Spontaneous Music
The discussion here is focused on Dinara Asanova, an unusual figure at Lenfilm not just because of her Kirghiz background (she was one of only two Central Asian directors at the studio), but because of her commitment to using improvisation, a considerable feat given that the entire system of Soviet control assumed scripts would be filmed verbatim. As the chapter contends, the license allowed to Asanova was at least partly dependent upon the categorization of her as a specialist in “children’s films,” which acted as a convenient way of trivializing her activities. The film at the center of analysis here, Woodpeckers Don’t Get Headaches, is examined as a particularly revealing manifestation of Asanova’s aesthetic principles because its protagonist, the young jazz enthusiast Mukha, has autobiographical echoes and because the spontaneity of his performances and the compositional manner of the film are in obvious association.