In the past decade, there has been a surge in English-language publications addressing the role and representation of Indigenous peoples in Soviet and post-Soviet cinemas. This is a topic of vital importance, which had been hitherto underexplored in Anglophone scholarship, despite the abundance of interest in and publications on Soviet and post-Soviet film. The global Black Lives Matter movement in 2020 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have only reiterated the urgent need for a decolonial approach to Soviet and post-Soviet Film Studies in the Anglophone context, a call to which notable academic outlets (including Apparatus journal) have duly responded.
Through the format of a monograph, A Siberian History of Soviet Film marks a crucial intervention in this arena. It devotes its 300 or so pages to the role of Indigenous Siberian individuals, both on and off screen, in the production of Soviet audiovisual imagery of the North. Its account of the contribution that Indigenous Siberians made to the cinematic and televisual representation of Siberian Indigeneity under the Soviet regime is both highly nuanced and sophisticated. It should also be noted that A Siberian History of Soviet Film also draws on important socio-political and historical contexts throughout, therefore broadening its appeal beyond Soviet Film Studies to other fields such as Soviet history, anthropology and social sciences.
The book is divided into three parts, each of which contains two chapters, that are broadly chronological and coincide with the different stages of Indigenous Siberian contributions to Soviet film and television depictions of the North. Part One focuses primarily on the growth of ‘expeditionary’ cinema in the late 1920s to the 1930s, setting out vital context to the representation of Indigenous peoples under the new Soviet regime. The second chapter within this first part is particularly illuminating. Drawing on archival testimonies and reports, it explores how Indigenous individuals — such as guides and actors — who collaborated on early Soviet film productions about the North negotiated the complexity of the ‘filmer-filmed’ relationship. Notably, Damiens details Siberian Indigenous guides’ and actors’ refusal to collaborate or capitulate to demands when they deemed sacred customs and/or spaces to have been violated by the non-Indigenous film crew. In foregrounding such instances, Damiens crafts a sophisticated argument that subverts the colonialist notion of the ‘passivity’ and ‘invisibility’ of the Indigenous subject, instead highlighting important instances of agency within the fraught relationship between the Soviet filmmakers and the Indigenous peoples that they filmed.
Part Two explores the role of Siberian Indigenous peoples in constructing audiovisual discourses of Soviet modernity, tracing the role of Indigenous people in cinematic imagery of the North from the Stalinist period through to the Brezhnev era. Chapter 3 illuminates the shift in production practices in the Stalin epoch, including no longer casting Indigenous actors (and using ‘ethnically ambiguous’ or Central Asian actors to play Indigenous Siberian parts) as well as the growth of studio-based, rather than location-based, film production. Damiens expertly maps this shift onto the wider Stalinist ideological narrative of the Sovietising ‘mission’ having been accomplished.
Chapter 4 explores the role of the Thaw in the production of audiovisual imagery of the North, focusing on the emergence of a new figure whom Damiens describes as the ‘ecological Indigenous individual’. This individual was particularly embodied in the character of Dersu Uzala and his various prototypes (he and they appeared in five key films of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s).1 Damiens constructs a convincing argument that through this archetypal character, ‘backwardness’ was reconceptualised in a positive light – and a critical eye was cast on the exploitation of the land. Iupik scholar Shari M. Huhndorf’s piercing analysis of the colonialist notion of the ‘perhaps lamentable’ yet inevitable ‘disappearance’ of Indigenous culture strikes me as important to Damiens’ insightful discussions of the construction of the ‘ecological Indigenous individual’ here (Huhndorf 2009, 98).
Finally, Part Three focuses on the development of Indigenous Siberian visual sovereignty on television in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Throughout this section, Damiens makes the highly convincing case of its role both in empowering Indigenous voices at the time and as an important precursor to the Siberian Indigenous film production that developed (particularly prolifically in Sakha Yakutia) after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Russian director Anatolii Nitochkin and his first television film Tymancha’s Friend is explored in Chapter 5, with an excellent close reading of the film along with its vitally important production and reception contexts. Some of the key strands of Damiens’ analysis (the politics and problematics of language, casting, representation and, more broadly, identity) that have been apparent throughout the book come to the fore here in her superlative discussion of this key Evenk-language film that had a Russian voiceover. Chapter 6 represents the culmination of these key debates in the discussion of Chukchi writer Iurii Rytkheu’s television films: The Most Beautiful Ships (1972), Tracking the Wolverine (1978) and When the Whales Leave (1981). With great nuance and dexterity, Damiens examines the role and contribution of Rytkheu to these audiovisual representations of Chukchi selfhood, tracing the important production, representational and reception aspects of these television films. Part Three segues neatly into the book’s Epilogue, which focuses on subsequent televisual representations of Chukotka as well as the birth of Siberian Indigenous film production in the post-Soviet period — scholarship to which Damiens herself has contributed significantly.
To conclude, A Siberian History of Soviet Film makes a truly important contribution to Soviet Film Studies, and is presented in such a lively, engaging manner that it will appeal to undergraduates and established Film scholars alike. The pages of the book are also punctuated with wonderful images from film archives which complement the analysis brilliantly. Finally, a special mention should be given to Adrian Morfee’s excellent translation of the original work published in French — despite their linguistic proximity, translating French into English well is not an easy feat.
Adelaide McGinity-Peebles
Lecturer in Film and Television Studies,
University of Exeter, UK
1 Damiens cites these as Dangerous Trails (Opasnye tropy, 1954), Dersu Uzala (both the 1961 and 1975 versions), The Evil Spirit of Iambul (Zloi dukh Iambula, 1978), and Tracking the Lord (Po sledu vlastelina, 1979).
Dr Adelaide McGinity-Peebles (FHEA) is a Lecturer in Film and Television Studies in the Department of Communications, Drama and Film at the University of Exeter. Her research focus is on contemporary Arctic, post-Soviet, and Indigenous film and media. Her recent research project (sponsored by the Leverhulme Trust) investigated the representations of the Russian Arctic in contemporary film. She has published on the topics of ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, and the environment in Arctic, post-Soviet, and Central Asian film and media.
McGinity-Peebles, Adelaide. 2025. Review: “Caroline Damiens: A Siberian History of Soviet Film: Manufacturing Visions of the Indigenous Peoples of the North, trans. by Adrian Morfee”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 19. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2025.00020.383.
URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
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