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Festival of Visual Culture: "Man at the Turn of the Century", Petrozavodsk, Russia 25-28.09.2003

A review by Berit Madsen

The Finnish ethnographic filmfestival Festival of Visual Culture celebrated its third anniversary in September this year. Whereas the previous two filmfestivals have been held in Joensuu, Karelia, in northern Finland, this year the festival moved to Petrozavodsk, the ‘capital’ of the Republic of Karelia in north-west Russia. This particular arrangement was an outcome of cooperation between the festival’s main organizer Pekka Silvennoinen/the Arts Council of North Karelia in Joensuu and the Ministry of Culture in Russian Karelia. A good part of today’s Russian Karelia was under the Finnish flag until it was annexed by Russia during the Second World War. Most of the Finish inhabitants evacuated to the Finnish side of the border, leaving their houses, fields and physical history behind. Petrozavodsk has been celebrating its 300th anniversary in 2003 and the Festival of Visual Culture fitted well into the Finnish Week Programme of the celebration. The cross-border filmfestival cooperation should, however, in the words of Pekka Silvennoinen also be seen as a common interest from both sides of the Karelian border in closer cultural ties and exchanges. And as such filmfestivals are notoriously brilliant events for creating relations and exchange.

The festival was an intimate event with almost all filmmakers present to introduce their work. Personally I am quite fond of these small-size festival arrangements as they offer the possibility of profound discussions of films presented as well as often have an atmosphere of informality which allows real meetings of this global colleague hood. All participants were hosted in the same huge, deep-red Stalin epoch hotel some 500 meters from the screening place, took Russian style meals in the hotel restaurant and vodkas in the night time for those with little need for sleep which all together added to the intimacy of the event. The organizers had, moreover, allowed sufficient time between each screenings for proper debate.

The film festival presented a fine programme of both brand new and more recent anthropological documentary films from the hands of Scandinavian filmmakers as well as a repertoire of recent and archival films from Russia. One brand new film was Ambassadors (57 min., 2003) by Jouko Aaltonen from Finland – a real premiere as Aaltonen put the last hands on his film the very day before coming to Russia. The film is about the culture of a specific modern global tribe, the ambassadors, and its specific rituals, common language and codes of conduct. More specifically, the film is a portrait of the life, professionally and privately, of a Finnish diplomat family, the Linholms. In the film they set out for their new post in a long row of international posts. This time it’s India and the film follows the Linholms as they arrive in what is at one and the same time a new country, a place of living, a next step in their career - and a particular lifestyle which is not that unfamiliar though.

Most ethnographic films intend to move beyond the surface of cultural practice to understand the personal experience of the protagonists on a deeper level as well as the variety of factors which partake in structuring values, individual choices and experiences. In the case of ambassadors: How would a filmmaker approach a subject which by (professional) nature keeps up appearances, which asks of its ‘actors’ to minimize personal preferences and feelings in favour of an accepted diplomatic way of acting and being?

Aaltonen chooses wisely to give priority to the attempts of the Linholm family to live a family life as normal as possible in the midst of this particular world of diplomacy. By following Mrs. Linholm in her daily activities as well as the whole family whenever they are gathered we understand the balancing acts which this lifestyle demands of its ‘practitioners’. In a very touching scene Mrs. Linholm is informed that her mother has passed away. Aaltonen is careful not to dwell on her face as she tells about her grief and how her husband also has experienced loss of family while being away from Finland. This happens during the family’s preparation for a huge official gathering on the Finnish National Day which demands of Mrs. Linholm to push aside personal pains and other irrelevant feelings in favour of, as she puts it herself, ‘playing diplomats’.

Aaltonen also travels with Mr. Linholm to reception after reception, meeting after meeting and on his official travel to Nepal. As audience one cannot differentiate one meeting from the other and this seems to be one plot of the film: The repeating rituals and common unwritten laws for conduct makes it possible for a diplomat to move from one place to the other without loosing thread with his professional world. Visually expressive scenes show the professional ways of both giving and receiving visitor’s cards with the use of only one hand and we hear a representative of the Finish embassy repeating himself over and over again when giving gifts at official meetings and saying ‘this is Finnish art…’.

To enlarge the complexity of this cultural phenomenon of diplomacy, Aaltonen makes interviews with a series of former and present ambassadors, e.g. the Danish ambassador living in a split-family with wife and kids home in Denmark (which might be the future ‘practice’ of ambassador life?). The former Finnish ambassador delivers a striking comment as he remarks that one reason for moving each 2-4 year to a new post is to prevent the ambassador from getting too involved in the country of his post and thereby run the risk of forgetting the interests of his country. I think that its quite bizarre to have an institution which produce a tribe of people who are not allowed to get attached to the place they live in – something which perhaps could be called ‘a culture of distance’. This aspect is also visually apparent in the film as we drive with Mr. Linholm in his ambassador car through the poor streets of Delhi or in the scenes where the daughter Annette plays alone either in the huge empty house or on the lawn outside with a huge fence separating the world inside from the outside. Aaltonen does, however, not fall into the trap of making cheep points and this contrast is never exaggerated but just shown as part of the reality.

The anthropologist Iikke Ruohnen is, in an interview intercut, very precise in contextualising the culture of ambassadors as modern nomads, as a tribal culture and thereby adding an anthropological frame for understanding this culture. At the festival there was some discussion on whether it could be called a tribe or not. In my opinion the concept is quite fitting. As the film so brilliantly shows, the whole life of ambassadors and diplomacy is encompassed in the sense that more or less all aspect of its life refers to itself, it’s a cultural, social, political environment with clear rules, a value system, a common language and to some extent also in-marriages in the sense that it takes certain individuals to cope with this particular existence. Aaltonen does, however, never forget to show the human face of his protagonists. As a last comment, it’s a relief to watch a film about ‘people in power’ as a contrast to the majority of ethnographic films dealing with minorities on the edge of society as poor, marginalized etc.

Another recent production from a participating Finnish filmmaker was The Sorrow and the Secret (29 min., 2003) by Lasse Naukkarinen. The Sorrow and the Secret is a brilliant attempt to tell an extensive and complex History through an individual: it’s a story of how the ‘black years’ (the Finish Civil War of 1918 and its aftermath) are alive in an individual’s present life and consciousness. The film thereby creates what can be called ‘living history’. The film follows the ceramist Catharina Kajander as she is working on a big terracotta sculpture, a woman’s torso, through which she expresses the tragic history of her family. As she makes the terracotta clay look like granite we understand that her grandfather worked as a granite stone worker in Hanko during the Civil War and probably died in prison camp after the Red Uprising. The mother of the protagonist was then adopted by another family and from the Red uprising and onwards the events of the Civil War in Hanko put its mark on the whole line of women in the family. As the torso Catharina is making has no arms and legs, it symbolises in her own words that ‘one cannot escape one’s faith’.

I deeply admire how Naukkarinen make his films very sharply focused as he again and again manages to cut into the bone of a story. He doesn’t fall into the trap of including disturbing aspects, and he always goes around his subject and protagonists with a warm and human gaze. Concerning this story about the Finish Civil War its not difficult to imagine how the film could have been told differently in the hands of another filmmaker with inclusion of archival material, interviews with a whole range of survivors from the 1918s etc. Instead Naukkarinen invites us to understand this complex History by his very simple focus on one individual. At the same time the film tells more stories as it can also anthropologically be seen as an interesting film in the genre of ‘material culture’: How a ‘ordinary’ material such as granite encompass a story, small or big, but always a story.

Another interesting ‘Finnish acquaintance’ was the film End of the Line (60 min., 2000) by Iiris Härmä and Visa Koiso-Kanttila. The film sets out to explore the challenging theme of globalisation, in this case such as it is seen and experienced by a group of factory workers at the former family owned bus body factory, Carrus Helsinki. The factory was sold to the Volvo group about a year before recording the film and the film crew follows the workers during what is to become the final year of its existence. Volvo plans to centralise all its European bus production at a mammoth factory in Poland and in the end the workers at Carrus gets the choice of moving temporally to Poland to teach Poles to take over their jobs or row up in the line of unemployed Finnish workers. In-between the beginning and this end, the film dwells with the factory workers, their hopes, fears and thoughts, in particular following the senior shop steward Pertti Oksman whose dairy serves as a narration in the film. There is a touching scene when a 65 years old worker is fired due to a cut-down of staff. His colleagues organize a small good-bye party for him in their lunch break canteen, serving coffee and cake in an atmosphere of strained cheerfulness. When the time comes for leaving the factory for the last time, he carries two plastic bags and a bouquet of flowers with him. A contrast to his life-long career as a factory worker and a scene which is hard not to see as a symbol of arrogance from the global industry towards its employees. Somehow this scene also marks the beginning of the end. Before this happens, though, the workers fight to save the factory from closing down by all means available to them: strike, voyaging to the Volvo headquarter to talk to the leading staff, considering the possibility of taking over the factory themselves etc.

For the factory workers the closing down of the factory is not just about loosing their jobs but also a clash with their loyalty towards their employer and the pride they put into doing their jobs as properly as they can. As remarked by one of the workers ‘even though we feel badly treated, we have done a good work’. As such the film moves into a more subtle aspect of globalisation: The disappearance of the ‘race of faithful workers’ in the old-fashioned sense of the word is something not less exotic than any other so-called disappearing tribe. This aspect comes fully through in the words and facial expressions of the workers when they talk about it. I would, though, have loved to see more of their craftsmanship and learned about it through visual images.

The film is shot in a traditional observational style and probably also influenced by the fact that it’s made for television. This doesn’t, however, take away the strength of the story of ‘the local of the global’ and last but not less important, it’s urgent that these events and stories are documented and shown.

A much more ‘local’ film is At Home in the World (63 min., 2003 – final version) by Rossella Ragazzi, lecturer at the Visual Anthropology Unit in Tromsö, Norway. Local film … and then by second thought –no. Ragazzi and her camera follows Else, an elderly Sami woman living in Sørøya, one of the most remote islands of Finnmark at the very Nordic coast of Norway. Actually the film is, as I see it, somehow a tribute to this remarkable women. Though Else definitely is settled in her physically remote homestead, she invites us to participate in larger stories such as the deeds of the German Army in west Finnmark during the World War II as Else memorises it and her childhood. But the largest non-local story of the film is Else’s expressions, verbally and physically, of universal human capacities and emotions: love, spirituality and sensing the world around oneself.

Else lives by herself, takes care of her small husbandry and seems to be a person whom (a selected group of) family and neighbours are fond of visiting for talking about God and Nature or getting her view upon whatever occupies her visitors mind. One senses that Else is satisfied on her own. Maybe it was only by the coming of Ragazzi and her fellow researchers (Eivind Merok and Holger Hole) that Else got into story telling? After the screening Ragazzi said that she felt like a child or student in the company of Else who introduced her to knowledge of Living and of Nature in its widest sense. Their relationship turns the film into a very warm portrait. And it’s a class-room example of the depth which can appear when the relationship is understood as the most important in a filmproject. Thanks for reminding us of that!

The festival also presented two students film from the Visual Cultural Studies programme in Tromsö: Abdoullahi Baba’s film Cows are better than Money (35 min., 2003) and Vadim Likhatchev’s No Terminal (46 min., 2003). Abdoullahi, himself a Cameroonian, takes us in his film to Djoundé – a small village in northern Cameroon and to Habibou, the main character who is quite fond of his cows. Habibou belongs to the ethnic group which in anthropological literature is often called Fulani but who themselves say Fulbe, – an ethnic group living in about 15 different African countries. Habidou is a former nomad who has abandoned his nomadic life for a settled existence which allows his children to go to school. The film doesn’t give us much insight into the wider political or social context for this process of change which influences so many people in the area. Instead the film settles with the family and their daily activities – the caring for and milking of cows, harvesting corn, collecting water, eating, and the dialogue between the filmmaker and the main protagonist Habidou. The first part of the film reveals a particularly funny dialogue between the filmmaker and Habidou as the latter asks Abdoullahi to taste some of the fresh milk pouring from the cows’ udder. Abdoullahi refuses with reference to the deceases he might get from it, to which Habidou replies that the filmmaker cannot describe the milk if he hasn’t tasted it himself..? As it was remarked after the screening, this small sequence shows how a transformation of an ‘informant’ into an ‘assistant’ and finally into an ‘anthropologist of a film’ can take place as revealed when Habidou wisely turns the argument of close participation onto the filmmaker himself, hitting the nail on the head that it’s not possible to acquire any understanding of milk (or anything else) if you stay in the distance. In this case Habidou becomes the anthropologist, teaching his ‘student’ the secret of knowledge acquisition.

The other Tromsö student film No Terminal by Russian filmmaker Vadim Likhatchev is set in the village Taman on the coast of the Black Sea in North Russia. In contrast to the calm atmosphere of cows in Cameroon, this film brings us to the very heart of a struggle of a small group of eco-activists against the construction of an ammonia terminal by the chemical corporation TogliattiAzot. The filmmaker chooses to follow the activists in their daily discussions and activities: planning of demonstrations and protest meetings, hunger strikes and being arrested – all of which takes place in the context of an otherwise quiet celebration of a Cossack festival in the village. It becomes clear, though, that the situation is not that simple but entails a rather complex situation: A clash between Cossack tradition and hierarchy and the young activists, the position of the local inhabitants and the police in the conflict situation and (possibly?) also a clash between the young ‘global nomadic activists’ such as the Rainbow Keepers who composes the main part of the activists. To me, they seem to be a group that will head anywhere in the world if there is something to fight for but who possibly doesn’t always correspond in their ideas and approaches with the locals? Personally I am not well informed about this area and the history of the Cossacks and to me the film would have benefited by introducing some of the context which could help differentiate and decode all those sequences in the film which were definitely heavily loaded with meaning. The film is, though, very important as it documents and highlights the situation of the struggle and moreover, it is full of good, friendly-atmosphere hanging around the young activists and in this way brings much more human life and substance into the situation than a more classic reportage of the situation possibly would.

Estonian filmmaker and anthropologist Liivo Niglas, familiar from his highly appreciated film The Brigade (2000) about Siberian reindeer nomads, was present with a new film from the same area Yuri Vella’s World (58 min., 2003). This time, though, the film didn’t dwell on the lives of nomads but instead is a portrait of Yuri Vella, a charismatic forest Nenet. The forest Nenets compose a small ethnic group of about 2000 members who live in the forest Tundra, most of them as settled reindeer herders.

At first sight Yuri Vella is but one amongst other men of his ethnic group but it becomes apparent that he in some ways is different. He chooses to turn his back to the life of town-settlement and has moved to the forest, he has managed to establish an elementary school in his wintercamp to give his grandchildren a proper education and teach them reindeer herding skills ‘as they no longer know anything about nature, reindeers etc.’ as he himself puts it. As in The Brigade Niglas walks quietly around with his protagonist as they talk about life and Yuri Vella informs about his philosophy of living with and in Nature: Not to be too greedy such as his father who could not resist the temptation of killing more foxes than necessary which, according to Vella, caused his young death. A very funny scene carries this basic philosophy of nature and living further as Vella explains the tradition of ‘giving’ calves to presidents. This makes it possible to detect the state of affairs of the president and his politics as the well-being of the calf will reflect that – and we then get to understand that the last calf, given to Putin, has now died.

As Yuri Vella puts on a video of himself, made by German Television, we get a hint that Vella is even more special than is revealed during the film. Niglas told after the screening that Vella actually is a quite famous ‘indigenous TV-star’ and has been portrayed by several TV-stations. He apparently also understands how to use this fame to express his visions and perhaps succeed in changing his life. I fully understand that Niglas chooses to portray Vella from another perspective than the more ‘exoticising’ programmes (such as the German TV-portrait which highlights him as a shaman). But at the same time it could have expanded the complexity of this highly interesting reindeer herder if this other level was more explicit in the film. One thing there can be no doubt about, though, is that Niglas is a master of the classical ethnographic observational-participatory filmstyle.

The festival also presented a package of Russian anthropological and documentary films – spanning a period from the 1920s to today. What seems as a common feature amongst recent anthropological Russian films, at least according to the selection made for this festival, is an interest in ‘Old Believers’ (religious communities that have survived the Soviet Union era), themes of ‘traditional culture’ and ethnological research subjects.

The archival films Hunting and Reindeer Herding in Komi (1927) by Bendarski Judin, and L. Kapitsa & V. Pronin’s Along the Shores and islands of Barents Sea (1929) both goes into the relation between herders and nature. The first follows reindeer hunters going hunting, putting up their tent in the snow and other daily episodes – the second is more like a ‘nature film’ with visuals of the sea, the coast line and plain-like areas and only in the late part of the film we see scenes of nomads and their reindeer cattle and fishing activities. For both films one remarks the beautiful camera work and poetic visual storytelling so famous for filmmakers at these times.

A third archive film was On Taymyr (20 min., 1961/2002) by Eduard Timlin, portraying a group of Nganasans – the most northern reindeer herders in the world. The film is apparently also the only existing film which describes this group of people as deer herders and not as nomadic hunters. Epistemologically, the film is set within the scientific visions of evolution which saw hunters as representing our common past. This particular group of nomads should be seen as incorporating a way of life corresponding to that of the Bronze Age. Now they soon will turn modern. Apart from this scientific gaze, the film is - as the two above mentioned films - a delight to watch for its visual qualities. We follow the herders’ activities with their deer, going fishing, packing down and putting up tents, working with skins etc. The film then jumps to the modern life as it unfolds in settled village communities with wooden houses and children picking flowers. Suddenly we see a tractor, stuck in the mud, and it can only be seen as a meta-commentary on the evils of modernity. Other films with a clear political message were N. Prim & V. Pate’s film The Mari People (1929) set in central Russia. The film is a typical propaganda film of its time, showing how bad everything was under the Tsars and how good it all became under Soviet power.

The ‘good of the Soviet power’ was more than once challenged during the festival as most of the recent Russian films took a point of departure in what luckily managed to survive the Soviet era, such as religious beliefs. The film The Second Birth (26 min., 2003) by Natalia Litvina is based on video material made by the filmmaker and researcher in the period 1999-2003 amongst a community of priestess old believers in the region of Upper Cama in the Ural Perm district. The practice of second birth baptizing is crucial in distinguishing between adherents to different versions of Christianity and in the film we follow an elderly old-believer as she teaches a group of young girls and boys how to carry out the ritual. This is for me a very interesting scene in the film as it goes beyond the naïve idea of believers just ‘knowing almost genetically how and what to do, and instead the film gives time to see how they are taught how the kneel and carry out the prayers in the correct manner, before they are taken to the lake where they repeat what they have just been taught before they receive their ‘second birth’.

In the film At Zhaky apai’s (13 min., 2003) by Elana Popova & Yuri Bashurov the protagonist, an elderly lady living in Karamas-Pelga village in Southern Udmurts, is busy preparing for the ‘Great Day (B’ig’im nunal) in the Easter holiday. Old eggs and small branches in a decoration in the corner of the living room are removed and thrown away and replaced with new ones and HUGE breads are prepared and baked in just as HUGE ovens accompanied by the words: ‘thank God for work, if you don’t want to work you don’t want to live’. Relatives come for a visit and hour-long séances of singing takes place. The film has its fine moments following the preparation for the visits and celebration, the singing scenes, though, goes on in what almost feels as ‘real-time’ and they would serve the film better if cut down to a sequence fitting the story and rhythm of the film and the rest of the material kept for archival and research purposes. The second film by Yuri Bashurov The Svirel (13 min., 2003) also takes on the perspective of the particular as it portrays a flute (an old chuvash ‘svirel’) maker Leonid Tsi’plenkov. He cuts the svirel out of a branch and seems very devoted to his flowers as he composes songs about blossoming gardens. Bashurov’s third film at the festival The Krjashens (13 min., 2003) also explores the theme of ‘Old Believers’: it is set in an orthodox Tatar-kryashen community in Udmurtia, following inhabitants of Porim village as they are invited to say orthodox prayers in Tatar language, as well as to a Russian wedding and an Udmurt commemoration of the deceased. We are informed by the protagonists of the film that the people of the community could not practice their faith when they were young – they were not allowed to baptise, to carry out weddings in their own manner etc. Older people reflect on how it was being Christians in the past and comment that the young generation don’t master the tradition and language of the community as ‘they are all Russians’.

As mentioned, a large part of the recent Russian films at the festival put focus on ‘surviving cultural practices’ and thereby on important aspects of the Soviet history. I would personally also love to see films about present modern day Russia, about young people in Moscow or people living in the outskirts of Russia. Not least as Russia is undergoing rapid changes. My curiosity hopes for films which can bring me into ‘whats-happenings’ in this part of the world today.

Besides all the filmic experiences at the festival, the Russian part of the festival team had organised a wide range of happenings, the most unforgettable being a group of female entertainers singing naughty songs and inviting us for dance and going in bus through the dark Petrozavodsk forest to sauna in the Russian-Finland friendship wooden hut. Thanks a lot. And thanks to Pekka Silvennoinen and all the organisers for a warm festival in cold autumn Karelia.