E-mail: eale@yandex.ru Tel.: +7 (495) 939-32-92
1, Leninskie Gory, Moscow, 119991, Russian Federation
PhD in Arts, Associate Professor, Leading Researcher of the M. V. Lomonosov Moscow State University
Visual anthropology as a form of intercultural communication arose only in the second half of the 20th century. Before that this role was played by cinema, with a different degree of awareness, trying to increase emerging public consciousness by reflecting on the life of people who were on the periphery of “civilizing” processes. In Russia, where discussion about visual anthropology appeared only in the late 1980s, documentary cinema continues to play a dominant role, significantly influencing the formation of Russian visual anthropology. The goal of this article is to survey the interaction between the socio-cultural, ideological, information and technological processes that took place in the country until the end of the 1940s, when all of its resources were mobilized to participate in the Second World War.
In the pre-revolutionary period, documentary cinema began to perform a cognitive function, which eventually became its main one. Its simple, short, filmed fragments now offer rare evidence of a past way of life. After the Revolution, the new state tasked cinema to help create a “new man”. This goal was taken up by Dziga Vertov, the ideologist of a special vision of reality seen through a film lens who became concerned with the impact of the documentary screen on the viewer. Vertov’s “film truth” became a symbol of exploring the real world using the language of cinema. In particular, his “The Sixth Part of the World” represented an unprecedented attempt to capture the life of different peoples over a vast expanse of the country and inspired other documentary filmmakers to undertake ethnographic photography.
The active growth of cinema in the initial pre-revolutionary period; its obvious achievements in the difficult 1920s; and the alarming trends of the Stalinist 1930s; all provided the background for the development of domestic documentary cinema as intercultural communication during the second half of the 20th century.
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