Audient Authentic: Turksib

This is the third in my 2020 monthly series watching “classic” (pre-1990) documentaries.

After starting this chronological series with two films in the 1920s – two really good ones at that – I had wanted to move further afield when I delved into the 1930s. It was not to be, in terms of year, format (silent vs. sound) or even geographical location. In fact, although the movie I chose was released in 1930, it is listed as a 1929 movie in some locations – in other words, the exact same year as the movie I watched in February, Man With a Movie Camera.

The problem with the significant documentaries of the 1930s, such as they are, is that very few of them are of feature length. I am rigid in one way when it comes to comparing films, and that is length. I can’t rightly judge a 12-minute film alongside a 100-minute one – they just aren’t both apples.

I had identified a film I thought I wanted to watch, Pare Lorentz’s 1936 documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains, but balked when I saw it was only 28 minutes long. Over the years, I’ve expanded down my definition of feature length to include something like the 45-minute masterpiece Sherlock Jr., but 28 minutes was just a bridge too far.

So I decided to use my very helpful library-funded streaming service Kanopy to give me some new choices. You can filter by category and by the year of its release, which gave me seven 1930s documentaries to choose from. Only two of them, however, surpassed that magic 45-minute barrier, both examples of early Soviet documentary. The longer of the two, the 58-minute Turksib, became my choice for March.

Director Viktor Turin’s film of the building of the Turkestan-Siberia Railway was indeed not released until May 24^th, 1930, making it a 1930 film by my definition. However, its Wikipedia page starts out by calling it a “1929 film,” which makes sense only in the fact that it was filmed in 1929. In fact, it was released before the railway was opened, and in the end portion, it plays very much like a promotional video for the railway, with a lot of flashing of the year 1930 as the time when this great event will occur. So I can see why a person might think of it as a 1929 film, even though it is not.

What’s more, the film was made in the very same part of the world as Man With a Movie Camera, further making it a less than ideal next pick in a series devoted to the full spectrum of available samples falling under the umbrella “classic documentary.”

I’ll try to do better form here on out.

Anyway, I enjoyed this film. It doesn't tell a whole lot of a story, but it shows a couple different far-flung regions of the greater Russia area and their vastly different climates, from the dry plains to the south to the frigid tundra of the north. We get a bit of a flavor for life in both locations (which also kind of reminded me of my first film of this series, Nanook of the North) and can see the nascent attempt to bridge the two between the titular railway line. We see local groups move from resistant to accepting and even begin to help out the effort. 

What I really liked about Turin's approach was his sense for a part standing for the whole. He had a great sense of how to establish his settings by focusing in on unlikely details, which also come in a succession that shows his great understanding for pacing and editing. He sets his camera up in really interesting locations as well -- sometimes under a train as it is going along the tracks, even. 

I don't know that this is a particularly notable or enduring document, but I found it to be assembled in a very watchable way, including maps that show the terrain to be covered, and a good ethnographic sense of the lives of the locals. And though it does become quite sensational in the end, as it previews the coming attraction about ready to open, that doesn't detract from the smart and even-handed approach to the material that precedes it. 

I feel like I could/should add a bit more, but it's been three nights since I watched it and to be honest, some of the details have already fled my brain. But I did really like it, so, good accidental choice for March.

And then, just for the hell of it, I also watched The Plow That Broke the Plains, as a bonus.

I enjoyed this to some degree, but I feel like it cheats a bit more in its approach to the documentary format. It too is trying to show an important regional change over a period of time, using some sort of similar maps as Turksib to show the swath of the U.S. that it considers to represent the great plains, and how they were tilled over time to become a great wheat-producing region. But in telling this history, it uses footage that was obviously shot only recently to represent, for example, a time of great production and profitability of the regional farming during World War I. Only World War I was actually nearly 20 years before this was shot, so you know it's kind of bullshit.

Still, it does give an interesting, if short, survey of the history of the farming of this region, until it was abandoned in the Great Depression. You do get a sense for a 20-year period, even if it relies on things like newspaper headlines and footage that you know is divorced from time to tell the story. Hamstrung a bit by that decision, the film is light on actual humans appearing on screen.

It also feels a bit too "News on the March"-style with its narrator speaking in that dramatic and exaggerated style known to the news reels of the era. It has the same promotional style of the last segment of Turksib, only made more on-the-nose and cheesy (for want of a better word) due the spoken rather than written word. It felt like something I would have watched in school in the early 1980s, a relic of earlier styles of imparting information to people/children, and who knows, maybe I did.

Okay, I've got some good feature-length candidates in the 1940s, I think. After I get these earlier decades out of the way, I'll slow my pace down and begin watching a couple movies per decade.