"Naryn Diary". Television and Cinematography of Kyrgyzstan in the 70s - Early 80s. Part - 14

Meetings by the Kyrgyz Mountains

...I again refer to the films of Vidugiris as a lesson for young graduates of VGIK. Take example from such people, seek and find your path not in artificial constructs of fictional plots, but in the understanding of real life, in the documentary drafts of time.

Chingiz Aitmatov

From a report at the IV Congress of Cinematographers of Kyrgyzstan. April, 1982.

Conversations at the desk, or strokes to the portrait of the documentary filmmaker R. Khelimskaya. In the early 70s, Yuri Khanyutin, one of our most "keen-eyed" film scholars, noted: "It is characteristic that the lyrical, emotional beginning, defining the style of Vidugiris's film (referring to "Naryn Diary." — R. X.), today predominates in our documentary cinema..."

A. Vidugiris. The most amazing thing around us is people. I have always tried to seek and find people of mighty spirit. It is they who often did much more than was expected of them...

Sociologists around the world rightly speak of the infantilism of modern men, who supposedly lack the living space to spread their shoulders in the age of scientific and technological progress. Not so the man on the Naryn cascade — he can do everything!

Perhaps the most important function of cinema — and above all, documentary — is to educate the viewer through positive examples. That is why I spent so much time trying to find, see, and recreate on screen the image of the modern hero. Today's hero. We live in a dynamic, rapidly changing time, new traits and facets appear in the character of the modern person, and I try to find them, convey them to the viewer, and thereby perhaps somehow influence education, the spiritual and social formation of a person...

First digression. Why did the authors of the "Diary" get "lost"?..

In April 1970, a new sign appeared on one of the doors of "Kyrgyzfilm" — "Naryn Diary". Vidugiris and Nikolai Ryshkov, a recent VGIK graduate, began a new — full-length documentary film. A year later, in a small tone hall of the studio, in a cozy dead-end on Togolok Moldo Street, Vidugiris recorded the voiceover text for the "Diary". The "voice-over" sounded a bit — anxious, a bit — confused. Although the film began with an unexpected (in the conditions of planned film production, which does not encourage experiments during the shooting period) statement from the authors: "We do not know what will be the main thing in the 'Diary'. Maybe it will be an event? But what?.. Most likely, it will be a person... But how to find him?", the conclusion about the emergence of the creative idea of the authors of the "Diary", to which E. Kriger came, looked somewhat strange: "...initial observations, meetings, conversations led the authors to decide to make their film in the form of a diary." E. G. Kriger probably forgot that documentary cinema still begins with: 1) a proposal (preferably in one version); 2) a literary script (preferably in one version); 3) a director's script (preferably also in one version)... And if Vidugiris is still trying to create an "illusion of improvisation," then he had serious reasons for this.

The diary form of organizing life material, possessing wide compositional and genre possibilities, which gained the right to exist in literature back in the 70s of the last century — with the release of "The Diary of a Writer" by F. M. Dostoevsky, finally comes into documentary cinema through the time-tested travel diary. This was "The Algerian Diary" (1962) by G. Asatiani. And the regularity predetermined by time is seen in the official ceremony of awarding the first prize by the chairman of the jury of the V All-Union Film Festival (1972) G. Asatiani to the director from Kyrgyzstan A. Vidugiris for the film "Naryn Diary"...

The "planned improvisation" of the film — the search for its heroes, leads the viewer to different people: shepherds and archaeologists, an old akyn and daring young editors laying high-voltage power lines in the mountains, naive first-graders from the old village of Toktogul and newcomers to the multi-storey new city of Toktogul, to the builders of the All-Union shock Komsomol construction of the Toktogul Hydroelectric Power Station.

Sniper-precise, sometimes minimal in footage, portraits combined into one — a multi-faceted, concise, generalized image of the modern person, the Soviet man of the 70s.

The professional camerawork of the authors lends the film the authenticity of a document, creating the local color of the time, circumstances, conflicts, and the uniqueness of human destinies. The camera is light, smart, and confident both in the "detailing" of "domestic" episodes (moving into new houses, building a carousel by Ageich, etc.), and in the long majestic shots of the rarely beautiful landscapes, filmed with telephoto lenses while floating on a raft. How attentive, how focused is the camera's gaze, having seen on the granite ledge of the Prinaryn rock: "Here lies the geologist Klimenko," and in the grand panorama of regime shooting of the under-construction HPP, and in the large-scale shots of Naryn in flood, filmed from a helicopter, and rising to the heights of philosophical generalization of events.

Revealing the emotional-dramatic content of the fact, the authors emphasize the authenticity, documentality of what is happening both through direct commentary-explanation and the introduction of genuine documents into the visual series, and the combination of both. But with a complete reliance on fact, Vidugiris strives to overcome pure factography.

The reportage episodes of the film journey, of which we become participants — are not only the "framework" but also the main "building material" of the film about the events of the early 70s in one of the regions of Kyrgyzstan. Absolutely exposing the technique of reportage by introducing into the frame participants of the expedition with cameras and microphones, creating a complete sense of "immediacy" of what is happening, "broadcasting life" in a significant part of the film (the survey of a group of builders in the prologue: "What is heroism?", "Who can be considered a hero?", episodes "Work at the dam", "Conversation with Peter Shinko", "Visiting Ageich"), the author uses the reportage method of direct cinema research to establish certain regularities of life development.

The Opening of Cinematic Kyrgyzstan at the IX Moscow Film Festival. Part - 13