The Northernness in the cinema-documents: the expeditions “Cinema-Eyes” in the 1920s
Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, Russian Academy of Sciences, Saint-Petersburg, Russian Federation, [email protected]
ABSTRACT
Introduction: the North historically inspired the creative experiments of filmmakers with its ethnographic color. As a result, the images of more than a century-old cultural evolution of ethnic communities were reflected in a significant set of visual documents. Since many original traditions of the indigenous northerners have been lost or disappeared in the past, the archival films give a modern researcher a unique opportunity – to see elements of gone cultures in their mobile relationships, to comprehend their driving causality.
Objective: to introduce into humanitarian circulation information about unexplored visual and ethnographic experiments implemented in the early and middle of the 1920s in the expeditions of the titular Soviet cinematographers.
Research materials: film-, photo- and text documents of the 1920s, materials of early Soviet periodicals, thematic printed publications, personal archives of cinematographers.
Results and novelty of the research: the comprehensive review of the history and content of ethnographic filming by the Soviet “Cinema-Eyes” in the North is provided in the article for the first time. On the one hand, the conducted archival
search and research analysis of ethnographic materials from the legacy of leading Russian documentary filmmakers that are not presented in the scientific field opens access to informative film sources containing unique visual-ethnographic materials about the evolution of local ethnic communities (Komi, Kolva-Yaran, etc.). On the other hand, it develops retrospective studies of the processes of socialist reorganization and refractions of national policy in the North in the early Soviet period.
Key words: visual ethnography, North, Samoyeds, Komi, archival film document, Tisse, Lemberg, Belyakov, Vertov
Acknowledgements: the research was supported by the Russian Science Foundation as a part of the project № 22-18-00283 “The Northernness of Russia and the Ethno-Cultural Potential of the Arctic” (A. V. Golovnev), https://rscf.ru/project/22-18-00283/.
For citation: Golovnev I. A. The Northernness in the cinema-documents: the expeditions “Cinema-Eyes” in the 1920s // Vestnik ugrovedenia = Bulletin of Ugric Studies. 2024; 14 (2/57): 371–381.
