Shub: Re-Editor, Editor, Director-Editor
Svilova: cutter, editor, editor-director
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.). 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.
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. 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. 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. Ann Kaplan’s 1983 Women and Film to her 2000 Feminism and Film. 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).
Despite 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.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. In the West, women’s cinema, as it had been understood by feminist theory of the 1970s and 1980s, was by definition counter-cultural because it broke with patriarchal conventions of the ways in which women could be filmed and the kinds of stories that could be told about them. But Soviet cinema actively resisted the gendered visual and narrative tropes of classic Hollywood films, while Soviet culture defined itself as providing equal opportunities from the start, thereby relegating the question of sexual difference to the dustbin of history.2 And, while Socialist Realist art produced a number of female artists, almost none of them made it on to the world stage, in part because they were often pushed into traditional arts and crafts (which never counted as high art and therefore was not worthy of museums, criticism, etc.), and in part because women’s art (zhenskoe iskusstvo) was devalued as such, in favour of works that showed a “man’s hand,” a “man’s eye,” or a non-female way of looking or thinking.3
Soviet rejection of Western feminist theory and the repudiation of gender difference as a precondition for thinking of oneself as an artist meant that the “gender of the author as producer” played a much smaller role in the consciousness of these artists than for prominent filmmakers in the West (Stollery 2002: 87-99). Ironically, this also meant that the work of these women in the film industry was lost to history: because their narratives often did not conform to that of their male counterparts and because they never insisted on their status as “auteurs,” their contributions were subsumed by the larger historical narratives that took place around them. Moreover, because Western feminist theory largely focused on the absence of women or on the problematics of their representation, with very few exceptions (for example Kira Muratova), none of these women became a part of the institution of film history and film theory. They first “fell out of the limelight and then out of the film history itself” (see Gaines 2018). This study takes as its point of departure the history and contributions of two Soviet editors/directors – Ėsfir’ Shub and Elizaveta Svilova – in an attempt to make visible what has largely remained invisible: film editing as women’s work.
In the history of Soviet filmmaking, it is hard to imagine two biographies that were more radically different. Ėsfir' Shub was born to a well-to-do Jewish family in Ukraine in 1894, and grew up surrounded by artists, poets, writers, and theatre directors. Her education took her from the Institute for Women’s Higher Education in Moscow to Symbolist circles, Constructivist evenings, and an apprenticeship in Vsevolod Meierkhol’d’s revolutionary theatre. There she met poets Aleksandr Blok, Andrei Belyi, and Konstantin Bal’mont, the writer Fedor Sologub, and others. She was a close friend of avant-garde filmmakers Sergei Ėizenshtein, Dziga Vertov, Aleksandr Dovzhenko, the revolutionary poet Vladimir Maiakovskii, and the Socialist Realist writer Aleksandr Fadeev. She was a welcomed guest at the house of the writer Aleksandr Ėrtel, and at the residence of Osip and Lilia Brik. A picture taken by Aleksandr Rodchenko shows Shub with artist Varvara Stepanova at an “evening of the constructivists,” with Rodchenko’s poster for Vertov’s 1924 Kinoglaz / Kino-Eye (Dziga Vertov, 1924, USSR), visible on the wall behind her.
Fig. 1: “A constructivist evening” with Ėsfir’ Shub (bottom right) and Rodchenko’s poster for Vertov’s Kino-Eye (Courtesy of Alamy Stock Photo).
She travelled to Berlin with Vertov, edited films with Ėizenshtein, spent evenings talking about the future of Soviet art with Maiakovskii. Shub remained at Goskino until 19424, when she became one of the main editors of the newsreel series Soiuzkinozhurnal, later called Novosti dnia / News of the Day in the Central Studio for Documentary Film in Moscow. In 1933-1935 Shub supervised the montage workshop in Ėizenshtein’s class in VGIK. During the war she edited newsreels and continued to teach montage in VGIK when the school moved to Alma Ata on the Black Sea. Her closest friends in the film world were Ėizenshtein, Pudovkin, Vertov, and the critic Viktor Shklovskii. In 1959 she published a book of memoirs of her life in the cinema Krupnym planom (In Close Up), republished in 1972 with the title Zhizn’ moia – kinematograf (Cinema is My Life). Over a long career (she died in 1959), Shub directed over a dozen films, and while “Ėsfir’ Shub” may not be a household name, it figures in many biographies and film histories. As Vlada Petrić claims, along with Preobrazhenskaia, “Esther (Esfir) Shub was the most outstanding Russian woman-filmmaker of the silent era.” (Petrić 1978: 429) 5
By contrast, Elizaveta Svilova is probably the best known editor to have worked in the USSR, and yet, her name is barely mentioned in most of the usual sources on the history of Soviet cinema, and like most editors, she remains under-researched.6 Born in Moscow into a railway worker’s family in 1900, she began apprenticing in the film industry at the age of twelve, cleaning film and aiding the selection of positives and negatives in a film laboratory. From 1914-1918 she worked for the Pathé studio in Moscow as a cutter and photo-printer (Penfold 2013: 14). She worked as an editor for pioneering pre-revolutionary director and actor Vladimir Gardin, and on Meierkhol’d’s 1915 adaptation of Portret Doriana Greia / The Picture of Dorian Gray (Vsevolod Meierkhol’d and Mikhail Donin, 1915, Russia). In 1918 Svilova moved to Department of the People’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros), in her words, to “nationalise the film industry,” (ibid.: 15) and in 1922, she was managing the editing workshop at Goskino (State Cinema). It was there that she met Dziga Vertov and thus began their life-long collaboration, which together produced some of the greatest documentary / non-played films of the early Soviet period, including the 1929 Chelovek s kinoapparatom / Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929, USSR).7 Between 1939 and 1956, Svilova edited over one hundred non-fiction films and newsreel episodes, and directed such significant WWII documentaries as Berlin / The Fall of Berlin (with Iulii Raizman, 1945, USSR, winner of the 1946 Stalin Prize); Osventsim / Auschwitz (1945, USSR), and Sud narodov / Nuremberg Trials (1947, USSR).
Upon Vertov’s death in 1954, Svilova changed her name to Vertova-Svilova and retired from the film industry to dedicate herself to the preservation of Vertov’s memory and archive. Thus, her own role in the Soviet film industry is overshadowed by the larger-than-life presence of her husband, despite the fact that Vertov himself frequently referred to his life-long collaboration with Svilova and included sequences of her editing in his remarkable Chelovek s kinoapparatom (as well as, much earlier, in Kino-Pravda No. 19). In 1970, Svilova, in collaboration with Ilia Kopalin and Semiramida Pumpianskaia, released a re-edited version of Vertov’s Tri pesni o Lenine / Three Songs of Lenin (Dziga Vertov, 1934, USSR), in an attempt to restore the work to its original form.8 Alongside it, she also published the book Tri pesni o Lenine (Three Songs of Lenin) (1970) and compiled a festschrift in 1976, Dziga Vertov v vospominaniiakh sovremennikov (Dziga Vertov Through the Eyes of his Contemporaries), to commemorate Vertov’s contribution to Soviet cinema. In the final years of her life, she toured Europe with the re-edited version of Three Songs of Lenin, which by then included the ten original negatives of Lenin she found in 1932. It is largely because of Svilova’s efforts to preserve his archive that Vertov is remembered today as one of the greatest Soviet avant-garde filmmakers, rivalling even such a well known figure as Sergei Ėizenshtein.9
Fig. 2: Elizaveta Svilova and Dziga Vertov at the cutting table (Courtesy of Alamy Stock Photo).
How do we measure a film editor’s contribution? How do we begin to see where the work of the director stops and her work begins? In the formative early years of cinema (whether the US, Western Europe, or the USSR), editors – or “cutters,” as they were originally called – were often women, and unlike the professions of director or cinematographer, editing was always considered “suitable for the female sex,” because of its similarity to sewing, weaving, and other forms of female handy work (Meuel 2016: 8). As David Meuel and others have noted, in this early period, women were well represented in the producing and directing ranks (there were at least twenty-five female directors working in the US film industry during this time), but they were most dominant in another key filmmaking role: that of the editor or cutter (see Meuel 2016: 8). Initially, film directors in the US cinema industry did their own cutting, which in the first years of filmmaking was fairly rudimentary. But as the amount of film footage that a director needed to make a film increased, a new breed of behind-the-scenes worker appeared to sort through, organize, and assemble this “raw” material. Beginners in this field were called “patchers,” and they worked their way up to “negative cutters.” The job requires workers to sift through enormous quantities of filmed footage by hand to find the shots that worked best and then put them together in the optimal way to tell stories. And because the work was “low paying and considered menial and monotonous (work akin to knitting or sewing),” women – usually young women just out of high school with little or no professional training – were considered ideal candidates for the job (Meuel 2016: 8).
All this changed around 1910, when D.W. Griffith and others began to understand filmmaking as first and foremost an art of editing, that could literally mean the difference between a film’s success and its failure. The husband and wife team of James and Rose Smith, who worked with Griffith on such classics as The Birth of a Nation (1915, USA) and Intolerance (1916, USA), perfected many of the editing techniques that radically altered film art, including dynamic crosscutting to build suspense, the strategic use of a close up to intensify drama, the variation between medium and long shots to move the narrative forward (Meuel 2016: 8). And indeed, it was Ėizenshtein’s viewing of Griffith’s Intolerance that spurred the development of Soviet montage theory, and the notion that film is simply raw material until it is assembled on the editing table (Eisenstein 1949).10
In her 1923 application to the “Council of Three” to join the “kinoki” (Vertov’s filmmaking group, can be translated as cine-eye group), Svilova described the work of an editor before Vertov’s newsreel series Kino-Pravda, before “montage” became the operative mode of Soviet cinema.11 She noted that she had been working in the cinema industry since 1910, and that during that time, she had worked for a number of firms, with a number of directors, and on many feature films, most of them dramas, since the newsreel (khronika) “scarcely existed,” nor was there any understanding of editing as such. Film directors, she writes, would make a film by putting it together in the order of the scenes, give instructions where to stick in the intertitles, look at it on screen, “and the picture would be considered ready, that is to say, edited” (Svilova 2004: 88). The set was filmed from a single location 25-30 (or in rare cases ten) meters away, so there was nothing for the director to edit, and any experienced editor (montazhnitsa – fem.) could create the film without the help of the director. Svilova notes that in this way, working in the Gardin studio she assembled films for directors Nikolai Malikov and Iosif Soifer, while over at the Khanzhonkov studio the editor, Vera Popova, used to edit their directors’ productions without any difficulty.12 This was even more true for newsreels, she notes, which no one thought to edit in an artistic way. Newsreels made by Pathé and Gaumont were shot from a distance of 40 meters and put together by the cameramen who shot them, with the additions of intertitles. Again, no one thought about editing these pieces of film in such a way as to produce a work of art.13 Svilova claims that for her, the breakthrough came in 1922, when she saw the first issues of Kino-Pravda and met its “editor” (redaktor – usually used for literature / newspaper editors, probably here to underscore the fact that Kino-Pravda was a newspaper, modeled on Pravda), Dziga Vertov (Svilova 2013; Tsivian 2004: 89). Svilova’s account, while exaggerated to draw attention to the work of Vertov and the kinoki, nevertheless highlights the shift in the very idea of film editing that took place precisely between the 1910s and 1920s. Whereas earlier, film was merely “assembled,” it could now be artistically constructed.
In the US, as the cinema industry became more successful and more homogenized, work roles became more specialized, and they also became more segregated, with gender emerging as one of the principal determinants in who worked in such roles as producer, director, and editor. What Janet Staiger has called Hollywood’s “assembly phase” meant an increasingly detailed (and gendered) division of labor, and the use of the continuity script, standardized by 1914, meant that tasks could be assigned to specialists who would not necessarily have to work closely together. Thus, the editor could assemble hundreds of numbered shots into a film with minimal input from the director (Bordwell et al. 1985: 134-147; see also, Thompson 1993: 386-388). Between the late 1920s and the early 1940s only one woman, the editor-turned-director Dorothy Arzner, regularly directed films for a major Hollywood studio. Male directors, meanwhile, adopted “overtly masculine forms of dress such as jodhpurs and high laced-up boots as well as stern, often harsh, on-set behaviours” (Meuel 2016: 10). With the exception of editing, behind-the-camera work was no longer seen as a female profession.14
The gender politics of the early USSR were in theory inclusive, and its cinema industry was also less segmented and regimented than its American counterpart.15 As Kristin Thompson shows, like early Hollywood, the French, German, and Soviet industries in the 1920s were similarly structured by a division of labour, but in each of them, most of the control over the final product remained with the director, with a smaller number of editors when compared to the US. Instead, all three industries employed an “assistant” or cutter (called a “monteuse” in French and “die Kleberin” in German, both gendered feminine), responsible for splicing the dailies together and helping the director, who was also the main person in charge of editing (Thompson 1993: 388). Soviet film directors typically edited their own films, making both the rough cut and the final work print version, while Soviet editorial duties more closely resembled those of an assistant editor in Hollywood: “sorting shots, splicing the rushes together, and eventually cutting the negative” (Thompson 1993: 396). Indeed, arguments put forward by Ippolit Sokolov and others in the late 1920s in favour of an “iron scenario” were precisely aimed at montage directors like Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Vertov, who rejected the very idea of a script by which their work would be bound, in favor of assembling the film entirely on the editing table (Sokolov 1926). As director Semen Timoshenko wrote in 1926, “exposed footage was not itself artistic – it only becomes so when arranged into a whole” (Timoshenko 1926: 74-45).16 For the most part, Soviet film directors were men, while, as Martin Stollery notes, “fleeting references in memoirs and visual evidence from photographs taken in Soviet cutting rooms suggest it was often women who performed the auxiliary role of editor” (Stollery 2002: 95).17 Going into the 1920s, in the USSR and elsewhere, women often worked as screenwriters, editors / cutters, costume designers, and the like, often without receiving on-screen credit.18 Thus, it is precisely because women played a less visible role in the establishment of the Soviet film industry that Shub and Svilova emerge as such important figures for historical analysis. Together, their work shows us why we need to pay closer attention to women’s contributions to Soviet cinema (and world cinema, more broadly), while their roles as editors help to shift our focus from the director-auteur, always already conceived as male, in another direction.
Compared with Svilova, Shub’s career in the cinema looked more like the careers of the male avant-garde directors around her. The fact that we know so much less about her than about her close friends and fellow filmmakers Ėizenshtein and Vertov is in many ways the result of gender bias stemming from both the historical circumstances in which she worked and our own gendered ways of seeing. As Stollery has noted, while Shub’s practice of authorship conformed to the avant-garde ideal of “author as producer” much more so than Ėizenshtein’s or Vertov’s, from an industry perspective, her films could only be perceived as “an extension of the type of work usually performed by invisible, uncredited women” (Stollery 2002: 96).
Like many early Soviet filmmakers, Shub started out in the theatre, as an officer in the theatre Department of the People’s Commissariat of Education (Narkompros). From there, she went to work as a film editor for Goskino (State Cinema), in 1922, where she was put in charge of re-editing foreign films imported for Soviet distribution, and where she produced her own compilation documentary films Padenie dinastii Romanovykh / The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), Velikii put’ / The Great Way (1927), and Rossiia Nikolaia II i Lev Tolstoi / The Russia of Nicholas II and Lev Tolstoy ((1928). Shub learned her craft on the job and during evenings spent in Lev Kuleshov’s apartment watching him edit pieces of film on his light table, as well as by studying closely the work of fellow Goskino director, Dziga Vertov.
As Shub notes in her memoirs, Zhizn' moia – kinematograf, the editing table and the screening room taught her the proper construction and composition of a shot, forced her to develop a memory for different shots, their internal structure, content, and movement, as well as to determine the rhythm and tempo of the work as a whole.19 She learned when to cut from a long shot to a medium one, from a medium to a close up, and the reverse. Re-editing films made it possible for her to understand the “magnetic power” of scissors in the hands of someone who is literate in the art of montage, and to begin to work toward a form of invisible or continuity editing (“stremit’sia, chto by perekhody byli ne zametny”), cutting in such a way that the shots would replace each other smoothly with a match on both movement and content within the shot (Shub 1972: 76). Re-editing both foreign and domestic films – including Westerns, detective films, films with Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, Pola Negri, Asta Nielsen, Lillian Gish and others – Shub learned the way pieces of celluloid are not merely stuck together, but need to be organized in order to produce both rhythmic and dramatic effects (ibid.: 8). She saw that film required a different kind of acting from the theatre, and that montage was a way to bring out the “emotional” quality of both the actor and the film. Her favourite task was to splice together partial and unmarked rolls of film, without intertitles or libretto, into a coherent narrative – or, as she put it, “to create a scenario for an already existing film” (ibid.: 76).
At Goskino’s Montage Bureau, Shub re-edited over 200 films for ideological content, becoming an expert at montage, and experimenting with composition and rearrangement to create new films on the editing table. Ėizenshtein learned montage from Shub. The “Brothers” Vasil’iev were her students.20 Together with Ėizenshtein, for example, she reedited Fritz Lang’s Dr Mabuse, der Spieler / Dr. Mabuse, the Gambler (1922, Germany), in which, according to Shub, they “changed the narrative structure of the film as well as the intertitles. Even the film’s title was changed; it became Gilded Rot (Pozolochennaia gnil’)” (Shub 1972: 75; see also Petric, 1984: 21-46). Stollery notes that unlike the typical editorial experience, Shub’s original post in Goskino’s Montage Bureau enabled her to exercise and develop her creativity, without being overshadowed by a director (Stollery 2002: 95). Shub is the only woman recorded as having worked at what Yuri Tsivian describes as this “professional elite club,” which acquired a “certain reputation within the film industry” (Tsivian, 1996: 336). Yet, Tsivian’s account of this professional elite club barely mentions Shub, and instead, focuses on a number of male editors, including “Benjamin Boitler,” who was “recognized as the wittiest of the them all” – but who has since “passed into oblivion” (Tsivian 1996: 336). Tsivian goes so far as to dedicate his article to this figure of wit and wickedness, while noting in a footnote that while he was able to track down the other editor, “Birrois,” mentioned by Ėizenshtein in this context, “the record does not mention Boitler” (Tsivian 1996: 343). This does not prevent Tsivian from speculating on why Ėizenshtein, who by that point was already working on his first film, Stachka / Strike (1925, USSR), was sitting up all night re-editing Dr Mabuse. One answer might be: in order to learn montage from Fritz Lang, but that answer seems unsatisfying, since “nothing of Lang’s style can be traced in Eisenstein’s films.” A more adequate answer, Tsivian suggests, is that he was there “to learn from Boitler” (Tsivian 1996: 341). And yet, by far a still more adequate answer might be: he was there to learn from Shub. Not from the witty male editor whose existence we can neither confirm nor deny, but from the woman who was literally sitting right next to him.
Fellow filmmaker Sergei Iutkevich, for example, describes the terrifying moment when he was faced with the prospect of editing his first film, Kruzheva / Lace (1927, USSR) – the feeling of complete helplessness when looking at reels of celluloid that needed to be spliced together according to some “unknown laws” by which “raw film material becomes a film” – and turning to Shub for help because of her “sense of the segment” (chuvstvo kuska) (Iutkevich in Shub 1972: 5-6). At this time, Goskino was still located in the old Khanzhonkov studio space that was not even equipped with a Moviola, meaning that one could not see the rough cut until the following day, and all editing, in Iutkevich’s words, was done by “intuition.” The art of montage for Iutkevich was the ability to combine “dead” pieces of celluloid in such a way as to produce a “living” film, and “the best practitioner of this art was Esfir Shub” (Iutkevich in Shub 1972: 6).
Another telling story was Shub’s contribution to the making of Kryl'ia kholopa / Wings of a Serf (1926, USSR) on which Shub worked together with the director Iuri Tarich and screenwriter Viktor Shklovskii, participating in on-location shooting and directorial discussions. Watching the shoot as it happened, Shub noted that the actor Leonidov (who played the role of Ivan the Terrible) had a particularly strong facial expression when the film would first begin to roll, squinting one eye as the lights came on. These early shots were not considered part of the usable material and usually cut from the negative before those were handed over for editing, but Shub inserted them into the film, using these “accidental” shots to bring out the character of Ivan, and which, according to Iutkevich, “made all the difference to the film’s success” (Shub 1972: 9; 80-81).
Friends with Vertov and Rodchenko, and married to Aleksei Gan,21 Shub thought of cinema as a constructivist enterprise, in which the method of montage allowed her to assemble archival footage to tell a new story with previously existing material, earning the title of “director-editor” (rezhisser-montazher) (Shub 1972: 9). As she wrote in 1927:
Over the course of two months I watched 60,000 meters of negative and positive film. We made 5200 meters of positive prints (from duplicate negatives) for editing; out of this, 1500 meters made it into the film. While editing I sought to address the documentary nature of the material. Without abstracting the material, without focusing exclusively on formal tasks (subject matter – objective form – just means of expression), I used the functional method of Constructivism. This allowed me to consistently and steadily, despite the very limited range of the filmed historical events, create a cohesive film story demonstrating a certain phase of the Revolution (Shub 2016: 18).
Nonetheless, when Shub first moved from re-editing foreign features to making her first compilation film, her role was not perceived as that of director, but merely an editor “assembling” found footage. Padenie dinastii Romanovykh was originally released without giving Shub on-screen credit, and Maiakovskii and Ėizenshtein both had to step in to insist that the film carry her name (Mayakovsky 1988: 172). The head of Goskino, Il’ia Trainin understood Shub’s work as that of a basic cutter gluing together pieces of film shot by others, a work that “anyone could do” (Leyda 1960: 224-225, and 230). It was in fact, Shub’s “authorial invisibility” as Stollery has called it, that made her work revolutionary, by making it part of a collective, rather than individual enterprise (Stollery 2002: 93). The process of locating, sifting through, compiling, reshooting, reframing, enlarging, matching speech, action, and movement within the frame of pieces of film originally shot by many different cameramen – all of this Shub did in order to produce a coherent and fluid narrative that told the story of the years leading up to the February revolution with documents that had been made for an entirely different, if not the opposite, purpose. To make successful compilation films (called “montage films” in Russian – montazhnye fil’my), Shub needed to edit not just for artistic and ideological consistency, but also for differences in style, quality, format of film stock, and speed – all this was necessary to achieve visual consistency. A great deal of (unacknowledged) creative labour went into the production of this film-document, made with largely “second hand” materials.
Shub’s Padenie dinastii Romanovykh was the first of three compilation films she made during 1927-1928. Shub researched the film at the Museum of the Revolution in Leningrad, where for two months she poured over 60,000 meters of film, locating and organizing existing film material, convincing the Soviet government to buy 2,000 feet of negatives about the February revolution from the US, and eventually, shooting an extra 1,000 of the final 6,000 feet of the final film (Malitsky 2013: 164). Shub thought of her work as similar to that of an engineer who would construct a new building or machine from already existing parts. Mikhail Yampolsky calls Shub’s films “reality at second hand,” a kind of “readymade” cinema, in which the archive took precedence over individual vision (Yampolsky 1991: 162-163). But fellow filmmaker Grigorii Kozintsev put it a different way: in a 1972 documentary film Ėsfir’ Shub – Krupnym planom (Ėsfir’ Shub – In Close Up), Kozintsev stresses that for the first time, “history” became the star (geroi) of cinema. For Shub, he notes, montage was not the mere act of gluing together pieces of film, nor was it merely a way to tell a story; montage was a way of thinking, of expressing thought on the screen (“montazh ne kak skleika, montazh ne kak sposob rasskaza, montazh kak khod mysli”).22
The length of an edited sequence became one of Shub’s main formal achievements. Her reliance on found archival footage and her use of long takes were seen by Soviet critics as a way to restore authenticity to the film document and to “connect” with the masses (Stollery 2002: 93; Yampolsky 1991: 162-163; Roberts 1991). This was particularly true of the reception of her Padenie dinastii Romanovykh, assembled and released in 1927, and commonly acknowledged as the first compilation documentary film.23 Following Shub’s lead, Lef critics (such as Viktor Shklovskii, Osip Brik, and Sergei Tret’iakov) argued in favour of documentary films composed largely of long takes, which would allow for contemplation and examination of the material. They claimed that this method and form would help film become less a product of individual vision, literally and figuratively, and thus less likely a distortion of the filmed material reality. Using many different people to film raw material would make the images more relevant to a variety of viewers. And the long take would restore documentary authenticity by imbuing particular images with more authority.
For critics and fellow filmmakers like Brik and Kuleshov, Shub’s success lay in the slower pacing of her editing, particularly when compared to that of Vertov’s brother and cameraman, Mikhail Kaufman, who, according to Kuleshov, “had not grown out of his inclination towards rapid montage.” In Kaufman’s work, “the best sequences are too short – you cannot examine them properly” (Yampolsky 1991: 162).24 In 1929 Shub herself formulated the basic aim of her montage: “emphasis on the fact is an emphasis not only to show the fact, but to enable it to be examined and, having examined it, to be kept in mind...” (Shub 1972: 268; also in Yampolsky 1991: 162-163). Working and thinking “collectively” to actively change the conditions of production, Shub created an archive of film documents that could be used by everyone (compare this to Vertov’s similar call for a film archive), developing a new genre based on the repudiation of the notions of authorship, very much in opposition to her fellow avant-garde male directors (Stollery 2002: 93-94). And as a result of this stance, she was nearly erased from film history. As Stollery notes, following Ian Christie, Western evaluation of early Soviet cinema can be broken down into two original phases, roughly understood as “Eisenstein vs Pudovkin” (before 1968) and “Eisenstein vs Vertov” (after 1968). Stollery suggests that in our current third phase, we might look instead at “Eisenstein vs Shub” to rethink the notion of authorship for Soviet cinema, but also, I might stress, to acknowledge that our knowledge of film history has been shaped by certain kinds of conventions, inflected by historically constructed gender distinctions that govern the stories we tell about people and events.
Thus, for example, we might look once more at the famous picture of Ėizenshtein on the throne of Nikolai II, the picture that, as Stollery notes, vividly encapsulated the tension around authorship within Ėizenshtein’s biographical legend. The photograph, taken during the making of Okt’iabr / October (1928, USSR), of the “stumpy director sitting across the Tsar’s throne in the Winter Palace dressed in what appear to be workman’s overalls,” demonstrates Ėizenshtein’s position vis a vis art and authority – both revelling in it and gently mocking it at the same time (Stollery 2002: 88). As Marie Steton has claimed, “With a mock gesture of His Majesty waving his hand, [Ėizenshtein] ordered photographs to be taken of himself in his role of iconoclastic emperor of a new art form. But as he sat on the throne, his short legs did not touch the floor. Defiantly, he flung his legs over the arms of the throne and was photographed again” (Seton 1952: 96; and Stollery 2002: 88-89).
Fig. 3a: Ėizenshtein during the filming of Okt’iabr (author’s collection).
Fig. 3b: Ėizenshtein and Shub during the filming of Okt’iabr (author’s collection).
But another photograph, made while Ėizenshtein and Shub were both working on their anniversary projects to commemorate the 1917 Revolution, shows a completely different picture: Ėizenshtein huddled next to Shub in one of the palace chairs, surrounded by the detritus of Imperial power, now being used as props for films, the two of them smiling and hugging. This is not a picture of “His Majesty” the director, of the author as auteur, but rather, of two colleagues and friends catching a break from work. This is a snapshot, rather than a portrait, reproduced nowhere but in Shub’s own book of memoirs, where she writes about her life in the cinema in the context of all of the male artists by whom she was surrounded. The picture forms part of the collective nature of her work in the cinema, of her non-insistence on herself as an “author,” of a conscious self-fashioning that was not about that particular form of self-promotion.25 But historically, it also means that while the picture of Ėizenshtein has been reproduced from biography to biography and serves as the image of his artistic genius, Shub’s remains hidden, and it is only by looking into the archive, into the memoirs that still remain mostly untranslated, that we can see that she was there too.
A similar paradox of visibility and invisibility haunts the work of Elizaveta Svilova. Apprenticed in the film industry from before the Revolution, Svilova was one of a handful of film personnel who successfully made the transition from the pre-Revolutionary cinema industry to the Soviet period. Even more than Shub, she was trained entirely in editing: she began her career as a photographic printer and editor for Pathé Frères in Moscow, and moved up from film cleaner to negative cutter to editor. In 1919, she began working as an editor of the Moscow Film Committee of the People’s Commissariat of Public Education (Moskinokomitet Narkomprosa); from 1922-1927 she worked as an editor in the state film production agency, Goskino (renamed Sovkino in 1927); from 1927 in the Ukrainian film studio, VUFKU; from 1932 for Mezhrabpomfil’m; and from 1936-1956, for the Central Studio for Documentary Film (Soiuzkinokhronika, renamed TsSDF in 1944)26. Her filmography lists many directorial assignments and, as Annette Michelson has put it in a somewhat roundabout way, “she is an outstanding example of the interesting development and realization of careers for women in a cinematic tradition which was grounded in an aesthetically innovative and politically revolutionary era” (Michelson 1984: 12n).
In 1919, working for the Film Committee in Malyi Gnezdnikovskii Lane in Moscow, Svilova met Dziga Vertov, the eccentric young director who had jumped from the second story in order to test the capabilities of rapid filming, and who was already working full time on the Kino-nedelia / Cine-week newsreels and developing his theories of the “kino-eye.” The story (told by Svilova in her memoirs) is that one day, she found Vertov wondering the halls of the Kinokomitet in utter despair over the fact that none of the montage girls (montazhnitsy) were willing to edit the newsreel to his specifications, throwing out the ten- and five-frame bits of films he had given them as useless. Svilova “took pity” on the artist, and a relationship – not only of editor and director, but of wife and husband – was born (Vertova-Svilova 1976: 66).
The intimate link between directors and editors has often been described as a marriage (see, for example, Meuel 2016: 18). In the case of Svilova and Vertov the intimacy born of their working relationship translated into marriage and the intimacy born of the marriage transformed their working relationship. Svilova describes the joy of working next to Vertov at the montage table, of his infectious enthusiasm and attention to detail, peering over the minutest details of an individual frame or sequence of shots. Like herself and like Shub, Vertov was guided by “intuition,” determining the length and placement of a sequence and then rearranging, and constructing the whole thing anew (Vertova-Svilova 1976: 68). Sometimes, when there was a tight deadline, he worked with several editors (“montazhnitsy,” again, implying that they were all women) at once, overseeing each segment as if “conducting an orchestra” or playing a game of chess, where many different moves have to be kept in mind at once (Vertova-Svilova 1976: 69). Svilova was the creative collaborator and chief editor for all of Vertov’s major works, and she acted as co-director on four of Vertov’s later films. Indeed, as Jeremy Hicks notes, there is a perceptible shift in Vertov’s later work from the earlier idealized masculine spheres centred on demolition and physical strength, toward a focus (starting with Tri pesni o Lenine in 1934, and continuing on through Kolybel’naia / Lullaby, 1937, USSR) and Tri geroini / Three Heroines (1938, USSR), upon a “feminine sensibility and less aggressive forms of self-realization.” More than Vertov adopting a female perspective, Hicks argues that Vertov and Svilova become an ever closer creative partnership. She becomes increasingly more prominent in film credits, and the pair are listed as co-directors in the credits for Kolybel’naia and Pamiati Sergo Ordzhonikidze / In Memory of Sergo Ordzhonikidze (1937, USSR), and she is listed as co-author of the scenario of Tri geroini. Finally, Hicks notes, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish Vertov and Svilova (Hicks 2007: 108). (And, I might add here, her taking on the name Vertova-Svilova upon Vertov’s death is another way in which she signals that union.)
While Svilova’s own account consistently downplays her contribution, Mikhail Kaufman suggests that it was precisely her joining the kinoki that made it possible for Vertov to achieve his ideas about montage. Working with different temporary editors (montazhnitsy) whose job was limited to gluing together assembled pieces of film, could not hope to achieve the kind of filmmaking Vertov was already advocating. The difficult task of mastering and developing a film language needed the help of a permanent and fully committed “comrade-in-arms” (soratnik), and this is the role that Elizaveta Svilova came to play: she supervised, organized, and translated Vertov’s ideas into a finished product (Kaufman in Vertova-Svilova 1976: 74). As Yuri Tsivian has argued, “Svilova made Vertov’s montage madness a reality” (Tsivian 2004: 24). “As Kino-Pravda developed,” wrote Vertov in 1958, “its crew grew. Svilova mastered the new alphabet. Kaufman developed into a first-rate cameraman. Belyakov became absorbed in the problem of expressive intertitles … every day something new had to be invented. There was no one to teach it; we were on an untrodden path” (Vertov 1984a: 152).
Fellow documentary filmmaker Il’ia Kopalin remembers Svilova as always sitting at the editing table in a well-illuminated corner of a dark basement, while Vertov paced the halls, looking at this or that individual piece of film, periodically snatching a shot and handing it to her with the words, “half a meter, fifteen frames…” (Kopalin in Vertova-Svilova 1976: 105-106). But he also recalls the first time he met them, during the location shoot in the village of Pavloskoe-Luzhetskoe for Vertov’s first feature film, Kino-Glaz. They were walking down the wide village street – Vertov, Kaufman, Svilova, and the administrator Kagarlitskii – looking at everything with interest. Vertov and Kaufman were “dressed elegantly, in their leather jackets,” while Svilova was dressed simply, “blending in with the village girls” (Kopalin in Vertova-Svilova 1976: 105). A Russian working class woman, Svilova could easily disappear into the background, and her role as “comrade-in-arms” made her virtually invisible to the uninformed eye. Yet, what I think is notable about Kopalin’s brief account here is the fact that in opposition to his claim that Svilova was always to be found at her editing table in one well-lit corner of the basement, she was clearly also present at location shoots and that her role as a kinok meant that she participated in the selection of material to be filmed as well as the material to be edited. Pumpianskaia confirms this, noting that Svilova was often present at a shoot, because Vertov relied on her “eyes” and the way she saw things (“Vertovu nuzhny byli ee glaza. Kak ona vidit…”). In fact, as she notes, he often photographed them (Pumpianskaia 2002). And while the overall ideas behind the films were Vertov’s, their execution depended as much on her skills at the editing table as on that of the cameramen who shot the footage she carefully assembled. Vertov recalls the “dark and damp” basement on Tverskoi Boulevard where they sat “continually hunched over bits of damp film,” writing: “the author-director of Kinopravda bundles Comrade Svilova in his short fur coat. It’s the last night of work and the next two issues of Kinopravda will be ready” (Vertov, 1984b: 126), and this is in many ways the best portrait of the two of them, together, hunched over pieces of film, making something radically innovative while lacking in all basic resources, such as heat and light.
As Vertov’s career in Soviet cinema waxed and waned, Svilova’s career took on an independent existence, though without ever severing their partnership. She directed her first film, Bukhara in 1927, and in 1930, began teaching editing techniques, particularly the editing of sound, at the Lenin Institute, while she assisted Vertov in the production of (Ėntuziazm / Enthusiasm, 1930, USSR), the first Soviet documentary sound film. In 1932 she started preparations for their next film, Tri pesni o Lenine, carrying out research by night while teaching during the day. Christopher Penfold has called Vertov and Svilova’s years at VUFKU as arguably the most productive and critically acclaimed of their collaboration, from the “exploration of montage to the design of live-recorded soundscapes” (Penfold 2013: 18). Moving from Mezhrabpomfil’m to Soiuzkinokhronika marked an important transition: here, Svilova’s role developed from Vertov’s assistant director to his co-director, jointly producing Slava sovetskim geroiniam / Glory to the Soviet Heroines (1938, USSR) and Tri geroini, and from 1939 she directed, edited, and assisted on hundreds of newsreels and documentary films, while Vertov was pushed more and more out of the industry that he had helped to build. Pumpianskaia recalls that in the 1940s, Svilova “was always in high demand”: “She proved to be a brilliant master of editing, and all the best directors considered it a blessing to work with her. And as a director she is interesting. At the TsSDF there were three famous women-directors: Setkina, Svilova and Venzher. There was still the great Esfir’ Shub, but at that time she was already somehow out of work” (Pumpianskaia 2002).
As Penfold suggests, for all of Vertov’s films, Svilova performed a “unifying function”; she was “responsible for the overall aesthetic, pace and form of the films” (Penfold 2013: 37), while receiving almost no credit for it from the outside world. As Vertov wrote bitterly in his diary in 1934,
Comrade Svilova is the daughter of a working man who died at the front in the Civil War. She
has twenty-five years of work in cinema and several hundred films under various directors to her credit. She can claim among her achievements the creation, through many years of effort, of a film heritage of Lenin. On the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet cinema, when all her students and friends were rewarded, Comrade Svilova was used as an example, punished with conspicuous disregard, and received not even a certificate. Only a serious offense could justify her lack of recognition. Yet Comrade Svilova’s only crime is her modesty! (Vertov 1984c: 189-190).
Despite becoming, as Vertov notes a few paragraphs later, the “best editor in the USSR,” Svilova’s overall “invisibility” (to Soviet authorities, to film history) is perhaps one reason that her appearances in Vertov’s films, most notably, in his 1929 Chelovek s kinoapparatom have garnered so much attention.27 While the film is (starting from its title) explicitly focused on the cameraman in the act of filming, critics have frequently turned to the depiction of Svilova editing as the moment of its clearest self-awareness, the moment when the film consciously breaks down in order to demonstrate the mechanisms of its production, of the arrival, as Jean-Louis Baudry has put it, “of the instrument in ‘flesh and blood.’”28
Throughout the film, images of Svilova editing are meant to align with images of specifically female labour, from cutting hair to manicuring nails to sewing. This is editing as “women’s work” as Judith Mayne had put it, in the sense that what we are seeing is not only film being put together, but specifically the conflation of editing with traditional women’s craft (Mayne 1989). Mayne’s argument is that Chelovek s kinoapparatom, almost despite itself, aligns gender with class and segregates men and women into the traditional roles of active and passive. Thus, for example, she compares the sequences of Kaufman with a camera to those of Svilova editing, noting that while the (camera)man is out in the city, filming (and braving great feats to do so), the (female) editor is confined to the private space of the editing studio, and shown editing pictures of women and children. She notes that in the editing sequence, “filmstrips are cut, looked at, classified, but never fused together” (Mayne 1989: 174). This is somewhat true of the first sequence in which we see Svilova sift through, cut, and sort into categories the various pieces of film which will become Chelovek s kinoapparatom, but which will also serve to create the kind of film archive that Vertov was advocating throughout the 1920s.29 But it is not true of the second sequence, which precisely pairs Svilova’s task of gluing and assembling the final film with women painting nails (similar in the use of a small brush for delicate work), cutting hair (and cutting strips of film), and sewing (splicing film together).
This sequence is yet another example of the visual analogue between the women’s body and the body of the film, demonstrating the way Svilova and Vertov conceived of editing as a haptic, bodily experience.30 It reminds us that throughout Chelovek s kinoapparatom (and here, it might be important to recall that the Russian title is not gender inflected, is “person” rather than “man”) the woman’s body is fused with the body of the film, starting with the early sequence in which the female dancer’s blinking eyes are intercut with the opening and closing of window blinds, and the quickly opening and closing iris of the camera, and ending with Svilova’s blue eye superimposed on the Kaufman’s camera lens.
Fig. 4a: Woman fused with technology, Chelovek s kinoapparatom (frame capture).
Fig. 4b: Svilova’s eye fused with the camera lens, Chelovek s kinoapparatom (frame capture).
Indeed, if we compare the shots of Svilova editing in Chelovek s kinoapparatom to those in the 1924 Kino-Pravda No. 19, we might note how that earlier sequence informs and complicates the later one. Titled a “camera-race” from Moscow to the Arctic Ocean, Kino-Pravda No. 19 is one of a series of Vertovian newsreels structured as “cine-races” that culminate in his 1926 feature-length film Shestaia chast’ mira / A Sixth Part of the World (USSR). Throughout the newsreel, the “camera” acts as an independent entity, racing a passenger train, traversing vast stretches of Soviet land on the back of a sled, even getting caught underneath the wheels of a freight train, in order to record the actions and people with a mechanical, non-human eye meant to yield not subjective reflections but objective “truth” (pravda). But what is vital for this analysis, is the fact that Kino-Pravda No. 19 ends with a self-reflexive turn that anticipates the famous editing sequence from Chelovek s kinoapparatom, concluding with a sequence of shots of Svilova at the editing table, sorting through negatives for Kino-Pravda No. 19. The final segment of Kino-Pravda No. 19 is introduced by the title: “Selection of negatives for Kino-Pravda N. 19,” followed by shots of Svilova at the montage table (presumably in that one well-lit corner of the dark and dank basement on Tverskoi Boulevard). As she turns on the light to illuminate her work, we recognize (a younger) Svilova sorting through the negatives, which in this case, are not of women or children, but of a train rushing past, of people moving through the city, of factory smoke stacks. The sequence includes rapid cutting and superimposition between shots of Svilova at work, sorting rapidly through the negatives, with shots of the film strip running across the light table. This contrasts with already familiar shots from the newsreel the viewers have just watched, providing them with the negative image, black and white reversed.
Fig. 5a: Selecting negatives for Kino-Pravda 19
(frame capture).
Fig. 5b: Selecting negatives for Kino-Pravda 19
(frame capture).
Fig. 5c: Selecting negatives for Kino-Pravda 19
(frame capture).
Fig. 5d: Selecting negatives for Kino-Pravda 19
(frame capture).
Fig. 5e: Selecting negatives for Kino-Pravda 19
(frame capture).
Fig. 5f: Selecting negatives for Kino-Pravda 19
(frame capture).
The emphasis here is on Svilova looking, on the bodily experience translated into perception. As she examines the strip of film on the light table we see it not as a positive, but a negative, seeing in other words exactly what she sees, rather than its printed opposite. Not the film as it will be projected, but the film as the editor sees it.
The filmstrip’s reversal from positive to negative forces us to confront the materiality of the filmmaking process, documenting the moment of its own production. Moreover, as the film strip begins to move more and more quickly in Svilova’s hands, we cut back to a close up of her eyes scanning the negatives. Faster and faster the film moves through her fingers, and faster and faster the editor’s eyes dart back and forth across the frame, taking in every shot. We are, quite literally, seeing Svilova seeing. Indeed, the moment in which we look up at Svilova’s face is shot from the position of the montage table. The camera (and the viewer with it) has assumed the place of the filmstrip, and we might even go so far as to say, that Svilova is now looking directly at us. It produces, as Mayne calls it, a fusion of subject and object, in which the woman becomes “both the object seen and the perceiving subject,” breaking down the standard Western dichotomy of the look and the gaze (Mayne 1989: 176). The unchecked mobility of the camera is here tamed, and film is brought under the masterful control of the editor, who in this case – as in the case of so many others – is a woman. It is the female editor who organizes, sorts, glues, fuses, and in every way makes cinema possible, creating a work of art out of raw material.
Lilya Kaganovsky
lilya@illinois.edu
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Lilya Kaganovsky is Professor of Slavic, Comparative Literature, and Media & Cinema Studies, and the Director of the Program in Comparative & World Literature at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her publications include The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928-1935 (Indiana, 2018) and How the Soviet Man was Unmade (Pittsburgh, 2008); and the co-edited volumes Mad Men, Mad World: Sex, Politics, Style and the 1960s (Duke, 2013), Sound, Speech, Music in Soviet and Post-Soviet Cinema (Indiana, 2014), and Arctic Cinemas and the Documentary Ethos (Indiana 2019). She is a member of the editorial boards of the journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema and the I.B. Tauris film series, Kino, and contributes film reviews to the on-line cinema journal KinoKultura.
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Vertov, Dziga. 1929. Chelovek s kinoapparatom / Man with a Movie Camera. VUFKU.
Vertov, Dziga. 1930. Ėntuziazm / Enthusiasm. Ukrainfil’m.
Vertov, Dziga. 1934. Tri pesni o Lenine / Three Songs of Lenin. Mezhrabpomfil’m.
Vertov, Dziga, Elizaveta Svilova. 1937. Pamiati Sergo Ordzhonikidze / In Memory of Sergo Ordzhonikidze. Soiuzkino.
Vertov, Dziga. 1937. Kolybel’naia / Lullaby. Soiuzkino.
Vertov, Dziga. 1938. Tri geroini / Three Heroines. Soiuzkino.
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URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
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