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DOCUMENTARY FILM AS A REASON TO RETURN TO THE PAST (ON THE MATERIAL OF THE RUSSIAN HISTORY OF THE SEARCH FOR THE ZEPPELIN “ITALIA”) // Tomsk Journal of Linguistics and Anthropology. 2022. Issue 2 (36). P. 90-104

In 1928, the main sensation for the whole world was the accident of the airship “Italia”, which crashed on its way back after reaching the North Pole. Several states tried to work together to save the survivors. But the Arctic Ocean did not yield – moreover, the crew of Raul Amundsen’s plane, who fl ew to the rescue of Umberto Nobile’s expedition, became a new victim. It was possible to interrupt the series of failures thanks to the active involvement of the Soviet Union in the operation, which sent three ships with two aircraft to the search area. Thanks to the hard work of the crew of the Krasin icebreaker and the experience of pilot Boris Chukhnovsky, at the last moment, the polar explorers who were losing hope were saved. One of the most notable acts of the propaganda campaign, which was widely launched after the completion of the operation, was the prompt release of the full-length documentary film “Feat in the Ice”, which was shown with great success on many domestic and foreign screens. The film was based on newsreel footage of cameramen who worked on three ships participating in the rescue operation. The purpose of the article is to reconstruct the history of the creation of a film document at the end of the “silent film era”. The object of consideration will be the chronotope of the “rescue air-sea expedition”, put by the directors “Vasiliev brothers” as the basis of the film. In the context of information from different sources about the event being covered, a comprehensive analysis of the content and structure of the film will be carried out. The introduction gives a brief overview of the period of the avant-garde formation of the language of Russian documentary cinema. In the main part, when analyzing the content of the episodes and the plot construction of the film “Feat in the Ice”, literary evidence of the participants in the rescue of the Nobile expedition is also given. With this approach, according to the principle of complementarity-complementarity, the chronicle film should be considered not so much as an independent reliable source, but rather as an emotional image-reason that, in interaction with other information materials, recreates the atmosphere of a historical episode, interest in which has not disappeared even now.

Keywords: airship “Italy”, newsreels, avant-garde cinema, the principle of complementarity, episodes, structure, silent documentary film “Feat in the Ice” 1928