PDF Roots of Wisdom; Branches of Devotion: Plant Life in South Asian Traditions by Fabrizio M Ferrari in History

Description

Filmmakers in the early decades of the Soviet Union sought to create a cinematic map of the new state by portraying its land and peoples on screen. These films created blueprints of the Soviet domain’s scenic; cultural; and ethnographic perimeters and brought together – in many ways – disparate nations under one umbrella. Categorised as kulturfilms; they served as experimental grounds for developing the cinematic formulae of a multiethnic; multinational Soviet identity. Screening Soviet Nationalities examines the non-fictional representations of Soviet borderlands from the Far North; to the Northern Caucasus; and to Central Asia between 1925 and 1940. Beginning with Dziga Vertov and his vision of the Soviet space as a unified; multinational mosaic; Oksana Sarkisova rediscovers films by Vladimir Erofeev; Vladimir Shneiderov; Alexander Litvinov; Mikhail Slutskii; Amo Bek-Nazarov; Mikhail Kalatozov; Roman Karmen; and other filmmakers who helped construct an image of Soviet ethnic diversity and left behind a lasting visual legacy. The book contributes to our understanding of changing ethnographic conventions of representation. It also looks at studies of diversity despite the homogenising ambitions of the Soviet project; and reexamines methods of blending reality and fiction as part of both ideological and educational agendas. Using a wealth of unexplored archival evidence from the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive (RGAKFD) as well as the Gosfilmofond state film archive; Sarkisova examines constructions of exoticism; backwardness and Soviet-driven modernity through these remarkable and underexplored historical travelogues.