46 mins., 35mm, b&w. Silent, Russian intertitles.
Production : Sovkino
Source : Russian State Archives, Krasnogorsk. Can also be viewed in reasonable quality as part of a television programme presented in Russian by film historian Alexander Deriabin here. An English translation of the intertitles is available here.
Background : This film concerns the Udege, a small hunting and gathering society whose traditional lands lie in the forest north of Vladivostock in Primorsky and Khabarovsk krais in the Russian Far East.
It is arguably the most accomplished of the many films of ethnographic character in the kulturfilm genre produced in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and early 1930s.
It was directed by Alexander Litvinov (1898-1977), who had joined Sovkino in 1927. He became interested in the Udege after reading an article in a Moscow journal and the following year, set out for the Russian Far East with the cameraman Pavel Mershin (1897-1942), and assistant Efim Feldman, to make two films about the Udege, this one, Forest People, and another, Through the Ussuri Area, which is a film about the expedition itself.
Both films were based on the prior work of Vladimir K. Arsenyev (1872-1930), a former military officer, topographer and self-trained ethnographer, who lived in Vladivostock. Arsenev had written a series of highly appreciated quasi-fictional works about the Udege, from which the titles of both films were taken. One of the main characters of this work is Arsenyev’s guide, Dersu, who later became the principal subject of Akira Kurosawa’s film, Dersu Uzala (1975).
Based on Arsenyev’s long-standing prior relationship with the Udege, Litvinov and his crew were able to establish a close rapport with the subjects, which is reflected in their apparent ease in front of the camera, despite the intimate nature of much of the shooting. In his memoirs, Litvinov describes how he planned each scene together with the subjects, thereby avoiding the breaking of any cultural taboos and using re-enactment where necessary.
When these Udege films were released, they became the subject of international acclaim and led to Litvinov being compared to Robert Flaherty, whose work was very popular in the USSR at that time.
Content : Forest People employs a sophisticated though entirely realist film language to offer a series of scenes of everyday life amongst a group of Udege, both around their village and engaged in various subsistence tasks in the forest.
The domestic scenes include a sequence showing a woman retiring to a remote house to give birth and another of a marriage negotiation, as well as various interior shots within the houses of family life, of children playing, of babies being cradled etc.
The forest scenes include very well executed sequences of the felling of a tree and the making of a canoe, fishing from similar canoes, and various hunting sequences, including a remarkable sequence in which a bear is hunted and killed by a single man armed with a spear. This is followed by a relatively long sequence in which, after it has been smoked, the bear’s meat is shared out among the men of the community.
There is also a substantial sequence concerned with shamanism. Prior to the shamanic performance itself, young hunters dance to ensure the favourable disposition of the spirits. The shaman himself – identified by name as Doke Insi of the Amulenko clan – then leads the dancing before ingesting a spirit and entering into trance.
The last ten minutes of the film has a propagandistic purpose. After a sequence showing young people learning agricultural skills, a committee of elders agrees to send a messenger, one Suntsai, to Vladivostok to request supplies from the government. Suntsai meets up there with Arsenev who helps write out a formal request, which is duly granted.
But before Suntsai returns home, Arsenyev takes him to the cinema to see the other film that Litvinov made during this expedition, Through the Ussuri Area. Suntsai is delighted to see his own image and, according to Litvinov’s memoirs, declared in broken Russian, “Everything filmed truly”.
The film concludes with a return to Udege territory and two men are shown hunting deer from a canoe. An intertitle suggests that although the Udege will learn to herd cattle, and will get a school and a hospital, they will still hunt wild animals.
The final credit sequence features another form of reflexivity as images of both Litvinov, the director, operating a Debrie Sept camera, and Pavel Mershin, the cameraman, operating the larger Debrie Parvo, are inserted amidst the title cards.
Text : Sarkisova 2017: 84-90.
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