boy straddled transformed too easily into a tank to convey the heart-wrenching story of a first-grader driven to suicide (!) by the petty, narrow-mindedness and malicious calculation of his relatives. If long-distance truckers, treating the boy to cinema and ice cream, were such frequent visitors in the vicinity of the aul, and if the school, from whose speakers "Samovsvety ( A popular Soviet Era music group ) belted, was just a stone's throw away, why would a seven-year-old need to drown himself because an uncle, long known to be a brute, killed and ate a deer? All of this reeked of something Lars Von Trier might concoct—although Shamshiev's film could be viewed as a prophetic revelation of future festival cinema. However, unlike the more ironic films of the seventies, "The White Ship" did not fare well at the Berlin Festival, where preference was given to the mocking and methodically convincing Altman (the "Golden Bear" went to his film "Buffalo Bill and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson").iRobert Altman (1925–2006) was an American director, a major figure in New Hollywood

It seems that Shamshiev himself realized that he had gone too far and slipped into cruel melodrama: it's no coincidence that he inserted a Bollywood song and dance in the middle of the film, almost as a belated expression of self-irony, acknowledging his defeat.

In "The Cranes," this melodramatic excess—where the earth curves dramatically in front of a wide-angle lens—was compounded by a different kind of simplicity. The film was co-produced with "Lenfilm," it featured a diluted version of Tarkovsky, reminiscent of scenes like the concussed military instructor in "The Mirror." "The Cranes" was aptly compared to "Ivan's Childhood," but Tarkovsky himself described his own debut as a "contrived student picture, the kind that was born in a VGIK dormitory while hungover."

Shamshiev's last attempt to adapt Aitmatov was so unsuccessful that the writer had his name removed from the credits, and Shamshiev left cinema after it in 1988. The film was based on the 1973 play "Ascent to Mount Fuji." The concept was to stage a purely theatrical piece, where aging friends who had adapted to the stagnation of their war years searched among themselves for a traitor who had denounced their poet friend during Stalin's era, set against the backdrop of Mount Karaulnaya. However, the mountain's truth could not endure two hours of actors over-performing, baring their souls under portraits of Politburo members brought from a demonstration, nor could it support the overly conceptual construction of the narrative.

It is entirely unclear why Shamshiev felt the need for such a direct experiment: staging theater according to all its traditional rules in a natural setting. Perhaps it was to test falsehood against the spirit of nature? If so, the result was predictable: not only did the falsehood in which the characters lived utterly collapse, but so did, following the film's logic—which obligingly paralleled the logic of perestroika—our entire country up to the era of Gorbachev. This downfall also swept away the meticulously crafted, skillfully built actor's legend of Temirova, which had just previously succeeded in the monument to Aliya. Perhaps the curses her heroine-actress hurls at her burnt-out husband while kneeling and lifting her heavily mascaraed eyelashes to the sunset could contend for an award in the category "Worst Female Role of All Time in the World and Universe."

This is especially notable considering that Shamshiev had already had a highly successful experience with "open-air theater"—arguably his most harmonious film, "Among People" (1978). The credits list two directors: himself and Artyk Suyundukov. At 21, Suyundukov played Tailak in Shamshiev’s debut, "The Shot"—the very boy who sets out to steal horses from Salmen, mocked by other boys: because his mother made him wear a fur hat so he wouldn’t catch a cold.

The hero of the film, which Suyundukov directed together with his cinematic godfather while finishing his directing degree at VGIK, is Kanat, a contemporary peer of Tailak. Kanat is a shepherd who returns to his mother from the pasture safe and sound, his face beaming with the infectious smile of Mira Nurmakhambetov, a broad-cheeked, bushy-browed, and full-lipped actor who would have all the producers of doramasiKorean dramasfighting over him had he entered cinema today. The collective farm sends him to study in the capital, and a granddaughter (Temirova) visits the neighbors, making Kanat's smile stretch even wider. Meanwhile, the village is left with only eccentric old people played by select character actors from the theater. Thus, with humor and laughter, the story tells how these clowns ultimately triumph over the young man's ambitions, impulses, and first love: in the finale, we see him playing dominoes with the elders, and in unison with them, he turns at the sound of a distant car engine: "Yes, our village is strange—we always look at the road: 'Who is that? Who is driving there?'"

Unfortunately, this black-and-white film did not resonate well with audiences. I believe that today, in the era of downshifting, it speaks much more clearly and poignantly: at the end of the 1970s, the trend of young people leaving villages for the capitals was on the rise, and Shamshiev was ahead of his time, leaving this gem for the 21st century. At the same time, another of Shamshiev's masterpieces, "Wolf Pit" (1983), distinguished itself as the first and only Kyrgyz film to be released on 70mm film by Goskino of the USSR, intended for screening in wide-format theaters with floor-to-ceiling screens and without partitions. Such an order was granted only to films seen as having a substantial visual impact, and this move paid off: "The Pit" became Shamshiev's highest-grossing film, drawing twice as many viewers as even "The Scarlet Poppies," with 21.4 million tickets sold, a substantial figure for 1984, when cinema attendance had significantly declined compared to just three years earlier.

In "The Shot" and "The Scarlet Poppies," Shamshiev, perhaps unconsciously, viewed the rocky slopes of the Tian Shan through the lens of a Western. Meanwhile, in "Among People," he structured the everyday life of the aul using the principles of theatrical comedy. However, he explored Kyrgyzstan's recent history and texture using the style of the Japanese social detective genre, which flourished in the 1970s and had evolved into a unique form of gangster romance by the early 1980s. This shift was sparked by the arrival at "Kyrgyzfilm" of Talgat Nigmatulin—a familiar screen gangster known for his role in "Pirates of the 20th Century" (1979). Nigmatulin was brought to Kyrgyzstan by Melis Ubukeev, who returned to feature film directing after a 17-year hiatus with "Provincial Romance." Upon first seeing Nigmatulin in elegant black shirts, suits, and coats, with a modern, slightly longer haircut, set against the backdrop of a contemporary city, Shamshiev was reminded of the magnificent Japanese actors from popular films of the time, such as "Castle on the Sand" and "Dangerous Chase".

He adopted the form of the Japanese social detective, complete with all its elements: crimes rooted in the past, numerous flashback scenes preceded by titles indicating the place and year of action (here, "Tian Shan, 1929," "Kara-Kum, 1944," "Osh, 1949," "Frunze, 1965"), a war that significantly impacted the hero's fate, and the inevitable gatherings of police (here, militia officers).In the Japanese detective genre, the "killer's lament" holds even more significance than the crime investigation and is always accompanied by a sentimental musical theme (composed by Viktor Lebedev from Russia, known for his Soviet equivalent of "The Young Girls of Rochefort" – "Heavenly Swallows"). From the Japanese gangster romance, the archetype of the existentially wounded hero was adapted into "Wolf Pit." At that time, this character type was typically portrayed by Ken Takakura in films such as "The Yellow Handkerchief," "Winter Flower," and "Echoes of Distant Snows." All these films were shown in our cinemas, at festivals, and during Japanese Film Weeks, and Shamshiev adeptly transplanted their structure onto Kyrgyz soil. Was it worth the effort to shoot a two-and-a-half-hour film to recreate a Japanese hit with Kyrgyz material? Absolutely. G.K. ChestertoniGilbert Keith Chesterton (1874–1936) – an English writer, journalist, and Christian philosopher known as the "prince of paradox"rightly claimed that detective stories reveal how the world lived in different years and how our everyday life was structured. Cinema has a "mummy effect" – it preserves time and place. It's wonderful that thanks to "The Pit," post-war Kyrgyzstan has been made accessible and understandable to us, translated into the engaging and poignant language of contemporary Japanese gangster romance cinema.

After the failure of "Fujiyama," Shamshiev left cinema—though he uniquely continued his experiments in creating "captured open-air theater." In 1995, he staged a theatrical performance of "Manas," which marked the beginning of his directorial career in "Manaschi." He then edited the footage shot during the show into a TV program. The creative failure with "Fujiyama" was not the only reason for such a drastic action. The Kyrgyz "miracle" was created by young men who were constantly driven—faced with the dilemma of either becoming a "Director or shepherd!" If their mission was to pioneer a cinematic language for their homeland, the generation of the 1980s, born with an awareness of Kyrgyz cinema's esteemed status, was described by both Tolomush Okeev and Shershenaly Usupaliev, chairman of the Kyrgyz SSR State Cinema, as "well-read, educated, and impressively knowledgeable." However, behind their erudition and eloquent speech lay a deeply troubling void—a lack of creative passion for the arts. Shamshiev could not proceed without a disciple, without someone to guide, without a protege or a Galatea—without a sense of continuity and legacy.

It is possible that Shamshiev's creative confusion in the latter half of the 1980s was influenced by the fact that, in the case of "Wolf Pit," his prophetic gift tragically manifested itself. Talgat Nigmatulin eerily replicated the fate of his character by getting involved with a spiritual sect, which was a front for smugglers, and was killed in February 1985—precisely when his striking photograph, featuring him in a white Japanese (!) shirt patterned with dragons and clouds, adorned the cover of the latest issue of "Soviet Screen" displayed at newspaper kiosks across the USSR.

Certainly, Shamshiev's exit was heavily influenced by the collapse of the Soviet film production and distribution system. Only one republic managed to leverage this upheaval to begin expressing itself in cinema with a young, resonant voice after decades of disarray and state-mandated projects. This, of course, refers to the "Kazakh miracle." But that is an entirely different story.