2024-07-12 18:10:15
July 10 marks the 115th anniversary of the birth of the prominent Azerbaijani film director, one of the founders of national documentary cinema, Niyazi Badalov, Day.Az reports.
Niyazi Badalov was born in 1909 in the city of Sheki. He began his career in 1927 at the local cinema “Yeni yol” as an assistant projectionist. In 1931-1936 he studied at the VGIK (Moscow) in the directing department under one of the classics of world cinema Sergei Eisenstein.
Continuing his work at the Baku Film Studio (now the Jafar Jabbarly Azerbaijanfilm Studio), in 1938 he shot his first works – the documentaries Komsomol Generation and Azerbaijani Ashugs. In the late 1930s, he also taught film technology at the acting department of the Baku Theatre College. He was one of the organizers of the amateur film movement in those years. In the 1940s, he dubbed The Great Life, The Man with a Gun, The Awakened Land and other feature films in Azerbaijani. His short feature film Souvenir, shot in 1942, was shown during the Great Patriotic War in the rear and on the front lines and contributed to the rise of high morale among Soviet soldiers. This was the first and last feature film in his career. There was also a theatrical period in his life. In 1944, he took part in the creation of the Salyan State Drama Theatre, becoming its artistic director. But a year later, he returned to documentary filmmaking.
He shot hundreds of stories for the newsreels “Soviet Azerbaijan”, “Young Generation”, “Sport”, “Art”, as well as “Daily News”, “Across the Country of Soviets” (Moscow) and created more than fifty films, including “General Hazi Aslanov”, “Nagorno-Karabakh”, “Muhammad Fizuli”, “Mirza Fatali Akhundov”, “Where are my children?”, “People’s poet Samad Vurgun”, “Island in the mountains”, “His name was Serafino”, “Relay”, “Eternal trace”, “Bridge over the Caspian” and others. Many directors use frames from Niyazi Badalov’s films in their works.
He died on November 2, 1997 in Baku.