Formation of cultural memory by means of film: The case of the historical documentary film “100 years of dreams: the way of the yakut statehood”

The article is devoted to understanding the cultural memory of the people using the example of studying the historical documentary film “100 Years of Dreams: The Path to Statehood.” The author relied on modern theoretical and methodological definitions of the concept of “cultural memory” as symbolic representations expressed in figurative and symbolic interpretations. For the first time, the author applied the concept of cultural memory in the study of similar topics in the interpretation of M. Halbwachs, P. Nohr, J. Assmann and others, highlighting the most important of these ideas. The historical and documentary film “100 Years of Dreams: The Path to Statehood”, released in 2022 on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the formation of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic, and written by playwright V.E. VasilievKharyskhal and historian A.A. Borisov. It became the first in the history of Yakut documentary filmed in the genre of historical documentary using elements of a feature film. Various newsreels have been filmed in Yakutia for several decades, but the Nikita Arzhakov’s film is the first experience of this kind. The system of ideas laying the base for the cultural memory of the Yakut people about the events of the formation of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic – the first national statehood in Yakutia – was formed over the course of a century. The film’s script reflected this stable system in all its main components, from the images of the founding leaders of the Yakut autonomy to its specific visible symbols, right down to the tradition of the annual holiday dedicated to the date of formation of the Yakut Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic at the republic’s level. This film is seen as an institutional copy of this system of ideas, which becomes a historical source linking the past with the present.

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