A Tiger’s Leap into the Future[1]
Filipa Ramos
Mourning is a one-sided experience. To go through an insurmountable loss is to learn how to reconstitute rhythms, affects, relationships, memories and temporalities. To grieve is to enter a period of suspension, a moment of inactivity that is required to adapt to change and reorganize life. This process may eventually lead to the acceptance of absence and its reconstitution: by facing a void and understanding how to cope with it, one's emptiness can be gradually reconstituted, so that it may be possible to move ahead and reinvent a future.
Those who depart know no transformative process, at a social level at least. On the contrary, they gradually start receding from life. From the initial haunting and poignant presence caused by their passing, they are slowly re-arranged and set amid things gone. Mourning can thus be seen as a mode of accepting a linear conception of time in which absences are archived, deemed unrepeatable and inaccessible.
In Saodat Ismailova’s film The Haunted (2017), the mourning of a disappeared animal from Uzbekistan, the artist's home country, opens the way for the weaving of a complex system of geopolitical, affective, linguistic and environmental ecologies that co-exist across diverse moments. Without it being its core subject, the film presents time as an entity that measures the movement across various relationships.
Concurrently, past, present and future are observed as human constructions, as concepts that can be moulded, rethought and recreated. This elasticity of time allows the artist to invent a way of dealing with memory in which various events—what has happened, what is taking place and what will become—co-exist in an extended now that is deeply entangled with other temporalities.
Such a combination of moments opens the way for another form of dealing with mourning and grief: the departed and missed ones continue to traverse the space and time of the film, as their presences are also awaited in the days to come. In engendering such an elastic chronology, Ismailova also pays tribute to the inner nature of the cinematic image, which has the capacity to constantly renegotiate with history the representation of events, and to dilute fiction and facts across material and immaterial cultures. The classical conventions of the temporalization of history operated by moving images are thus further stretched in this film, which not only ‘makes history visible’[2] but also makes the making of history possible. By dealing with images and events related to the cultural identity of Uzbekistan, which are little known to many outside it, Ismailova turns viewers into an ensemble of witnesses who are capable of testifying to the facts alluded to by the film. This gesture attests to the importance of storytelling as a fundamental forensic tool, in particular when conducted by such a privileged medium for conveying remembrances and situations as that of film. By narrating a story that exists in multiple, simultaneous times and layers, the artist opens the way for its multiple outcomes—every time the film is screened the events it narrates may unfold differently. The mourning ritual is therefore embedded in a transformative potential that benefits not only those who grieve but also those who are missed: their fate can always change and their presence can be summoned, called upon by the voice of the filmmaker in association with her filmic medium.
This dilution of conventional times, associated with the rites for conveying and dialoguing with various forms of life across different, puts The Haunted in close relationship with the practices of shamanism, to which the film subtly alludes. Bypassing the traditions of ethnographic documentary, which use lens-based media as privileged means for anthropological observation and inquiry, the artist made a film whose operativity is close to those of shamanistic ceremonies. Time is permeable, past and future are fluid, presences exist across conditions and modes of being, animals (humans comprised) collaborate and talk to one another and words can make things happen.
The Haunted revolves around the extinction of the Turan tiger (Panthera tigris virgata), also called Turanian tiger (referring to the ancient naming for the land in the north of the Amu Darya river, the ‘Land of Tur’), Caspian tiger (Caspian being the ancient people who lived in the southwest of the Caspian Sea), Hyrcanian tiger (Hyrcanian Ocean was the name given during Classical Antiquity by Greeks and Persians to the Caspian Sea), Persian tiger or Babre Mazandaran (babr, meaning tiger in Farsi, thus the Tiger of Mazandaran, the Persian Province of the southern coast of the Caspian Sea). For around ten thousand million years,[3] until the first decades of the twentieth century, this tiger subspecies ranged through the isolated watercourses, basins, riverine corridors, lake edges, mangroves and grasslands of a large area that, as its diverse nomenclatures indicate, extended from western to eastern Asia, to the Middle East, modern Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Afghanistan, Trans-caucasia and Mongolia up to northwest China.
In 1900, there were nine subspecies of tigers, differentiated by body size, skull characters, pelage coloration and striping patterns. They were named after the regions where they were found. These subspecies were the aforementioned Turan tiger, Siberian or Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica); Amoy or South China tiger (Panthera tigris amoyensis), Indochinese tiger (Panthera tigris corbetti), Indian or Bengal tiger (Panthera tigris tigris), Sumatran tiger (Panthera tigris sumatrae), Javan tiger (Panthera tigris sondaica), Balinese tiger (Panthera tigris balica) and the Malayan tiger (Panthera tigris jacksoni), which was only identified as a subspecies in 2004. Despite significant variations in dates, it appears that the Balinese, Turan and Javan subspecies were extinct in the 1940s, 1970s and 1980s respectively. Today, an estimated 3,200–4,500 Bengal tigers exist across Bangladesh, Bhutan, western China, India, western Myanmar and Nepal. Fewer than 500 Siberian tigers live across eastern Russia, north-eastern China and Korea. There are no South China tigers living in the wild and only 50 individuals in captivity. About 400–500 Sumatran tigers survive in Sumatra; 342 Indochinese tigers live in Thailand, east Myanmar and Vietnam. 250 to 340 adult Malayan tigers inhabit the southern and Central parts of the Malay Peninsula, their territory partially coinciding with that of the Indochinese subspecies.
It is hard to trace the exact dates of the extinction of the various tiger subspecies. Investigating that of the Turan tiger, the artist met an old couple that claimed to have seen one such animal in the late 1960s in some reeds in Khwarezm, a large oasis region on the Amu Darya river delta, in western Central Asia. While filming in the ruins of the monumental necropolis of Mizdakkhan, she encountered some local people who argued that tigers still return there every four or five months and that they have learned to recognize their presence through sound. When they are close, the dogs, insects and even the wind become silent, as if life was arrested. Then, in the morning, they find tiger footprints around the area. Other records have earlier chronologies. Some believe that the last Turan was killed in 1947 near the village of Agh-Ghomish, in the surroundings of the Golestan Jungle in northern Iran. Others say that the last tiger was killed at Uludere, in Hakkari, Turkey, in 1970. It is also said that one of the princes of the Golitsyn Russian aristocratic family killed the last Turan in 1906 in the surroundings of Tashkent, where The Haunted is set.[4] This taxidermized tiger was exhibited there, at the Uzbekistan State Museum of Nature up to 1960, when a fire blazed the museum and the animal with it. The tiger was later replaced by a taxidermized female Bengal whose unfortunate history tells of yet another pitiful encounter between humans and tigers.[5]
In The Haunted, we see a worker of a natural history museum cleaning and looking after a stuffed tiger as if it were a domestic object. This gesture reveals the fate of the animal, stuck between being the proof of its own crime and its ultimate fetishization. This tiger is not a ghost (a post-life entity that comes to the future) nor a living dead (a body that refuses to decay) but a hologram: a simulation of life, an abiotic three-dimensional set of projections that characterize humankind's bipolar relation to the natural realm they consider detached from themselves. For what other way could there be to describe the process by which humans simultaneously destroy, venerate, cry, worship, exploit and preserve the world they are part of and the creatures they share it with?
No longer existing as living beings, the last remaining Turan tigers inhabit the vitrines, dioramas, shelves, crates and drawers of natural history museums and zoology colleges around the world. Their skulls, bones, skins and stuffed bodies are tokens of their paradoxical condition. Their matter has been saved but not their lives; in very little time they will even cease to exist as a memory, as those who recall seeing a living Turan tiger are also gradually vanishing away. Each preserved specimen is twice dead: first as an individual, second as a kind.
Largely dying from direct and indirect human action, most bodies of the disappeared Turans weren’t preserved. There was little or no space for animals in the large land reclamation program established by the Russian government in central Asia during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (which was in control of the region since 1876), which needed to assure the proper conditions of safety for farmers and settlers and for whom tigers were considered a pest that should be eliminated. Tellingly, its politics were more effective in eradicating the tiger than in providing the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union with the agricultural self-sufficiency it aimed for.
Acting in coordination, rulers, army and farmers were aligned in killing as many tigers as possible. Militaries were given instructions by the Russian Empire to kill all tigers found in the area around the Caspian Sea. Hunters were attracted by an appealing bounty system that lasted until 1929; commercially, tiger skins were highly viable, worth 1500 to 2500 roubles, compared to 300–500 roubles for a snow leopard, 20 roubles for a horse and 10 for a cow.[6] In tandem, the clearing of forests and their replacement with rice and cotton monoculture—crops that require substantial amounts of water, upon which the tiger also depends, as its habitat is established along hydric soils—radically altered the environment where the animals lived. This also affected the life of most ungulates in the region, in particular wild pigs and deer, the tiger’s primary prey, and which, between hunting, habitat transformation, natural causes and diseases, suffered a rapid decline between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. Deprived of their territory, their food source, their circulation areas, hunted for money and for status, the Turan tigers were decimated to extinction. In the second half of the twentieth century, they were only to be found as folklore appearances.
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Faced with the impossibility of having a direct encounter with a Turan tiger, the artist poetically addresses the animal by writing a farewell letter in which she treats them as an ancestor, a landowner fellow and a next of kin. Combining found audio and film footage with her own recordings, the letter reflects on how the story of the extinction of a single animal is the result of a complex combination of facts and conjunctures where personal and familial affairs are woven with the geopolitical history of a territory and its human and nonhuman inhabitants. The letter also reveals the consequences of the disappearance of an animal: extinguished were not only the tigers but a whole habitat, which was shattered by the absence of one of its core constituents. The vanishing of these tigers caused not only an ecological void, but also affective, identitarian, political and mythological chasms that ultimately emptied out an important part of Uzbek and Central Asian culture.
But The Haunted is more than a parting missive. The events of the past, when narrated on top of footage of the current territory of Uzbekistan—arid, endless landscapes in which the horizon is the only vanishing point—gain the possibility of being transformed into something different. Their recollection may help to establish a new future, whose determinacy is not dictated by the conditions of the present. An individual gesture translates into a shared, communal experience, and mourning becomes a regenerative process that has the capacity to poetically and concretely heal a shattered, barren situation. A step towards the restoration of the Turan tiger and all this animal brings and stands for has been initiated by The Haunted. A possibility of healing has just begun.
May 2017, revised in November 2022
Originally published in Dina Akhmadeeva, Erica Moukarzel, Yuliya Sorokina, Filipa Ramos, Marian Cousijn, Saodat Ismailova. 18000 Worlds. Amsterdam, Eye Filmmuseum/NAI010 Publishers, 2023, pp. 82–87.
[1] The title borrows Walter Benjamin's expression 'tiger's leap' (tigersprung), used to describe the ongoing transactions between past events and their actualization through present-day contexts. The original section reads: History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now. Thus, to Robespierre ancient Rome was a past charged with the time of the now which he blasted out of the continuum of history. The French Revolution viewed itself as Rome incarnate. It evoked ancient Rome the way fashion evokes costumes of the past. Fashion has a flair for the topical, no matter where it stirs in the thickets of long ago; it is a tiger's leap into the past. This jump, however, takes place in an arena where the ruling class gives the commands. The same leap in the open air of history is the dialectical one, which is how Marx understood the revolution. (As translated from German in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4, 1938-1940. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, p. 395).
[2] An expression borrowed from Harun Farocki and Andrei Ujicã's documentary Videograms of a Revolution (1992).
[3] It is thought that about two million years BC the Panthera genus was separated into those that have been classified as its various species (Panthera tigris, the tiger, Panthera leo, the lion and Panthera pardus, the leopard). Around 10,000 BC, the eight geographical Panthera tigris subspecies begin to differentiate.
[4] H. Ziaie, A Field Guide to the Mammals of Iran, Tehran, Iran Wildlife Center, 2008.
[5] The living female Bengal tiger was originally a gift to the Tashkent Zoological Park by India. A delegation visiting the city during the 1966 peace talks between the Indian Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri and the Pakistani President Mohammad Ayub Khan (which resulted in the Tashkent Declaration between India and Pakistan) saw a lonely male Bengal tiger in the Tashkent Zoo and sent a female one. The animal was killed by the male during the mating season and her body was subsequently sent to the Nature Museum.
[6] Hartmut Jungius, Yuri Chikin, Oleg Tsaruk and Olga Pereladova, Pre-Feasibility Study on the Possible Restoration of the Caspian Tiger in the Amu Darya Delta, WWF Russia, https://wwfeu.awsassets.panda.org/downloads/final_tigerreporthartm5_07_2010.pdf
