Mankurt

Mankurt is a film by the Turkmen director Hojaguly Narlyýew, which premiered in 1990 in what was then the Soviet Union . The film was only shown in Turkmenistan in 2007. It is based on a chapter of the novel One Day Longer Than a Life (Russian: И дольше века длится день) published in 1980 by the Kyrgyz author Genghis Aitmatov .

action

The setting of the film is the Turkmen desert. After a battle situation between two peoples is shown at the beginning, the representation moves on to the preparation of the slaves that have been won. The captive men are tied to wooden beams before their hair is shaved off. The bald heads are then covered with camel skins, which are burned into the heads of the men while they are tied up on the desert floor for several days. This process is demonstrated to the children of the conquering people like a textbook. In the following the main story shifts to one of the prisoners. The young Yelaman is viewed from close up during the dehumanizing mankurt development. In flashbacks his past life is reproduced with the help of his memories.

A second storyline shows the desperate family, whose father Dömnɘz and son Yelaman did not return from the fight. When Ayım's mother and Yelaman's wife suspect that he would not return home alone, the mother decides to go looking for the son. At the same time, the tied Yelaman is on the verge of losing his identity, which goes hand in hand with the blurring and ultimately the extinction of memories.

While Ayım, riding on her white camel, sets off on the journey, her dead son becomes a mankurt. As a mindless post, he now acts as the keeper of a herd of goats. A short time later, the mother also arrives at the place where Yelaman tends the animals, mostly alone. All of your attempts to recreate your son's memories fail. When she made one last attempt a few days later to persuade Yelaman to return home, the boy Tannir bought her time with his suicide. The boy belongs to the opposing people and already emerges beforehand through his emotional behavior that deviates from the whole. However, the time gained by Tannir's suicide does not have a positive effect on Yelaman's recovery. The mother's repeated attempts to influence him ultimately lead to him feeling threatened and shooting his mother.

Production history

The 81-minute film was produced in 1990 in the Soviet Union in the largest Turkmen film studio " Turkmenfilm studios ". The film team mainly consisted of Turkish and Libyan actors. The location of the film and the action was the Turkmen desert. Genghis Aitmatov expressly endorsed the cinematic partial staging of his novel and supported Narlyýew in the implementation.

The broadcast in Turkmenistan was regulated by the first President of Turkmenistan, Saparmyrat Nyýazow . He gave the following reasons for the broadcast ban: "I simply wanted the younger generation to know the true story of their people and not to become mankurts." It was only after his death in September 2007 that it premiered at the Baku Film Festival.

Hojaguly Narlyýew

Hojaguly Narlyýew graduated from the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography in Moscow in 1960 with awards for both his work as a cameraman and as a director. After completing his training, he returned to his home country, where he started out as a cameraman at Turkmenfilm. His first film, which received national and Soviet attention, was Newestka (Turkmen: Gelin, German: daughter-in-law). This also marks the beginning of his collaboration with Maja-Gosel Aimedowa , who remained his muse for many years and who embodied the suffering and hope of Turkmen women in many of his films. In the film Mankurt she plays the mother of the dead Yelaman. Narlyýew is known for serious subjects and a succinct moral standard, which he places on his work and the audience. The chosen setting is mostly the desert and its inhabitants, simple nomads who are aware of their origins and traditions and who live by them. His main focus is on the roots of his people and how they must be preserved under all circumstances. Often the most important figures are women - young girls or already mothers, whose task is to preserve traditions and ideals.

Performing means

Narlyýew uses detailed images in his film that enable the recipient to empathize. He also works with ambivalences such as young / old or good / bad. Particularly intensely processed motifs are those of mother's love, loss of identity and the desert landscape with its inhabitants. On the plot level, the director in Mankurt also makes use of intermediate characters that were added to the novel. The film-technical implementation is characterized by a cleverly changing camera work through which different perspectives of the participants can be perceived. In the implementation, he does not shy away from uncensored violent recordings that show the relentless handling of the prisoners, the bleeding of the camels and Tannir's suicide. By dealing with the various identity crises, he draws attention to the current problems of late Soviet cultural policy.

Intermediate figures

In addition to Yelaman's wife, who is lying feverishly in bed, he adds Tannir as an active intermediate figure. This is a little boy who belongs to the conqueror people. He differs from his fellow men in thinking and acting. His actions are characterized by compassion, which is also expressed through emotional discharges such as crying. His ability to empathize and the accompanying reaction of his father, in the form of incomprehension, is already made clear in the opening scene. Unlike the other children who are brought up to be warriors, he does not withstand the images that the bestial procedure presented, and saves himself in tears to his mother. He also stands by Yelaman as a guard next to the bound and abandoned men by giving in to his desire for water. The suicide at the end is also preceded by an emotional scene in which Tannir tearfully observes the mother's pitiful attempts to bring back the memories of her boy.

A possible understanding of the role of this character can be derived from the political context in which the film appeared. The period of upheaval of perestroika is also known as the "phase of restructuring". The changes at all levels of social life go hand in hand with an uncertainty that gives rise to ambivalent feelings. The young representatives of the generation, who are characterized by an ambivalent way of thinking, play a special role here. On the one hand, the young Soviets look to the future with hope, and on the other, they hold fast to what they were trained to do. Tannir could symbolize this generation. On the one hand, through his ability to empathize, he forms an opposing position to the rest of the people, on the other hand, despite the emotional pain, he follows all of his father's instructions. From a socially critical point of view, suicide could be seen as the last resort out of society.

Film design and motifs

With targeted camera work, the viewer has the opportunity to understand the film on various meta-levels. The change from inside and outside perspective is exemplary. This is not only functionalized in order to explain the process of memory loss, but also gives the viewer a certain image of the nomadic population of Turkmenistan.

Representations of ambivalences can also be seen in the mediated motherly love. It is used not only to move the plot forward, but also to show an emotional connection. The motif of motherly love is evident in Yelaman's mother as well as in the relationship between Tannir and his mother. This offers her son care and protection as he fails to withstand his father's demands that are aimed at creating a fighter and breaks in emotionally. In the context of the emergence of the late Soviet Union, this bond can be due to the bond between the people. In perestroika, this is questioned or wavered.

In addition to the figure-bound change of perspective and motif, Narlyýew also works with the distance from the viewer to the action. After the viewer observes the opening scene from a frog's perspective and from a safe distance, the process of becoming mankurt is demonstrated up close, as if he were a participating observer. By means of this alternation of distance and lack of distance, the recipient's perception is specifically directed.

The loss of roots and with it the loss of one's own identity is portrayed in Mankurt as the worst fate that can overtake one. Although Ayım and Dömnɘz both met their deaths in the end, their fate is nowhere near as cruel as that of their son. It is no coincidence that the younger generation is given this lot: Narlyýew was extremely critical of the cultural revolution that was imposed by the Soviet Union, then by the new President Saparmyrat Nyýazow . With his film he wanted to make it clear that the culture and traditions of a people could not be maintained and developed from outside or from above, but only from within themselves. This was not only a criticism of the first Turkmen president and the strong personality cult that he established around himself after taking office - which was also the reason that Mankurt had to wait a long time for his official premiere in Turkmenistan. It was primarily a criticism of the cultural policy of the Soviet Union, to which Turkmenistan belonged from 1925 until its collapse in 1991. The identity of the mankurt is deprived of its identity and, in retrospect, is no longer even aware of this uprooting - a fate shared by the many peoples of the former Soviet countries. Not only that entire ethnic groups were resettled in supposedly “more suitable” areas, national identities were also invented, which were mostly based on the largest population group and still had to be integrated into the larger Soviet framework. Turkmenistan was also "revolutionized" in this regard. An example of this was the so-called liberation of Muslim women from the headscarf, which was considered a triumph of Soviet rule, regardless of the long tradition of this religious custom. The ruins at the beginning and at the end of the film, which form the background for the final clash of the characters, are a memorial for the transience of the conquerors and at the same time a reminder that you can only survive if you stick to the traditions and memories of the own people preserved.

The desert and the living things in it are also of great importance to Narlyýew. In scenes in which the viewer gets to know the life of Yelaman's tribe better, the desert is depicted as alive, even almost green. The young family even plays in a stream, the life-giving water stands for a promising future - only Ayım suspects that this will be an empty promise and tries to avert the fate of their son by rescuing him from the inexorably flowing water. The vultures circling around the prisoners stand for the cruelty of the desert and at the same time for the endlessness of a natural cycle. On the other hand is the cruelty of the people. Instead of a circle, it is a spiral that inevitably results in the extinction of the human race. Yelaman's vegetative status and Tannir's death mark the end of their tribes, for their fates only lead to new suffering, not new life.

Web links

Mankurt in the Internet Movie Database (English)

Individual evidence

↑ K. Narliev: Mankurt. In: YouTube. Durdy Bayramov Art Foundation, August 15, 2017, accessed August 6, 2018 (English, subtitled).
↑ Čingiz Ajtmatov: A day longer than a life . Complete, ext. Edition, 1st edition, Unionsverlag, Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-293-20057-5 .
↑ Svetlana Slapke: Fragments from the history of Turkmen cinema . In: Cinema in Central Asia: Rewriting Cultural Histories . IB- Tauris, London / New York 2013, p. 101 f .

[1] K. Narliev: Mankurt. In: YouTube. Durdy Bayramov Art Foundation, August 15, 2017, accessed August 6, 2018 (English, subtitled).

[2] Čingiz Ajtmatov: A day longer than a life . Complete, ext. Edition, 1st edition, Unionsverlag, Zurich 1995, ISBN 3-293-20057-5 .

[3] Svetlana Slapke: Fragments from the history of Turkmen cinema . In: Cinema in Central Asia: Rewriting Cultural Histories . IB- Tauris, London / New York 2013, p. 101 f .