Russian movie poster for the movie Mongol
No! I flat refuse to write about The Dark Knight even though I have an intuition that it is probably quite good despite all the brouhaha about it in the media. Being the eccentric, eclectic individual I am, this post will be about a movie I saw a week ago entitled Mongol.
Going to see Mongol last Friday night was a treat for me. Back in the olden days when I was a university student, my alma mater The University of Georgia regularly showed foreign films at the university’s movie theater inside the student center. Prior to those days before I went there, UGA had its’ own television station which aired once a week a program called simply The Foreign Film. Because of this program’s featured movies I learned the patient technique of reading subtitles. Years of watching international films prepared me for Mongol last week along with years of watching historical films.
Mongol was actually nominated this year for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards. It also won best picture in the Nika Awards this year. The Nika is Russia’s equivalent to our Academy Awards.
Mongol is Russian director Sergei Bodrov’s vision of the life of Temudjin, better known to us today as Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan means “universal ruler.” It was his title, not his given name. Bodrov’s portrait shows a Genghis Khan who is not a medieval Hitler of the steppes, but an individual who suffers much and who rises above his suffering and humiliation to become a great military leader.
Mongol has both masculine and feminine elements to it which makes it appealing to both men and women. Like the great epics of Samuel Bronston or William Wyler’s Ben Hur, there is action, violence, great dialogue, and a timeless love story. Mongol tells the story of the early years of Genghis Khan before his massive conquests. The story even has moments of humor. It is not all blood and swords.
I especially loved the photography and setting of Mongol which was shot in Kazakhstan. Some of the settings which were chosen for the filming were so remote that Bodrov’s crew actually had to build roads to access some of the areas.
The film’s dialogue is in Mongolian, but the actors are a mix of Mongolians, Chinese, and Kazakhs, and the actor who plays the adult Temudjin is played by a Japanese actor, Tadanobu Asano who is considered to be a cross between Johnny Depp and the great Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. I also enjoyed the various looks of the Asian actors some of which were quite attractive. It is not often that a western audience is able to see an all East Asian cast.
The clothing of the characters, everything took me back over 800 years ago, and the story of love and loss and love again between Temudjin and his beloved wife Borte was especially moving to me in a personal way.
A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting an actual Mongolian. She was a Christian and was here with a group of young Mongolian converts to sell costume jewelry in order to raise money for a school that was being built back in Mongolia. I had just returned from my second trip to Turkey where I had learned that some Turks have the name Cengiz which is pronounced “Jing-giz” just like Genghis. Some of my Turkish students told me that the Mongolians were their cousins and saw Genghis Khan as an ancestor of the Turks. When I told the young Mongolian woman this, she was astonished and said that Genghis Khan was the father of HER country. Well, I did read somewhere that the early Turks had slanted eyes, which many of their cousins do in parts of Central Asia. One Romanian lady I met implied to me that Genghis Khan’s Mongolian horsemen were actually Turkic. One of the spirits of the Mongols looked like a wolf. One of the symbols of Turkic/Altaic mythology is the wolf.
Going to see Mongol last Friday night was a treat for me. Back in the olden days when I was a university student, my alma mater The University of Georgia regularly showed foreign films at the university’s movie theater inside the student center. Prior to those days before I went there, UGA had its’ own television station which aired once a week a program called simply The Foreign Film. Because of this program’s featured movies I learned the patient technique of reading subtitles. Years of watching international films prepared me for Mongol last week along with years of watching historical films.
Mongol was actually nominated this year for Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards. It also won best picture in the Nika Awards this year. The Nika is Russia’s equivalent to our Academy Awards.
Mongol is Russian director Sergei Bodrov’s vision of the life of Temudjin, better known to us today as Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan means “universal ruler.” It was his title, not his given name. Bodrov’s portrait shows a Genghis Khan who is not a medieval Hitler of the steppes, but an individual who suffers much and who rises above his suffering and humiliation to become a great military leader.
Mongol has both masculine and feminine elements to it which makes it appealing to both men and women. Like the great epics of Samuel Bronston or William Wyler’s Ben Hur, there is action, violence, great dialogue, and a timeless love story. Mongol tells the story of the early years of Genghis Khan before his massive conquests. The story even has moments of humor. It is not all blood and swords.
I especially loved the photography and setting of Mongol which was shot in Kazakhstan. Some of the settings which were chosen for the filming were so remote that Bodrov’s crew actually had to build roads to access some of the areas.
The film’s dialogue is in Mongolian, but the actors are a mix of Mongolians, Chinese, and Kazakhs, and the actor who plays the adult Temudjin is played by a Japanese actor, Tadanobu Asano who is considered to be a cross between Johnny Depp and the great Japanese actor Toshiro Mifune. I also enjoyed the various looks of the Asian actors some of which were quite attractive. It is not often that a western audience is able to see an all East Asian cast.
The clothing of the characters, everything took me back over 800 years ago, and the story of love and loss and love again between Temudjin and his beloved wife Borte was especially moving to me in a personal way.
A few years ago I had the pleasure of meeting an actual Mongolian. She was a Christian and was here with a group of young Mongolian converts to sell costume jewelry in order to raise money for a school that was being built back in Mongolia. I had just returned from my second trip to Turkey where I had learned that some Turks have the name Cengiz which is pronounced “Jing-giz” just like Genghis. Some of my Turkish students told me that the Mongolians were their cousins and saw Genghis Khan as an ancestor of the Turks. When I told the young Mongolian woman this, she was astonished and said that Genghis Khan was the father of HER country. Well, I did read somewhere that the early Turks had slanted eyes, which many of their cousins do in parts of Central Asia. One Romanian lady I met implied to me that Genghis Khan’s Mongolian horsemen were actually Turkic. One of the spirits of the Mongols looked like a wolf. One of the symbols of Turkic/Altaic mythology is the wolf.
In Mongol, Temudjin and others refer to their god as Tengri. I could not miss the slight similarity of the spelling of Tengri with the Turkish name for god which is Tanri, which in the Turkish alphabet ends with an un-dotted “I”. In the film there were characters with names like Targutai and Altan which looks like Turkish male names. Targutai reminded me of Turgay. Since beginning this, I actually found Altan in a list of Turkish names for males.
Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol is certainly worth seeing. Some of its scenes and music reminded me of a number of things: barbarians, Native Americans, the old American west. But at the same time it takes you to a time and place which are unfamiliar to most movie audiences. The expansive steppes filmed in Mongol are some of the exact places where Temudjin and his people roamed centuries ago.
In Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol we see a different, more humane Genghis Khan to be, a man’s whose great suffering and alienation does not break him, but leads him to greatness. In the end, Mongol is a very inspiring story of how an individual with the right stuff inside can survive and even move towards greatness.
The following clip from Al Jazeera English from the Al Jazeera network is a very informative interview with Sergei Bodrov about the making of and his reasons for making a film about Genghis Khan, a man who even today is hated, feared, and revered in a number of cultures. The interview is a little over 7 minutes long. The second half of the clip is about German film maker
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Though not on this post’s subject, the Fassbinder portion is worth seeing.
The official website for Mongol can be visited here.
Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol is certainly worth seeing. Some of its scenes and music reminded me of a number of things: barbarians, Native Americans, the old American west. But at the same time it takes you to a time and place which are unfamiliar to most movie audiences. The expansive steppes filmed in Mongol are some of the exact places where Temudjin and his people roamed centuries ago.
In Sergei Bodrov’s Mongol we see a different, more humane Genghis Khan to be, a man’s whose great suffering and alienation does not break him, but leads him to greatness. In the end, Mongol is a very inspiring story of how an individual with the right stuff inside can survive and even move towards greatness.
The following clip from Al Jazeera English from the Al Jazeera network is a very informative interview with Sergei Bodrov about the making of and his reasons for making a film about Genghis Khan, a man who even today is hated, feared, and revered in a number of cultures. The interview is a little over 7 minutes long. The second half of the clip is about German film maker
Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Though not on this post’s subject, the Fassbinder portion is worth seeing.
The official website for Mongol can be visited here.
5 comments:
well, turks come from central asia and we really believe that we have a blood line with the people living in central asia. ok, im not an expert on the issue and actually i dont want to get into any argument to prove it. it is a very common belief in turkey that the mongols, the ozbeks, the azeris and maybe some other central asian people which i cant remember right now are all cousins.
Thanks for commenting here, Superhero.
Yes, I know that the languages of Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, the Turkmen of Iraq, and of some the peoples of western China is Turkic. Did I leave out any other places? If you know Turkish, you can basically understand the languages of all of these places. I am not trying to dispute this. I am no linguist or ethnologist, but I was trying to show here the similarities of language that even I, an amateur, can see. It was only that the Mongolian girl was a little shocked about Genghis Khan being claimed by the Turks.
Once again thanks, and come again:)
Also Superhero I need to add that I know that Turkish has similarities to Japanese and Korean too.
Hi, I was surprised to find link to my website at your blog! Thanks for supporting me! I read some of your posts and is pretty impressed with your writing style. Keep it up! :)
Hello Anson,
Maybe you forgot but a few months ago you asked me on Blog Catalog to add your blog to mine, so I did. You have commented here before, and please keep commenting whenever you like.
Thanks for your kind comment on my writing:)
Post a Comment