The Muse as Producer:

Lilia Brik and Soviet-Jewish Documentary Filmmaking in the 1920s

Author

Maria Garth

Abstract

In July 1926, the influential figure known as the ‘muse of the avant-garde,’ Lilia Brik (1891-1978), exchanged letters from Moscow with her collaborator and romantic partner, the poet Vladimir Maiakovskii (1893-1930), while he was travelling. Brik’s letter was about a new organisation called OZET (The Society of Jewish Workers) and the film Evrei na zemle / Jews on the Land (Abram Room, USSR, 1927). It would come to be the first, and only, agitprop film that Brik and Maiakovskii worked on together during their brief careers in cinema. The organisation OZET provided funding for the film, which was produced jointly by the studios Sovkino and VUFKU (All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration). Brik was invested in the project of Jewish emancipation through her work with OZET, and Brik and Maiakovskii worked with director Abram Room and screenwriter Viktor Shklovskii to document the resettlement project of Soviet Jews building an agricultural commune in Crimea. This 18-minute film depicted the successful assimilation of Jewish colonists as they developed a flourishing farming community from previously undeveloped land. This article argues that understanding Brik’s involvement through her identity as a Soviet Jewish female filmmaker is important for contextualising the film’s enduring significance in the histories of early Soviet cinema. For her, creating a film about the inclusion of Jews – a historically oppressed minority in Imperial Russia – within the Soviet project of collectivisation was one of the ways to promote the Jewish cause in the early Soviet Union.

Keywords

Lilia Brik, Vladimir Maiakovskii, Crimea, Soviet Union, Evrei na zemle, Jews on the Land, Soviet cinema, OZET, Sovkino, VUFKU, Jewish studies.

Introduction¹

In July 1926, the influential figure known as the ‘muse of the avant-garde,’ Lilia Brik (1891-1978), exchanged letters from Moscow with her collaborator and romantic partner, the poet Vladimir Maiakovskii (1893-1930), while he was travelling. On July 12, she wrote to him with excitement, “The most important news is that I’m working in ‘Ozet’ (The Society of Jewish Workers). If you can, go and see the colonies in the Crimea. In a few days Vitya Shklovsky is going there to make a film with Room and Yushkevich (from Goskino). So far I have very little to do and they don’t pay me” (Jangfeldt 1986: 173). Thus began the pair’s joint project of summer 1926. Later that month, Brik went to Crimea to begin working on the film, staying there through the month of August. As she alluded to in her letter, in 1926, Brik worked for the organisation OZET (Obshchestvo zemleustroistva evreiskikh trudiashchikhsia, the Association for the Agricultural Settlement of Jewish Workers), which operated under the umbrella of the Soviet Communist Party’s KOMZET (Komitet po zemel’nomu ustroistvu trudiashchikhsia evreev, the Committee for the Settlement of Working Jews) as both a bureaucratic organ and an advocacy group. It remains unclear whether she was eventually paid for her work on the film, since she referenced the lack of payment in her July letter to Maiakovskii. In a photograph taken in Crimea in August 1926, Brik and Maiakovskii pose together in the outdoor garden of a palace while on their vacation that month (Fig. 1). Taking some time after filming concluded, the image shows them as they looked at the end of that summer – happy, tired, and tanned from the sun. In the absence of any photographs documenting the behind-the-scenes process of making the film, this vacation snapshot is a glimpse into their life in Crimea.

OZET funded the silent black-and-white documentary film Evrei na zemle / Jews on the Land (Abram Room, USSR, 1927) about the resettlement project of Soviet Jews building an agricultural commune in Crimea. The short, 18-minute film showed the establishment of the Jewish settlement as it developed from unused land to a productive and self-sufficient community through the gradual process of colonisation (Dekel-Chen 2005: 105). Shot on location in Western Crimea, it featured no professional actors and depicted the lives of real people. As noted in the intertitles, the Jewish agricultural colony they filmed was called Ikor, Hebrew for ‘core’ (Pronin 2019: 190). Officially, the resettlement movement aimed to convince Jews located domestically and abroad to move to Jewish-run collective farms within the Soviet Union and offered monetary support to assist with voluntary resettlement. The film was produced by the film studio Sovkino and VUFKU’s (All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration) Yalta studio.

Active between 1925 and 1938, OZET was tasked by the Soviet state with addressing the political issues of disenfranchised Jewish people in the Soviet Union. The documentary Evrei na zemle was part of a wider project to encourage public support for Jewish agricultural settlement and to combat antisemitism under the political project of Communism. For OZET, and the Soviet government more broadly, at stake was the problem of turning an urban Jewish population largely inexperienced in agriculture into successful agrarian farmers under the difficult conditions of undeveloped rural land in Crimea. To maximise effectiveness in spreading its message, OZET utilised a variety of media to advertise, including cinema, paintings, pamphlets, posters, books, articles, and newspapers. Thus, OZET was the central organ responsible for promoting the position of new Jewishness under Communism. During this period, many Soviet artists and artistic groups were involved with OZET, of which Maiakovskii, Shklovskii, and Brik were some of the most high-profile names.

Brik was credited as the film’s organiser (organizator s"ëmok, producer in contemporary parlance), in the opening credits. On set during filming, Brik also worked as an assistant to the film’s director, Abram Room (1894-1976). It is remarkable that she held this position, which was unusual for a relatively inexperienced female filmmaker. The film was written by two literary celebrities of the Soviet avant-garde, Maiakovskii and Viktor Shklovskii (1893-1984), who worked together to create the screenplay and Russian-language intertitles (Vaksberg 1998: 175). The film was only available with Russian-language intertitles (although some of the on-location signage shown in the film is in Yiddish), and not other languages such as Ukrainian or Yiddish. This appears to indicate that its agitational message was primarily aimed at Russian-speaking audiences.

The film’s cinematographer was Albert Kiun (Kühn), a German who worked for VUFKU. It was first screened in November (either on November 15 or 16, according to conflicting sources) for the delegates of the First All-Union Congress of OZET, which took place in Moscow, 16-18 November 1926. The propagandistic aims of the film’s creators were primarily directed at urban audiences, but it was also shown in rural areas through limited screenings (Vaksberg 1998: 263, note 57). Ludmila Shleyfer Lavine has argued that OZET’s motivations for creating the documentary film were to shape public opinion about the Jewish movement, which would be accomplished by promoting the resettlement of Soviet Jews into new agricultural farms (kolkhozes), fundraising monetary donations for OZET, and promoting sympathy for Jewish causes by countering rising anti-Semitism (Shlayfer Levine 2021: 213).

We are thereby challenged to read the film in terms of its multi-ethnic and colonial context. During the film’s production in 1926, Crimea was an Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic, which became part of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic only in 1954. As a film about a colonial settlement, set in a territory that changed governments, assigning the film ‘nationality’ raises a number of important conceptual questions. Whether historians and scholars should categorise the film as Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish, or more generally as ‘Soviet’, is open for debate. Certainly, recent political conflicts have heightened awareness of these issues and shaped contemporary discourse about how we interpret the film and its central focus on the land and themes of dispossession and settler-colonialism.

Due to its origins in relation to OZET, on a practical level, Evrei na zemle is best understood as a joint venture between the centre (‘Moscow’) and VUFKU. It is reflective of the ethos that epitomised a brief collaborative period during the mid-1920s between different film studios in the history of early Soviet cinema, predating the consolidation that came to characterise Soviet film production soon after. Although the documentary had limited success during its original run (Shklovskii himself characterised the film, and the colonial project it represented, as a failure in his memoirs), recent scholarly interest in the film is a testament to its importance in the international history of cinema (Pronin 2013).

Creating a film that framed Jews – a historically oppressed minority in Imperial Russia – as participants in the Soviet project of collectivisation was one of the ways to promote the Jewish cause in the newly formed Soviet Union. Although it was only her second film, Brik’s role in the production was central to its creation. I argue that understanding Brik’s involvement through her identity as a Soviet Jewish female filmmaker is important for contextualising the film’s enduring significance in the history of early Soviet-Jewish cinema. The following sections of the article first discuss the circumstances surrounding the making of Evrei na zemle, followed by an overview of the colonial project in Crimea. In the next sections, Brik’s biography and filmmaking career are explored in relation to the film and her Jewish identity. These sections evaluate how Brik’s participation shaped the film’s production as its sole credited female crew member. Finally, this article considers the contributions made by Brik within the broader context of women filmmakers in the early Soviet Union.

While other scholars have analysed the film through the work of Maiakovskii, Shklovskii, and Room (see Iangirov 2021, Jangfeldt 2014, Pronin 2019, Shleyfer Lavine 2021, etc.), and the ways that each of them shaped what it came to be, the specifics of Brik’s involvement and her influence on the film have been largely overlooked. This aspect of the film’s history is addressed by highlighting the significance of her participation in the overall aims of the project and how she helped shape its ideological message.

Making Evrei na zemle

In the mid-1920s, a Soviet-sponsored ‘national’ project – emerging from early Bolshevik nationality policy and positioned in tension with Zionist movements – sought to establish Jewish agricultural colonies within the Soviet Union. Rather than advocating emigration or a separate territorial state, this initiative aimed to reconfigure Jewish life within a socialist, territorially grounded framework (Shneer 2011). OZET’s work on the ground was heavily bolstered by its media campaign involving periodicals, film, art, photography, literature, and music.² The film’s treatment of Jewishness – and the relationship between religion and Communism – is complex and deserves an in-depth critical study. Even the film’s title Evrei na zemle (which literally translates to “Jews on the earth/soil”), obliquely refers to this complicated issue through the use of the expression “na zemle”, which simultaneously suggests the duality of the documentary’s protagonists being both from planet Earth and working on the earth (that is, literally tilling the soil at the agricultural farm) (Golovnev 2021: 1051-1063). The title also alludes to how the film represents the binary relationship of the shtetl (symbolising the old way of life) versus the kolkhoz (which represents the ideals of the new Soviet way of life for Jewish settlers). It addresses not only the Jewish experience of settling in Crimea but also early Soviet attitudes about the political prospects of such colonial projects.

The film was praised in a review published in the November 17, 1926, issue of Izvestiia. The journalist Grigorii Ryklin (1894-1975) commented on the political issues addressed by the film, writing in his review,

Many people come here from the towns [iz mestechek]. Many are afraid of the steppe, hard, unaccustomed labour. The weak retreat back to the rickety tents of the bazaar. The strong stay here to build the new. These strong men are part of the peasant family of the Soviet Union. These new peasants cannot but be welcomed by every class-conscious worker, every class-conscious peasant. To this day, the enemies of the revolution are trying to throw a seed of discord into the fraternal family of the working people of the Union. They deliberately lump together the Jewish NEPman, the Jewish worker, and the Jewish farmer [krest’ianina-evreia]. But this rotten seed of discord and hatred, brought from Tsarist times, will bounce off the class consciousness of the labourers like peas off a wall (Ryklin 1926).³

Much depended on these efforts to create effective mass messaging through cinema. The film’s agitational techniques emphasised the benefits of resettlement, framing the project – often described as “colonisation” – as a success and encouraging voluntary migration.⁴ However, it was only for a few brief years in the late 1920s, from approximately 1926 to 1930, that Crimea was selected by OZET as the location for new Jewish settlements (with headquarters in Simferopol and other regional branches in Kharkiv, Minsk, Belarus, and Tbilisi, Georgia; along with international locations). Quickly thereafter, OZET deemed the project a failure. The Crimean settlements predated the establishment of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast and Birobidzhan in the Far East of Russia. Once Birobidzhan was firmly established in 1931, settlers were sent there instead of Crimea, effectively ending the campaign by the early 1930s (Dekel-Chen 2005: 44-50).

During the 1920s, high-level efforts were underway to Sovietise and modernise the Soviet Union’s Jewish population through political and cultural campaigns such as “korenizatsiia” (nativisation or indigenisation) (Shternshis 2006: xv). Hence, Evrei na zemle was part of a high-stakes effort that was important to the top Party leaders in Moscow. They feared that the failure of Soviet efforts to establish Jewish agricultural colonies would lead to an economic downturn, food shortages, resistance and revolts among the farmers, and critiques of collectivisation from abroad (Dekel-Chen 2005: 107). Plagued by paradoxes and political tensions, the agricultural colonisation was a difficult process. Ultimately, due to many factors, not only did this project in Crimea fail, but by the late 1930s, OZET and Komzet were also dissolved along with the entire campaign encouraging mass Jewish (re)settlement.

The film’s ties to Crimea go beyond its location. It is important to note that the film was produced by the VUFKU studio in Yalta, the first united Ukrainian film studio (Sakhno 2020). Film historian Rashit Iangirov has argued that VUFKU had a major stake in the production because, in addition to Evrei na zemle, Maiakovskii had signed contracts with the studio in August 1926 to write four more screenplays for them (Iangirov 2011: 188). As will be discussed later, the film crew was assisted by a film director at the VUFKU Yalta film studio during the production. Cinematographer Albert Kiun also came from VUFKU Yalta to work on Evrei na zemle, which was mentioned in the correspondence about the film between Maiakovskii and Brik while they were discussing the technical aspects of filming in late July 1926.⁵ Ultimately, Evrei na zemle was the only production that Maiakovskii, Shklovskii, Room, and Brik collectively worked on together for VUFKU. While financial compensation certainly played a part in why they worked on the film (although there were also issues with timely payment for their work, as Brik noted in her letter to Maiakovskii quoted at the beginning of this paper), to varying degrees, they were each genuinely interested in the Jewish resettlement movement and the Jewish colonies in Crimea.

In fact, during the 1920s, it was not uncommon for filmmakers from Moscow and the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic (RSFSR) to work for VUFKU. As scholars of Ukrainian cinema history have demonstrated, directors and screenwriters from Moscow were actively recruited and invited to participate in VUFKU films during the 1920s. Scholar of Ukrainian film history Volodymyr Myslavs’kyi has argued that filmmakers from the RSFRSR helped VUFKU expand and produce more films than it would have been possible with only Ukrainian talent during this period of rapid growth and expansion in the 1920s.⁶ Along with Maiakovskii, the list of Moscow filmmakers working for VUFKU during the 1920s included such renowned figures as Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) and his brother Mikhail Kaufman (1897-1980). The pair made their famous film Lyudyna z kinoaparatom / Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, USSR, 1929) for VUFKU after leaving Sovkino.

Today, we can evaluate Evrei na zemle for its transnational and transcultural characteristics and what it reveals about the collaboration between Sovkino and VUFKU during the mid-1920s.

Identity and Colonial Settlement in Crimea

Evrei na zemle presents a two-part narrative of Soviet Jewish progress. The first part establishes the difficult living conditions of Jews in rural shtetls, demonstrating the need for resettlement in Crimea. In the empty fields, the settlers are shown building houses and digging a well for water and irrigation. The second part shows life in the colony where the new community is flourishing after “in total, nearly 100,000 Jews were resettled on the land,” as the Russian intertitles tell us. Resilience in the face of adversity becomes a recurring theme in the film as the settlers overcome hardships in the process of building their settlement. “There is more left to do,” reads the text of the last intertitle, ending the film on an urgent and hopeful call to action. In reality, as we know, resettlement efforts in Crimea ended soon thereafter, and Evrei na zemle was one of only a few such films to be made before the project ended entirely. Today, the film serves to memorialise this brief episode in Soviet history.

The intertitles repeatedly emphasise the significance of the film’s setting in Crimea. As Lavine observed, “In fact, the allocation of Crimea for Jewish agrarian settlements fed into a recurring antisemitic trope of privilege at this time” (Shleyfer Lavine 2021: 213-214). In the opening scenes of the film, the filmmakers contrast Crimea’s reputation as a resort destination with the uninhabited land and empty fields allotted to the Jewish settlers. The premise of Crimea “as that stereotypical setting of beach, leisure, tourism, and conspicuous consumption,” (Shleyfer Lavine 2021: 214) is established early on by showing the shimmering waters of the sea with the text “This is the Crimea that awaits the dachnikov (weekenders): (as Crimea is typically imagined),” followed by a shot of an elderly bearded man with a cane walking through an empty field with nothing on the horizon. The next intertitle emphasises this contrast with text that reads “This is what welcomed resettlers: (such is the land of Northern Crimea allotted to the Jews),” making it clear that the settlers were facing very challenging circumstances. Lavine (2021: 214) attributes the setup of this visual contrast between the fantasy and reality of Crimea for Jewish settlers to “the screenwriters’ sarcasm around this stereotype”, which she sees “come through their use of quotes around the intertitle ‘krasivye mesta’ (beautiful lands), followed immediately by the old man walking toward the camera through the bare field.” In the next shot, tumbleweeds roll through the empty, windswept field. Later, in their recollections, the filmmakers frequently commented on the added difficulty of filming in the remote locations of the Crimean settlements. Writing in a biography of Room in 1929, Shklovskii had this to say about his experience of working with the director on the film:

Room and – by chance – I was filming with him in Northern Crimea the documentary film Evrei na zemle. There were two of us, and we took turns dispersing the crowd that interfered with filming in the city, and with cameraman Kiun protected the camera from dust in the empty steppes of Crimea. There is no water there, and pigeons live in old, abandoned wells; there are empty fields. Now wells are churning there, and Jews from small towns are settling in small groups. In the desert, some small, colourful birds fly across the ground, tumbleweeds roll across the planted grass, and there are lonely tarpaulin tents of settlers. And in other places there are already houses made of porous Taganrog stone. Here Abram Room saw New Jews, and we bet several times with him whether we would distinguish a Jewish colonist from just a colonist or just a krest’ianin [farmer] – and several times we were mistaken.⁷

The Crimean setting is a recurring visual motif in the film, showing the connection between the colonial settlement and the land. Allusions to the peninsula’s verdant landscape and proximity to the sea help to impart an authentic sense of place. Drawing on such visual elements, Maiakovskii’s intertitles use lyrical language to formulate the film’s main themes of Jewish identity, modernity, land use, collectivisation, and renewal through farming.

In one notable scene where Brik may have played a part, the community’s first female tractor driver is shown operating a tractor in a field. The filmmakers’ choice to present “Rosenblum”⁸ starting the tractor and driving away in it while a male worker wearing a multi-panel tweed newsboy cap on his head watches is perhaps ambiguous. Nevertheless, this scene highlights the underlying politics of socialist production, in which the filmmakers sought to cast such images as markers of favourable social progress (Fig. 2).

This scene is pivotal for understanding the gender dynamics of the film, but it lasts only about ten seconds. In the short span of time between the title card introducing “The first traktoristka (female tractor driver) – Rosenblum” and the next title card that reads “Field work,” only a brief glimpse of Rosenblum is shown on screen. These few moments are just enough time to see that she confidently starts the tractor and drives it off-screen. She is dressed in plain work clothes, consisting of a button-front shirt with rolled-up sleeves and pants, which would have been optimal for the position required to drive a tractor. Her hair is fully covered by a white cotton kerchief tied tightly around her head, and she wears large protective goggles that are resting on her forehead. She may have removed her goggles and moved them up to her forehead to better see the tractor’s controls, but nevertheless, this small detail confirms that she was a real traktoristka ploughing the field that day. The man next to her appears to have been helping her restart the tractor after it stalled, although their interaction is brief and not explained in the film.

In the following scene, “Field work,” a column of tractors drives across the screen, including one tractor in the procession driven by Rosenblum, recognisable by her distinctive white kerchief, and another tractor operated by the newsboy capped-man who had been standing next to her in the previous scene when she was starting the tractor. Each of the tractors pulls a plough behind it to till the soil for planting. That a Jewish woman would be celebrated in the film as a tractor driver (traditionally considered to be a “male” profession) would have been remarkable for Soviet audiences still unaccustomed to seeing such progressive representations on screen. As Dekel-Chen has observed, “To a Soviet audience, still strongly rooted in rural tradition and patriarchy, such an image would have been particularly evocative; the combination of a Jew and a woman on a tractor probably seemed very unlikely” (Dekel-Chen 2007: 445). Although there are no archival sources that document how scenes were set up for filming, the film’s portrayal of Rosenblum is consistent with how women were represented in Brik’s other films. Like Evrei na zemle, Brik’s next film Stekliannyi glaz / A Glass Eye (Brik and Zhemchuzhnyi, USSR, 1929) uses some of the same techniques to show women as active agents of society. In general, Brik’s interest in portraying women as strong characters is a unifying feature across her multidisciplinary body of creative work. In this way, gender was intimately embedded in the ideological construction of the film – both on and off the screen.

Another scene near the end of the film shows Jewish men discussing the colonies over a meal at the OZET headquarters, which is introduced with an intertitle that reads, “After reviewing the colonies, in the courtyard of Ozet there is a heated debate” (Fig. 3). The old man with a beard shown earlier makes a reappearance dining outdoors with the whole group. “What did I not see at the mestechko?” the intertitle probes. “I did not see bread…,” reads the next intertitle, and then we see that the old man with a beard is talking and gesturing at the table, implying that he is the one speaking. He explains: “There will be bread here – because we HAVE:” “...water…” and the next shot cuts to a well and water flowing through a newly constructed irrigation system. He continues, adding that they have “...land…,” followed by a shot of a man pushing a plough through a field. And lastly, “...tractor…” as a column of tractors drives through a field. In this way, the ‘mestechko’, a Jewish settlement, is contrasted with the modernised collective farm. The old versus new way of life for Soviet Jews is a recurring thematic element within the film and is again underscored by this scene. It is first set up in the opening introductory scenes, where we see the poverty of the mestechko. Then it reappears at the end as a foil to the colony, which has bread, water, land, and tractors that guarantee a better quality of life for the settlers. Here, the political message is again made clear.

In the 1920s, the Soviet film industry as a whole was ideologically oriented in a variety of ways. This was by design and not seen as detracting from the aims of the film. The issue of accurate and fair representation, along with questions of agency for the film’s subjects and how they were portrayed, leaves room for debate about the veracity of the narrative. At the same time, since the colonies only lasted for such a brief time in the 1920s and early 1930s, the footage of this community presented in the film is a rare surviving glimpse into the history of the Jewish colonial movement in the Soviet Union.

Jewish Filmmaking in the Early Soviet Union

It is perhaps not altogether surprising that everyone who worked on Evrei na zemle had a personal connection to Judaism, although in different ways. During the production, Room, Shklovskii, and Brik travelled throughout Crimea to film, scout locations, and gather background material. All three were experienced filmmakers, but they learned about the daily struggles of resettlement and colonisation while filming in Crimea. They relied on consultations with OZET to flesh out the ideological orientation of the film and to identify locations for shooting (Golovnev 2021: 1059).

Although Jewish themes were a feature of his work, Maiakovskii was not Jewish. However, he was sympathetic to the goals of the film and the Jewish people it featured.⁹ Undoubtedly, these views were shaped by his friendship with the Briks. Lavine traces his history as an outspoken supporter who wrote poetry on Jewish themes and aligned himself with Jewish causes to oppose anti-Semitism publicly.¹⁰ Aleksandr Pronin attributes Maiakovskii’s involvement with OZET (and his membership in the organisation) to Brik’s initiative (Pronin 2013). Bengt Jangfeldt quotes Brik as saying, “On his arrival in Moscow, Maiakovsky helped OZET [The Society of Jewish Workers] to arrange an enormous writers’ evening in the House of Unions, all the takings from which went to the Jewish colonies. He wrote the poem ‘The Jew’ (‘Yevrey’) for this evening and read it with enormous success. He wore the OZET badge he was given for several days, and he dedicated his poem ‘The Jew’ to his comrades from OZET” (Jangfeldt 1986: 260-261, note 8). Considering his strongly held views on Jewish issues in the Soviet Union and the added financial incentive of this work, it is clear why Maiakovskii agreed to contribute to Evrei na zemle.

Room, Maiakovskii, Shklovskii, and Brik resided in Moscow; they were high-profile members of the urban creative class that had little in common with the impoverished participants of the resettlement movement. While they were ideologically invested in the Jewish cause under Communism, they occupied a more prosperous class position than the Jewish settlers in their documentary film. As Brik’s correspondence from that summer illustrates, the main point of tension was that their social position made it difficult for the production team to connect with their subjects, given that their own lives were so far removed from the struggles of rural homesteading. Their proximity to OZET signaled their commitment to the project of new Jewishness under Communism. Maiakovskii, in particular, was known as “the poet of the big city and the Revolution” (Jangfeldt 2014: 356). Shklovskii and Room were both born into Jewish families and were sympathetic to the project of Jewish resettlement.¹¹ Nevertheless, being Jewish themselves (with the exception of Maiakovskii), they contributed valuable personal experience to the production, which may have helped inform the film’s optimistic tone that cast the Jewish colonists in a positive light.

Interestingly, although closely associated with the film, Maiakovskii was not involved in the actual location filming. During filming, he was present in Crimea and even met with Brik and Shklovsky while they were there. However, he did not join them ‘on set’ because he was staying in Yalta to fulfil a paid poetry reading obligation, as he wrote to Brik in Moscow from Yevpatoriya on July 15, 1926: “For reading to the patients in the sanatorium I’ve been paid two weeks board and lodging in Yalta” (Jangfeldt 1986: 174).¹² The film was shot far away from Yalta, in Yevpatoriia and Bakhchysarai in Western Crimea, as Brik documented in her letters and telegrams to him in Yalta (Fig. 2).¹³ It would not have been quick or easy for him to travel back and forth, and his presence was not especially necessary. Despite his physical absence during filming, Maiakovskii received regular updates from Brik and helped from a distance – a notable testament to his dedication to the project.

Iangirov suggests that Maiakovskii arranged for cinematographer Kiun to join the production, which he did by contacting Aleksandr Solov’ev (1898-1973), a film director working at the VUFKU Yalta film studio (Iangirov 2011: 188). Maiakovskii also contacted Solov’ev to request that film stock be sent to the production crew, after receiving panicked telegrams from Brik asking for his intervention because they did not have enough film. In her letter to Maiakovskii on July 23, 1926, from Yevpatoria, after letting him know they had started filming, Brik had attached a postscript: “Please, please phone Solov’ev immediately and ask him to get hold of some film (two cans) immediately. We haven’t got enough. We sent him a telegram” (Jangfeldt 1986: 175-176).¹⁴ On July 29, 1926, he sent a telegram to Brik from Yalta: “Promised send film Monday. Lectures probably prevent trip [to] Bakhchisaray. Will wait Yalta” (Jangfeldt 1986: 176).¹⁵

Lilia Brik as a Filmmaker

Evrei na zemle was one of only three films Brik made as fully realised projects. Although her brief filmmaking career has often been overlooked by film scholars and even Brik’s own biographers, her filmography is noteworthy. As it were, omissions from the historical record characterise women’s contributions to early Soviet cinema. In the 1920s, there were many more women active in the film industry than the familiar names that are usually championed as examples. Film historian Jane Gaines argues that we must stretch our imagination to look at women that we have “yet to imagine as having been there”, but we also have to be aware “that it is not only cultural distance that renders their lives unimaginable” (Gaines 2018: 9). Women often worked behind the camera and were not listed by name in the credits. Inclusive crediting of all contributors would not become standard practice in filmmaking until much later. Looking at invisible, or even ‘peripheral,’ women in cinema, we must take this as our starting point by looking at the women who were not in front of the movie camera. This then brings us to Soviet filmmaking and Lilia Brik.

Lilia Brik was not only an actress, editor, director, and producer, but also an artist and a writer. However, she is best known as a model and muse, as the subject of Maiakovskii’s famous 1923 poem Pro eto (About This) and immortalised by Rodchenko in a number of famous photographs that solidified her reputation as an early Soviet ‘femme fatale’ – a characterisation about which she was ambivalent. After Maiakovskii’s death in 1930, others sometimes publicly referred to her as his wife, although they never legally married. Although Brik had many career achievements, it was her romantic relationship with Maiakovskii that gave her celebrity status, first in Moscow and later, internationally. She held a respected position within the highest echelons of Moscow’s intelligentsia and was internationally celebrated for her role in the Soviet Union’s avant-garde artistic production of the 1920s. Brik often travelled to Western Europe, building a reputation abroad through her close connection to her sister, the writer Elsa Triolet (1896-1970), who lived in Paris with her famous husband Louis Aragon (1897-1982), the French Surrealist poet. However, after Maiakovskii’s death by suicide and lasting through the remainder of her life, she faced public backlash for her polyamorous relationships and unconventional lifestyle and was viciously reviled in the press, as chronicled in detail by her biographer Anatolii Valiuzhenich (2016: 80-134). This demonstrates how much her proximity to power mattered socially and culturally. Despite continuing interest in Brik’s personal life (new biographies continue to be published about her into the present day (see Ganieva 2020; Valiuzhenich 2015 and 2016; Ikshin 2008)), her career and artistic endeavours have been largely overlooked by film scholars. Acknowledgement of Brik’s pioneering status as an early Soviet filmmaker is long overdue, as Adelheid Heftberger has observed (Heftberger 2018).

Indeed, the trajectory of Brik’s life was quite unusual in comparison to her contemporaries. Born into a Jewish family at the end of the 19th century, her adult life was closely tied to the revolutionary fervour of the Russian Revolution and the formation of the Soviet Union. Lilia (Lili) Kagan was born in Moscow in 1891 and died there in 1978, having lived to see the renewed interest in the Soviet avant-garde as one of its last few remaining, living members in the 1970s. Her parents were Jewish, and in 1912, she married the Jewish writer and critic Osip Brik (1888-1945) and changed her last name from Kagan to Brik. They later divorced, and Brik remarried twice more, again changing her last name. In 1915, she met Maiakovskii, and their personal and professional lives became closely intertwined. Lilia Brik’s first silent film was made in 1918 with Maiakovskii. Titled Zakovannaia fil’moi / Chained by the Film (Nikandr Turkin, Russia, 1918), it was written by Maiakovskii, who also acted in the film. It was directed by Nikandr Turkin, with Brik in the starring role alongside Maiakovskii. Neither Maiakovskii’s screenplay nor the film survives in full, as Brik wrote in her published recollections (Brik 1989: 193).

The 1920s marked the height of Brik’s artistic and cinematic career. She was an active member of the community of artists associated with the avant-garde who were shaping the aesthetic of the new Soviet nation. She was involved with many of its leading figures through an intermingling of professional and personal relationships through her social circle. Many artists of the avant-garde experimented with different forms and worked across media, and Brik was no different. She dabbled in sculpture and writing at separate points in her life, although she did not exhibit as an artist.¹⁶ As a young woman, she trained professionally to become an artist and studied sculpture in Munich in 1911 (Valiuzhenich 2016: 12). However, during the 1920s, she mostly worked in cinema.

Her next film, Evrei na zemle, came almost ten years after her first one. Her last film was Stekliannyi glaz / A Glass Eye (Brik and Zhemchuzhnyi, USSR, 1929), co-directed with Vitalii Zhemchuzhnyi. After acting in her first film, in her next two films, Brik chose to work behind the scenes, focusing on production work instead of pursuing the more glamorous path of acting on screen (Heftberger 2018). Brik’s plans for other films went unrealised, and these projects were never completed. After this brief foray into filmmaking, Brik never worked in cinema again. It is unclear whether this choice was intentional or by circumstance. Brik never addressed it publicly. One explanation may be that Maiakovskii’s death in 1930 monumentally altered her personal and professional life, and she put her creative pursuits aside to focus on building his posthumous legacy.

According to a quote that Brik’s biographer and stepson, Vasilii V. Katanian, attributes to Room, the director wanted to invite Brik to work on his next film, but she was busy with something else. He praised her energy and engagement on set, along with her management abilities. Room also referenced her ability to procure much-needed, but difficult-to-obtain, film when they needed more, as I discussed earlier in the section “Jewish Filmmaking in the Early Soviet Union.” These skills were essential for her producer (organizator) role. Katanian quotes Room as saying “She was very energetic and engaged. She pestered Shklovsky, who was taking a long time with the script, and squeezed out film from somewhere. I wanted to invite her to work on my next film, but she was busy with something else, and it was a pity” (Katanian 2002: 80).¹⁷

It remains an open question whether Brik was indeed associated with the different iterations of the Soviet secret police (the OGPU and NKVD), as has been controversially alleged by sources such as the investigative journalist Arkadii Vaksberg (1998). Although contested and not fully supported by archival research, it is nevertheless important to register the presence of these claims since they have shaped the public perception about Brik’s influence on those in her social sphere and the projects she worked on, including Evrei na zemle. Allegations that both Osip and Lilia were police informants, or even active secret agents responsible for reporting on the lives of Soviet luminaries in their social circle, have not only been raised posthumously but also originated in their own time from their contemporaries, including the poets Sergei Yesenin (1825-1925) and Anna Akhmatova (1899-1966).

What is undeniable is that Lilia Brik had personal connections to top Soviet officials. Lilia (along with Osip Brik and Maiakovskii) was close friends with Iakov Agranov (1893-1938), a high-ranking deputy within the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD), who helped orchestrate the represessions of the Great Purge of 1936-1938. He was executed in 1938. Lilia Brik also married another high-ranking Soviet military official, her second husband, Vitalii Primakov (1897-1937), who was accused of colluding in an anti-Soviet plot and also executed during the Great Purge.

Lilia Brik had social power as a cultural organiser, often hosting friends and acquaintances of LEF at the home she shared with Osip Brik and Maiakovskii. This far-reaching personal network, both at home and abroad, meant that she had both insider influence and privileged access to the Soviet Union’s leading cultural figures of her time. The extent to which Brik’s association with members of the highest echelons of state and cultural power may have been motivated by possible work with agencies of the Soviet government, and whether this may have related to her work with OZET, remains open for further investigation.

Creatively, Brik was an innovative multimedia artist who primarily worked on collective, collaborative projects, making her contributions difficult to credit in terms of traditional definitions of sole authorship.¹⁸ Within Brik’s artistic network, which was clustered around the 1920s avant-garde journal Lef (Left Front of the Arts) and its successor Novyi Lef (New Lef), the concept of single authorship was heavily criticised for being anti-Soviet.¹⁹ A number of feminist film scholars have argued that the influence of auteur theory on how film history is written obscures women’s involvement in cinema production by attributing the entire work to a single male director—or in this case, Maiakovskii, Shklovskii, and Room (Kaganovsky 2018).

In this example, auteur theory and collective authorship are completely different ideologies, but nevertheless, both serve to exclude Brik. Delineating Brik’s specific contributions to Evrei na zemle is a reconstructive effort intended to show how her participation as a crew member and producer shaped the content and form of the film. This analysis shines a light on her own artistic vision to counteract the way her contributions to cinema are overshadowed in other studies that prioritise her collaborators.

The title of this article alludes to Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Author as Producer” (1934), which centres on the political dialecticism of literary production in a revolutionary context.²⁰ As its main example of the successful producer, the essay points to the Soviet writer Sergei Tret’iakov (1892-1937), whom Brik knew well through their mutual association with LEF. While it was never published during Benjamin’s lifetime, much has been written subsequently about the significance of Benjamin’s text for understanding the political orientation of the Soviet avant-garde during the late 1920s and early 1930s (Gough 2010: 383-403). Although in Benjamin’s formulation, ‘the producer’ refers to the class position of literary writers, mostly bypassing cinema, I extend the premise to film production and apply the concept to Brik as a film producer. This application makes it possible to think through Brik’s unique position on the film crew and her role in the creation of Evrei na zemle. Thus, within the cinematic apparatus, the muse becomes the producer and moves from being the subject to becoming the creator herself. As Benjamin writes in the essay, “Tretiakov distinguishes the operating writer from the informing writer. His mission is not to report but to struggle; not to play the spectator but to intervene actively” (Benjamin 1934: 770). Having been largely overlooked in scholarly histories, the functional purpose of the producer in early Soviet film, and this production in particular, is an interesting avenue for further study.

Situating Brik’s role as organizator s"ëmok in this context, were it not for her dedication to seeing the project completed and her active intervention in resolving problems during filming, Evrei na zemle may not have been made, or may have been an entirely different film altogether. While it is unknown exactly how Brik earned the producer title and the full extent of her duties, it is imperative to note that the parameters of professional responsibilities on set were not yet as clearly defined as they are today. It was also a unique role because, in general, “the Soviet film industry did not have producers, and only directors had the creative and technical expertise to make films” (Belodubrovskaya 2017: 91). To become a documentary film producer in the mid-1920s, no formal training was required. Nevertheless, Brik’s existing personal and professional connections, prior filmmaking experience, and industrious attitude to problem-solving were valuable attributes to have.

This structural ambiguity shaped the gendered distribution of labour during the making of the film and was characteristic of film production more widely during this period. For film workers in the 1920s, professional titles on set were often interchangeable. Productions made on a small budget,²¹ like Evrei na zemle, also required their crew to work in several capacities. In Brik’s case, her title as producer may have served as an umbrella term that encompassed a variety of responsibilities, not unlike today, where a producer’s level of involvement may vary by project. That she was credited at all for her work is significant, given the nature of the Soviet film industry at the time. Since film labour was gendered in pre-defined ways during the 1920s, women’s labour in film production, particularly behind the camera, was often obscured. Almost no official documentation exists to chronicle Brik’s participation and contributions outside of her own reports preserved in her correspondence with Maiakovskii during the summer of 1926. This is also true for other women who were employed in the Soviet film industry during this time and is symptomatic of the way that the industry operated during its early years. Brik, for her part, was fully aware of the significance of her contributions to Evrei na zemle and Soviet cinema even as her work was overlooked or minimised by others.

“There is a lot more left to do” – Women Filmmakers in Early Soviet Cinema

Within the broader context of women filmmakers in early Soviet cinema, Brik’s high level of contributions is remarkable, as attested to by her inclusion in the film’s credits. Viewing Brik’s work on Evrei na zemle alongside her contemporaries allows for a better understanding not only of her individual contributions but also those of other women and marginalised figures who helped shape the trajectory of Soviet cinema during its early stages but remain largely invisible in its histories. In 1926, the year that Evrei na zemle was produced, few women held professional roles in Soviet cinema. Overall, women’s opportunities in the film industry were undoubtedly constrained by entrenched perceptions about traditional gender roles and misogyny more than a lack of skills or qualifications.

As the only credited woman among the film’s production crew, Brik had a unique role in the making of the film. Without Maiakovskii’s presence on set, Brik and the others on the crew were responsible for shaping the visual look of the film and deciding which scenes to shoot. While histories of early Soviet film production have focused on analysing screenwriting, acting, directing, editing, and camera operation, the producer’s role has not received as much attention. Thus, Brik’s role in the production has also been minimised in recent analyses of Evrei na zemle, which may be attributed to a lack of understanding about her responsibilities as the organizator s”ëmok. As Brik’s epistolary exchange with Maiakovskii demonstrates, obtaining film and the camera operator was part of her work. These essential logistical tasks made it possible—quite literally – for the film to be made. In her July 12 letter to Maiakovskii, Brik wrote that the beginning of filming was progressing slowly (Jangfeldt 1986: 173).²² By the end of July, filming was actively underway, and she was busy on set, which she detailed in her frequent letters to Maiakovskii that month.

Although Brik’s involvement in the project might seem uncharacteristic in comparison to the rest of her filmography, her interest in Jewish issues is supported by her biography and personal politics. Brik was raised by her Jewish parents in Moscow at a time when the right of Jews to reside in the city was still politically contested. Her Russian-Jewish father, Yuri Kagan (1861-1915), worked as a lawyer on behalf of Jewish clients (Ganieva 2020: 10). He was invested in the “Jewish question” as it pertained to Jews’ legal right to live in Moscow (Katanian 2002: 4-5). The intersection of Jewish rights and politics occupied both his professional and personal interests. Yuri Kagan’s advocacy for Jewish rights influenced his daughter’s political views, especially in combating antisemitism.

Much like the subjects of Evrei na zemle, Brik herself represented the ideals of a new Jewish identity under Communism. Having lived through the oppression of Jews in pre-revolutionary Russia (Katanian 1998: 12), she had direct knowledge of what it meant to be a Jew – first in Russian and then Soviet society. This self-awareness of her Jewish identity and personal experience of antisemitism faced by Jews shaped her outlook on contemporary politics. Undoubtedly, Brik lived a more secular lifestyle than the Jewish settlers in Evrei na zemle. While working for OZET, she used the film as a mechanism to bridge her modern orientation with the sense of pure ethnic identity that the Crimean settlers represented in her eyes.

It was this personal connection that sparked her interest in the Jewish colonies in Crimea, as she remarked in her letter to Maiakovskii quoted earlier. One of the only scholars to do so, Lavine even attributes the film’s conception to Brik: “While travelling around Crimea, Lily Brik developed the idea of a documentary on this experiment, for which Mayakovsky co-authored the film’s captions with Shklovsky” (Shleyfer Lavine 2019: 445). If true, this claim further solidifies Brik’s essential role as the film’s producer, making her directly responsible for the creation of Evrei na zemle.

The Marxist ‘woman question’ as it relates to Soviet silent cinema was introduced by Judith Mayne in her pioneering feminist study published in 1989 under the title Kino and the Woman Question: Feminism and Soviet Silent Film (Mayne 1989). In the book, Mayne stresses the paradoxical paradigm of women workers in Soviet cinema, where they are both relegated to “women’s work” behind the camera but are also represented as the “embodiments of socialism” in front of the camera (Mayne 1989: 179). This analysis can be extended to Brik and the way that gendered labour played out during the production of Evrei na zemle and the representations generated in the finished product on screen.

For the few Soviet female filmmakers we know, many other women performed the same types of work without credit, which has led to the undervaluing of women’s contributions to the history of film. As the film historian Lilya Kaganovsky has astutely observed, “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” (Kaganovsky 2018). For these reasons, Brik’s work as part of the film crew that made Evrei na zemle is an important contribution to the history of Soviet cinema and the role of women in it.

Conclusion

Evrei na zemle remains largely unknown but is nevertheless significant as a documentary film that connects the history of Jewish cinema in the early Soviet Union and Lilia Brik’s career in filmmaking. The film’s exploration of the concepts of earth, soil, and land reveals how cultural heritage can be co-opted in a highly politicised climate to serve a particular ideological regime. While we can only speculate on the fate that befell the Jewish settlers whose lives are documented in the film, this silent film gives viewers a glimpse of the prevailing 1920s Soviet attitudes toward the “Jewish question” in the context of rising antisemitism and how the topic was treated in this medium. Along with Stekliannyi glaz, the film is one of the best surviving examples of Brik’s work in filmmaking. Therefore, Evrei na zemle offers a valuable case study of how a female Jewish filmmaker approached the politics of Jewish issues in Crimea in the production of official agitprop cinema.

As the only credited Jewish woman who worked on Evrei na zemle, my analysis has focused on Brik’s contributions and the intersection of her identities to provide not only a new understanding of this film but also of the role that marginalised identities played in Soviet cinematic production of the 1920s. Her work as a producer of the film was a step in a new direction of artistic autonomy for the woman publicly given the title of ‘lover,’ ‘muse,’ and ‘wife’ of famous literary men. Although by her own accounts, Brik relished her role as a muse, she also had other accomplishments to her name and actively sought to establish herself creatively and independently within the artistic social sphere she occupied.

A new understanding of the film begins to emerge when analysed through the intersection of gender and Jewish identity. This shows how they converge with the historical contingencies of the interwar period that led to the creation of the film and Brik’s role in its development. Like the subjects of her film, Brik was a new kind of Jewish woman grappling with the future of Communist modernity. While Brik might offer just one example of how histories overlook those who problematise the dominant narrative, a closer examination of her legacy is rich material for new investigations and studies of early Soviet film history.

Maria Garth
Independent Scholar

Acknowledgement

I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of this journal for their valuable comments and suggestions, which helped strengthen this article. I would also like to express my gratitude to the editorial team of this journal, particularly Denise J. Youngblood; Natascha Drubek; Eva S. Zak, and Irina Schulzki, for their contributions and assistance during the editing process.

Bio

Maria Garth is a scholar of global modern and contemporary art and the history and theory of photography, with an emphasis on Soviet visual culture. She received a PhD in Art History from Rutgers University (USA). Her peer-reviewed research on the relationship between aesthetics, politics, and gender has been published in the Journal of Russian American Studies, Journal of Avant-Garde Studies, Proceedings of the National Library of Latvia, and SEQUITUR.

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2778-260X

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Suggested Citation

Garth, Maria. 2026. “The Muse as Producer: Lilia Brik and Soviet-Jewish Documentary Filmmaking in the 1920s”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 22. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2026.00022.422.

URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/

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