Georgia in Soviet Film in the 1920s and 1970s

• In Event: Centering the Periphery in Post-Stalinist Transcaucasian Cinema

Abstract

The paper explores the depictions of Georgians as Soviet citizens in the early Soviet kulturfilm,
comparing them to the fiction film of mature socialism of the 1970s. Kulturfilms of the 1920s
attempted to depict the ethnic republics as part of the diverse ethnic landscape of the new country.
While claiming to oppose the colonial gaze, such films still created long-lived cliches of how the
Soviet center has imagined the non-Russian periphery. Mikhail Kalatozov’s Salt for Svanetia
(1929) is one of them. More defined within film genre, Georgy Danelia’s Mimino (1977) is the
continuation of similar framing of ethnic variety and difference within the Soviet Union. Despite
being a product of mature Socialism, Mimino weaves in the ideas of where the country failed to
achieve socialist goals and who is to blame.

Author

• Alla Savelieva, U of Colorado at Boulder