Ethnographic Film in Russia of the Second Half of the Twentieth Century. From the USSR to the Present
This publication continues the article on “Ethnographic Cinema in Russia in the First Half of the Twentieth Century” (Traditional Culture. 2019. No. 4. Pp. 136-147), a consideration of the history of documentary cinema as a means of intercultural communication. In the period after the Second World War, the trends that had previously formed largely retained their influence. Their impact affects the development of ethnographic cinema in Russia even now. The post-war period was the time of “film atlases,” surveys of film based on popular science magazines, also known as “film travels,” in which only a small part was devoted to ethnographic topics. Their basic purpose was to display the achievements of the Soviet system. The participation of the scholarly community was limited to the role of consultants; university and academic ethnographic films were only created in isolated cases. The first visual anthropology festival in the post-Soviet space in the city of Pärnu offered a new approach to depicting human communities. The main goal put forward by the filmmakers was to reveal the essential features of the lives of people who had entrusted them with stories about themselves. They promoted new principles of visual anthropology such as authenticity and moral responsibility toward the culture being portrayed; these also presented a challenge to viewers. The modern period of visual anthropology is marked by the search for ways to integrate the methods of modern anthropological research with the current ethical and aesthetic language of documentary cinema.