STORM OVER ASIA: Did Osama bin Laden Watch This Film Somewhere Along the Line?

Russian film makers of the 1920's were the pioneers in epic picture making. Taught by the theorists Kuleshov and Vertov (who gleaned some ideas from exhaustive studies of American D.W. Griffiths' films), the big three were Sergei Eisenstein, V.I. Pudovkin, and Alexander Dovzhenko. They taught the World that Cinema could not only be a vehicle for entertainment (Hollywood's take) or strictly an art form (German Expressionism) but become a way of conveying emotionally powerful political and social ideas, often to people who had never been allowed the printed word. Of the three, Vsevolod I. Pudovkin was the most adventurous in technique; the most profound, in theory and practice.

To paraphrase, similar to Eisenstein's theory of Montage, Pudovkin's was a simple theoretical formulation: (word to image) + (word to image) = (sentence or montage) -- as illustrated in his greatest films (MOTHER, 1919; THE END OF ST. PETERSBURG, 1925; and STORM OVER ASIA, 1927). It was a revelation to many Western film makers. But beyond that, unlike Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin believed in the power of the informed individual in his pictures.

The least known or appreciated of Pudovkin's great trilogy above (for reasons we shall touch on), STORM OVER ASIA, may be the most extraordinary illustration of his work, and certainly the most fun.

With surrealistic touches beyond anything that Eisenstein or Dovzhenko came up with, Pudovkin fashions in STORM OVER ASIA an epic myth, set in Russia after the First World War. Britain, the United States, France, Poland, Chezkoslovakia, and White Russia have poured expeditionary forces and partisans into the collapsing Czarist empire, occupying strategic areas and interfering in an on-going civil war between the Bolsheviks and the Czarists, with disastrous consequences which would haunt the Western Powers for the next 70 years. Into this setting (deep in Central Asia), wanders a simple young fur trapper, Bair (Valari Inkizhinov), whose father (I. Inkizhinov) has sent him to "civilization," in order to sell the family's seasonal harvest.

In his travels, Bair rests at a Buddhist lamisary, where he witnesses the Tuvan Feast of Tzai, and is given an amulet by the High Lama (F. Ivanov). Bair innocently becomes involved with a cheating fur buyer, Henry Hughes (Victor Tsoppi), and finds himself among warring factions in the growing Russian Revolution. The combination gets him captured by the British Expeditionary Force, which is prepared to shoot him as a spy. Fortunately for Bair, a British missionary (V. Pro) attached to the command translates the inscriptions on and within the amulet, and discovers that they declare Bair, by Buddhist reckoning, to be the direct descendant and heir of the great conqueror, Genghis Khan!

[It is said that screenwriter Osip Brik's screenplay from an unpublished novel by I Novorshenov was based on an actual event, when a mongol trapper was detained in South Central Asia in 1920, and found to be bearing a document identifying him as a direct descendant of Genghis Kahn. The film is sometimes entitled, THE HEIR TO GENGHIS KAHN.]

Military Intelligence quickly calculates what a unifying factor Bair, as a puppet leader of the Mongols, might become in uniting the Central Asian tribes on the White Russian side favored by the Allies. They bring him to Headquarters, and give him an intense education in sophisticated Western manners, history, and political theory. On a particular evening, some months later, the British Commander (I. Dedintsen) throws a big party for his staff, the *American, French and White Russian attaches, and their families. The guest of honor, prospective Emperor of Altai Mongolia, Tana-Tuva, and the Central Asian Republics (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan), is Bair, who has been groomed, dressed, and trained to charm Western sensibilities.

His handlers have succeeded only too well. The Commander's wife (C. Belinska) is giddily impressed by Bair, while his beautiful blonde daughter (Anei Sudakevich) hits it off with this smooth Mongol operator. As that fact becomes more obvious, the inherent male prejudice and racism of junior Allied officers comes to the fore. Bair is physically removed from the scene, sent away and humiliated.

[Memorable scene: When junior officers snub the Puppet Emperor, a British General goes into such a rage that his tunic bursts into flames! Western critics often criticize this image as evidence of Soviet heavy handedness and amateurish technique. On the contrary, Pudovkin knows exactly what he is doing. He is presenting a metaphor for the inadequacy of conventional approaches by Westerners to Eastern cultures and attitudes, which they had barely begun to understand. (The same problem consternates the dwindling American "coalition of the willing" in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, and the rest of Middle and Central Asia today.) Poduvkin's metaphor is apt, direct, startlling, and very funny. One may imagine how tribal members in the Kush must have laughed at it!]

The montage speeds up, arriving at a wild, surreal climax of charging Mongols on horseback, led by the now fully cognescent Bair. It has been copied since in a thousand "sword and sandal" epics from Hollywood or Rome to India.

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Pudovkin, a former chemistry student, a Moscovite, wounded in World War I, taken prisoner by the Germans, understood the intricacies and costs of war. He also relished the diversity of the new sprawling Soviet Union. STORM OVER ASIA was shot almost entirely on location, and the director took a keen perspective on the people, customs, and tribal organizations he encountered. He hired a friend, Valeri Inkizhanov, a Buriat-Mongol actor, for his lead, employed the actor's father for verisimilitude. He sensitively recorded the tribal rituals he found (with his usual cameraman, Anatoli Golovnya, carrying a "hand held" Debrie strapped to his chest), incorporating a few of the sequences into his film.

Pudovkin's anthropological interest first had to overcome Buddhist and Muslim objections, on the spot, then the suspicions of Soviet censors back in Moscow. The film, for this reason, over the next thirty years, had the ritual and tribal scenes trimmed or rearranged to make them less prominent, and within the Soviet Union, the film shrank from 140 minutes to 125.

[We now know that, for nearly 30 years, a furious theoretical debate went on within the Soviet Polit-Bureau over how the peoples of the Soviet Asian republics were to be treated. In almost a parody of the action in STORM OVER ASIA, one camp insisted that all the republics be homogenized into the Russian Motherland. The other camp wanted to praise the tribal civiizations of these republics, champion their unique cultural qualities. The result was a constant, face and about face, bureaucratic tug of war. What was in one year, was out the next.]

And so, from 1930, a badly cut STORM OF ASIA, along with other chopped up masterpieces by Pudovkin, Eisenstein, and Dovzhenko, were shown sporadically in Europe and America, more often talked and written about than actually seen. While all these films tended to be dismissed by Western newspapers (but not Western film makers and critics) as simply "Commie propaganda," STORM OVER ASIA had a particularly difficult time because, already cut at home, it raised strenuous objections in official *British, *French and* American circles for daring to show an Allied Expeditionary Force deep in Russia, when the West was spuriously trying to suggest that an attitude of wait and see neutrality had been maintained, of bringing the warring factions together peacefully.

Further cuts were made, and by the time I saw it after its French re-release in 1951, STORM OVER ASIA was no longer a 140 minute typhoon but an 80 minute thunder storm.

Still, it was impressive.

One can't help wondering if Osama bin Laden, the "New Genghis Khan" recently promoted by the West, though he considered Russian Infidel blasphemies as bad as those brought to Islam by America, might not have seen STORM OVER ASIA on his travels, in a cave somewhere, and recognized a parallel. No doubt the climax would have pleased any speck of Romanticism left in his ascetic soul.

In 1999, Image Entertainment brought back the 125 minute version with a 1949 Soviet score by Nikolai Kryukov. Recently, I have read that the 140 minute edition, Pudovkin's cut, is available with a modern/ethnic score by Yat-Kha, in the style of recent efforts by The Clubfoot Light Orchestra or The Subterraneans, and incorporating Tana-Tuvan "throat singing," recently become popular in the West.

Where this edition may be found, only God or Stephen Murray will know.

Look for it!

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*NOTE: In 1918, just before the end of World War I, at the behest of the British Government, the War Department directed General "Black Jack" Pershing, the Commander-in-Chief of the American Expeditionary Forces, to send three battalions of our infantry and three companies of our engineers (known as the Polar Bears) to serve under British command in Northern Russia. Ostensibly, they were to secure the Northern Ports, guard supplies provided to the Czarist Government, and separate warring forces in the growing Russian Civil War. (Roles reversed with the British, our men were carrying out duties similar to those our forces have recently performed in Afghanistan and Iraq.) They sailed from England, and arrived in Murmansk on September 4, 1918.

In archives, certain of them still classified, we may learn that the American troops assumed other duties, securing the lines of the Trans-Siberian Railway in Central Asia, so that Polish and Chezk Legions battling the Bolsheviks might be evacuated at Vladivostok, the main Far Eastern port of Russia (from where they were convoyed back around the World, eventually to their home countries). The extent of American involvement is still not entirely clear or agreed upon.

The American Expeditionary Force officially returned eight months later, in May 1919, having suffered 400 casualties. The whole thing has long been forgotten, except by historians. The tribes of Central Asia, however, may still tell its story around campfires these nights, along with their tales of Alexander, the first Western Devil they encountered.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: DVD
Video Occasion: Good for a Rainy Day
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older