Veronika Alexandrovna Belyaeva-Sachuk,
PhD (Ethnology), Candidate of Historical Sciences, Peter the Great Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (Kunstkamera) of the Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Ekaterina Yuryevna Trushkina,
Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Buryat Buddhism in the Soviet Ethnographic Cinema of the 1920–1930s
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2022-5-9
Nowadays Soviet cinema of the 1920s–1930s attracts different fields of humanities. Ethnographic films produced by leading film studios of the USSR, such as “Sovkino”, “Kulturfilm”, “Mezhrabpromfilm”, “Tsentrnauchfilm”, etc.) expand the boarders of ethnography and visual anthropology. They actively include the new knowledge and previously unknown facts and information into the scientific research. The archival documents open up the new perspectives for the research of cultural and religious studies as well as currently nonexistent away local traditions and rituals but have been shot in the films. They are also an unique documentary resource for studying the specifics of the visual representation of the ethnicity in the USSR. The Soviets paid a great attention to the elaboration of cinema as a great tool for mass propaganda and agitation among people. Ethnographic cinema takes its own special place closely connected with the nation-building processes and production of the new image of a multinational Soviet state. The unprecedented on its idea and scale project “Cinema-Atlas” was run at the 1920s in the USSR. The project idea was to release a film almanac of 150 series about the life of different ethnic groups of the Soviet Union. The all the big film studios of the country was initiated in the production process. The article focuses on a deep study of the film “Storm over Asia” (“Potomok Chingiskhana”) directed by Vsevolod Pudovkin and produced by film company “Mezhrabpomfilm” in 1928. The history of creation and a detailed analysis of the film discover the specifics of representation the Buryats in Soviet cinema. The film is shot in Buryatia, so now it’s an unique document for ethnographic and anthropological studies of the Buryat culture and Buryat Buddhism as well. It contains documentary material about a central Buddhist religious ritual – Tsam; the rite of treatment by emchi-lama (a doctor), lifetime footage of the 16th Pandito Khambo Lama Danzha Munkozhapov.
Publishing: 28/10/2022
The article has been received by the editor on 11/09/2022
How to cite: Belyaeva-Sachuk V.A., Trushkina E.Yu. Buryat Buddhism in the Soviet Ethnographic Cinema of the 1920–1930s // Historical Courier, 2022, No. 5 (25), pp. 116–129. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2022/ISTKURIER-2022-5-09.pdf]
The research was carried out at the expense of the grant of the Russian Science Foundation (RNF) No. 21-18-00518 “Cinema Atlas of the USSR: The Experience of Positioning a Multinational state” (https://rscf.ru/project/21-18-00518/).
Links: Issue 5 2022
Keywords: visual anthropology; Cinema-Atlas; Buryat Buddhism; Soviet ethnographic cinema