Search

ACTING PERFORMANCES IN UZBEK DOCUMENTARY FILMS // ΠΡΑΞΗMΑ. Journal of Visual Semiotics. 2023. Issue 3 (37). P. 54-72

Soviet cinema established a specific genre of film portrait, which was supported both by the visual norms of Soviet film production and by the genre specification common to literature and cinematography, aimed at streamlining large arrays of works intended to educate Soviet people. Maxim Gorky and Dziga Vertov played a key role in establishing this genre and legitimizing it as an educational artistic program with its sometimes quite provocative features. throughout the history of Soviet cinema, this genre showed great resilience, which can be explained both by the Soviet viewer’s general conception of progress and its visual representations, and by the canonical nature of the techniques of documentary film portraits. At the same time, the general image of the representation of modernity as the performance of progress prevailed over the narrative, which therefore did not need additional narratives or effects. Acting performances in documentary films were thus either condemned or tolerated as ornamental. The article delineates two types of documentaries, ethnographic and biographical, and shows how the screen principles of Soviet cinema limited the introduction of acting inserts. The collapse of the Soviet film production system significantly changed the audience. First of all, the literature-centrism of Soviet culture, in which narratives about the past and present were generated by literature, disappeared; now the cinema began to develop them independently. Next, audiences themselves began to differentiate their expectations from cinema, projecting onto it the experience of watching television and the experience of encountering Hollywood performing films. Finally, a new generation of filmmakers began to make greater use of acting inserts along with special effects to build a narrative that complemented the national historical narrative and thereby attracted more viewers. At the same time, viewers were not fully accustomed to narratives of things, perceiving them exclusively as documentary evidence. Therefore, the use of acting inserts often undermined the credibility of the film’s historical accuracy and the credibility of new documentary filmmaking in general. Such were the underlying reactions of the audience, which, although not explicitly expressed, were noted by the most perceptive Uzbek filmmakers in interviews conducted specifically for this study. The study of Uzbek films in the last three decades has shown the search for new ways to make film portraits that take into account both the play of narratives and the variability of viewer expectations. Not all of these pursuits have been successful, but they have shown a steady desire on the part of filmmakers to avoid the emotional lethargy characteristic in post-Soviet documentaries due to the lack of a single idea of universal progress that viewers accept as credible. Nation-building requires both a renewal of the idea of progress and a new conflict of narratives with a flawless use of techniques that are not chosen by the director, but entail each other, and create the aesthetics of a documentary with acting performance inserts.

Keywords: documentary, film portrait, director, staging, image, hero, Uzbek cinema