This article examines the multicomponent phenomenon of Soviet ethnographic cinema on the example of the ethnographic documentary film “Tungus peoples” (1927) by Elizaveta Svilova, a pioneer of anthropological cinema in the Soviet Union. This film was the part of the project unprecedented in Soviet history – “Cine-atlas of the USSR” – the creation of a series of documentary films about the peoples and territories of the country for use in the education system. Initiated by the Central Committee of the CPSU as a visual construct of a new country on the screen, the project was carried out by the combined forces of the scientists and filmmakers. At the turn of the 1920–30s Soviet film production was actively associated with the design of visual images of peoples and regions that allowed viewers to make a movie tour of their «own» and «foreign» territory. Analyzing archival data, director's interview and testimonies of his contemporaries, we observe the evolution of mentioned film project in connection with parallel processes in politics and cinematography. Based on the illustrative example of the work of director and editor Elizaveta Svilova, the article traces the use of the possibilities of cinematography as an effective resource for creating screen images. Due to the specifics of silent movies, this film is a kind of the cinematic text consisting of roughly equivalent number of cinema frames and text captions alternating in the narrative. In this regard, an effective method for analyzing this film, applied in this article, is his research decoding – “translation” into a text format. The resulting film text allows us to identify and analyze, on the one hand, the features of the screen image of the Tungus culture of the early 20^th century, on the other, the basis of the specific creative method of the director. On the example of Elizaveta Svilova's creativity, the article explores the potential of cinema as a form of the research cognition. In the end the conclusion about a phenomenon of the ethnographic movie as a multicomponent historical source is drawn.

Golovnev Ivan Andreevich, Candidate of Sciences (History), Researcher, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera) RAS, 3; University Emb., St. Petersburg, 199034, Russian Federation, e-mail: golovnev.ivan@gmail.com

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