By Mark Seton
Screen history, like other histories, is often written and framed by those who impose their voices above other voices – frequently, it’s male voices speaking above and over female voices. That means we only get to hear and see, at best, only half the story. Karen Pearlman’s screen trilogy, comprising of Woman With An Editing Bench, After The Facts, and I Want To Make A Film About Women offers an engaging and touching account of cinema history’s several neglected women filmmakers, alongside other creative collaborators in the 1930s and the era of Stalin. This trilogy provides an invaluable experience both for cinema-goers in general, and, more specifically, should be in the core curriculum of any screen production training program.
The visceral experience of witnessing each short film reveals, as Pearlman (and her colleagues John MacKay and John Sutton) observe, that “what we call ‘thinking’ takes place across and by way of reliable and complementary couplings of brains, bodies, and world.” I would add that this trilogy also proffers an alternative to the more familiar Hegelian-informed Marxist dialectic that is predicated on antagonism between thesis and antithesis in order to generate synthesis. Whereas, the cumulative narrative of this trilogy models a generative flow of dialectic, as dialogue and collaboration, among various ideological starting points rather than an antagonistic, competitive, win-lose, start-stop dynamic.
Woman With An Editing Bench establishes the mise en scene that will inform each short film. One is immediately struck by the aural groundedness of the rhythms of sound – editing spindles turning, gates opening and closing, the running of celluloid through fingers, scissors or razors cutting, the whirring of a moviola mechanism – interwoven with a musical accompaniment of piano and strings. As an embodied sense, hearing takes precedence because we can hear our environment and respond more immediately than waiting for our eyes to locate and focus upon the apparent source of the sound.
This first film’s title is, itself, a playful provocation. The cine-literate world may take for granted Dziga Vertov’s film Man With A Movie Camera. But how might we better acknowledge the Woman With An Editing Bench, given that the focus of attention in this film is Elizaveta Svilova (played by Leeanna Walsman) who was the editor and film collaborator for Man With A Movie Camera, as well as Vertov’s partner (played by Richard James Allen)? Pearlman’s narrative account of Svilova’s work and life progressively juxtaposes several themes: men talking and women listening (and continuing to work); the fixity of written text (and its vulnerability to State censorship) in contrast to the fluidity in meaning-making with ‘found’ footage; and the value of collaboration interweaving what a director ‘likes’ (often determined by past preference) with what a film project needs in order to ‘work’ (depending on an editor’s present, felt sense). What is honoured is Svilova’s dedication and skill in creative work and expression, alongside her wisdom in preserving and disseminating the legacy of her collaborative partnership with Vertov.
The middle work, After the Facts, initially positions itself at one-step removed from the drama of history as Pearlman’s voice-over declares that “facts become thoughts when you cut them together”. We witness the innate value of film’s capacity to document or ‘capture’ facts that subsequently, through the editor’s hands, convey many different, sometimes contradictory ideas. Again, a rhythmic soundscape of the cutting room underscore this shorter film as Pearlman vividly uses documentary ‘found’ footage of Russian women in the 1930s to help us experience the numerous thoughts that can be generated by combining ‘she looks’, with ‘what she sees’, and ‘what she thinks’. The cine-literate viewer might associate this with the so-called Kuleshov effect. Pearlman graciously points to the fact that editors (mostly women) were already doing this, and queries why a man, who observed this pre-existing process, should be credited with it.
A key exponent of the ‘editor’s effect’ was Soviet filmmaker and editor, Esfir Shub, who is now often credited with the invention of the ‘remix’ film. According to Shub, “the effect was not so much to provide the facts but to evaluate them from the vantage point of the revolutionary class.” She worked with Svilova and Dziga during a time when Soviet leaders wanted to rearrange the ‘facts’ – presenting the new Soviet order to the watching world as a kind of musical fantasy. Shub and her colleagues wanted to show real women and real work. These were the facts, even if we only know them ‘after the facts’. An especially touching moment is how Karen ‘inserts’ herself into the archive of these innovative and compassionate filmmakers. She rhythmically cuts facts together about real women and real work (footage kept safe by Shub and her colleagues) to generate some thoughts of her own, even incorporating her own body’s movement response, into the assemblage.
I Want To Make A Film About Women, the final narrative of this trilogy, uses another metaphor familiar to those who have worked with film, rather than video or digital recording, namely the reel. Physical constraints meant that only a limited amount footage could be contained on a reel at the shooting, editing and projection stages. But this apparent limitation also enables time for reflection and new ideas to emerge, particularly during the shooting stage. Pearlman offers five reflections – five reels – about the impacts of being kept hidden and silenced by men who were unwilling to share power. The first reel, entitled “Esfir Shub” (played by Victoria Haralabidou), begins with her declaration: “I want to make a film about women” and places us in a dramatized, theatrical space of a kitchen where women spend much of their time. Experiences of making do with what is available apply to both life and to creative expression, even in the midst of frequent, often violent and terrifying upheavals. The kitchen provides a refuge and oasis where relationships are formed and deepened over the everyday necessities of life, as well as where new possibilities could be envisaged and worked for.
The primacy of relationships is heightened in the second reel, entitled “Friends”. We witness among these creative and hard-working women the close, embodied instances of affection, love, connection and touch that inform why and how they work with and off each other, rather than in isolation and illusory autonomy. This is effectively counter-pointed by “Men”, the title of the third reel, in which it is revealed that Shub was friends with men too – Eisenstein (played by Tug Dumbly) and Vertov (reprised by Richard James Allen) – whom are remembered as great filmmakers. Yet, ironically, Shub has not been given similar recognition. Here, Pearlman builds upon the theatrical space by setting up both a kitchen and a series of platform steps and a baby carriage around which we see Shub, Eisenstein and Vertov, performatively use the space, to re-enact their sometimes antagonistic relationships with each other – similar to the theatrical ‘machine’ spaces envisaged by innovative Russian constructivist and theatre maker, Vsevolod Meyerhold. Once more, cine-literate viewers will recognise the platform steps and baby carriage as Pearlman’s playful homage to the famous baby carriage scene in Eisenstein’s film Battleship Potemkin. This is highly pertinent given the fact that it was Shub who taught Eisenstein how to edit in her own kitchen.
Reel four, entitled “Labels”, draws our attention to the confinement and frequent violence done to women through objectifying labels such as ‘Jew’, ‘wife’, ‘muse’ or ‘intellectual’. These words pervasively float in the air that surrounds these women. But such words can’t be tolerated for long before a declaration – “I work” – launches the audience into the fifth and final reel, entitled “Work”. Here we witness both a culmination and a celebration of these womens’ work in design, clothing, movement, staging and framing. However, such hopeful energy is soon suppressed by the totalitarian stance of Stalin, leaving these women downcast, motionless – not killed, but starved of support, recognition and opportunity. This is a crucial moment of artist meeting artist as “Shub” breaks the ‘fourth wall’ and directly asks the director of this trilogy (Pearlman, off-camera): “Karen – are we cut?” Pearlman steps into the filmic space and joins Shub in this moment of crisis. Pearlman admits she can only imagine what Shub must have thought and felt when their creative opportunities were suppressed. According to Shub, it’s all about stopping to actually listen and look at what she was saying through her images, through her editing, through her construction of ideas. And so the film ends with the faces of women joyously interacting with each other as they work hopefully for their future.
Some might see this revisiting of the past as some kind of idealised nostalgia – a desire for some pre-digital ‘golden age’ of filmmaking. But I sense that Pearlman is drawing our attention to a larger human endeavour that we have yet to embrace – namely, the value and hard work required to welcome collaborative diversity across gender identification, sexual orientation, physical, cognitive and emotional attributes, so that we can engage creatively with our contemporary world in a collaborative rather than an antagonistic way that honours all voices and experiences.
To watch Woman With An Editing Bench, click here. To watch After The Facts, click here. To stream I Want To Make A Film About Women on SBS On Demand, click here.
