DOCH RYBAKA (TZAREVNA SCALING; literal translation of the Russian title is „Fisherman’s Daughter”) is a folk tale film, with the folk tale element serving as its apparent envelope. Inherently simple in its form, the film in its essence is an exercise in Slavic lore, Russian folk tale tropes, archetypes and morphology, Christianity, the cultural history of Russia, of its social consciousness, its standing and integration within the „modern world” and „modern conscious.”
The narrative of the film is strictly a horizontal line, a story leading from point A to point B. Yet it is augmented with a structure of implications and metaphors that curve the film into a spiral that cycles through several perpendicular dimensions: periods of Russian history, histories of culture and metaphor, the development of mythology and moral of folk tales, Christian symbolism and colour as language. Thus, the film may be perceived by ways of its folk tale narrative only – horizontally – or followed along the spiral of the study into periods of Slavic culture and mythologeme.
The analysis of the cultural complexity requires an insight into the dramatic dependency of any given society on its history and myths that are ethnocentric in essence.
The plot was developed from the work of Vladimir Propp, such as Morphology of a Folk Tale, and Carl Gustav Jung, as well as the personal cultural imprint of the filmmaker. It features a protagonist, an antagonist, an assistant and guiding figures, as well as the overcoming of a series of initiations, confrontations and trials, followed by a return from the netherworld back to reality. The further analysis of the cultural complexity requires an insight into the dramatic dependency of any given society on its history and myths that are ethnocentric in essence.
Slavic history across each of its periods in „tectonic shifts” (from the onset of Christianity to the events of 1989-1991) has formed the characteristics of the region. Not all of the historical aspects, however, have had an equal impact into the Slavic social consciousness, as each generation will attest to its era differently from the others and will communicate idiosyncratically with its past, segmenting and evaluating its heritage in a specific way. At times the very selection of historically significant events is dictated by ethnocultural policies that allow for mystification of the past and guide certain interpretations. Thus myths are created. In Slavic cultures, such a mythologized strata of social consciousness is very active still today. Within contemporary Slavic logospheres, explicitly or more often implicitly, such mythologized schemes of history and structures of power are actualised. The film is intended to reflect such multifaceted mythologized strata and extrapolate their effect over the contemporary viewer. May the current generation find answers to the questions posed in an appeal to lore and history?
