VISUALIZATION OF ETHNICITY IN SOVIET CINEMA: «COUNTRY OF GOLDS» BY AMO BEK-NAZAROV (1930)
DOI: 10.23951/2307-6119-2020-1-114-125
Based on the material of the ethnographic documentary «Country of Golds» by the classic of Soviet cinema, Amo Bek-Nazarov, the article considers the direction of artistic documentary as an example of visual and anthropological experiments in the USSR at the turn of the 1920–1930s. Analyzing archival data, director’s diaries, and contemporary testimonies, the author traces the evolution of the mentioned film project in connection with parallel processes in politics and cinema. In the period under study, Soviet filmmakers tested various visualization formats of ethnicity, constructing the Soviet myth of the peoples of the new Union freed by the revolution, which the party leadership needed. Based on an illustrative example of the work of director Amo Bek-Nazarov, the article traces the use of the capabilities of ethnographic cinema as a resource for creating effective on-screen images for traditional use: traditional life (the image of the «dark past») and innovations of socialism (the image of the «bright future»). As soon as the film «Country of Golds» is a kind of film text, consisting of approximately the same number of film frames and text captions alternating in the narrative, the method of analysis of the film was its research decoding – «translation» into text format. The article analyzes the potential of the cinema as a form of visual anthropology, and the film as a multicomponent historical source that displays the culture of the film being shot and shot, reflecting the silhouettes of culture and ideology of its time. Conclusions are drawn about the film «Country of Golds» as a multi-layered historical cinema source, and about the director’s creative methodology for combining documentary and artistic techniques in the process of ethno-cinematic work, as relevant for study and use in modern visual anthropological practice.
Keywords: visual anthropology, anthropological cinema, Amo Bek-Nazarov, national politics, USSR
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Issue: 1, 2020
Series of issue: Issue 1
Rubric: ANTHROPOLOGY
Pages: 114 — 125
Downloads: 1070