Soviet-Indian Coproductions: Ali Baba As Political Allegory
Soviet-Indian Coproductions: Ali Baba as Political Allegory by MASHA SALAZKINA Abstract: This essay considers the history of Soviet Indian coproductions focusing on Ali Baba and 40 Thieves (1980) as a political allegory over the fate of the multination state. It addresses the formal utopian character of the fi lm and the excessive threat of sexual violence in the song-and-dance numbers. he subject of this essay is the little studied phenomenon of the Soviet-Indian cinematic coproductions. While giving a general outline of the history of these coproductions, I focus primarily on the most commercially successful of these joint efforts, Ali Baba and 40 Thieves (Alibaba Aur 40 Chor/Priklyucheniya Ali-Baby Ti soroka razboinikov, Latif Faiziyev and Umesh Mehra, 1980), henceforward Alibaba. I argue that the fi lm contains a political allegory expressing anxiety over the fate of the multination state; that anxiety lies beneath the formal utopian character of the fi lm, which attempts to show the constitution of a new community on the screen and to defi ne the role of its political subject in the face of crime and governmental corruption. I will address these issues through discussing the directors’ choice of the material (a story from One Thousand and One Nights, or The Arabian Nights, as it is better known in English); the narrative structure of the fi lm; performance histories of the Indian and Soviet actors; and, fi nally, through a reading of the excessive threat of sexual violence concentrated in the fi lm’s song-and-dance numbers. Alibaba, I con- tend, is of interest not only due to the formal and institutional hybridization of two autonomous cinematic traditions, Indian and Soviet, but also as a cultural object which displays a shared anxiety over the role of the state as its existing political and economic order moves palpably toward the brink of collapse.
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