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The low-tech film, shot on video and blown up to 35mm, follows Paul Pena, a blues musician from San Francisco -- he's played with B.B. King, John Lee Hooker, Bonnie Raitt and others and wrote the 1970s Steve Miller song "Jet Airliner" -- on a voyage to Central Asia, where he participates in a contest celebrating the ancient art of throat-singing. Witnessing that high point in Pena's otherwise difficult life -- he's blind, in shaky health and prone to depression -- is one of the film's major pleasures; another is encountering Pena's exuberant friend and mentor, the master throat-singer Kongar-ol Ondar.

Genghis Blues Directed by Roko Belic Starring Paul Pena and Kongar-ol Ondar

Fiddling with his shortwave radio early one morning in 1984, Pena stumbled across some strange sounds. What seemed at first like electronic oscillations turned out to be human voices capable of producing two or more notes at the same time. "Now that's for me," Pena said to himself. Some notes were high-pitched, twangy and whistle-like; others had the guttural quality of a bullfrog's droning, which reminded Pena of the blues singer Howlin' Wolf.

It took Pena seven years to ascertain that the sounds he'd heard were created in Tuva, a small Russian republic along the northwestern border of Mongolia, but within a few weeks of purchasing a Tuvan CD he was able to reproduce those sounds and had started integrating them into his music. While Ondar was greeting his fans after a concert in San Francisco during the early 1990s, Pena sidled up to the master and began vocalizing in the lower-pitched kargyraa style. Ondar was so impressed he invited Pena to Tuva's 1995 triennial throat-singing competition.

The history of Tuva supplied in the opening section is slightly imprecise. The country was settled centuries ago by Turkic peoples who became allied with Genghis Khan. After spending the 18th and 19th centuries under Chinese rule, Tuva was absorbed first into czarist Russia (the documentary doesn't state this) and was technically (though, by some accounts, not actually) independent before officially joining the Soviet Union in 1944.

Director Roko Belic's college instructors included the indie cinema director Gregg Araki -- Belic plays one of the anarchic, disaffected teens in Araki's "Totally F***ed Up" -- which may explain the film's mild deviations from the documentary norm, such as the use of impressionistic montages and behind-the-scenes glimpses of the filmmaking process.

For its first half-hour, "Genghis Blues" unfolds more or less like a conventional documentary, as Belic, who produced and shot the film with his brother, Adrian, introduces Pena and the engaging eccentrics who either accompany him on his Asian adventure or help make it happen. Among Pena's supporters are Ralph Leighton, a founder (with inspiration from Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman) of the California-based Friends of Tuva, and the late Mario Casetta, a wisecracker who for years played world music on KPFK, the Los Angeles affiliate of Pacifica Radio.

Shortly after the group's arrival in Tuva, however, "Genghis Blues" evolves into an intimate portrait of two sentient artists. The eminently likable Pena, a Creole American who traces his familial and musical roots to Cape Verde, is a spirited bundle of emotions. At various moments he's jolly, petrified, confident and despondent, though onstage he consistently wows the audience. The Tuvans call him "Earthquake" because he's from San Francisco and because he's able to hit notes so low they sound like the earth trembling. Belic told me recently that he'd been under pressure from some of the musician's friends not to show Pena's less self-assured moments -- he admits to despair over his blindness and becomes frantic after losing his depression medication -- but the director wisely included them.

That "Genghis Blues" has won audience-favorite awards at the Sundance, Rotterdam, San Francisco and Florida film festivals indicates that the revelations have hardly undermined the documentary's feel-good sensibility. But more important, they provide a context for Pena's very personal music: This is a man who sings his life. They also make his triumphs -- he wins two prizes at the contest -- all the more endearing.

The drama in "Genghis Blues" revolves around Pena's participation in the contest, but the most poignant sequences occur when Ondar, who veritably radiates joy -- one interviewee hyperbolically describes him as being (to Tuvans) JFK, Elvis and Michael Jordan "all rolled into one" -- takes Pena and his pals on a tour of Tuva's countryside. Though the documentary doesn't directly mention it, one paradox about the contest, which grew out of its founder's zeal to preserve a cultural tradition, is that it presents throat-singing in a wholly artificial milieu. The Tuvans were nomadic herders, and some still are; throat-singing, which lone herdsmen did to relate to the land and to communicate with compatriots who were sometimes far away -- the sounds apparently carry very well -- was never intended as performance per se. Tuvan songs tend to be about rivers, grassland and other aspects of nature, and it's only after the camera traces the areas that inspire the music that the connection between form and content is fully made. The on-the-road footage also underscores the Tuvans' embrace of life despite poverty and other challenges -- which in turn shows how deeply intuitive Pena was in incorporating throat-singing into blues music.

At one point, Pena stands where the Dalai Lama had stood a few years earlier -- many Tuvans are Tibetan Buddhists -- and rues his inability to express the timelessness he's sensing about the place. "I don't know if you can get such a thing on camera," he says as it focuses on a nondescript monument. That the Belics left in this acknowledgment of their documentary's limitations reflects the overall integrity of their endeavor. Watching "Genghis Blues," I sometimes got the feeling there was more to the story. But Pena and Ondar are highly compelling, and the film captures the combination of sensitivity and serendipity that underlies artistic expression.
salon.com | July 9, 1999

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