Unwritten/Written/Rewritten Histories: The Glory of the Khan and Boris the First as Alternative Historical Narratives in Bulgarian Cinema

Abstract

Unwritten/Written/Rewritten Histories: The Glory of the Khan and Boris the First as Alternative Historical Narratives in Bulgarian Cinema* The historical films Khan Asparukh (1981), directed by Liudmil Staikov, and Boris purvi (Boris the First, 1984), directed by Borislav Sharaliev, belong to the most productive and prosperous period in the development of Bulgarian cinema. The early 1980s mark, in a certain sense, a climax in the production of films whose purpose was to engage with historical and socio-political issues by presenting history in terms of its dilemmas, rather than its solutions, and by overtly questioning the stability of both a more distant and a contemporary historical, social, and political scene. The year 1981 and the years that followed saw a renewed cinematic interest in the history of a nation that had for years grappled with issues of resistance to more powerful empires (the Byzantine Empire in the middle of the ninth century, the Turkish Empire from 1493 to 1878, and the Soviet Empire from 1944 to 1989), with the questions of its roots and the return to an indigenous cultural past, and with the debated issue of national identity. The history of Bulgaria in the 1980s was still largely dominated by what I shall refer to as linear historical which tended to present historical events as unequivocally progressive, untroubled by doubts in the power of the head of state and in the beneficence of the numerous alliances that the country had formed in the course of its thirteen-hundred year history. Whereas in the 1980s historians did not talk about the undercurrents of a well established historical narrative (the written history of Bulgaria), the auteurs/directors of Bulgarian films were already questioning the unequivocal nature of a narrative that was largely dominated by a Marxist-Leninist ideology. In other words, the Bulgarian films of the early 1980s dedicated to the anniversary of the Bulgarian state were beginning to anticipate the need for a rewriting of history, for the creation of alternative historical narratives that would question, subvert, and complement the main narrative. In order to position the historical perspective of the films created in the 1990s in a larger cultural context, a brief overview of the development of the Bulgarian film industry seems to be in order. The history of Bulgarian cinema is marked by a number of different trends in philosophy and politics, which have shaped the films' representations of historical events. The nationalization of the film industry occurred shortly after the end of World War Two and the establishment of the socialist state in 1944, and Boris Boroshanov's Kalin the Eagle (1950) was one of the first films produced by this new industry. This film belongs to the tradition of socialist realism and presents the fate of a haiduk, a fighter against Turkish oppression, who returns to Bulgaria to find his country invaded by foreigin capitalists. Like Kalin the Eagle, most of the earliest Bulgarian historical films produced in the 1950s reveal an engagement with issues of the nation's more immediate or distant past. David Cook writes in his overview of Bulgarian cinema: Alarm (Trevoga, 1951), was the first feature of the well known cinematographer and documentarist Zahari Zhandov (b. 1911). Scripted by Anzhel Vagenstein (b. 1922), a graduate of the Moscow State Film School (VGIK), this film was a semi-documentary story of the division of political loyalties within a single Bulgarian family during the last days of World War 11. Zhandov and Vagenstein also collaborated on Septembrists (Septemvriytsi, 1954), an historically researched account of the 1923 uprising...I The themes in most of the films produced in the 1950s focused on issues in Bulgarian history that are similar to those in the histories of other East European countries, more particularly, of the Soviet Union. These cultural crossovers often resulted in co-productions and positioned Bulgarian cinema in the larger context of an East European film tradition. …