Eleanor Rees’ new book investigates a field that contemporary scholars of the pre-revolutionary and Soviet cinema still know very little about. Much has been written recently about the history of film production, acting and narrative; the work of cameramen and editors is also discussed with a certain regularity. Even though production artists (designers, art directors) are in many ways responsible for what may now be called early Russian and Soviet cinema, their contributions have been on the periphery of scholarly attention for many years. As Rees notes, her book is a response to an appeal by the famous production artist Nikolai Suvorov. In 1938, he wrote: “Questions about the artistic culture of cinema are still far from resolved. It is even not clear what position the production artist (khudozhnik) plays in film production. But we hope that art historians will pay attention to this ‘unknown,’ but very important participant in the filmmaking process” (174). In her effort to answer these questions, Rees largely relies on primary sources, articles from the film periodicals of the 1910s–1930s in particular. She also draws on works by prominent Soviet film scholars such as Vera Kuznetsova and Gennadii Miasnikov (a prolific designer himself) that are not well-known today, especially to the Western reader. The book contains a very helpful appendix with articles on production design from early film periodicals and archives; the English translations of these texts will be extremely valuable for any scholar interested in the subject.
In the introduction, Rees discusses the goals of her book and points to a very important translation problem which has its roots in the history of the profession. In the cinema of the Russian Empire and the early Soviet Union, an individual responsible for a film’s design was called a ‘khudozhnik’, which would mean ‘artist’ if we were to translate it literally. However, as Rees convincingly explains, this word and other terms used by scholars previously (such as ‘set designer’ and ‘production designer’) do not reflect the meaning of ‘khudozhnik’ in full because, in Soviet and pre-Soviet space, this profession was significantly different from what it was in the West. She proposes translating ‘khudozhnik’ as ‘production artist’: “By adding the prefix ‘production’ to the direct translation of khudozhnik, I seek to emphasize that the role in Russian cinema similarly had responsibility for a whole range of creative and technical spheres that formed part of the film production process” (13). This terminological clarification is probably one of the book’s strongest arguments, and it might be reasonable to follow Rees’ approach to the use of “khudozhnik” from now on when writing about pre-Soviet and Soviet cinema.
Instead of tracing the history of the work of the production artist chronologically, Rees arranges her material thematically. Each of the four chapters examines the representation of a different material environment: the rural provinces, the domestic interior, the workplace, and artistic or entertainment spaces associated with artistic production and performance. However, the chapters’ order correlates with the history of the profession. For instance, the first of these chapters focuses on the rural environment, which was the only setting for the earliest Russian films produced in the 1900s. Later, filmmakers moved to the domestic interior, and that is the subject of the next chapter in the book.
Each of the book’s chapters presents a mini-history of production design in connection to a certain material environment. Chapters start with discussing early pre-revolutionary films and end with an analysis of Soviet films produced in the late 1920s or early 1930s. In such cases, the selection of films may often arouse questions. Why does the author mention this particular film and not that one? However, in my opinion, what is most important is that Rees has been able to find a balance between canonical and lesser-known films – and, on the other hand, between the surviving and lost (non-extant) ones. For instance, in chapter 5, she discusses Meyerhold’s famous Portret Doriana Greia / The Picture of Dorian Gray (Vsevolod Meyerhold, 1915, Russian Empire; lost) and Bauer’s Umiraiush’ii lebed’ / The Dying Swan (Evgeni Bauer, 1916, Russian Empire; extant) along with Viskovskii’s Iego Glaza / His Eyes (Viacheslav Viskovskii, 1916, Russian Empire) and Lazarev and Chardynin’s Za dveriami gostinoi / Behind the Drawing-Room Doors (Piotr Chardynin and Ivan Lazarev, 1913, Russian Empire), surviving films that are not so well-known among film historians. Rees incorporates original analyses of these films into a broader discussion of the evolution of production design. There is a strong tradition of discussing pre-revolutionary films from the point of view of plotting, production history, and camerawork. It is refreshing to see how Rees analyses these films from the perspective of production design. For example, in chapter 3, she offers an interesting discussion on how mirrors function in Kreitserova sonata / The Kreutzer Sonata (Vladimir Gardin, 1914, Russian Empire). She later revisits this motif and explores it in connection with other films, such as Nemyie svideteli / Silent Witnesses (Evgeni Bauer, 1914, Russian Empire) and The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Although Rees’s approach to analysing films is very productive, it might have benefitted from relying more on archival sources. What we see on screen is not necessarily the result of the production artist’s work. It would be helpful to refer to the original sketches and documentation related to the film’s production; unfortunately, such references are rare in the book. For the pre-revolutionary period, not many sources of that kind have survived. However, it is possible to collect a whole corpus of such materials for Soviet films, particularly using the rich collections of the Central State Film Museum in Moscow and the Archives of Art and Literature in both Moscow and St. Petersburg.
Rees defines the book’s focus as follows: “The book […] does not intend to provide a comprehensive study of the work of particular individuals. Rather, it seeks to establish a typology of production artists in order to show how, as a professional group, they influenced the aesthetic and technical decisions involved in filmmaking” (2-3). The idea of establishing specific patterns in the history of production art is tempting but it is difficult to do so unless one takes a large corpus of material into account. The author “sets out to explore the figure of the production artist in Russian and early Soviet cinema” (1), yet the geographic range does not expand beyond Russia. A reader interested in the artistic side of early Soviet cinema may be disappointed not to find any mention of production design in Georgia, Armenia, and Central Asia, let alone the highly acclaimed and influential Ukrainian school. The uniqueness of the so-called Leningrad school of filmmaking is barely mentioned. It would be helpful to delve more into certain case studies before summarising and building up a typology. The book would have also benefited from a more carefully compiled Index. In a pioneering study of production artists, with many references to such prominent figures as Nikolai Suvorov, Vasilii Rakhal or Anatolii Arapov, it would have made sense to include all their names in the index.
Overall, however, Designing Russian Cinema: The Production Artist and the Material Environment in Silent Era Film is a very significant contribution to film studies. It will undoubtedly provoke further research interest in the subject and, more broadly, into pre-Soviet and Soviet silent cinema.
Anna Kovalova
University of Pittsburgh
ANK492@pitt.edu
Anna Kovalova, PhD, is an assistant professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She is the author of Kinematograf v Peterburge 1896-1917 (with Yuri Tsivian, 2011). In 2015-2019, she taught film history and literature at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow). She has published in Film History, The Russian Review, Slavonic and East European Review, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Osteuropa, and other journals. As the head of the research team project Early Russian Film Prose, she has edited the most complete electronic database of early Russian narrative film texts: https://hum.hse.ru/filmprose/libretti. She is the editor-in-chief of Daydreams, the first scholarly database of feature films produced in the Russian Empire.
Bauer, Evgeni. 1914. Nemyie svideteli / Silent Witnesses. A/o “A. Khanzhonkov i Ko”.
Bauer, Evgeni. 1916. Umiraiush’ii lebed’ / The Dying Swan. A/o “A. Khanzhonkov i Ko”.
Chardynin, Piotr, and Lazarev, Ivan. 1913. Za dveriami gostinoi / Behind the Drawing-Room Doors. A/o “A. Khanzhonkov i Ko”.
Gardin, Vladimir. Kreitserova sonata / The Kreutzer Sonata. 1914. Russkaia zolotaia seriia.
Meyerhold, Vsevolod. 1915. Portret Doriana Greia / The Picture of Dorian Gray. Russkaia zolotaia seriia.
Viskovskii, Viacheslav. Iego Glaza / His Eyes. 1916. Russkaia zolotaia seriia.
Kovalova, Anna. 2024. Review: “Eleanor Rees: Designing Russian Cinema: The Production Artist and the Material Environment in Silent Era Film”. Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures in Central and Eastern Europe 19. DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.17892/app.2024.00019.373.
URL: http://www.apparatusjournal.net/
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