The cinema-atlas of the USSR: "Bukhara" (1927)

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.

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