1 In part, this invisibility stems from the fact that the very notion of a “women’s cinema” was itself anathema to the Soviet mind set, including to those who may or may not have been its actual practitioners. And yet, in the history of Soviet cinema, women often occupied vanguard roles: in 1925, Ol’ga Preobrazhenskaia helped to found the All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in 1927, Ėsfir’ Shub invented the compilation documentary and in 1932 recorded the first ever sync-sound interviews Elizaveta Svilova’s editing skills made possible Dziga Vertov’s rapid montage and Iulia Solntseva was the first of only two women to receive the Best Director Award at the Cannes Film Festival (Solntseva received her award in 1960 it would take another fifty-seven years for a second female director, Sofia Coppola, to be so honoured).ĭespite these and other significant contributions, women in the Soviet film industry have remained largely invisible, and it is still remarkably easy to tell a history of Soviet cinema by focusing only on male directors. Ann Kaplan’s 1983 Women and Film to her 2000 Feminism and Film. This lack of scholarly attention to Soviet women’s cinema by critics in Russian / Soviet studies is mirrored by critics outside of it – there are, for example, no essays on Soviet films or on female directors in any of the English-language volumes devoted to women’s cinema, from E. Indeed, to this day, no one has attempted to “recreate or recompose” the cinematic landscape of Soviet cinema, or to make a case for the Soviet women filmmakers who have been ignored or marginalized by subsequent film history. Mayne’s Kino and the Woman Question and Lynn Atwood’s 1993 Red Women on the Silver Screen were the first (and to date, only) books to address the question of women in Soviet cinema, and in both cases they focused largely on representation – that is to say, on women in front of, not behind the camera. Rather than examining the works of women filmmakers that might offer “evidence of a radical difference,” and “of other approaches to filmmaking which would challenge the standard views of and assumptions about the time,” Mayne’s book provided a vital alternative reading of canonical Soviet films of the 1920s (all directed by male directors, shot by male cameramen, and scripted by male screenwriters), that paid attention to how gender and the “woman question” were constituted for Soviet cinema and its difference from classic Hollywood models. In her 1989 groundbreaking feminist study, Kino and the Woman Question, Judith Mayne acknowledged that while her book focused on questions of gender and ideology in Soviet avant-garde films, there were “no discoveries of previously ignored films to be found here,” nor was there an “attempt to seek compensatory treatment for the women directors who have been ignored or marginalized in film history, women such as Olga Preobrazhenskaya and Esther Shub.” (Mayne 1989: 10) “My concern,” wrote Mayne, “is less with recreating and recomposing the cinematic landscape of the 1920s, than with rereading the films which have become a part of the institution of film history and film theory” (ibid.). Film Editing as Women’s Work: Ėsfir’ Shub, Elizaveta Svilova, and the Culture of Soviet Montage Author Lilya Kaganovsky keywords Ėsfir’ Shub Elizaveta Svilova Soviet Union montage editing feminist film history women’s cinema Table of contents yes
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