Documentary film directors and their interest are surely attracted to numerous disasters and misfortunes, uninvestigated cases that remained an unrecognized event. Quest for truth requires a completely different documentary style and narrative form and a film about an unknown disaster aims at seeing the result of imagination and reality. TV and movie viewers have become accustomed to the fact that they are often offered an independent investigation in modern documentaries. This is an incredibly difficult burden for an author who has certain tragic stories used in the plot of a documentary film. Naturally, the TV documentary format is, more frequently, more intensively loaded with verbal material and reportage-specific details than documentary cinema in general. Moreover, possessing an inexhaustible resource of technological innovations and effects, modern documentary cinema uses this very visual resource while telling a story full of surprises and assumptions.
And yet, the impact of the word and its correctly pronounced intonation is unchanged for the viewer in most cases if it is in organic harmony with the content of the image. It is true that the main power of the moving image is still its visual essence but the word is an addition to the information and the informative mission belongs to it.
Noe Dumbadze's documentary film, "The Case of the Dyatlov Group" was shot in 2024 and one of the first questions caused by watching it is the following: Why did the tragedy, the death of the expedition in unknown, terrible conditions of the Ural mountains in the Soviet period, become a subject of great research interest for the author? However, from the first few episodes, it can be seen that the case of the Dyatlov group simply does not remind us of any of the tragedies and cases we are familiar with, neither in terms of scale, or in unknown details, nor in character.
The story of the expedition that died in Ural is very similar to a mystical, horrifying revenge, where there can be many versions, and the author naturally talks about these versions but the main thing is still different: the story of the bodies that were thrown out of the tent by an unknown force and found at an incredible distance, in a terrible condition remains in its original position to this day: the audience does not know the real reason, neither the representatives of the older generation nor the younger generation.
The case of the Dyatlov group seems to be a physical analysis of the story that happened in 1959 during the Soviet system, where it is very difficult to determine the cause and to correctly identify the original reality, that is why this case is probably the only one among the cases the essence of which is from the beginning to the end (and not partially) shrouded in mystery. Noe Dumbadze's film creates a kind of synthesis of journalistic investigation and the dynamics of documentary cinema. The director does not claim to find out the truth but for this purpose, starting from artistic staging details and extensive episodes, ending with the first and previously unannounced interview with one of the main participants in the case, he uses everything that will help to restore the iconic and real picture. The story is indeed mystical. The members of the group were found dead, killed by an unknown force and, for the most part, in unnatural positions, in the remote Ural mountains. The expedition itself left no trace of any secret mission. Even the search does not confirm this version for the author of the film despite the fact that such a motive was also revealed. And yet, the point is that because of the powerful impact of television documentary cinema, this story was able to distinguish the great tragedy of a small scale from the great northern expeditions or other famous cases. Not just death, but the revival of inhuman fear, and the author was not able to show it on a large scale, despite the fact that the narration (especially the verbal material) lacked significant professional refinement in terms of intonation and spoken lexical-speech manner.
The use of phraseology is probably how the author envisioned it, and it really adds more informative nature to the work but it partially lost the main thing, which is quite interesting throughout its timeline.
The author of the film found an image that evokes a sense of mystery by searching for a television documentary, where no eye-catching effects are used, boredom caused by endless demonstrations of lifeless bodies is not born, and distrust of artificially created versions is not revealed. On the contrary, the ratio of showing this tragedy itself and the choice of photographic material in the image, as well as the scarcity of staging details, are very interesting, effective and expressive, because in it, in each of these episodes and frames, the main thing lives – fear. And fear, seems to be the main driving force and real character for the dead heroes of this film as well as the surviving hero, since it managed this time to revive the era and present the horrible and primal instincts of animals as a feeling so familiar to documentary cinema but rarely well brought to life. And to explain what the power caused by fear can do, about which we don't know much even in the finale of the film, although we could see the main thing: documentary cinema kept this feeling alive, or rather, revived it and that was the important thing.
Multiple television productions, reportages turned into films usually find it difficult to embody any instinct in this way or to bring it alive at the expense of great work and effects. Unfortunately, this has become a feature of modern television documentaries (worldwide). It is true that we cannot talk about any work, but there is a trend. Just as the interest in the thousand versions of the mystery of the Egyptian pyramids is lost in this way, with the same sad "success" different versions created by computer graphics (for example, the flood) are violently offered to the viewer through documentary "modeling of events" and all this has become a boring monotony of the already fashionable way. That is why the evasive attempt of the young author acquired for me a new and completely natural meaning in the direction of the artistic image despite the obvious gap in the verbal authorship line – he was able to easily and without any artificially exaggerated spectacular findings, show the ominous views of the mysterious forest, the face of human fear, loneliness, photography, which came into the viewer's focus with a few frames and thus told us how fear lives, what power it has, what can be its artistic equivalent, so to speak, and an easy match on the documentary screen, by creating natural noises and a feeling of snowy loneliness. The exclusive interview, which the author conducts with the hero of the film, a searcher who survived, is the most minimalistic artistic form of these fears and versions – analytics turned into a portrait, which itself drags us into the narrative.
This direction can return documentary cinema to its original nature – the ability to create or preserve alive the natural feeling that distinguished it in the 1920s, when there was still no effects were created to enhance the feeling, which even at its greatest manifestation can be boring.
Ketevan Trapaidze
