Documentary Film and the Volga Famine: Save the Children Fund’S Famine (1922)

Abstract

In February 1922, the Save the Children Fund released a short documentary film, Famine, as part of their campaign to raise money for famine relief in Russia. The enormously successful campaign itself and this use of film are widely seen as a significant moment in the history of modern humanitarianism. However, while this was not the first or only film made about the Russian Famine in this period, most previous scholarship has treated Famine as such, in the context of the history of humanitarianism in Britain or humanitarian film. This article argues that an analysis of other earlier films suggests they were also factors influencing the making of Famine. The first of these films was the Russian documentary Remember the Starving (Pomnite o golodaiushchikh) released in September 1921 and screened as part Soviet Russia’s own relief efforts; a version of this was shown from January 1922 by the Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen in his European lecture tour. This film in turn was prepared by the German-based, Communist-led aid organisation, Workers’ International Relief. The newsreels also depicted the famine, in issues released in the USA from October 1921, but not screened in Britain. The article argues that Famine was made to fill this gap, but also as a distinctly humanitarian film response to the wider international films, and that the films taken together mark an important, hitherto neglected moment in the emergence of documentary film.