Cross-Dressing Women in the Cinema of the Russian Empire, 1910-1917

Author

Stasya Korotkova

Abstract

This article analyses cross-dressed performances by women in films produced in the Russian Empire between 1910 and 1917. It examines around 25 films, both those that are extant and those considered lost, and identifies two major groups: cross-gender cast films and films featuring women characters who temporarily disguise their gender identity. In most of the films in the first group, women are cast in the roles of boys and young men, which links them directly to the theatrical travesty tradition. The article devotes special attention to Portret Doriana Greia / The Picture of Dorian Gray (Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1915, Russian Empire), in which the actress Varvara Ianova played the eponymous role. It also traces some of the public discussions on the topic of travesty in Imperial Russian theatrical circles, focusing on a 1905 brochure Pochemu ia igraiu rol’ Orleanskoi Devy / Why I Play the Part of the Maid of Orleans by Boris Glagolin, an innovative theatrical actor and director who indeed portrayed Joan of Arc on stage. Among the films that depicted cross-dressing as intrinsic to the plot, the article briefly reviews several comedies, as well as dramas in which cross-dressing was less widely represented and usually included as part of a heroic narrative. The film Nelli Raintseva (Evgenii Bauer, 1916, Russian Empire) represents a remarkable exception to this trend and is therefore analysed more closely.

Keywords

Russian Empire, pre-revolutionary Russian cinema, cross-dressing, travesty, lost films, 1910s.

Introduction

The historiography of early cinema in the Russian Empire has a remarkable history of its own. First attempts to conceptualise pre-revolutionary cinema were made by Soviet film scholars who mostly branded the films decadent and reactionary. Despite certain ideological prejudices, several important Soviet works, such as Veniamin Vishnevskii’s fundamental catalogue from 1945 and monographs by Romil Sobolev and Semen Ginzburg from the 1960s, helped to preserve important accounts of this early film culture. Western publications were scarce until the rediscovery of 286 early films at the Soviet State Film Archive Gosfil’mofond and their subsequent presentation at the Giornate del Cinema Muto Festival in 1989. After the reemergence of these films, interest in the cinematic legacy of the pre-Soviet period grew both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Since then, scholarship on Russian Imperial cinema has developed in various directions, with the topic of gender politics receiving increasing attention in recent years. Building on articles by the feminist film scholars Miriam Hansen (1992) and Heide Schlüpmann (1992), Rachel Morley’s pivotal book Performing Femininity was published in 2017. It was followed by various articles written by the participants of the Research Team Project “Early Russian Film Prose”, led by Anna Kovalova (Andreeva 2020 and 2022; Gudkova, Kozitskaia et al. 2020). In 2022, the representation of women was the focus of the conference The ‘New Woman’ in the Cinema of the Russian Empire, held at the University of Basel, and in 2023, Svetlana Smagina dedicated some chapters of her insightful Russian-language monograph Novaia zhenshchina v kinematografe perekhodnykh istoricheskikh periodov / The New Woman in the Cinema of Transitional Historical Periods to pre-revolutionary cinema. However, to the best of my knowledge, there is no comprehensive scholarship specifically on cross-dressed women in Imperial Russian cinema. This subject offers an interesting perspective on the representation of femininity as well as on ‘female masculinity’ on screen.¹ This article therefore aims to provide an overview of the examples of female to male cross-dressing and to map out the possible conventions behind its usage in Imperial Russian cinema, while also exploring whether the trope of cross-dressing contains meanings that are not obvious for a modern-day viewer.

The history of Russian Imperial cinema is still fragmented, as its canon tends to gravitate primarily towards distinctive and innovative dramas, especially the works of the celebrated director Evgenii Bauer. Many frivolous comedies and less artistically ambitious dramas remain understudied even though they have the potential to broaden our understanding of mainstream early film culture as well as its undercurrents. The paucity of studies about less prominent dramas and films of lighter genres is an unfortunate omission – after all, what can be more promising for a feminist critique than a film titled Masculine Girl, Feminine Man? This film, Muzhestvennaia devushka, zhenstvennyi muzhchina (Władisław Lenczewski, 1916, Russian Empire), is currently considered lost.

By seeking out traces of cross-dressed performances not only in extant films but also in those that are lost, I hope to expand and nuance our understanding of gender expression for women on the early film screen. My interest in the non-extant part of early film heritage resonates with Allyson Nadia Field’s The Archive of Absence: A Manifesto for Looking at Lost Film. Field argues that “scholarly writing is [...] disproportionally weighted towards extant films”, but with more than 80% of early films considered lost “it is irrational to perpetuate extant-centric film history” (Field 2015: 23). This is also true for the early Imperial Russian film heritage, with its approximate 15% survival rate. The extant-centric cannon of Imperial Russian film history cannot fully reveal the variety of ways in which women were represented on screen. Turning to other media in the absence of the moving images themselves can be productive for broadening the scope of analysis.

Instead of choosing several exemplary films, I aim to present (even if only briefly) all the pre-revolutionary Imperial Russian films featuring cross-dressed actresses that I have so far managed to trace. In my analysis, I focus specifically on cross-dressing, on its place in the diegesis and the way it was perceived, while not including performances with the early cinematic representation of lesbians (which requires a separate, thorough analysis that I hope to conduct on another occasion). However obvious this link – and cross-dressing’s potential for challenging gender norms in general – seems for a modern-day viewer, it was not necessarily as evident for film audiences one hundred years ago. The best illustration of this difference in perception might be the case presented in Robert A. Rushing’s article on cross-dressing women in Italian silent cinema. While recent reactions to a 1915 film Filibus (Mario Roncoroni, 1915, Italy) celebrate it for featuring either “one of the first lesbian characters in the history of film”, or a transgender character, not a single contemporary review of the film even mentioned cross-dressing (Rushing 2021: 88). The conservative Italian audience of 1915 simply did not see anything out of the ordinary in the protagonist’s gender disguise.

As Laura Horak has noted, “[r]eading cross-dressed women as embodiments of contemporary concerns flattens and sometimes misrepresents the cultural work that they were doing in their own times” (2016: 2). Understanding what these images were communicating to the viewers of the 1910s is essential, since cinema not only reflected contemporary norms and expectations towards gender expression but also actively formed them. In my analysis, I take the reactions of the 1910s film press as a point of departure in an attempt to reconstruct the conventions of cross-dressing in Russian Imperial cinema, carefully testing the intuitive hypothesis of whether each of the performances was really subverting any gender norms of its time.

Jiu-Jitsu and a Suffragette with a Tail

A rich lady, Vera Nikolaevna, hires a new maid, who proves to be an indispensable, efficient worker, skillful at massage, manicure and other services. The Count, who has been unsuccessfully courting Vera Nikolaevna, shows his real face: he tries to take Vera Nikolaevna by force. The maid comes to her mistress’s rescue and drives away the attacker with jiu-jitsu. After the police arrive, however, it is revealed that Vera Nikolaevna’s maid is actually an escaped male convict in disguise. Vera Nikolaevna is outraged: a strange man has watched and touched her in her most intimate moments. Her pride is also wounded: “Is she really so uninteresting that the male criminal maid [prestupnik-gornichnaia] was so indifferent to her?” (Daydreams Database 2023a).

This is a brief summary of the libretto of the lost film Ia ne veriu v dobrodetel’ zhenshchiny / I Don’t Believe in a Woman’s Virtue (Nikolai Kozlovskii, 1916, Russian Empire). Vishnevskii’s catalogue of pre-revolutionary films mentions that the film is loosely based on a story by Guy de Maupassant (1945: 122) – apparently it is the short story “Rose” (1884) that concerns the fall of a convict disguised as a chambermaid (but lacks the plot-line of the lady’s violent suitor and the jiu-jitsu attack).

Fig. 1. M. S. Kal’manson. 1916. Poster for Ia ne veriu v dobrodetel’ zhenshchiny.²

According to Vishnevskii, the male criminal in disguise is played by the actress Mariia Kulikova. The decision to cast an actress in the role of a man pretending to be a woman seems curious. In order for the character of a convict in a maid’s costume to be believable and for the denouement to make sense to the audience, Mariia Kulikova probably had to play a “strange” maid, queer enough to give the viewers a hint of their hidden masculinity. Since the film is considered lost, it is hard to assert this or any other hypotheses about this casting: Kulikova’s name in the list of actors might be someone’s mistake. However, cross-dressing was in no way a rarity. If the information about Ia ne veriu v dobrodetel’ zhenshchiny is correct, then it happens to be at the crossroads between films with cross-gender casting and those in which cross-dressing occurs simply as a part of the plot. Both categories were present on the early screens of the Russian Empire, especially for female performers.

Besides, in the first two decades of the twentieth century, women’s fashion in general was transforming, gradually including more and more items of clothing previously available only to men. Women dressed in clothing that was unfeminine by the standards of its time were not rare, either in life or on the screen. However, less conventionally feminine attire suggested additional subtexts, whether about modernity and urban lifestyles or politicisation. In the Russian Empire, by the mid-nineteenth century less feminine clothing and hairstyles for women were universally recognised not as a quirk but as a clear political statement. At this point, the image of the “nigilistka” emerged: “hatless, short-haired nihilists who wore plain black woollen dresses” (Stites 1990: 70) and “frequently assumed dark glasses” (Stites 1990: 103).

Ideologically charged film heroines were often marked out through less feminine clothes and hairstyles; for example, consider the protagonist’s friend, the female doctor Koretskaia from the extant film Nelli Raintseva (Evgenii Bauer, 1916, Russian Empire). In the script, by Aleksandr Amfiteatrov, she is described as an instantly recognisable type: “with slick hair, a pince-nez, and a non-revealing dress resembling a shirt” (Amfiteatrov 1916: 6). She also smokes. Koretskaia is thus marked as a New Woman, independant, assertive, and professionally successful in a male-dominated occupation. She represents modernity and progress, as does the main character of the openly pro-feminist extant drama Zhenshchina zavtrashnego dnia / Woman of Tomorrow (Petr Chardynin, 1914, Russian Empire). Also a dedicated female doctor, Anna Betskaia delivers a speech in favour of equal rights in one of the film’s scenes. These serious, emancipated cinematic heroines are in no way portrayed as caricatures, which was the case for many nameless real-life suffragettes, who were often mobilised for comic effect.

Pre-revolutionary cinemas showed foreign farces mocking the women’s suffrage movement. Drawing on their success, filmmakers working in the Russian Empire made at least five comedies about suffragettes. Three of these were produced by the Khanzhonkov studio and starred the very popular Polish actor Anton “Antosha” Fertner. These were Sufrazhistki / Suffragettes (director unknown, 1915, Russian Empire), Pobornitsy ravnopraviia / Combatants of Equality (Władisław Lenczewski, 1915, Russian Empire) – characterised by Vishnevskii (1945: 74) as “a mediocre farce that satirises the women’s suffrage movement” – and Zhenshchiny, bud’te iziashchny / Women, Be Graceful (Władisław Lenczewski, 1915, Russian Empire). This latter film, while a parody, quite literally shows women to be weary of impractical, feminine outfits. Antosha plays a publicist who laments that modern women lose their graceful appearance under their mannish suffragist clothes. He falls asleep and has a nightmare: an angry mob of suffragettes “put a corset on him, tighten it mercilessly, put high-heeled shoes on his feet, and a heavy wig on his head” to demonstrate how painful it feels to look graceful (Daydreams Database 2023b).

The other early Imperial Russian comedies about suffragettes were an adaptation of Jerome K. Jerome’s play Zhenskaia logika (Miss Gobbs; Zhenshchina-Ianus) / Women’s Logic (Miss Hobbes; Janus Woman) (V. Demert, 1917, Russian Empire) and – possibly the most curious example – the film Sufrazhistka ili muzhchiny, beregites’ (Khvostataia sufrazhistka) / Suffragette, or Men, Beware (aka The Tailed Suffragette) (attributed to Anatolii Durov, 1913, Russian Empire). The suffragettes were played by the animals of the renowned circus trainer Durov. Unfortunately, all these films are lost, but one can safely assume that “the combatants of equality” (even those with tails) were portrayed as recognisable types and visually marked by their distinctive style of clothing.

Emancipated female film protagonists, who openly challenged the traditional position of women, could represent both the promise of modernity and its threat. But regardless of whether they were portrayed as strong, enterprising personalities, or deployed for comic effect, as a target for ridicule, their appearance signalled a recognisable political identity. Meanwhile, women’s cross-dressing or mannerisms that could be read as traditionally (or stereotypically) male had a strikingly different position in the cinema of the Russian Empire. In the examples I have found so far, gender-crossing for film heroines never marks a shared identity, much less a political one. If anything, it reinforces their femininity and cements their transformation as purely temporary, whereas cross-gender acting roles illustrate the contribution of female masculinities to the cultural production of boyhood and manhood on screen.

Female Boys: from Tsarevich to Blackface

In 1913, the Romanov dynasty celebrated 300 years in power. For the grand jubilee, Khanzhonkov’s studio released a ceremonial film, Votsarenie doma Romanovykh / The Accession of the House of Romanovs (Vasilii Goncharov, Petr Chardynin, 1913, Russian Empire). In this solemn historical epic, the first tsar of the Romanov dynasty, young Mikhail Fedorovich, was played by a woman: the actress Sof’ia Goslavskaia.

The portrayal of the Tsar and the royal family was sacred territory and any frivolity was absolutely unthinkable. As Natascha Drubek notes, “[f]ilm censorship in Russia began [...] with a preoccupation with the moving images of the Tsar” (2017: 15). The same reverential logic applied to his direct ancestors, because a ruling Tsar was supposed to be the embodiment of God on earth for his Orthodox subjects. Film producers actively sought the intercession of high-ranking officials: just two years previously, Khanzhonkov had secured the “Highest Resolution” from the Imperial Chancellery for his production of the patriotic epic Oborona Sevastopolia / The Defence of Sevastopol (Vasilii Goncharov, 1911, Russian Empire), along with permission to use units of the Russian army and the military fleet for filming (Khanzhonkov 1937: 48–49). Considering this, it would be hard to suspect filmmakers of any intention to profane the image of the first ruling Romanov by casting a woman as tsarevich.

The attention of the film’s reviewers was mainly focussed on its “historical illiteracy” (Ivanova, Myl’nikova, Skovorodnikova, Tsiv’ian, Iangirov 2002: 141): the tsarevich’s May arrival in Moscow was filmed in winter, the infantry were wearing overly modern warm jackets, and the horses had their tails trimmed in a historically incorrect manner, they complain. But no one found the decision to give the role of tsarevich to a woman scandalous, provocative or even, in fact, worthy of any discussion.

Fig. 2. Sof’ia Goslavskaia as tsarevich Mikhail in Votsarenie doma Romanovykh. 1913.³

In the early twentieth century in the Russian Empire, many theatrical actresses specialised in travesty performances and were cast specifically in so-called “breeches roles” on stage. The practice was not as anachronistic as one might think, and came in handy during World War I when male actors risked being drafted at any time. In 1917, the magazine Kulisy published a comic “little feuilleton” about Shakespeare bringing Othello, the Moor of Venice to a modern-day entrepreneur who corrects the title’s Mavr (Moor) into Mavra (a female name). Shakespeare argues that the Moor is a man, to which the entrepreneur replies: “A man? Embarrassing. [...] Where will I get a man unfit for duty to play your Moor. Now the Moor must be female” (F. 1917: 12). A dispirited Shakespeare agrees for an actress to play Othello.

The theatrical travesty tradition spilled over into early cinema, bringing some of its conventions along. All the male roles played by women in early Russian Imperial films were those of young men and boys. In Girls Will Be Boys: Cross-Dressed Women, Lesbians, and American Cinema, Laura Horak calls such characters “female boys” and explains their traits in early US-produced films, as follows:

Female boys connected moving pictures to centuries-old theatrical traditions. Furthermore, they made a specific appeal to middle-class mothers and grandmothers by embodying a sentimental ideal of boyhood. Female boys were considered more expressive, more beautiful, more innocent, and more vulnerable than boys played by male actors (Horak 2016: 24).

Interestingly, Goslavskaia was not one of the actresses known specifically for travesty performances, even though she mentioned that in acting school her favourite role was that of a page Cherubino (1974: 140). In her memoirs, Goslavskaia recalls the director Chardynin's reasoning behind casting her as the tsarevich: “Actors, even the youngest ones, are rude, devoid of charm and nobility, while travesty actresses are stereotyped” (Goslavskaia 1974: 139). It seems that Chardynin shared the traditional theatrical notion that men were unfit for the portrayal of innocent boys, while at the same time aspiring to create a travesty performance specifically for cinema. He preferred to pick an actress who had already made her screen debut and showed a good sense of the camera, so that she would embody a young man in a new way, bypassing the “stereotyped” canon of the theatrical tradition.

However, most of the Imperial Russian films with cross-gender casting of male characters embraced theatrical traditions, which they applied without much adjustment. In Nikolai Rimskii-Korsakov's opera Snegurochka / The Snow Maiden (1881), based on the play of the same title by Aleksandr Ostrovskii, the role of the shepherd boy Lel’ was written for a female contralto or mezzo-soprano. In opera productions, this role was traditionally (and still is) performed by a woman. Despite the performer’s voice being of absolutely no importance for a silent film, in Władisław Starewicz’s film Snegurochka / The Snow Maiden (1914), Lel’ was still played by a woman, the actress N. Semenova.

Fig. 3. N. Semenova as the shepherd boy Lel’ in Snegurochka, 1914.⁴

The artistic craft and liveliness displayed by Lel’ makes him of (platonic) interest to the Snow Maiden. In both Ostrovskii’s play and opera’s libretto, his character is not, strictly speaking, innocent or sentimentally pure: he constantly basks in the attention of the village girls and cheekily asks for kisses as a payment for singing his seductive songs. The playfulness ingrained in Lel’ seems more characteristic of an adolescent, than of the mature male characters common on screen at that time.

It would also be difficult to label as innocent the cruelly mischievous boys in a film adaptation of Wilhelm Busch’s illustrated story Max und Moritz – Eine Bubengeschichte in sieben Streichen / Max and Moritz: A Story of Seven Boyish Pranks (1865). A lost film, Maks i Morits / Max and Moritz (M. Gurin, 1914, Russian Empire) was supposed to be the first in a series of Max and Moritz films, but it apparently flopped – no other films followed. One of the boys was played by an actress, whose name remains unknown. A brief description mentions only that the film was shot “with the participation of youngsters from the Moskovskii Khudozhestvennyi and Svobodnyi Theatres” (Anon 1914).

Fig. 4. An advertisement for Maks i Morits. Sine-Fono 1914 (15): 67.

The characters of adolescents could be not only diabolical, like the famous Max and Moritz, but also driven by an awakening desire, like Tom from the lost film Chernyi Tom / Black Tom (Mikhail Linskii, 1916, Russian Empire). This was a film adaptation of a popular song by Isa Kremer, a prominent singer, recitalist and, in her later life, a performer of Yiddish folk songs (in fact, she is often credited as the first musician to sing in Yiddish on big international stages). The film featured Kremer herself and told the story of an Algerian delivery-boy named Tom who falls in love with a white lady. The lady never takes him seriously and later falls in love with a white gentleman. Driven to desperation by jealousy, Tom prepares a knife. One could assume that in the screen version of her song, Isa Kremer would star as the white lady, but, according to an advertisement for the film (Anon 1916), she starred as Tom, which makes it a cross-dressed performance in blackface. Interestingly, the advertisement features a typically elegant portrait of Kremer and only indicates the role she plays in the text. Kremer’s repertoire leaned heavily on stereotypical “exotic” images of far away lands: among her other hit songs were Negr iz Zanzibara / A Negro from Zanzibar and Poslednee Tango / Last Tango, which is set in Argentina.

Tom is introduced as a Black boy who dreams that “once he grows into an adult, [he] will buy a tall house and will live there with a white wife” (Sarieva 2018: 262). However, his love is not that of a child, but quite adult and passionate. In the lyrics he is presented as a sexual but essentially infantile character, unable to soberly assess his matrimonial chances. Tom’s innocence manifests itself only in a child-like naivety and yet-to-be-tamed impulses, which places him rather far from a sentimental ideal of boyhood.

Fig. 5. Tat’iana Bakh (on the left in the background) as Mishka in Drakonovskii kontrakt / A Draconian Contract, 1915.⁵

In 1914 and 1915, Petr Chardynin shot at least three comedies with female boys. The lost film Bambukovoe polozhenie / A Sticky Situation (Petr Chardynin, 1914, Russian Empire) featured the actress Dora Chitorina as Vitia, the Duchess’s young student son. In the film Drakonovskii kontrakt / A Draconian Contract (Petr Chardynin, 1915, Russian Empire) of the “Antosha series”, starring Fertner, the actress Tat’iana Bakh played a boy named Mishka, who helps Antosha get out of trouble. The mischievous boy Kol’ka in the lost film Zloi mal’chik / Evil boy (Petr Chardynin, 1915, Russian Empire) is played by “Bauer the second” [vtoraia], the feminine form of the adjective suggesting that this was, presumably, the child actress Emmochka Bauer.

Bauer the second [vtoraia] also plays a boy in the extant film Pervaia liubov’ / First Love (Evgenii Bauer, 1915, Russian Empire). It depicts a saccharine ‘love story’ between two children: a boy invites a girl for a date. She dresses up and puts on make-up, mimicking what her adult sister usually does, and then sets off.⁶ On her way she is frightened by a frog, which later turns out to be just a clutch bag shaped like a frog. The boy tires of waiting for her and leaves, while the upset girl returns home where she is cheered up by feeding some little chickens. This short film, clearly designed to be adorable, presents both children as sweet and angelic. Its female boy is probably the closest in Imperial Russian cinema to the sentimental image of idealised boyhood that early American films gravitated to (Horak 2016: 25). Many of the female boys in the films of the Russian Empire represent a “red-blooded” type of boyhood. They express playfulness, insouciance and impulsivity that were not befitting of adult men outside of the setting of a rowdy gathering.

Contrary to the intuitive assumption of modern-day viewers, none of these cross-gender roles sparked any polemics. They did not seem to challenge the dominant gender system and were apparently not perceived as an oddity or subversion. However, there was one film that did force the press to dispute the appropriateness of cross-gender casting: Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Portret Doriana Greia / The Picture of Dorian Gray (1915, Russian Empire).

Travesty is a Dangerous Thing

Travesty is a dangerous thing in general, and especially travesty in a tailcoat. However, Madame Ianova never lets it be noticed that the role was played by a woman, while she “knows how to wear” a tailcoat admirably (Anon 1915a: 90).

This is a quotation from a press review praising the actress Varvara Ianova’s portrayal of Dorian Gray in Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Portret Doriana Greia / The Picture of Dorian Gray (1915, Russian Empire). This film, created by one of the most important directors in the history of Russian and later Soviet theatre, is unfortunately considered lost. Based on the scarce surviving materials and reviews, it is still possible to grasp how visually innovative and experimental Portret Doriana Greia was in its time (Kovalova 2019). Unusually, its cross-gender casting was among the creative decisions debated in the press: “As for Madame Ianova, this is a complete curiosity: this curly-haired boy makes some angry, scandalises others, and puts many in a cheerful mood” (Anon 1915b).

Fig. 6. An advertisement for Portret Doriana Greia. Sine-Fono 1915 (3): 55.