Screening films on the peripheries: ‘cine-service’ in ‘red chums’ for Indigenous audiences in the rural Soviet North

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article looks at film exhibition targeting Indigenous audiences in the rural Soviet North. It draws on the case of ‘red chums’ (or red ‘iaranga’, or ‘yurt’, etc. depending on the target population), which were a type of political enlightenment facility set up specifically for the Soviet Indigenous peoples. From their implementation at the end of the 1920s to the early 1970s, when they became a staple of Northern Indigenous life, red chums served remote Indigenous communities and reindeer-herding brigades, and are today regarded with nostalgia. Rooted in political enlightenment rhetoric, cinema in red chums was one of several activities to mediate Sovietness to Indigenous people. They exemplify the Soviet notion of ‘cine-service’ in the particular context of an ethnically defined peripheral space, the ‘North’, which can be located diversely in terms of geography and should be apprehended more as a concept than as a region. Ultimately, looking at cinema exhibition practices in the Soviet rural Northern peripheries helps us to re-envision our global understanding of centre-peripheries dynamics in cinema history.