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"CINEMA ATLAS OF THE USSR": EDUCATIONAL FILM "EASTERN SIBERIA" (1935) // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2022. Issue 3 (37). P. 117-127

The paper examines the role of educational cinema in the USSR during the 1930s, with a focus on films about the “socialist reconstruction” of remote regions of the Soviet Union. As an example, the film “Eastern Siberia” (1935) filmed at the “Sibtechfilm” studio, directed by A. I. Gaidul is analyzed, using scripts and other documentation from the State Archives of the Novosibirsk Region. The film is analyzed in terms of its place in the history of regional cinema and its role in the construction of ideas and images in the context of Soviet history. The paper also discusses the historical context of the creation of educational films in the 1930s, the production process at the Novosibirsk studio “Sibtechfilm”, and the biography and methods of the film's director, A. I. Gaidul are considered. The authors also address methodological issues related to educational cinema at the Sibtechfilm studio in the 1930s. It is concluded that the creation of educational geographical films was a significant development in Russian visual anthropology and that the analysis of such films helps to understand the ideological, conceptual, and creative considerations involved in their production and use in the USSR in the 1920s–1930s.

Keywords: visual anthropology, Soviet cinema, film production, educational cinema in the 1930s, Sibtechfilm, Eastern Siberia (1935), A. I. Gaidul

The cinema-atlas of the USSR: "Bukhara" (1927) // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2023. Issue 2 (40). P. 90-99

The proposed study brings information about the ethnographic film “Bukhara” (1927) by well-known Soviet filmmakers, the cinematographer Ya. M. Tolchan and the editor E. I. Svilova. Based on this film work, the article examines the “experimentation of filmmakers” in the process of developing an ethnographic tendency in Soviet cinema. In the period under study, filmmakers fascinated by ethnographic exoticism and expeditionary romanticism actively tested various approaches to visualizing ethnicity and constructed a screen image of the Union of Nationalities Liberated by the Revolution, in which the party leadership, as the monopolist of thematic and production plans in the film industry, was interested, in order to strengthen the programs of the “Cultural Revolution” Among the tasks of the work is the description of the images of the collapse of the traditional existence of Uzbek society during the socialist upheavals in the east of the country in the mid-1920s, which were captured in the mentioned film. Since the heterogeneous Soviet East was one of the most problematic regions regarding Sovietization programs in the early Soviet period, it was assigned special cinematographic resources – the filming of the Central Asian film expedition by Ya. M. Tolchan and the subsequent editing of an independent film, “Bukhara” by E. I. Svilova, are considered in the context of the development of the large-scale state project “Cinema-Atlas Of The USSR” and in the context of parallel processes of Soviet national policy. The reference sources for the study were little-known archival documents and materials from the Soviet periodical press. The study uses an effective method of the author to read the film as a film text because, due to the peculiarities of silent film, the film “Bukhara” consists of approximately equal parts of film images and text subtitles interspersed in the narrative. The conclusion points to the film “Bukhara” as a multi-layered visual document of its time and to the need to study the phenomenon of the Soviet film atlas as a whole as a unique phenomenon that has produced a range of practical and theoretical materials that are in demand in modern visual anthropology.

Keywords: visual anthropology, Cinema-Atlas of the USSR, ethnographic film, "Bukhara"