(Post) Soviet Life and the Anti-Ethnographer’s Gaze
Landen Fulton
Soviet Woman in D’est – Icarus Films
Cold is the night of the wintry Post-Soviet Eastern Bloc. The bones of a dilapidating brutalist state lay the backdrop, as dozens of men and women listlessly line the snow-covered streets. The iron curtain has fallen on the once-dominant Socialist Republic, and no foreign attempt to document the idiosyncrasies (or mundanities) of newly sovereign public life is met without a harsh reciprocal gaze. As if too callous for the aestheticizing tradition of ethnographic cinema, spectacle is suffocated by just a returning stare. When attempting to visualize particular cultures, peoples, or historically significant moments in time, questions of representation are inextricable. Consequently, ethnographic cinema, a genre rooted in the representation of peoples, places, and cultures, has long been subject to critique of over-aestheticization, reductivity, and intrusive spectacle. Yet, some sparse portrayals are hyper-aware of this artifice-reliant precedent. As such, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s From the East (1993) elucidates ethnography’s means of romanticism. She attempts to document Post-Soviet life in the Eastern Bloc with one thing in mind — despite foreign curiosity, the ordinary is nothing to be aestheticized.
It’s been three years since Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) topped Sight and Sound’s internationally regarded “Greatest Films of All Time.” As with any system that attempts to rank art by collective opinion, winners become inherently reflective of the cultural and political zeitgeist, not only of the time they are made, but of the time they are critically recognized. Accordingly, in the 2020s, public progressive thought finally began to catch up with Jeanne Dielman’s almost-radical approach to feminist cinema and its accompanying movement of 1970s’ Second Wave Feminist scholarship. Jeanne Dielman became the arthouse’s cinematic paradigm for the now-normalized notion of the Male Gaze — a term originally coined in 1975 by film theorist Laura Mulvey’s discussion of gender and sexuality in narrative cinema. Yet, while Akerman’s magnum opus is widely known for its feminist ethos and subversion of the patriarchal stare, her lesser-circulated filmography unsettles a comparable cinematic practice of objectification.
Not exclusive to her most reputable feminist approach, an acknowledgment of the audience’s spectating eyes appears as a motif throughout Akerman’s filmography. Appropriately, within her non-fiction films, she takes precautionary measures to avoid the long history of cinematic manipulation. Despite their alleged factual ethos, it is well known that non-fiction and documentary cinema are inextricably tied to fiction, narrative, or rhetoric — complete objectivity is almost never their goal. The non-fiction film may very well persuade, manipulate, romanticize, or aestheticize its authenticity-branded subject. Thus, the genres of travel and ethnographic film have, historically, been heavily linked with an exploitative gaze, where foreign peoples and cultures are made cinematic spectacle by allegedly altruistic (often Western) filmmakers. Akerman is all too aware of this precedent and expectation. Subtly begging viewers to understand the inherent artifice of any cinematic representation, she subverts the ethnographer’s gaze, as well, using overt formal techniques that oppose the traditions of non-fiction (and Soviet) cinema.
In From the East, Akerman, alone with her 16mm camera, travels throughout Eastern Europe, documenting the waves of hope and distress immediately after the USSR’s collapse. The film, elusive to any plot or narrative structure, simply displays scenes of everyday life within the former Eastern Bloc. She documents Poland, Ukraine, Russia, and the former East Germany, yet her exact location is never disclosed within the film. Perhaps reductively, this purposeful geographic ambiguity portrays the newly independent nations as a mere post-Soviet agglomeration. She films the public and (almost) private lives of the intimate portrayed rural and urban landscapes, emphasizing the contrasts between folklife, lively metropolitanism, and urban decay. Ackerman originally intended to capture the crumbling socialist state “before it is too late,” but, at times, her windows into the former Eastern Bloc do not seem time-specific at all. From ecstatic optimism to fear of economic modernity, her cinematic slices of life capture an unspecified intimacy where viewers are not prompted to ogle at inflated foreignness or on-the-nose timeliness. Instead, viewers are left only to gaze upon a collection of quiet, inherently human behaviors.
Now, over 30 years old, From the East is both a time capsule and a cinematic rarity of (almost) authenticity. For an area of the world now so heavily avoidant of the Western gaze, unfiltered windows into post-Soviet life are sparse. Portrayals are distorted or heavily censored by both a propagandistic American lens and the self-affirming, self-isolating collective Eastern European government. At least attempting to be an outlier through reflexive self-awareness, Akerman’s film offers perhaps the closest thing to authenticity that the audiovisual spectacle can reach. Ackerman, of course, is no stranger to this meditative ethnographic formula. From the East is reminiscent of her prior, more beloved and deeply personal, News From Home (1977), where she documents the streets and subways of New York City under her own narration. As in From the East, she acts as both a common passer and an ethnographic intruder, where the individuals she films cannot help but notice her camera’s presence. That is, to her own benefit. Although this unique non-narrative ethnographic approach does not follow the traditional documentary formula that explores (or exploits) an overarching journalistic story, Akerman adopts a Bazinian lens where artifice is acknowledged but ultimately outweighed by realism. A diegetic recognition of her presence is, therefore, validating, and any attempt to subdue the returning gaze within a more conventional approach seems comparatively naive, reductive, and forced.
Unlike other modes of documentary, which attempt to subdue artifice, there are clear distinctions between Akerman as a passive and intrusive filmmaker. At times, Akerman herself is a mere spectator. Her recording gaze appears natural, as if acting as only a mediator for our eyes, completely unknown to the authentic individuals on screen. Unnoticed, she exhibits a group of farmhands at work, the passersby as she discreetly records from her car, and sledding children, naive to her presence. These moments of inconspicuous documentation are Akerman’s best attempt at authenticity, yet their reflexive counterparts more directly reveal that the film is unable to escape medium-inherent deceit.
The poignancy of From the East’s anti-ethnographic approach is felt as her presence is blatantly acknowledged. Diegetically, Akerman communicates that both she and the audience are only trespassers, alien to a land we feel entitled to make a spectacle of. In a linear motion, she consistently films groups of people who cannot help but notice her presence. She slowly drives by, recording people at bus stops, on busy streets, and in highly populated urban communal spaces. Naturally, her unwilling subjects stare into her camera, confused, uncomfortable, unconsenting. The camera and spectator are the intruders, and the film makes us painfully aware of it. Appearing vacant, tired, and unamused, some individuals make unwavering eye contact, while others unsuccessfully try to ignore. She films only common monotony, and we are almost shamed for looking, for expecting anything other than daily life.
At other interludes, Akerman films within locals’ own homes. These individuals, primarily women, pose carefully in front of her camera, performing daily, trivial tasks, often deemed insignificant by the provocation or narrative-seeking ethnographic documentarian. Her overt orchestration of these shots warrants no ambiguity. She purposefully makes her influence unmissable. Eastern European women sit on their couches, in their living rooms, or in their kitchens, cutting bread, cooking, locking eyes with Akerman’s lens. Again, as in her feminist masterpiece, domestic life is unabashedly portrayed for what it is — quiet, monotonous, inherently human.
Of course, From the East’s total refutation of artifice operates against not only traditional ethnographic practice, but also the ethos of pioneering Soviet film theory. Since the birth of the film medium, Soviet thinkers and filmmakers have continually attempted to embed propaganda into cinematic montage. Consequently, even non-fiction films were no exception. Among the most prolific figures in Soviet film history, Dziga Vertov, regarded as a pioneer of the documentary genre through his innovative Kino-Pravda (Film Truth) newsreels, claimed to offer images of “life caught unawares.” Vertov’s more conventional ethnographic approach may have claimed to authentically document Soviet life, but his seminal work, Man with a Movie Camera (1929), drew extensively from staged situations. Naturally, Akerman’s combination of Vertov’s “life as it is” sentiment with a series of unmistakable fourth-wall breaks almost mocks the early Soviets’ relentless attempts to maintain artifice, even in the realm of documentary cinema.
The precedent laid by these founding theorists and filmmakers only makes cinematic objections and satires all too easy for later documentary filmmakers. Akerman utilizes a reflexive eye-contact technique to make her presence and its accompanying artifice known, yet filmmaker Chris Marker adopts a much more confrontational approach to Soviet cinematic ethnography. Marker’s Letter from Siberia (1957), released between Vertov’s founding efforts and Akerman’s postmodern application, documents Siberian life with scrutiny that parodies both traditional Soviet and ethnographic practice. The essay film blends elements of conventional travelogue, reflexive analysis, animation, and still photographs to create a largely unprecedented approach to (allegedly) non-fiction cinema.
Like From the East, Letter from Siberia offers cinematic documentation of the declining USSR, using passive, non-narrative, and sometimes reflexive footage. Yet the film’s visual component is entirely moderated by a playfully antagonizing voice-over narration. Spoken by fellow French director Georges Rouquier, the narration offers an unnamed traveler’s philosophical musings and behavioral interpretations on the people and wildlife he encounters within the remote Siberian region of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. Like much of early ethnographic cinema’s appeal, he emphasizes the area’s isolation as an attraction in itself. Self-aggrandizing, he offers viewers a window into the eccentricities of a remote, peculiar culture, previously unseen by many of his global spectators. Naturally, the faceless narrator is, at times, biased, naive, self-important, and subject to tangent. This characterization acts as Marker’s parody of the traditional documentarian’s voice of god technique that attempts to overtly inform the audience under the guise of an authoritative, all-knowing presence. He fully intends to directly satirize and expose the documentary moderator’s history of manipulation by unmistakably exaggerating his condescending, sardonic testimony. Like Akerman’s approach, the film’s imagery alone exists as passive ethnographic documentation, but the added narration cannot feign even an ounce of sincerity. Rouquier’s condescending voice unambiguously spells out the film’s mocking tone, stating “…and yet our irony may be more naive than their enthusiasm.”
This parodic notion is only further reinforced as Marker directly demonstrates the authoritative power a narration may attempt to assume over its audience’s interpretation. Noting that the Soviet Union could be described as anything between a “workers’ paradise” and “hell on earth, ” he uses identical, repeating footage as an example to openly prove that spectators’ attitude to imagery is almost entirely dependent on this perception-guiding narration. Over the same repeating one-minute sequence, Marker plays with different narrative tones. He first describes the city as a modern, prideful home of picturesque arctic denizens who happily work in the joyful spirit of Socialist emulation to make their city an even better place to live. Immediately preceding this romanticised description, Marker repeats the montage, and the narrator continues with a newfound scorning pessimism, now describing a dark city with an evil reputation, where the miserable Soviet workers apply themselves to primitive labour. Finally, approaching a more objective description for the same sequence, the narrator continues: In Yakut, modern houses gradually replace dark older sections. With courage and tenacity, under extremely difficult conditions, Soviet workers apply themselves to visually improving their city, which could certainly use it.
Three different tones characterize the same imagery in dramatically different ways, and Marker begs us to question who these obviously biased narrations attempt to satisfy. This diegetic game he plays with his audience prompts us to recognize and question the limitations of any attempt at objectivity. He refutes Vertov’s promise of authentic documentation to instead reveal the very exploitation of this sentiment. A blind faith in documentary’s factual basis may, according to Marker, only make the viewer easily susceptible to manipulation. This, of course, was the Soviet film theorists’ entire intent. Voice-over, too, plays a large role in non-fiction films’ exploitative portrayals. While this formal technique was not used during Vertov’s silent era, the later inclusion has proven to be an extension of his founding propagandistic ethos. Yet, like Akerman, Marker adopts the anti-ethnographic gaze by exposing the perception-altering techniques historically used by aesthetics-reliant non-fiction filmmakers. Not only does his narrator continuously adopt a mocking tone that alone ridicules serious uses of the voice-over technique, but his three-part game bluntly exposes its unreliability.
Between Letter from Siberia’s transparent ethnographic irony and From the East’s unrelenting, reciprocal stare, the ethos of anti-ethnography is fully exemplified. These films only undermine the hallmarks of traditional ethnographic documentation. There are no interviews, no dialogue, no plot, information, or diegetic context. They embody, whether satirical or subtly, the sentiment that the camera and spectator are mere intruders. At the core of their thematic premise, they tell viewers to expect nothing other than monotony or blatant fictionalization. Again, the ordinary is nothing to be aestheticized, and no manipulation tactic, unwavering devotion to artifice, or authoritative propaganda should be able to convince us otherwise.
From the East’s ethnographic subversion conjures a sincerity not felt in conventional documentary, Soviet non-fiction, and certainly not Marker’s parodic addition to the documentarian tradition. This sincerity is, perhaps, the best attempt at approaching objectivity. Ackerman presents people existing in their own element, without manipulative subtext or an aestheticizing aim. Even as she takes precautionary measures to destabilize the traditional spectacle of ethnography, her authenticity produces what can only be identified by, as Jean Epstein would say, the soul of its object. Her object, the ethos of the European Bloc and its cold, stoic population, can only be most accurately captured with the recognition of both its limitations and its exploitative history. In return, the wintry night and its fur-bundled inhabitants lock eyes with an ogling audience, but only first through Akerman’s humble, cognizant lens.
