Female Images in Documentary Cinema About the North Caucasus: Kitsch and Ways of Overcoming It

The heterogeneity and diversity of the North Caucasus culture, which has been rediscovered in recent years due to the growing demand for domestic tourism, inevitably attracts the attention of journalists, filmmakers and researchers. The relevance of the issues is confirmed by the release of a variety of audiovisual content devoted to the socio–cultural specificities of life in the Caucasus. Documentary materials about the region in various genres – from reportage to large documentary films – are released regularly and provoke contradictory audience responses. The novelty of the study lies in the compilation of a list of artistic expressive means of audiovisual works that contribute to the creation of a certain image of the region’s inhabitants and the peculiarities of their socio–cultural life. The author analyses contemporary documentary materials about the role and status of women in the culture of the peoples of the North Caucasus, published on the Internet or released on the big screen for 2015–2021. The artistic analysis of the pictures allowed us to identify the main expressive means used by the authors of audiovisual works. Among them we can single out visual metaphor, leitmotif, cliché, montage, presence of the author and voice–over text, interviews, audio accompaniment. These artistic means are not characteristic features of one type of cinema, but they are tools of audiovisual narrative and occur in different proportions in the films. A comparative analysis of the films was conducted, which helped to systematize the material and to determine that these documentaries about the region exist in such artistic categories as kitsch, propaganda and visual anthropology. This has a direct impact on the viewer’s perception of the documentary material and generates a multitude of interpretations both within and outside the region.

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