Two films from the archives of the Institute of Ethnology and Anthropology of the Russian Academy of Sciences about the choreographic art of the Chukchi and Eskimos will be discussed. The films were made by Alexander Oskin and Maria Zhornitskaya of the Institute in the 1970s. Using a camera in the field was not the usual practice of Soviet ethnographers. In addition, they were separated from interaction with colleagues who had similar experience, and, along with professional filmmakers, were included in common ideological tasks. How did all of this define the characteristics of Soviet ethnographic cinema? How did Soviet ethnographers use the camera in the field? How did they search for a visual language to present phenomena difficult to describe verbally? How did other scholarly traditions influence this (if they did), Soviet ideology, and the established canons of visualization of Soviet nationalities? I will attempt to answer these questions in this paper.
