Esfir Shub

Pioneer of Documentary Filmmaking

Ilana Shub Sharp

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781501376481
• eBook ISBN: 9781501376504
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

Esfir Shub was the only prominent female director of nonfiction film present at the dawning of the Soviet film industry. She was, in fact, the first woman both to write critical texts on cinema and then practically apply these theorisations in her own films. As such, her syncretism of cinema theory and praxis inspired her to ask questions regarding both the nature of nonfiction film, such as the problem of authenticity and reality, and the function of the artist in society; issues which are still relevant in contemporary discussions about the documentary. Accordingly, this book demonstrates Shub's position not only as a significant filmmaker and recognised member of the early Soviet avant-garde but also as a key figure in global cinema history. Shub deserves recognition both as the founder and ardent promoter of the compilation film genre and as a pioneer of the theory and practice of documentary filmmaking.

1

Shub and the Art of Montage: Soviet Style

Montage was pivotal to Soviet film theory and practice in the 1920s. Therefore, this chapter is an exploration of the theoretical centrality of montage as a key identifier of avant-garde cinema in this era. It addresses the structural elements that underpinned Shub’s nonfiction film through her utilization of the revolutionary principles of montage, unique to the Soviet silent films of the vanguard.

Through its revolutionary political and aesthetic structure, Esfir Shub, Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov attempted to create a dramatic new reality. Each of these four filmmakers made key contributions through their own highly individual interpretations of montage, which they had identified as a crucial element upon which their cinematic philosophies were based. Indeed, Shub’s interlocutions with the avant-garde consisted of an interchange between the alternating voices of montage, Constructivism and nonfiction film. While Constructivism lay at her filmic foundation, Shub’s ideological montage (in symbiosis with Constructivist principles) was a means of mapping and unifying the structure and meaning of her raw material.

Soviet Montage: Its Origins and Specificity

‘Montage was a staple of Berlin Dada long before Eisenstein theorized about it in Mayakovsky’s¹ journal LEF the acronym for Left Front of the Arts [Levyi front iskusstv] in 1923.’² Although this statement cannot be denied, the historian Robert C. Williams, in Artists in Revolution, fails to acknowledge the impact of the Russian avant-garde artists in general (and Kazimir Malevich in particular) prior to the Revolution. Montage was a revolutionary expression of cinematic art in the newly emergent socialist society. It was itself a collage constructed from the following expressions: the artworks of Malevich circa 1914; the poetry of Velimir Khlebnikov, Alexander Kruchenykh, Vladimir Mayakovsky and the futurists; formalist literary theory; the photomontage of Aleksei Gan, Gustav Klutsis and Alexander Rodchenko; and the theatre of Vsevolod Meyerhold.³ In fact, montage was born out of Malevich’s nonsensical juxtaposition of visual images and also, its poetical equivalent, the literary trans-sense [zaum] of Khlebnikov and Kruchenykh in 1913. Added to this was the surreal emphasis of the artist Marc Chagall,⁴ the formalists’ defamiliarization [ostranenie] and the futurists’ displacement [sdvig]: all were captured in the kaleidoscopic world of Malevich’s artworks.⁵

Therefore, in opposition to Williams, I argue that the foundation of montage in the Soviet Union owes far more to the blooming of avant-garde art in the early twentieth century (before the upheaval of October 1917) than to Dadaist photomontage in 1918. The roots of montage lie embedded in the cultural soil of tsarist Russia, specifically in the work of Malevich, which in turn influenced Raoul Hausmann, Hannah Höch, John Heartfield and Kurt Schwitters.⁶ Interestingly, there is a powerful connection between Shub’s work and that of Höch’s.

Photomontage had its genesis in Malevich’s Lady by the Advertising Pillar [1914], Warriors of the First Division [1914] and Darkness in Parts, Composition with Mona Lisa [1915–16]. These mixed media artworks used collage and incorporated photographic images, creating an early synthesis of art and technology. While Hausmann and his Weimar colleagues were creating this new art form, the Constructivists Klutsis and Rodchenko were at the forefront of the advancement of photomontage and photography in the Soviet Union. Five years after Malevich’s groundbreaking artworks of photomontage, exhibited three years before the Revolution, Klutsis’s work, The Dynamic City, of 1919 is claimed to be the first example of Soviet photomontage: although Aleksei Gan is thought to have been exploring this genre as early as 1918.

Just as Höch and Heartfield used photomontage as a political weapon, Klutsis defined photomontage not ‘merely [as] the expressive composition of photographs. It always includes a political slogan.’⁷ Undeniably, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty was the cinematic realization of Klutsis’s earlier objective, as it was a chronicle of moving photographic images punctuated by political slogans. Using Constructivist rhetoric, Klutsis claimed further that ‘photomontage . . . is closely related to the development of industrial culture and forms of art for mass propagation . . . it represents a new art of the masses, because it represents the art of Socialist Construction’.⁸ In terms of the purely productive, functional and political aspects of her filmic constructs, Shub made her mark on the development of this aesthetic. She would echo Klutsis’s philosophy as she transformed this concept into her nonfiction films.

However, apart from the photomontage works on paper by Klutsis and Rodchenko, the evolution of the distinctively Soviet form of montage was further influenced by the stagecraft of Meyerhold and Mayakovsky. While Shub promoted the weighty issues of the USSR through her documentaries, she was well aware that the principles of Soviet montage, which she observed so seriously, were in fact derived from sites of laughter and merriment: the circus and the theatre. Indeed, both Meyerhold’s and Mayakovsky’s revolutionary experimentation in the theatre was to have a significant impact on (and be a vital rehearsal ground for) the montage practice of the young filmmakers.

Meyerhold and Theatrical October: Innovation and Montage

The influence of popular theatre on Soviet film and Constructivist art was substantial. Georg Fuchs’s The Theatre of the Future [Die Schaubühne der Zukunft], published in Leipzig and Berlin in 1906, was a catalyst for revolutionary artistic processes that began with Meyerhold’s observations on theatre and ended with the Constructivists. In his book, Fuchs expressed his belief that ‘dramatic art . . . should utilise the techniques of carnivals, acrobats, circuses, and the Japanese Kabuki and Noh theatres’.⁹ Fuchs’s volume was instrumental in the clarification and development of Meyerhold’s experimental and theatrical pathway, inspiring revolutionary methods of ‘circusization’ of the theatre and of biomechanics.

In 1921, Sergei Yutkevich and Sergei Eisenstein both became avid pupils of Meyerhold. As Yutkevich wrote, he and Eisenstein ‘were both crazy about the circus’ and each wished to become a metteur en scène under Meyerhold’s tutelage.¹⁰ Meyerhold’s emerging methodology would have a profound effect on Yutkevich and Eisenstein, and on Sergei Radlov and his Popular Comedy Theatre in Petrograd. In his position as a leading theatre director and mentor, Meyerhold would also play a vital role in the theoretical and practical development of the emerging filmmakers at the heart of experimental Soviet art and cinema.

Just prior to the February Revolution in 1917, Meyerhold launched his production of Mikhail Lermontov’s Masquerade. According to the Soviet theatre critic and historian Konstantin Rudnitsky, this interpretation was to have a profound influence on the repertoire of Russian theatre. Meyerhold perceived Masquerade as ‘a tragedy within the frame of a carnival’.¹¹ This was high art dressed in the garments of popular culture. Together with Mayakovsky, who extended this philosophy in his political satire Mystery-Bouffe, Meyerhold was creating a framework for the avant-garde filmmakers and the Constructivists (Shub, of course, being a member of both circles).

From a viewing perspective, the drama of Masquerade was highly filmic. Alexander Golovin, renowned for his artistry, replicated features of the interior design of the theatre on the stage thus creating visual continuity, a total entity.¹² Meyerhold and Golovin had suspended multiple curtains, which could be brought down smoothly and swiftly at varying points on the stage. These drops were utilized to slice and thrust the action forward with rapid cutting between various scenarios. A curtain would lift at the back of the stage resplendent with a different set, acting would then recommence, the curtain would fall and the drama and the actors would be propelled elsewhere so that the rhythmic pace could continue.¹³ Meyerhold also broke up the text: a soliloquy would start in one location and then the actor would move in front of another curtain closer to the audience, an d this scenario, in turn, would eventually be resolved on another section of the stage. Together with this editing was the corresponding optical montage. Meyerhold was forcing scenes to quickly flicker in front of the eyes of the spectators, cutting up the performance not just visually but also in terms of the rhythm and dialogue. The curtains were controlled like cinema frames. Meyerhold choreographed the actors’ body movements with precision, heralding his theory of biomechanics, which he was to utilize in his Constructivist theatre productions in the early 1920s. Thus, with the staging of Masquerade, a theatrical antecedent of filmic montage was already unfolding in early 1917.

Like his student Radlov with his Popular Comedy Theatre, Meyerhold’s emphasis on the circus and the music hall in order to create theatre for the populace was to have an immense bearing on Eisenstein in Strike and Yutkevich (and therefore Yutkevich’s fellow FEKS [Factory of the Eccentric Actor] collaborators, Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg).¹⁴ Moreover, Kozintsev recalls that over and above Meyerhold, their ‘dominant influence was Mayakovsky’.¹⁵ The anti-art stance of FEKS is reflected in their manifesto ‘Eccentrism’ [Ekstsentrism] published in Petrograd in 1922. This document clearly demonstrates not only their passion for popular culture, in particular music hall revue, pantomime and the circus, but even more significantly, it contains a denunciation of traditional figurative painting. Yutkevich, Kozintsev and Trauberg urge artists to ‘leave the picture frames and move towards . . . the object’ . . . ‘texture is a degree of tension in the treatment of the raw material’.¹⁶ Importantly, these are Constructivist sentiments and an indication of the allegiance of FEKS to the avant-garde in art and film.

In a less spectacular fashion than FEKS, Shub was to make her own contribution to the world of the circus. Before she resigned from TEO to embark on her film career, Shub wrote a pantomime script for the leading actor-clown personalities of the Moscow State Circus. Reviewed by the theatre critic P. A. Markov, Shub noted modestly, ‘it was well received. Markov commended the performance in the Theatre Courier [Vestnik teatra].’¹⁷ As Shub recounts: ‘the Moscow State Circus . . . contained famous dynasties of actors whose whole life was spent in close contact with the people. Socially relevant, acute and sometimes political scripts were heard from the circus stage, even in the blackest days of reaction.’¹⁸ Shub was nominated to its board of directors: ‘once a week I attended a meeting and an evening performance. . . . In this way, I supplied Meyerhold with precise knowledge about the working of Moscow’s circuses.’¹⁹

The influence of the circus aside, Kozintsev, who, like Trauberg and Yutkevich, later became an established filmmaker, reflected that ‘the Soviet cinema learned much more than the Soviet theatre, from the brilliant work of Meyerhold’.²⁰ Kozintsev was referring to the October Revolution and Meyerhold’s corresponding Theatrical October [Teatralnyi Oktiabr]. Shub expands on this assertion: ‘What was typical of Theatrical October? . . . Constructivism in the design of the “ground” (as they called the stage) and an enthusiasm for biomechanics. Also required from the actors, was an almost acrobatic mastery of movement. The theatre was expected to approach the dynamism of the circus with the showiness of the music hall.’²¹

Like his comrade Mayakovsky, Meyerhold was committed to the aims and principles of the Revolution. On 4 February 1918 (O.S.), Pravda described the demise of the ‘aristocratisation of theatre’ in favour of ‘carrying it out into the street’ with Meyerhold ‘working with a feverish intensity’ to make this a reality. Moreover, as Pravda added: ‘he is turning his as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Note on Translation and Transliteration
• Introduction
• 1 Shub and the Art of Montage: Soviet Style
• 2 Esfir Shub and the Constructivist Avant-Garde
• 3 The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty: Shub’s Constructivist Paradigm for Nonfiction Film
• 4 The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty: The Theory, the Politics and the History
• 5 Only Newsreels: Shub’s Triumphant Way Ahead
• 6 Shub’s Final Silent Documentary: Today
• 7 K.Sh.E.: Shub’s Conversion to Sound
• 8 Shub’s Spain: The End of the Line
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Esfir Shub: Filmography
• Select Filmography
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright