Viktor Turin's Turksib As an Ecological Message

Abstract

The documentary by Victor Turin The Steel Way. Turksib (1929)
is analyzed in this essay from the perspective of interaction between nature and
society. The essay compares Turksib with the avant-garde films of Dziga Vertov
and analyzes the language, editing system and poetics of intertitles characteristic
of Turin’s film. It is noted that in the visual structure of Turksib images of the
“sculpting in time” (according to Andrei Tarkovsky) allocate a significant role to
the ethnographic pictures of local people’s life, virgin landscapes and wild and
domestic animals. The accent is put on the emphatic rhythm of the intertitles,
which actualizes the problems of interaction between nature and society. The
construction of the Turkestan-Siberian railway through the Kazakh steppe
and the Siberian forests demonstrates the advancement of scientism whose
proponents are convinced of the inevitability of scientific and technological
progress. The essay shows how the attitudes of the representatives of power, the
transformers of the region lead to a change in value priorities - in particular,
towards “the pacifying of the stubborn nature” with the aim of putting it at the
service of man. The essay ends with an analysis of Turksib’s significance as an
ecological message and concludes that if the ideas and artistic techniques of
Turin’s film were developed further, the history of documentary cinema in the
following decades could include ecology as one of its major directions.