Anthropological movie-chronicle of Vladimir Erofeev (on the example of the "Roof of the world" film)

In the article, through the example of a classic documentary film «Roof of the World» (1928), made by the pioneer of the world's visual anthropology Vladimir Erofeev, the author examines the film image of the culture of the Tajiks of Pamir. Due to the specifics of silent movies, this film is a kind of cinematic text consisting of roughly equivalent number of cinematographers and text captions alternating in the narrative. In this regard, an effective method for analyzing this film, applied in the article, is its research decoding - «translation» into a text format. The resultant film text makes it possible to identify and analyze, on the one hand, the features of the screen image of the Tajik's culture of the early 20th century and, on the other, the basis of the specific creative method of the director-researcher. The «Roof of the World» is a sequence of episodes describing the economic cycle in the ethno-cultural community of the Pamir Mountains, accompanied by capacious comments of the author. On the example of Vladimir Erofeev's creativity, the article explores the potential of cinema as a form of research cognition. Based on the analysis of visual, textual and archival materials, the author concludes that the documentary film is a historical source. Erofeev's method, discovered by the director in the Pamir's expedition, consists of combining research and documentary elements in films, so that the film managed to convey not only the information about events, but also their figurative and emotional context - such an important «sensation» оf the Pamir. The conclusion about a phenomenon of the ethnographic movie as a multicomponent historical source is drawn.