‘I went there to live’: A case-study of Šarūnas Bartas’s Tofalaria and Few of Us

Abstract

I argue that contemporary filmmakers, including today’s most artistically acclaimed Lithuanian film director, Šarūnas Bartas, whose works examine an ethnographic subject, question the rigid distinction between art and ethnography and prompt us to rethink the definition of ethnographic film. However, since they are primarily interested in the result, these filmmakers inadvertently perpetuate a cinematographic colonialism instead of trying to challenge obsolete models of representing other cultures. To make my point, I analyse two of Bartas’s early films: Tofalaria (1986) and Few of Us (1996), both shot in the area of the Eastern Sayan Mountains informally known as Tofalaria and inhabited by the Tofalars, the smallest indigenous ethnic group in Russia. Although they focus on the same subject, these films employ two different strategies of filmmaking and visual representation: Tofalaria can be considered as a conventional ethnographic documentary in which a voice-over describes the images and tells the story of the Tofalars, whereas Few of Us is a fiction film which has a narrative structure and features professional actors alongside local amateurs. Both films share the same premise: Tofalar culture and the Tofalars themselves are dying. Moreover, Tofalaria is depicted as a non-place, to use Marc Augé’s term, and has therefore lost its anthropological meaning.