Morley, Rachel Performing Femininity: Woman as Performer in Early Russian Cinema (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 559 story ends with the creation of new beau mondes in the GULag after many members of Kharkiv’s beau monde were arrested. This engaging book is a model of interdisciplinary work, undoubtedly facilitated by Fowler’s background in theatre. She defines ‘theatre’ broadly to incorporate various performance genres. Her study challenges established historians who ignore cultural production, and it deserves to read by scholars of diverse disciplines. Department of History Susan Costanzo Western Washington University Morley, Rachel. Performing Femininity: Woman as Performer in Early Russian Cinema. I. B. Tauris, London and New York, 2017. xv + 288 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Filmography. Index. £64.00: $120.00. The main thesis of Rachel Morley’s book is elaborated in its title: the motif of woman as performer is examined as the key to the history of early Russian cinema. Early Russian cinema does indeed begin and end with the image of woman as performer, but between the Persian princess from the first Russian film, Sten´ka Razin (1908), who performs a fiery dance, and the circus artiste Pola in Molchi, grust´, molchi… (1918) there are dozens, even hundreds of other dancers, actresses and singers. Having established this trajectory, Morley has written a new history of Russian pre-Revolutionary cinema. Morley emphasizes the motif of woman as performer in a large number of pre-Revolutionary films, both those that have been preserved and those that have not: the absolute majority of early Russian films have been lost, and Morley’s broad approach to the material is undoubtedly the most productive. It is another matter that within the corpus of films examined in the book too strong an accent, to my taste, is placed on those of Evgenii Bauer: sometimes it seems that other directors are left in the shadows. Each of the book’s seven chapters is devoted to a detailed examination of the variations on the motif of woman as performer: the oriental dancer, the peasant girl, the opera singer, the tango-dancer, the gipsy dancer, the ballerina and the early modern dancer, the actress. Morley’s analysis is cyclic in structure, beginning with a thorough (and extremely witty) analysis of Sten´ka Razin and ending with a no less interesting analysis of Bauer’s late film, After Death (1915). Thus her synchronic approach to the material grows into a diachronic approach. There are some aspects of Morley’s study that deserve criticism. First, the survey of scholarly literature on Russian pre-Revolutionary cinema (pp. 1–5) seems incomplete and a little tendentious. In particular it is surprising that SEER, 96, 3, JULY 2018 560 both in this chapter and in the book as a whole there is not a single reference to one of the most recent and comprehensive books on Russian pre-Revolutionary cinema, Irina Grashchenkova’s Kino Serebrianogo veka (Moscow, 2005). Not only does Grashchenkova propose her own concept of the history of early cinema, but she also touches upon the questions which directly interest Morley. In addition, the tendency to examine the history of early cinema as the history of film direction — reflected, in particular, in the filmography (pp. 274– 78), where the films mentioned in the text are not listed either alphabetically or chronologically, but grouped by directors — does not seem to me to be fully justified. In Russia at the end of the 1900s and the beginning of the 1910s the director was scarcely the author, the main creator of a film. Often he carried out only technical functions, while the main responsibility lay on the shoulders of the cameraman and the film factory owner. The names of directors did not begin to appear on posters and in advertisements until 1914, thanks to the initiative of Vladimir Gardin. The formula of describing a film in terms of its director, for example, ‘Romashkov’s Sten´ka Razin’ (p. 5), does not, therefore, seem quite correct. It is also a pity that in a book devoted to early film plots questions of film dramaturgy are hardly discussed and the names of the greatest scriptwriters are mentioned either in the margins or else not at all. Each of these criticisms, taken individually, can of course be considered...