Fifty Years of Soviet Women's Cinema, 1929-1979: The Visible and the Invisible

FAIN: FT-279054-21

Lilya Kaganovsky
Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois (Champaign, IL 61801-3620)

Research and writing one chapter of a book examining the role of women and attitudes regarding gender in the development of the Soviet film industry.

Focusing on fifty years of women’s cinematic production (1929-79), this project makes crucial interventions in our understanding of the role of women filmmakers in the establishment and development of Soviet cinema. It tells a new story about Soviet film history with new archival evidence, giving attention to directors, cinematographers, and film editors whose significant contributions have been elided or erased by previous accounts, and offering case studies of films and filmmakers that provide an in-depth look at examples of women’s cinematic production from the 1920s avant-garde to the late Soviet period. It also engages with feminist film theory (classic and contemporary) to think about what “women’s cinema” is or might be. Soviet examples challenge our received notions of female authorship, the female gaze, and feminist filmmaking, because those were based on an incomplete historical archive that never included films or filmmakers from the USSR.