The Keynote address from the 2025 AATSEEL Conference.

Lenore A. Grenoble is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Chicago, specializing in Slavic and Arctic Indigenous languages. She holds positions as an Adjunct Professor at Ilisimatusarfik (the University of Greenland) and as Director of the Arctic Linguistic Ecology Lab at the M.K. Ammosov North-Eastern Federal University in Yakutsk, Russia. Her research focuses on language contact and shift, vitality and sustainability, studying the relationship of climate change, urbanization, and well-being in Arctic Indigenous communities. Her primary fieldwork engages with speakers in Northeastern Siberia and Greenland.

This cluster seeks to highlight the contributions of women filmmakers and feminist film scholars to the cinemas of the late Russian Empire and the early USSR. The introduction provides an overview of the history of women’s participation in these cinema industries, an overview of Anglophone film scholarship on Russian Imperial and Soviet women’s cinema, and brief summaries of the articles included in the cluster.

Lilya Kaganovsky is Professor of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles, and Associate Editor for film and media at The Russian Review. She has published numerous articles, book chapters, and edited volumes, and is the author of two monographs: How the Soviet Man Was Unmade (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008) and The Voice of Technology: Soviet Cinema’s Transition to Sound, 1928–1935 (Indiana University Press, 2018).

This article discusses the beginnings of feminist screenwriting in the Russian Empire. It explores the life and career of Ekaterina Vystavkina, who was a writer, journalist, eminent feminist activist, and screenwriter. Her two major works in cinema, The Bloodless Duel and The Golden Slipper, the first Russian Cinderella film adaptation, reflect the ideas of women’s emancipation and appear to be innovative experiments in plot making and genre. In the 1910s, critics did not understand the feminist message of these films. However, by comparing sources on these films with other texts written by Vystavkina, the authors of this article suggest discussing them as the first major examples of feminist screenwriting in Russia.

Anna Kovalova is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh. She has edited a collection of screenplays by Nikolai Erdman (Kinostsenarii, 2010). She is the author of Kinematograf v Peterburge 1896–1917 (with Yuri Tsivian, 2011). She has published in Dickens Quarterly, Film History, Kinovedcheskie zapiski, The Russian Review, Slavonic and East European Review, Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema, Osteuropa, and other journals. She is the editor-in-chief of Daydreams (https://daydreams.museum/), the first scholarly database of feature films produced in the Russian Empire.

Alexandra Ustyuzhanina is a senior researcher at the Gosfilmofond of Russia. In 2024, she carried out a reconstruction of Evgenii Bauer’s Nabat (1917). She has also curated a program of early comedies for the Moscow Archival Film Festival (2024) and several other programs of archival cinema. She has published in the journal Iskusstvo kino. She is the manager of Daydreams (https://daydreams.museum/), the first scholarly database of feature films produced in the Russian Empire.

Although the film Battleship Potemkin is often singularly linked with the auteur figure of Sergei Eisenstein, it is rarely mentioned that the film’s screenplay was written by Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko (1889–1974). This article suggests that the dilapidated state of Agadzhanova’s archive at the Russian State Historical Museum (GARF) can help explain why her efforts in this film and others have gone mostly unnoticed, mostly unnoted, and mostly forgotten. By making use of what I call the ambivalence of archive, I suggest that an important question for research on Soviet women’s cinema practitioners asks not only what we lose when figures like Agadzhanova are eclipsed, but why it happens in the first place, and what it tells us about the writing of film history both inside of the Soviet Union and outside of it. I do this both by reinvestigating and reconsidering how Agadzhanova’s labor for Potemkin was perceived over time, and by reconsidering her work as co-director of the understudied 1929 film, The Two Buldis. Constantly repressed but never entirely forgotten, the ambivalence of Agadzhanova’s archive can direct us to a unique form of cinematic labor that typical methods of film historiography have frequently eclipsed

Matthew Kendall is Assistant Professor in the department of Polish, Russian, and Lithuanian studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he teaches courses in Russian, Soviet, and Central and East European Film and Literature. In addition to writing articles on film, literature, and digital games, he recently completed a book manuscript, Revolutions per Minute: Sound Recording and the Soviet Creative Imagination.

This article discusses the 1929 film The Last Attraction (Poslednii attraktsion), directed by Ol'ga Preobrazhenskaia and Ivan Pravov. Ol'ga Preobrazhenskaia (1881– 1971) is one of few female Soviet directors to have achieved any kind of global renown, both in her own time and since. Yet beyond her best-known film The Women from Riazan Province (Baby riazanskie, 1927), her work remains little studied. This article is not about Preobrazhenskaia as a specifically female director. In fact, her most interesting Soviet-era films were made in a creative partnership with Ivan Pravov. Pravov, some twenty years her junior, began working with Preobrazhenskaia in 1927; they were partners, in life and work, until the mid-1940s. Analyzing The Last Attraction, I will reveal the complex interplay between these two directors’ varied but complementary cultural backgrounds. The film can be seen as a reflection on the relationship between political art and entertainment, and as a playful summation of its two directors’ experiences over the previous decade: their engagement, as actors and teachers, with the new State Institute of Cinema, and questions of dramatic art. The Last Attraction is a film about bodies, artifice and spectacle; it looks both back to the 1920s and forward to the emerging shapes of Soviet Socialist Realism. It is distinct amidst Preobrazhenskaia and Pravov’s oeuvre as an instance of direct engagement with the rapidly changing political environment—to which they fell foul in 1931.

Emma Widdis holds the established Chair of Slavonic Studies in the University of Cambridge, and is a fellow of Trinity College. She is the author of three monographs on Soviet cinema, and has recently edited The New Cambridge History of Russian Literature (Cambridge UP, 2024), together with her colleagues Simon Franklin and Rebecca Reich.

In 1932, acclaimed Soviet documentarian and pioneer of the found footage compilation film, Esfir Shub, announced her intention to make a film about women. Described by her as “a cinematic document about Soviet women,” the project aimed to combine an observational approach with an intense dramatic structure. By the end of 1933, Shub and her co-author, Soviet writer Boris Lapin, had completed a seven-chapter script titled Women, which focused on four individual heroines. Alas, Shub’s cinematic document about women never came to fruition and survives only as a collection of documents—including the script, some notes, and a handful of photographs selected by the director for the film. This article reclaims the story of Shub’s unrealized feminist manifesto, Women. Drawing on extensive archival evidence, it reconstructs a continuous history of the project and uses this historical context to analyze the script, shedding light on what is arguably the most obscure—and most important—period of Shub’s filmmaking career. The article demonstrates how Shub’s inventive documentary vision came into conflict with the ideological constraints of the state. Finally, it argues that while Shub’s innovations never reached the screen, they remain significant for offering an alternative developmental path for documentary film and for reshaping our understanding of feminist film history.

Anastasia Kostina is a Mellon Teaching Fellow at the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Her current book project, Between Theory and Practice: Esfir Shub and the Engendering of Soviet Documentary, explores the relationship between politics, aesthetics and gender during the nascent stage of Soviet documentary cinema. She has recently co-edited a collected volume titled The New Russian Documentary: Reclaiming Reality in the Age of Authoritarianism. Her writings on film have appeared in Feminist Media Histories, Film Quarterly, Senses of Cinema, KinoKultura, and Apparatus.

This essay calls attention to a neglected pioneer of cinematic innovation—puppet artist, animator, and director Sarra Mokil. In so doing, it identifies forms of cinematic thinking that are expressed not in the male-dominated field of logocentric film theory of her time and place, but in the practical, intuitive, but no less theorized praxis of filmmaking itself. I speculate on the kind of experiment and critical thinking that were done on her first project, puppetry for the short “The Master of Life,” and then treat briefly the history of puppetry as a satirical form in the Soviet Union through consideration of her work on The New Gulliver. Then I turn to the fairy tale world she created in her first two short films, asking how her approach to world creation, character movement, and cinematography reflect the expectations placed on her by industry and audience in the context of Stalinist cultural repression.

Anne Eakin Moss is Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Chicago. She is the author of Only Among Women: Philosophies of Community in the Russian Imagination, 1860–1940 (Northwestern 2020; Russian translation Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie 2023) and numerous articles on Soviet and world cinema and art, the most recent of which is “White on White and The Black Square: Shepitko’s The Ascent, Stan Brakhage, and Cinematic Abstraction,” published in Refocus: The Films of Larisa Shepitko, ed. Lida Oukaderova (Edinburgh UP, 2024). She is completing a book manuscript entitled “The Special Effects of Soviet Wonder.”

This paper aims to examine and discuss the meaning and the profound relationship established between body and power in the short story “Devushka Roza” (“Young Rosa,” 1944) by Andrei Platonov, situating it within the context of the writer’s later works while also considering his previous novels and short stories. In “Young Rosa,” the representation of the body serves as a priem, a literary device Platonov employs to move beyond of dichotomy “individual” and “collective,” toward a broader understanding of the interplay between the “individual” and “power.” A close reading of the story and an analysis of its different editions will demonstrate how Platonov was developing a reflection on totalitarian systems and, more specifically, on the role of violence as one of the principal tools through which regimes—in this case the Soviet regime—seek to exercise power over individuals. Rosa’s body is not only subjected to torture, but also becomes the symbol of an absolute loss of self, a nullification of the human being, which annihilates her to the point of complete dissolution of her own identity.

Giuseppina Larocca is Associate Professor of Russian literature and language at the University of Macerata (Italy). Her research interests include Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Russian Prose, Russian Emigration Literature, Russian Intellectual History, Literary Theory and the relationship between medicine and literature in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Russian Prose. She is the author of the research monograph L’aquila bicipite e il tenero iris. Tracce russe a Firenze nel primo Novecento (1899–1939) (The Double-headed Eagle and the Tender Iris: Traces of Russian Culture in Florence (1899–1939) (Pisa University Press, 2018). She is currently working on a book project, provisionally titled “Beyond Formalism. Lev Pumpianskii Between Classical Philology and Literary Criticism” (Academic Studies Press, Boston).