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Keywords: ethnographic cinema, visual anthropology, Lebedev, Chechnya, Soviet national policy.
The article on the example of the classic documentary film «The Country of Nakhcho (Chechnya)» (1929) of Nikolay Alekseevich Lebedev, the pioneer of the Soviet ethnographic cinema, discusses newsreels as a historical source. The film, shot by the Sovkino group during the 1929 scientific-cinematic expedition to the Caucasus, focuses on the traditions of the Chechen ethnic community, as well as their transformation under socialism. Analyzing the data of the periodical press, biographical notes of the director and published evidence of the contemporaries, the author traces the development of this film project in connection with the parallel processes in the national policy and social ideology of the USSR at the turn of the 1920‑1930‑s. The final version of the film «The Country of Nakhcho» is a kind of cinema-text, consisting of approximately the same number of film frames and text captions alternating in the narration. Therefore, the method of analyzing a film as a visual-text work was its research interpretation — «translation» into text format. Based on the analysis of the film text, the article explores the potential of cinema as a form of a multicomponent visual anthropological work that displays on the screen the culture of what is being filmed and of the creator of the film, projecting the silhouettes of the culture and ideology of its time to the screen. In connection with the consideration of the film in the aforementioned socio-historical context, the article concludes that the phenomenon of anthropological film as an effective form of research knowledge, allowing to record and broadcast over time not only actual events, but also their imaginative context that is so important for anthropological study.
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