Screening films on the peripheries: ‘cine-service’ in ‘red chums’ for Indigenous audiences in the rural Soviet North

ABSTRACT

This article looks at film exhibition targeting Indigenous audiences in the rural Soviet North. It draws on the case of ‘red chums’ (or red ‘iaranga’, or ‘yurt’, etc. depending on the target population), which were a type of political enlightenment facility set up specifically for the Soviet Indigenous peoples. From their implementation at the end of the 1920s to the early 1970s, when they became a staple of Northern Indigenous life, red chums served remote Indigenous communities and reindeer-herding brigades, and are today regarded with nostalgia. Rooted in political enlightenment rhetoric, cinema in red chums was one of several activities to mediate Sovietness to Indigenous people. They exemplify the Soviet notion of ‘cine-service’ in the particular context of an ethnically defined peripheral space, the ‘North’, which can be located diversely in terms of geography and should be apprehended more as a concept than as a region. Ultimately, looking at cinema exhibition practices in the Soviet rural Northern peripheries helps us to re-envision our global understanding of centre-peripheries dynamics in cinema history.

KEYWORDS:

• Film exhibition
• Soviet North
• Indigenous audiences
• centre-peripheries
• travelling cinema
• rural cinema

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Edward Tyerman for inviting me to take part in this issue, sharing his insights on the article, and editing it. This work was conducted within the research project ‘Community Building at the Cinema: Towards a Decentred and Entangled History of Cinema-Going’ led by universities Paris Nanterre and Paris 8. It was supported by ComUE UPL and EUR ArTeC under Grant ANR-17-EURE-0008.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The video is no longer online, but its transcript is still available on the Khibiny (2013) website.

2. For the convenience of the reader, I will use the word ‘chum’ as the generic name for these facilities throughout the essay, reserving the specific words ‘yurt’ or ‘iaranga’ only for cases when it is relevant.

3. While red chums were very often mobile facilities, they could also be stationary, although always for a temporary period. See for example Khazanovich (1939) and Putintseva (2010).

4. It should be remembered that in the USSR, all printing had to pass through the introduction into the plan of a publishing house (Estivals 1979). Typed texts printed through other means fall into the category of samizdat or self-publishing, and were produced in order to avoid Soviet censorship.

5. For the argument of this paper, I have put aside the two booklets published in the 1930s, Werbow (1933) and Khazanovich (1939): the first one because it is written in Nenets and I could not find anyone to translate it; the second one because Khazanovich says virtually nothing about cinema in her account (even though her archives, preserved at the Russian State Archive of the Economy, show that she did screen films in the red chum she managed in Taimyr). As a result, the majority of the cases studied here concern the post-war period.

6. For more on travelling cinema in rural Soviet Union, see Sumpf (2007) and Astachkin and Pozner (2020).

7. On the different conceptions of cine-service, see Tcherneva (2016, 2022).

8. To know with any certainty which films were shown would require visiting archival institutions in Russia that are currently inaccessible. Furthermore, the sources consulted rarely mention specific titles, being more interested in cinema as an experience rather than as a demonstration of this or that film.

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Notes on contributors

Caroline Damiens

Caroline Damiens is an assistant professor in film studies at the University of Paris Nanterre. She is the author of Fabriquer la Sibérie soviétique à l’écran. Une histoire filmique des peuples autochtones du Nord (2023) and editor of Ciné-expéditions. Une zone de contact cinématographique (2022) and (with Csaba Mészáros) the KinoKultura special issue on Sakha (Yakutia) cinema (2022).