39 mins., 35mm, b&w, silent (Russian intertitles)
Production : Sovkino
Source : Krasnogorsk Film Archive. Also viewable on YouTube here, albeit in a very poor copy, apparently lacking many of the original intertitles and the maps, and with superimposed extra-diegetic music.
Background : this film was shot in the mountains of Chechnya in 1928 and was the most ethnographic of a number of travelogues directed by Nikolai Lebedev in the late 1920s. As he himself was an outsider, with no previous knowledge of the region, he took on as a consultant Khalid Orshaev, a local playwright and government official, and creator of the Latin-based Chechen alphabet. It is perhaps on account of his influence that original working title of the film was changed from ‘Chechnya’ to ‘Land of the Nakhcho’, the latter being the name that the Chechens use of themselves.
Lebedev was also fortunate to have with him the highly skilled cameraman, Ivan Beliakov, an associate of Dziga Vertov and one of the original ‘Kinoks’.
Content : In overall structure, Land of the Nakhcho conforms in many ways to the conventional Soviet travelogue format of the period: it begins with shots of the natural environment in the Caucasus, continues with sequences dedicated to traditional Chechen subsistence and craft activities, followed by some general scenes of village life, a market and various examples of religious practice, before the dramatic appearance of a line of tractors, about three quarters of the way into the film, heralds the arrival of the Soviet presence and modernity.
The film then concludes with sequences of modern farming practices, oil wells, road-building, hospitals, literacy programmes and gymnastics, before culminating in a sequence showing the collective resolution of a traditional blood feud with the previously unimaginable active participation of the women.
However, there are number of features of this film that raise it above the norm for this genre of film. One is an opening sequence in which a Chechen declares directly to the camera that he will serve as a guide for the film which will therefore show the region as it really is, from an insider’s perspective.
Yet although the film begins by denouncing popular stereotypes about the Caucasus, as it proceeds, the generally positive view that it offers of the Chechens’ traditional way of life begins to crumble until about half-way into the film, after a long sequence of scenes showing women hard at work on a broad variety of tasks, a group of men are shown doing nothing. This is followed shortly thereafter by an intertitle declaring ‘Aged forty, a Chechen woman is an old wreck’, a close-up portrait of a woman, who looks to be in her seventies, and a shot from afar of a woman struggling up a hill with a heavy burden.
Another distinctive feature of the film is the quality of the cinematography performed by Beliakov. This is particularly evident in the sequence showing the zikr, an all-male ecstatic Quadiriya Sufi dance that is performed in a circle to the sound of circular hand drums, clapping and chanting. The combination of exemplary shooting and inspired editing make this the high point of the film from a purely cinematographic point of view.
From ethnographic point of view, however, perhaps the most interesting sequence is the one showing the resolution of the traditional blood feud in which the film culminates. Here too, it seems likely that the consultant Khalid Orshaev would have had an influence since his own first theatrical work as a playwright, The Law of the Fathers, had been precisely about the vendettas associated with such blood feuds, which were still on-going in the Caucasus region at the time of filming.
Text : Sarkisova 2017, pp. 147-154
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