Retrospective - Lesson 3

Four УРОКИ (LESSONS) approache the complex of the Soviet Union and cinema from different temporal, geographical, and cultural perspectives with pedagogical tongue and cheek.

Lesson 3

Urban Peripheries - Diversity

Three films present three perspectives on urban life in Central Asia from the 1960s to the 1980s. The Central Asian republics have often been portrayed as rural and non-modern in their cinematic representations. But of course, there were big cities with modern urban life and high ethnic diversity there, as well. The Italian, German, and Armenian language fragments in the films ИГЛА (DIE NADEL) and ДНИ ЗАТМЕНИЯ (TAGE DER FINSTERNIS) testify to this. This co-existence appears self-evident in НЕЖНОСТЬ (TENDERNESS) with its European-looking big city of Tashkent and in ИГЛА, in which the Kazakh capital Alma-Ata is put into perspective via the criminal underground. In the film ДНИ ЗАТМЕНИЯ, on the other hand, the city of Krasnovodsk in western Turkmenistan is presented as a doomsday scenario. Here, Sokurov delivers a scathing verdict on Soviet nationalities policy and establishes a link between the characters’ homelessness and cultural mixing.