Bodrov's Prisoners of the Mountains

[Sylvia Swift]

the bodrov interview:
sylvia swift
madonna at socrates.berekeley.edu
---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Fri, 9 Apr 1999 09:09:59 -0500 (CDT)
From: joan neuberger <neuberger at mail.utexas.edu>
To: madonna at socrates.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: Prisoner

Sylvia,
I'm glad you asked about the languages in Prisoner because I've been meaning
to look that up since it came up on slavcin. The comment I remembered comes
from an interview with Sergei Bodrov from Seans, no. 15 (1997), p. 34. I
don't know if that journal is available in the US (though if anyone on
seelangs knows, I'd appreciate finding out if it's still being published).
Here's the relevant question and answer. Please forgive --and don't
quote!--- my rough and ready translation
Joan Neuberger

 Aleksandr Timofeevskii asked Bodrov to respond to criticism that he had
conflated the various peoples of the Caucausus in ways that many viewers
[there as here apparently] found "tactless and inexcusably ignorant," of the
ancient complicated relations between muslims and christians. ... It's been
suggested, AT said, that you were thinking only of an international audience
with an eye towards international film festivals.

Bodrov: What can I say? I love the Geogian language, and I wanted to hear it
spoken, but in the Caucasus people speak not only Georgian but Azerbaidjani,
Lezginskaia, Avarskaia ,Agurskaia. We were filming in Dagestan, and there
people speak 36 different languages, and often local inhabitants don't
understand one another. I must confess that at times, I very consciously
could not and did not want to identify all of the contradictions
[protivorechie], who could converse with whom and who could not.  For me
this was a corner of the earth where people spoke in various languages and
for me that was its charm.
It is curious that critics did not notice my other little games
[?khitrosti], one of the heros, the man who spoke Georgian, went about in
nineteenth-century dress and no one paid any attention to that.

AT: Does it not seem to you that such a position could been interpreted as
an example of European chauvinism?

SB: Perhaps when the subject is small nationalities, one must be more
akkuratnee so that no one is offended. I could have introduced thousands of
reasons why an inhabitant of that aul in the film spoke Georgian: he could
have been a Georgian, convert to islam, married a woman in that aul and so
on. I just didn't want to do that , that seemed unecessary to me.

AT: Isn't it connected with the fact that at the time when you began the
film the Chechen conflict had not begun in earnest and you wanted to create
some kind of unified [sobiratel'nyi] obraz?

SB: No, that came later, when I already started to shoot the film. It was a
specific practical problem. I chose a Georgian actor, so what language was
he supposed to speak. If we shoot in an Ogulskii aul, he should speak
Ogulskii, but then I would have had to dub him, which I can't stand. That
also would have been wrong.
How strange that everyone would have been happy and no one would have seen
any chauvinism if I'd made the whole film in Russian. But that would have
been vran'e.

AT: That would have probably been a different situation. From the point of
view of the current standard understanding it would have been fine if all
the characters spoke either in English or Russian. It's possible that some
"international language" [in English in the orig.] would have seemed as if
it weren't a specific language.

SB: That's what I would have done if I were a chauvinist. But here lies my
respect for the material: nonprofessional actors, genuine languages, genuine
voices--all this is very important, it seems to me.