Leonid Kapitsa's cine-ethnography (case study of the film Along the coasts and islands of the Barents Sea)

Visual anthropological experiments in Russia have more than a century of history, reflected, in particular, in the corpus of Soviet ethnographic films of the 1920s and the 1930s. This article, based on textual and visual materials, is intended to introduce into the scientific circulation the information about the ethnographic film Along the Coasts and Islands of the Barents Sea (1929) made by one of the pioneers of ethnographic cinema, a professional researcher L. L. Kapitsa, as a multi-layered visual anthropological document. Analyzing archival data and published testimonies of the contemporaries, the author of the article traces the evolution of L. L. Kapitsa's work in connection with the parallel processes in the state national cultural policy and ethnographic science. Due to the specifics of silent cinema, the final film Along the Coasts and Islands ofthe Barents Sea is somewhat of a cinema-text consisting of approximately the same number of motion pictures and text captions alternating in the narration. That is why the method of analyzing the film as a visual and textual work was its investigative transcription - representation in the form of a film text. Based on the study of the film in its socio-historical context, the article draws conclusions about the phenomenon of an ethnographic film as an effective form of research knowledge, which enables to fix the culture of those being filmed and the culture of a film-maker and transmit through time not only the actual events, but also their emotional context, which is so important for anthropological study. Another conclusion concerns the potential of cinema as an informative historical source.