requires a great deal of attentiveness and effort on
the part of the viewer to grasp the references and
Vocal Parallels
[Вокалды параллелдер]
Kazakhstan, 2005
 retired opera divas from Union Republics: Erik
Color, 65 minutes
Kazakh with Russian voiceover translation
and English subtitles
Director: Rustam Khamdamov
Screenplay: Rustam Khamdamov, Renata
Litvinova
Camera: Rifkat Ibragimov, Sergei Mokritskii
Art Director: Rustam Khamdamov
 Chaikovskii’s duet of “Liza and Pauline”) is
Cast: Renata Litvinova, Erik (Salim-Meriuert)
Kurmangaliev, Araksiia Davtian, Roza
Dzhamonova, Bibigul' Tulegenova
Producers: Galina Kuzembaeva
Production: Gala-TV and Kazakhfil'm, with
the participation of Kinoprom.
For an appreciation of the transience of
things, and the concern to rescue them for
eternity, is one of the strongest impulses in
allegory.
Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German
Tragic Drama
Vocal Parallels meticulously preserves
the remnants of Soviet imperial legacy and, at the
same time, playfully unmasks the transience and
discrepancies inherited from it. The opening
voice-over narration, stating that “every
civilization is ephemeral” but “the abyss of the
history is large enough to encompass everything,”
alludes to this double-function of the film. Unlike
this fairly straightforward verbal statement, the
way how the film is made is far from obvious. It
connections being made in the film with regard to
the vanished Soviet empire.
In terms of genre, this film returns to the
unique Soviet variety show tradition called film-
concert. Film-concerts were meant to deliver high
art, like opera or ballet, to the masses and were
especially common during the height of Stalinist
cine-anemia [malokartin'e]. Vocal Parallels
roughly follows the structure of a typical film-
concert, but it is stylized in such an astonishing
manner that it becomes hard to distinguish
between nostalgic homage and caustic irony
toward this canonical Soviet form.
The eight arias from the classical
repertoire that comprise the film are sung by
Kurmangaliev, Araksiia Davtian, Roza
Dzhamanova, and Bibigul' Tuligenova. Each
musical entry (performed in the following order:
Glinka’s “Vania’s” aria, Puccini’s “Cio Cio San”
and “Floria Tosca,” Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und
Leben,” Brahms’s “Sophist Song,” Verdi’s “La
Traviata,” Rossini’s “Semiramide,” and
announced by the Mistress of Ceremonies played
by Renata Litvinova, an iconic figure whose
performances often embody the retro style of
Soviet times. In the film’s very beginning, she
aptly notes that “opera and ballet are the arts of
tsars, emperors, and big-shot communists,” thus
overtly suggesting a reading of this film-concert
through the lens of Soviet imperial ambition.
Instead of performing on the classical operatic
stage, though, the aged and forgotten divas sing in
their shabby domestic environments, be it a
nomadic yurt in the wide Kazakh steppe or the
dilapidated buildings of Soviet-style architecture.
Their costumes, flamboyant as they are, at a closer
look reveal that they are made of newspaper and
music scores, which can easily be caught in
flames.
Every single episode and detail in this
film is fraught with this kind of ambiguity. For
example, the divine voices that create lofty
imperial art emanate from the aging bodies of the
disheveled divas. The theatrical lighting and the
richness of details elevate each scene to the
dramatic extravagance of baroque painting, but
the hanging carcass of a sheep in the yurt and the
shabby domestic objects in the midst of the ruins
betray their inappropriateness for an opera setting. Chekhov’s Seagull, Khamdamov’s Vocal
A similar ambiguous effect is created through the Parallels shows at once aesthetic decadence and
ballet sequence reminiscent of a Degas painting. an ironical view on it.
The harmony of this delicate ballet composition, Olga Kim
which represents another imperial art form, is
playfully interrupted by two male figures sitting in Rustam Khamdamov is a Moscow-based film
traditional Central Asian robes. Through this director, artist, and fashion designer from
frivolous and inventive recycling of fragments of Tashkent. He graduated from the State Institute
the Soviet empire, the film rescues this dying for Cinematography (VGIK) in 1969. His first
civilization for eternity and, at the same time, short film, made as a VGIK student, received
exposes its incongruous and ephemeral nature. great acclaim from critics and filmmakers in the
The double entendre of the film is Soviet Union as well as abroad. The following
conveyed not only visually but also through the feature-length film, Accidental Joys, was banned
sound and its multilayered asynchronization. In and partly destroyed. Khamdamov returned to
terms of speech, we hear both the Kazakh and filmmaking after 20 years of silence, with a
Russian languages. Litvinova’s fragile high- French co-production, Anna Karamozoff, which
pitched voice narrating in Kazakh is subdued by a premiered at Cannes and was never released due
didactic male voiceover that provides a Russian to disagreements with the film’s producer. In
translation of Litvinova’s speech. This embedded 2003 he became the first artist whose paintings
structure of linguistic hierarchy—a common way were included into the Hermitage Museum
of translation of the films produced at the Union collection during their lifetime.
Republic studios—carefully replicates and pithily
discloses a typically Soviet way of preserving Filmography:
hierarchical heterogeneity within a homogeneous
culture. In terms of sound aesthetics, it is worth 1967 Heart in the Highlands (short)
mentioning that sound asynchronization is a 1972 Accidental Joys (destroyed)
common device in Khamdamov’s films. This 1991 Anna Karamazoff
decoupling of aural and visual images often works 2005 Vocal Parallels
in his films not merely as a defamiliarizing device 2010 Diamonds. Theft
but also as a way of preserving silent cinema 2013 Ruby. Murder
aesthetics within a sound film. The film as a
whole, both visually and aurally, attempts to
preserve various disappearing cultural forms from
different eras in a complex assemblage that
resembles a finely woven carpet.
The insertion of vast natural landscapes
in-between the décor-like ruins adds yet another
layer of ambiguity to the possibility of
preservation, by introducing the broader issue of
the relation between nature, culture, and history.
In addition to the inserts of natural landscapes, the
sounds of birds, horses, and sheep are mixed
throughout the film with the opera singing. This
sound collage is reinforced by the occasional
intercut between animal and human faces.
Considered together with Litvinova’s—as always
hyperbolized—closing statement that “lions,
jaguars, cheetahs, tigers, and eagles soon will
disappear and it is our fault,” this theme can be
interpreted as a self-ironizing allusion to an
apocalyptic extinction along with nature. In the
vein of Treplev’s decadent play embedded in