Category: Near East, Central Asia & Russia

46 mins., 35mm, b&w. Silent, Russian intertitles.

Production : Sovkino

Source : Russian State Archives, Krasnogorsk. Can also be viewed in reasonable quality as part of a television programme presented in Russian by film historian Alexander Deriabin here. An English translation of the intertitles is available here.

Background : This film concerns the Udege, a small hunting and gathering society whose traditional lands lie in the forest north of Vladivostock in Primorsky and Khabarovsk krais in the Russian Far East.

It is arguably the most accomplished of the many films of ethnographic character in the kulturfilm genre produced in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s.

It was directed by Alexander Litvinov (1898-1977), who had joined Sovkino in 1927. He became interested in the Udege  after reading an article in a Moscow journal and the following year, set out for the Russian Far East with the cameraman Pavel Mershin (1897-1942), and assistant Efim Feldman, to make two films about the Udege, this one, Forest People,  and another, Through the Ussuri Area, which is a film about the expedition itself.

Both films were based on the prior work of Vladimir K. Arsenyev (1872-1930), a former military officer, topographer and self-trained ethnographer, who lived in Vladivostock. Arsenev had written a series of highly appreciated quasi-fictional works about the Udege, from which the titles of both films were taken. One of the main characters of this work is Arsenyev’s guide, Dersu, who later became the principal subject of Akira Kurosawa’s film, Dersu Uzala (1975).

Based on Arsenyev’s long-standing prior relationship with the Udege, Litvinov and his crew were able to establish a close rapport with the subjects, which is reflected in their apparent ease in front of the camera, despite the intimate nature of much of the shooting.  In his memoirs, Litvinov describes how he planned each scene together with the subjects, thereby avoiding the breaking of any cultural taboos and using re-enactment where necessary.

When these Udege films were released, they became the subject of international acclaim and led to Litvinov being compared to Robert Flaherty, whose work was very popular in the USSR at that time.

Content : Forest People employs a sophisticated though entirely realist film language to offer a series of scenes of everyday life amongst a group of Udege, both around their village and engaged in various subsistence tasks in the forest.

The domestic scenes include a sequence showing a woman retiring to a remote house to give birth and another of a marriage negotiation, as well as various interior shots within the houses of family life, of children playing, of babies being cradled etc.

The forest scenes include very well executed sequences of the felling of a tree and the making of a canoe, fishing from similar canoes, and various hunting sequences, including a remarkable sequence in which a bear is hunted and killed by a single man armed with a spear. This is followed by a relatively long sequence in which, after it has been smoked, the bear’s meat is shared out among the men of the community.

There is also a substantial sequence concerned with shamanism. Prior to the shamanic performance itself, young hunters dance to ensure the favourable disposition of the spirits. The shaman himself – identified by name as Doke Insi of the Amulenko clan – then leads the dancing before ingesting a spirit and entering into trance.

The last ten minutes of the film has a propagandistic purpose. After a sequence showing young people learning agricultural skills, a committee of elders agrees to send a messenger, one Suntsai, to Vladivostok to request supplies from the government. Suntsai meets up there with Arsenev who helps write out a formal request, which is duly granted.

But before Suntsai returns home, Arsenyev takes him to the cinema to see the other film that Litvinov made during this expedition, Through the Ussuri Area. Suntsai is delighted to see his own image and, according to Litvinov’s memoirs, declared in broken Russian, “Everything filmed truly”.

The film concludes with a return to Udege territory and two men are shown hunting deer from a canoe. An intertitle suggests that although the Udege will learn to herd cattle, and will get a school and a hospital, they will still hunt wild animals.

The final credit sequence features another form of reflexivity as images of both Litvinov, the director, operating a Debrie Sept camera, and Pavel Mershin, the cameraman, operating the larger Debrie Parvo, are inserted amidst the title cards.

Text : Sarkisova 2017: 84-90.

39 mins., 35mm, b&w, silent (Russian intertitles)

Production : Sovkino

Source : Krasnogorsk Film Archive. Also viewable on YouTube here, albeit in a very poor copy, apparently lacking many of the original intertitles and the maps, and with superimposed extra-diegetic music.

Background : this film was shot in the mountains of Chechnya in 1928 and was the most ethnographic of a number of travelogues directed by Nikolai Lebedev in the late 1920s. As he himself was an outsider, with no previous knowledge of the region, he took on as a consultant Khalid Orshaev, a local playwright and government official, and creator of the Latin-based Chechen alphabet. It is perhaps on account of his influence that original working title of the film was changed from ‘Chechnya’ to ‘Land of the Nakhcho’, the latter being the name that the Chechens use of themselves.

Lebedev was also fortunate to have with him the  highly skilled cameraman, Ivan Beliakov, an associate of Dziga Vertov and one of the original ‘Kinoks’.

Content :  In overall structure, Land of the Nakhcho  conforms in many ways to the conventional Soviet travelogue format of the period: it begins with shots of the natural environment in the Caucasus, continues with sequences dedicated to traditional Chechen subsistence and craft activities, followed by some general scenes of village life, a market and various examples of religious practice, before the dramatic appearance of a line of tractors, about three quarters of the way into the film, heralds the arrival of the Soviet presence and modernity.

The film then concludes with sequences of modern farming practices, oil wells, road-building, hospitals, literacy programmes and gymnastics, before culminating in  a sequence showing the collective resolution of a traditional blood feud with the previously unimaginable active participation of the women.

However, there are number of features of this film that raise it above the norm for this genre of film. One is an opening sequence in which a Chechen declares directly to the camera that he will serve as a guide for the film which will therefore show the region as it really is, from an insider’s perspective.

Yet although the film begins by denouncing popular stereotypes about the Caucasus, as it proceeds, the generally positive view that it offers of the Chechens’ traditional way of life begins to crumble until about half-way into the film, after a long sequence of scenes showing women hard at work on a broad variety of tasks, a group of men are shown doing nothing. This is followed shortly thereafter by an intertitle declaring ‘Aged forty, a Chechen woman is an old wreck’, a close-up portrait of a woman, who looks to be in her seventies, and a shot from afar of a woman struggling up a hill with a heavy burden.

Another distinctive feature of the film is the quality of the cinematography performed by Beliakov. This is particularly evident  in the sequence showing the zikr, an all-male ecstatic Quadiriya Sufi dance that is performed in a circle to the sound of circular hand drums, clapping and chanting. The combination of exemplary shooting and inspired editing make this the  high point of the film from a purely cinematographic point of view.

From ethnographic point of view, however, perhaps the most interesting sequence is the one showing the resolution of the traditional blood feud in which the film culminates. Here too, it seems likely that the consultant Khalid Orshaev would have had an influence since his own first theatrical work as a playwright, The Law of the Fathers, had been precisely about the vendettas associated with such blood feuds, which were still on-going in the Caucasus region at the time of filming.

Text : Sarkisova 2017, pp. 147-154

An extract of the film can be viewed here