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Interview with
Gennady Sotnikov
By Yevgeny Zykov,
Ves' PROkat+ Magazine
(Issue No 9, October-November, 2005).
I, native resident of St. Petersburg , graduate of the Cherkasov Institute of Theatre, Music and Cinematography, worked in many theatres – from Kamchatka to Tallinn . For 18 years I have been cooperating with the Sakha Academic Theatre.
This movie project is very interesting to me, and is very dear.
The movie is being filmed with soul; it is being filmed for the audience, which is to see the real world, not distorted by robotic, mad camera objective beyond recognition.
Since childhood I have been interested in history and geography. I always knew, even before I read lines by Gumilev, that history originates in geography. I love maps, I like looking at them and thinking.
I love Siberia , its nature. I had often visited Yakutia and Buryatia. We are going to be shooting in different places. This will give the geographical range that will visually affect the historical range. Maybe unconsciously, latently, subconsciously this movie will affect the audience to feel the historical range of the events through geography. At any case, we really want that.
If you look at the world map, the territories conquered by Genghis Khan and Mongols strike one's imagination. These are territories beginning from modern Austria and ending with Cambodia and Java. Alexander the Great was a great commander, but when you look at the map of the world – it is just incommensurable. After all, Alexander the Great reached India . At those times it was totally fantastic.
It is very important for us that we shoot in various ranges, various landscapes, at various times of the day, during various seasons of the year.
In some sense my colleagues are right that they call this movie ecological. Because the aspect of nature, the motif of nature, the environment of nature (expansive, Siberian, Central Asian, not subdued) is very important. It is acting on such an integral chronotope, which we need.
Our working crew had watched a lot of movies and films on Genghis Khan, including some old American abracadabra and a modern Chinese soap opera serial.
I have an impression that all these films were shot in an area less than 3 square kilometres. It seems as if they had several camera-wagons, built a village, and had a lot of people in the crowds (thank God, there are enough people in China ). It is clear, that all of it is happening in some sort of a studio; though they have real mountains and skies, the scales still seem studio-sized.
But for us this grand scale and nomad's liberty is very important. It must be subconsciously felt by the audience.
The Mongol Empire started with nomads. Its conquests are the result of longstanding mass wandering of nomads. In the movie it is very important to feel the diversity of nature and its changes.
There is another very important idea. This is a Yakut movie. The Yakut version. There are many Yakut aspects, both ecological and culture studies. It seems to me, this will give the movie some special nuances. After all, it is being filmed by Asians about Asians. And here emerges something that consists of two indissolubly united parts: we are citizens of Russia , but on the other hand we are Asians. This is also very important. We are not Chinese, who are also Asians. We are Russian Asians.
The movie is based on the novel of a Yakut writer, which in turn is based upon all of the Yakut culture, which European-wise is a very young one but the one that has a great potential. First of all, it is the language material held in Olonkho – epically huge form. This also involves the poetics of Olonkho, with its fantastic nature, freedom, slowness, seriousness of any approach, cosmism. Because the fact that authors of Olonkho are experts in cosmos will consciously or unconsciously affect the movie.
… I grew up in the Hermitage. My favourite section is the one with primeval clothing, where there are excavations materials from all over the USSR , including Central Asia – they are of Scythians, Huns… Nomads. I know that material quite well. But it is somewhat different in the movies.
On the other hand, the more you read various scientific literatures (we have studied a whole lot of works by historians, ethnologists, ethnographers, archaeologists), the more you get a thought that all these works are worth for an artist – I stress, for an artist! – the same as a story of some horse herder talking about Genghis Khan as of his acquaintance. He is narrating the same thing as his grandmother told him, who in her turn heard from her great-grandmother and so on.
I remember a good saying by Andrei Borisov: History is history, ethnography is ethnography, and art is art. We take from the history and ethnography precisely the amount we need.
As for our Mongolian friends they have a zealous attitude towards their history. We are making a movie not about Mongolia , but about Central Asia . In Mongolia , as I noticed, they are projecting the state of a Mongolian costume typical of the beginning of the 20 th Century, which got conserved and became festive or ritual attire without developing – this state is sometimes quite naively projected onto 12 th Century. But this costume, which is close to the 20 th Century, had undergone huge influence of Chinese and post-Manchurian cultures.
I visited Ulan-Bator, there are amazing museums, marvellous monuments; it is classic. There is a huge collection of costumes, ideally peoples' costumes, wearing which they surely did not go out to milk a cow. But the collection refers to the end of the 19 th Century. I am inspired not by the costumes. In the Hermitage I saw two examples of nomad attire of the 9 th Century. It turned out that they almost fully resembled what had appeared 800 years later. The laws of clothing, which again are connected with the locality and economics, are the same. In one of burial sites there is even a head-dress, which looks absolutely like a Budenovka hat. Just a Budenovka: with two buttonholes on the earflaps, with wooden pieces on the lacing, with a spike. I thought at that time: what is it, why? It is just because it is a very functional form.
In 1917, before the Revolution, the Temporary Government decided to reform the Russian military uniform. The Budenovka hat, designed by artist Viktor Vasnetsov, was retained and transferred to the Revolution army, where the Red Army soldiers wore it with red stars on it.
uch interesting parabolas are described by the history of costumes. If you want, the shape of the Budenovka hat from the Genghis Khan epoch. For example, when Budenniy was not yet born, the hat was called “bogatyrka”, and you know what “bogatyr'” is (really strong hero). Bogatyr' derives from a Turkic, Mongolian word “bagatur”. |
