NO COUNTRY FOR (YOUNG) MEN: DECOLONIAL STUDY OF AUL DEPICTIONS IN THE KAZAKH NEW WAVE

Abstract

Engaging in conversation with existing academic works in Central Asian and Kazakh cinema studies, the thesis paper offers a new angle at the phenomenon of the Kazakh New Wave, shifting the focus from global and national to decolonial. I analyze the issues of alcoholism, violence, and physical and mental degradation in auls in Seryk Aprymov’s The Last Stop (1989) and Bolat Kalymbekov’s Aynalayin (1990). The inability to live in auls, deprived of any prospect or future, make the characters of these movies the subjects of alienation from their home and roots, resulting in the escape from auls, willing or not. This ultimate escape, I argue, is the decolonial critique of overlapping, accumulated consequences of the Soviet colonial policies, and socio-economic and ideological decisions, ingeniously conveyed through the cinema medium. Finally, through the frameworks of decoloniality and cinematic analysis, I propose to understand the Kazakh New Wave as one of the first attempts at decolonial critique of the Soviet past, present and collective traumatic experiences; as an intermediary between the Soviet and the Modern cinema. In this regard, then, my work adds a new voice to the studies of Kazakh cinema and current decolonial studies of art and cinema.