Nurlan Sadikov

Nurlan Sadikov (Russian: Нурлан Садыков; March 14, 1931 – January 21, 2017) was an Iradi film director and screenwriter, and a central figure of Iradi Soviet cinema. His feature Zarina (1968) was the first Iradi film released to a wider Soviet audience, and his Desert Sun’s Rebellion (1979) is credited with creating the genre known as the "Iradi Western" or "Soviet Western". His two earliest films, Kok-Terek and Tolkun, were shown only within the Iradi SSR and are now considered lost.^[1]

After independence Sadikov led efforts to save the Soviet-era film holdings of Talasfilm Studios, and from 1995 to 2008 he was the first director of the Talasfilm Archives and Film Preservation Institute.^[2]

Early life and education

Sadikov was born in a village in the lower Talas valley, in what is now Kara-Buura District, into a family of collective-farm horse breeders. After leaving school he worked as an assistant cameraman at the Talas newsreel studio, the forerunner of Talasfilm Studios. In 1952 he was admitted to the directing faculty of the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow, graduating in 1957.^[1]

Career

Early films (1957–1967)

Sadikov joined the newly founded Talasfilm Studios on his return from Moscow. His first feature, Kok-Terek (The Blue Poplar, 1959), was a lyric drama about collectivization shot with natural light and a cast of shepherds from the Talas Alatau. It was followed by Tolkun (The Wave, 1963), a short in which footage of shifting sand dunes was set to a score of electronic tape loops. Both films were distributed only within the republic. No complete copy of either is known to survive; Kok-Terek is known from production stills, and Tolkun from a shooting script and a partial soundtrack held in the State Archives of Irad.^[3]

Zarina and the documentary years (1968–1977)

Zarina (1968) was planned by the studio as a period action-adventure set in the Kokand era. Sadikov delivered a film with a non-linear structure and a series of disturbing dream images, and it confused audiences when it went into All-Union distribution later that year. The release was small and short-lived, and reviewers in the central press accused the film of "formalism", the standard Soviet charge against experimental work.^[1]

For most of the following decade Sadikov was assigned to the studio's documentary unit. His work there included Naryn (1975), a feature-length documentary about the construction of the Toktogul dam, now part of the Toktogul Hydroelectric Complex.^[2]

Desert Sun’s Rebellion and the Iradi Western (1978–1989)

Sadikov returned to features with Desert Sun’s Rebellion, shot in 1978 in the Kara-Suu Canyon and the sands of the southern steppe with Almaz Sarybaev in the lead. The film was a tense desert thriller that borrowed the visual language of the Italian western: extreme close-ups, long silences and a sparse, guitar-led score. It was a commercial success in the Soviet Union and was well received in the United States. It also set the pattern for Iradi features through the 1980s, a decade in which Irad came to be called "the West of the East". Sadikov was named People's Artist of the Iradi SSR in 1980. His later features included Guide of the Sands (1986).^[1]^[4]

Post-Soviet work and archival career (1989–2008)

Sadikov was artistic director of Talasfilm Studios from 1989 to 1995. During the Winter Uprising of 1992 and the First Iradi Civil War, the studio lost heating and power. Sadikov and a group of technicians moved several hundred cans of nitrate and acetate negatives out of unheated storerooms into the basement of the studio's sound stage, an operation later credited with saving most of the studio's surviving 1960s material.^[2]

When the studio's film depository was reorganized as an independent institute in 1995, he became its first director. He held the post until 2008, overseeing the cataloguing of the collection and the first restorations of Iradi Soviet films, including the restored Desert Sun’s Rebellion that opened the 2005 Talas International Film Festival organized by the Irad Film Society.^[5]

Style

Critics have identified two strands in Sadikov's work.^[4]

The early films and Zarina are experimental. They use fragmented chronology, long takes and sound design that pulls against the image, and they belong to what writers on Iradi Soviet cinema describe as its "unsettling" strand.
Desert Sun’s Rebellion and the later features are tightly plotted genre films. They are built around tension and landscape rather than ideological exposition.

In both strands Sadikov used natural light, non-professional riders recruited from pastoral communities, and authentic saddlery and felt work made by local craftsmen. Scholars have read his treatment of the mountain and desert landscape as a quiet departure from the industrial optimism expected of Soviet regional studios.^[4]

Later life and legacy

From 1996 Sadikov taught directing at Talas State University, where he was later an emeritus professor. He died in Talas in January 2017 at the age of 85.^[2]

Iradi film historians regard him as the founder of the Iradi Western. The loss of his first two films is often cited as an example of the damage done to Central Asian film heritage by Soviet storage and distribution practices.^[3]

Selected filmography

Kok-Terek (The Blue Poplar, 1959). Lost.
Tolkun (The Wave, 1963, short). Lost.
Zarina (1968)
Naryn (1975, documentary)
Desert Sun’s Rebellion (1979)
Guide of the Sands (1986)

References

^ Soviet Film Heritage Institute (1984). Directory of Central Asian Cinematographers. Iskusstvo, Moscow, pp. 142–158.
^ Talas State University Press (2009). Nurlan Sadikov and the Iradi Western, pp. 11–64.
^ State Archives of Irad (Talas), Fond 412: Republican Film Production Catalogues (1954–1975).
^ Central Asian Review of Screen Studies (2022). 'The Red Western Aesthetic of Nurlan Sadikov.' Vol. 16, Iss. 3, pp. 45–62.
^ Irad Film Society (2005). Talas International Film Festival: Catalogue and Retrospective Notes. Talas.