0:00-3:45 Place: Aqcha. Musician: Aq Pishak on dambura. Uzbek dance. This is an example of shooting in a hotel room with backlight. Close-ups are better, but then leave out the footwork. Towards the end, I zoomed in on the dambura playing technique.
3:46-6:40. Place: Samarkand. This is essentially tourist footage. We visited then Soviet Central Asia for comparative study of ethnic groups –Uzbeks and Tajiks—who straddled the Afghan-Soviet border.
6:41-7:03. Place: Frunze (now Bishkek), Kyrgyzstan. Short footage of a player on the komuz, the national lute. I had written my M.A. thesis on this and was delighted to witness it live in its homeland.
7:04- 11:57. Place: Kabul. Uzbek dance, Bangecha Tashqurghani on dambura. This was shot in the courtyard of our house, a safe place to stage dance, a covert activity. The dancer is a retired bachabaz, or dancing boy, in street clothes rather than the transgender outfit of men’s parties. Fixed-focus shot for all-body coverage. Inconvenient shadows from trees. 11:58-15:30. Place: Kabul. Survey footage. Opening in market street, with Greta. Panorama of city tests my steadiness- this is decades before Steadycam technology.
0:15-2:46. Place: Aqcha. Musician: Akhmad-bakhshi, Turkmen dutar player. This is one of those outdoors set-ups to film instrumental technique, with left-hand and right-hand isolation and overall shots. The camera was unable to keep up with the quick strokes, resulting in blurred images.
2:47: an inserted title from the French developer indicating some unexposed film they couldn’t process.
3:08-5:31. Place: Tashqurghan. Shaman séance with the qobuz fiddle. This was the most unusual and difficult to film sequence. This shaman normally performs his cure in a pitch-dark room, but he was convinced by payment for his rarely-hired services to do it on the balcony of the residence of Pierre Centlivres and Micheline Centlivres-Demont, Swiss anthropologists who had uncovered the existence of this pre-Islamic shamanism with me in Tashqurghan, at that time a conservative, somewhat archaic older city.
The “patient” is the patient Abdurrahman, the Centlivres’ servant and research collaborator. The qobuz fiddle and the tradition are related to Central Asian traditions of Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, with their horsehair fiddle orientation, as opposed to Siberian frame-drum manipulation. The documentation by the Centlivres and Greta add to the staged quality of the event, but the shaman went into trance anyway.
5:32-6:37. Rounding out a reel, flowers in the courtyard of our Kabul house.
6:38-7:38. Place: Andkhoi. Musician: Hamra-bakhshi, playing the Turkmen long flute, the tüidük. The backlight and zoom problems are evident. The playing technique is impossible to film, since the mouthpiece is hidden from the camera.7:39-10:08 . Place: Andkhoi. Uzbek dance. This was a high point for the cinematic potential of this type of filming. Staged in a hotel room, this retired dancing boy in half-dress has the light perfectly placed to produce the shadow effect. The fieldwork situation was difficult, as when they found me a dancer, there was no available musician, so he was moving to the sound of a pre-recorded dance tune I had rather than to live music, not an ideal situation, as the player-dancer interaction is key to this style of performance.
10:09: duplicate of the dance sequence on Reel 1 at 7:04.
12:38-15:18. Place: Tashqurghan. Musician: Abdullah Buz-baz. Marionette show with dambura lute. This buz-bazi tradition of staging a mountain goat figured tied to the musician’s hand has been documented elsewhere in Afghanistan and a bit beyond, and is linked to pre-Islamic beliefs connected to the mountain goats of Central Asia.
15:19-17:11. Place: Tashqurghan. Partridge fights (kowk-bazi) at 5 AM near the old citadel. Men form a betting ring and wager heavily. The birds are not hurt; the match stops when one becomes submissive. The covered objects are partridge cages. Panoramic views of the city follow.
17:12-18:58 Place: Mazar-I Sharif. Musician: Qandi-khan, player of the Kazakh dombra lute. Another technique sequence, ending with the impassive face of the musician.
18:59- Place: Kabul, our house. Baba Naim on the ghichak fiddle. Fieldwork shot at the end of Greta manning the microphone.
Unedited version of “Music in the Afghan North.” See below.
Footage somewhat mixed by the transfer person.
0:17 aerial footage of Hindu Kush
:27-:32 jumbled footage
:38 footage of kuchi black-tent nomad, which had to be taken from a distance only.
:49-3:04 jumbled footage
3:05-5:10. resumption of aerial footage of region between Kabul and Mazar-I Sharif. Point was to show various ecologies of settlement, as valleys spill into the plain, etc.
5:11-7:57 Partial footage of bazaar of Aqcha, an important market town in Afghan Turkestan, to show crafts, goods. Continues with landscape of the Kabul area. At 8:00, shot of zirbaghali drums for sale.
9:03-11:22 Kazakh musicians, Mazar-I Sharif. Posed outdoor shot, then indoor shot in the shop of a musician, with crowd peering in. Good example of
constrained filming possibilities.
11:24 Aqcha, Akhmad-bakhshi, Turkmen dutar musician.
12:38 Complete sequence of Aqcha bazaar,-13:36, ending in teahouse performance by Turkmen musician Aq Pishak and two Uzbek singers.
13:38 repeat of some footage of Abdullah Buz-baz, goat marionette specialist.
14:07 Place: Kabul. Official buzkashi horsemanship contest for jeshn, Afghan national independence holiday. Teams have province uniforms, unlike the game as played in the North, where it’s every man for himself. Rider seeks to grab goat carcass, elude rivals, and deposit it in the winner’s circle. Shots of spectators fleeing charging horsement and of Greta with Polish foreign aid architects.
16:34 Repeat of partial footage of shaman séance.
0:17
Place: Mazar-I Sharif. The annual Nowruz festival and pilgrimage at the great mosque, held at the spring equinox. The main event is the raising of the janda of Ali, green fabric wrapped around a tall standard. The crowd snatches pieces of the fabric for good luck in the coming year.
This was the most problematic footage I shot. We were four foreigners (Pierre Centlivres gets a close-up) among hundreds of aroused pilgrims, covertly filming them, including sometimes unveiled women of different ethnic groups. For the raising of the janda, I was standing just a few feet away from the action, hence the shaky camera due to jostling, but carried on, in the documentary tradition. Soldiers grab the first strips of fabric, then allow the crowd to move in. Around the square, mendicants and holy men gather. The famous white doves also appear, seen nowhere else in the region but around the shrine.
Reprise of footage on earlier reels.
3:51 Street-eye view of Kabul’s neighborhoods.
This is a layered product. In the mid-1980s, when VHS tape was available, I decided to transfer and edit some of the super8 footage into a film, for classroom and academic use, as there was no such survey of Afghan music available (and still isn’t). With virtually no budget, I economized, making title cards by hand. The stock was ¾” video tape, “UMatic,”the highest standard at the time. This was converted to dv format in 2016, so now the film represents three generations of film: super8, VHS, and digital.
To flesh out the silent footage, I added sounds from my fieldtapes, sometimes arbitrarily (aerial footage, partridge fight),sometimes as close to sync as I could get for the music performance footage. For a closer, I picked a sunset chat and left open the question of what would happen to Afghanistan, which at the time was under Soviet occupation. Overall, it might be said that there is a slightly sentimental, if not nostalgic, tinge to the film.
The content basically presents a survey of the topics in the book Music in the Culture of Northern Afghanistan.