CINEMA AS BRANDING - Tourism in Central Asia: Cultural Potential and Challenges - page 189

named Sharish: his character was invented to convey Ablai's extraordinary
stamina. 23 Yet, apart from these individual occurrences, Ablai's transgres-
sive personality made him an odd fit for the heroic epos: this genre func-
tioned to symbolize the “wished-for strength of the group in the face of
the enemy” and “idealized virtues of bravery [and] military prowess” and
was reserved for batyrs , the heroic warriors drawn from common people
(ibid: 61, 71). The Kazakh writers approached the allegoric expressions in
the story of Ablai carefully: Valikhanov marveled at why people decided
to ascribe such high qualities to Ablai and Yessenberlin used the mythical
lore as a narrative strategy to highlight his controversial character.
The filmmakers, on the other hand, matched the story of Ablai with
the logic of the Kazakh epos. This is how, in the film, Ablai was born en-
dowed with unusual qualities. He does not take favors from women from
the hostile camp, showing his integrity. He is invincible but, at one point, a
woman helps him to escape from a deadly threat. His life is followed from
his birth to the apex of his heroic career, which is remarkably consistent
in itself (ibid: 29). This uncritical drawing on historical epos made the
film-story obsolete. It also confused the Almaty movie-goers who did not
recognize the historical genre because of the obvious mismatch that led
them to assume that what they saw on the screen was a deliberate attempt
to simplify the story for the foreign audience.
Nor were the local viewers impressed with a moral closure of the dra-
ma of Aktaban Shubirindy . The Kazakh society experienced a series of
social disasters in a more recent history including the revolution, Stalin's
purges, collectivization, forced sedentarization, famine and in half a cen-
tury later, shock therapy and decollectivization. Each of these generated
dispossession, displacement, and suffering comparable to that of the Akta-
ban Shubirindy . The Elim-ai song, which narrates the loss and anxiety at
the time of the warfare with Jungars, is part of today's collective memory
because it has been used to underscore the impact of these modern disas-
ters in contemporary documentaries and other commentaries on the his-
tory of Kazakhstan.
This is not the only problem with the film. In the following section, I
will argue that the synchronization of different historical narratives and
genres has not only disrespected the Kazakh oral tradition but it also re-
23 Ablai was indeed a prisoner of Galdan Ceren; however, he was captured in the battlefield along with
other Kazakh warriors and not after his duel. Yet, Ablai indeed won a duel with one of the Jungar
nobles (Suleymenov and Moiseev 2006: 174-178).