Abstract

Sergei Bodrov’s Nomad (2005) and Vladimir Khotinenko’s 1612 (2007), were created as historical nation-building projects for Kazakhstan and Russia, respectively. Both had enormous budgets (34 and 12 million dollars, respectively), and both failed at the box office. While the former is an outward-facing film, positioned to rehabilitate the image of the Kazakh nation both at home and abroad and dedicated to the appearance of Ablai Khan and the defeat of the Dzhungars, the latter is aimed at a domestic audience, created to popularize the Day of National Unity, a holiday introduced in 2005 to celebrate the end of the interregnum known as the Time of Troubles, the expulsion of Polish-Lithuanian forces, and the election of the first Romanov tsar, which followed soon after. Despite these and other significant differences, I will draw upon Anthony Smith’s (1999) concepts of “Gastronomic Nationalism” (163-171) and “Ethnic Myths” of the “Heroic Age” and of “Regeneration” (65-68) to argue that these films are surprisingly similar, from their presentation of the “natural” hero and the oddly similar military victory over the villainized enemy, to their use of magical realism and self-orientalizing, to the image of the beloved, which serves as a metaphor for the nation itself. As I will argue, it is precisely the film’s “fictional mechanisms” (or how the narratives are constructed) and the “social mechanisms” behind them (or the intended audience reaction), as defined by Pierre Sorlin (2001), that made these films “epic failures” at the box offices, despite their high production values. For both Kazakhstan and Russia, the failure of these films represents not only the danger of alienating audiences, by attempting to manufacture identity through film, but also a powerful, early lesson for their production of future memory projects.