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List of contents
Introduction: Projects of a New Vision
1. They Must Be Represented: Kulturfilm and the National Niche in Soviet Cinema
2. Absolute Kinography: Vertov’s Cine-Race across the Soviet Universe
3. Arctic Travelogues: Conquering the Soviet North
4. Forest People, Wild and Tamed: Travelogues in the Far East
5. Diagnosing the Nations: Nationalizing Dirt and Disease on the Screen
6. Touring the Caucasus
About the author
Oksana Sarkisova is Research Fellow at Central European University, Co-Founder of Visual Studies Platform at CEU, and Director of Verzio International Human Rights Documentary Film Festival, Hungary. She is the author of Screening Soviet Nationalities: Kulturfilms from the Far North to Central Asia (2017) and editor of Past for the Eyes: East European Representations of Communism in Cinema and Museums after 1989 (2008).
Summary
Filmmakers in the early decades of the Soviet Union sought to create a cinematic map of the new state by portraying its land and peoples on screen. Such films created blueprints of the Soviet domain's scenic, cultural and ethnographic perimeters and brought together - in many ways disparate - nations under one umbrella. Categorised as kulturfilms, they served as experimental grounds for developing the cinematic formulae of a multiethnic, multinational Soviet identity. Screening Soviet Nationalities examines the non-fictional representations of Soviet borderlands from the Far North to the Northern Caucasus and Central Asia between 1925-1940. Beginning with Dziga Vertov and his vision of the Soviet space as a unified, multinational mosaic, Oksana Sarkisova rediscovers films by Vladimir Erofeev, Vladimir Shneiderov, Alexander Litvinov, Mikhail Slutskii, Amo Bek-Nazarov, Mikhail Kalatozov, Roman Karmen and other filmmakers who helped construct an image of Soviet ethnic diversity and left behind a lasting visual legacy.The book contributes to our understanding of changing ethnographic conventions of representation, looks at studies of diversity despite the homogenising ambitions of the Soviet project, and reexamines methods of blending reality and fiction as part of both ideological and educational agendas.
Using a wealth of unexplored archival evidence from the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive (RGAKFD) as well as the Gosfilmofond state film archive, Sarkisova examines constructions of exoticism, backwardness and Soviet-driven modernity through these remarkable and underexplored historical travelogues.
Foreword
Soviet expedition films from between 1925-1940 are examined as early forms of documentaries with both ideological and educational agendas
