Apparatus, 6: Women at the Editing Table: Revising Soviet Film History of the 1920s and 1930s (2018)

“The construction of the historical narrative of film editing has the cultural invisibility of women and of collaborators embedded within it. Film histories regularly spend whole chapters describing editing as a significant revolution in the medium. However, while the names of “great directors” are evoked in these discussions, the names of editors are not mentioned: “…for the most part, the women who cut film in the silent era remained unacknowledged in film credits or the trade press. Their work was considered to be merely technical rather than creative.” […]

Collectively, the articles in this issue are shifting understanding of the editor’s work from ‘merely’ technical or ‘just helping’, which is a gendered erasure of women’s work, to understanding it as expert collaboration in filmmaking. In other words, creative work. Why is this important? Because by obscuring the creativity of the work of the hands of women who watched, sorted, cut and pasted frames of film together we obscure the women themselves.” (from Editorial)

Texts by Karen Pearlman, John MacKay, and John Sutton, Lilya Kaganovsky, Natalie Ryabchikova, Nikolai Izvolov, Adelheid Heftberger, and Esfir Shub.

Edited by Karen Pearlman and Adelheid Heftberger
Publisher Apparatus, Berlin, August 2018
Open access
ISSN 2365-7758

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