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Visual Anthropology
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In Siberia, “There's Nowhere to Go”

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzera
a
Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies, Georgetown University, Washington, DC,
USA

Online publication date: 04 January 2010

To cite this Article Balzer, Marjorie Mandelstam(2003) 'In Siberia, “There's Nowhere to Go”', Visual Anthropology, 16: 1,
89 — 91
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/08949460309595102
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/08949460309595102

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 Visual Anthropology, 16: 89-91,2003
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DOI: 10.1080/08949460390182854

F I L M REVIEWS
In Siberia, ”There’s Nowhere to Go”
The Cradle. Directed by Raissa Ernazarova; camera: G. Raspevin;
sound: A. Karpenko. Produced by Novosibirsk Telefilm, 1989;
49 mins., color, 35 mm.; English subtitles. Distribution: Fax:
+ 7-3832-35-52-37.
Father, Son, and Holy Torum. Directed by Mark Soosar. Produced
by Weiko Saawa Film Estonia, 1997; 90mins., color, VHS; sub-
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titled in English from Russian and Khanty. Distributed by

Museum of Modern Art, Circulating Film Library, 11 West 53rd
Street, New York 10019. Tel.: 212-708-9530/9532; Fax: 1-212-708-
9531.
Lost Lands. Directed by Manfred von Eyk; produced by Viverra
Films, 1998. 27mins., color, VHS, in English. Distributed by
Instructional Video Services, New Mexico State University, P.O.
Box 30001, Las Cruces, NM 88003. Tel.: 505-646-3700.

During a dramatic forest fire caused by incompetent oil industry workers, a

Khanty father in Raissa Ernazarova’s poignant film The Cradle explains: ”There’s
nowhere to go, not for us or for the deer.” Ten years later a similar theme is echoed
in both von Eyk‘s Lost Lands and Mark Soosar’s Father, Son, and Holy Torurn,
(accepted into the Margaret Mead film festival in 1998). All three films contain
powerful testimonies, featuring the sad and sometimes angry voices of Siberian
indigenous peoples, Khanty and Nentsy, who have lost, or are in the process of
losing, valuable lands to the energy industry.
The most compelling visual drama comes from the Estonian master filmmaker
Mark Soosar, whose camera seems to intrude into the very heart of the family
break-ups and confusions that have been the emotional fall-out of energy industry
contracts gone bad, and of leaders wanting to get the best deal for their people and
themselves without being seen as selling out to oil companies. Soosar’s film

Address correspondence to Balzeum.georgetown.edu

89
 90 Film Reviews

focuses on the story of an old couple living in the woods of Eastern Khanty ter-
ritory. They nurse a sick deer, laid low by smoke and oil, pray with ancestral
images, and use a bear skin to communicate with the spirit world and with a
foster son-leader (Petr Moldanov) living in a nearby town. When they go to town
themselves, to clarify the status of dreaded oil exploration on their lands, an
indifferent (Russian) company man refers them back to their adopted son. The
wise yet helpless Khanty elder buys his wife two scarves, trying to mollify and
console her after an on-camera argument. Early on, he beats a large drum in the
forest, in a scene more evocative of shamanic atmosphere than usual seance
protocol. But this elder was indeed a Khanty shaman of some repute. The dignity
of his prayers and improvisational songs render especially gut-wrenching the final
scenes of vodka-soused deterioration, against a background of huge bright flames
from oil derricks lighting the night sky. From whom did the vodka come?
Far less emotionally fraught, the film of the Dutch director Manfred von Eyk
was made for a television series on ”applied anthropology.” It features the field-
work of the Russian folklorist Olga Balalaeva and American professor Andrew
Wiget, who have been promoting a protected area for Eastern Khanty of the
Vasyugan River region, following a United Nations ”biosphere” model. While the
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film (and fieldwork) occasionally bog down in the inevitable logistical difficulties
of a boat caravan, it too communicates the desperation of backwoods Khanty who,
having relatively successfully combined fishing, hunting, and reindeer breeding in
the difficult Soviet period, now find themselves under siege for their lives and
lands. An existing nature preserve in this area is not enough. The active leadership
of Khanty “community cooperative” president Vladimir Kogonchin, shown too
briefly, has been crucial in a movement to expand the protected territory and
prevent Khanty from signing away rights to their lands. The Native Americanist
Andrew Wiget’s final statement, ”You can even pollute a river and have it recover,
but if you destroy a culture it is gone forever,” reveals a somewhat static, purist,
and romanticized view of ”culture” that permeates the film. Yet precisely this
strong conviction has led to a very valuable MacArthur Foundation project to map
Khanty reindeer pasturage and sacred places.
Raissa Ernazarova’s film features the respected Nenets poet Yuri Vella, who is a
reindeer breeder and, subsequent to the film, became a well-known defender of
indigenous rights. Married to a Khanty woman, Vella cogently explains on camera
that Khanty and Nentsy in his northern home territory are intermixed. While the
film stresses the destruction of a crucial and nurturing river by poorly planned
road construction, important points are also made about debilitating boarding
schools where Khanty children are beaten, and about the arrest and persecution of
Khanty shamans in the Soviet period.
A useful cinematic device is the introduction- of the film’s ”characters” at its
start, enabling the viewer to follow new speakers somewhat better than if they
appeared without context. We learn of the Khanty family, plied nearly senseless
with alcohol by an oil worker, who then robbed them of everything from food and
furs to reindeer antlers. We sympathize with the bright boy who dropped out of
school in disgust, and the reindeer breeder elder who killed and sold all his deer,
rather than let them fall into the hands of Russian hunters. Unfortunately, the
subtitles are hard to read and contain poor translations (from Russian, not Khanty
 Film Reviews 91

or Nentsy). For example, the translations of “witchcraft” for shamanic practice,

and ”idol” for ancestral images, are quite misleading. The sound of New Age
music in the background is sometimes disconcerting, especially when it competes
with snippets of delightful Khanty music featuring zither and dulcimer-like
instruments. The film literally clangs with the sound of oil rigs, jarring but
necessary to communicate the multidimensional assault on the senses represented
by the energy industry. The film’s date might seem a disadvantage. Yet one of its
most important contributions is to remind us that the energy industry, begun in
the 1960s in West Siberia, made searing incursions into indigenous life well before
the breakup of the Soviet Union and the advent of the current, chaotic, heavily
state-subsidized, post-Soviet “market” economy.
Ernazarova’s film ends with an exquisite but abandoned Khanty ornamented
birch bark cradle, symbol of the demise of Khanty cultural life and the difficulties
of its rebirth. For its time, at the end of the Soviet period, the film was adventurous
and hard-hitting, depicting gritty realism over glossy Socialist Realism. Ten years
later, Mark Soosar shows how much deeper a film can bring viewers into the pains
of indigenous life. He did so at some peril, for one of the film’s protagonists
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considered suing him for invasion of privacy. This would not have happened in
the Soviet period, for the award-winning film, available through the Museum of
Modern Art in New York, could not have been made.

Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer

Center for Eurasian, Russian
and East European Studies
Georgetown University
Washington, DC 20057, U S A