SRSC’s first issue for 2017 presents the result of our call for papers for a themed issue on ‘Women in Cinema’ to mark the journal’s tenth anniversary. The work on this cluster has been fascinating: we had a number of submissions, and curiously they were all written by women. Having left the scope open with the title ‘Women in Cinema’, and hoping also for submissions on women designers, camerawomen and female editors, we received articles with rather traditional coverage: actresses, women on screen and women filmmakers. It would appear, therefore, that there is scope for further work in the area of women’s cinema, women in cinema and women filmmakers, which is very good. On the other hand, there appears to be a certain reluctance to address head-on an issue that merits substantial revisionism, as Lilya Kaganovsky astutely noted in a paper she recently presented at the University of Bristol (9 December 2016), namely that the role of women in Soviet culture and Soviet cinema has indeed been quite different from that of women in Western cinema. Focusing on an article by Maya Turovskaya in Iskusstvo kino 5 (1981) on the issue of ‘zhenskii fil’m’, with Lana Gogoberidze’s Some Interviews on Personal Matters (Ramdenime interviu pirad sakitkhebze, 1977) as a case study, Kaganovsky highlighted the difference in the perception of women on screen through a female perspective, and noted the failure of the critical discourse at the time to find appropriate terms amidst qualifiers such as zhenskii, zhenstvennyi and feministskii. Indeed, the woman’s question was formally raised with regards to cinema only in the 1990s, in an issue of Iskusstvo kino (6, 1991) devoted to women in cinema, and in Lynn Atwood’s seminal publication Red Women on the Silver Screen (1993), with a significant contribution by the doyennes of Soviet film criticism, Maya Turovskaya and Elena Stishova. Significantly, Atwood’s volume also had only women contributors, just like our cluster here.
The three articles in the cluster reflect the emergence of a properly identifiable woman’s gaze (or touch) in post-war cinema: Olenka Dmytryk analyses the work of Dinara Asanova and Larisa Shepit'ko in terms of a haptic visuality that distinguishes their films from a dominant (male) discourse; Olga Mukhortova analyses the star persona of Renata Litvinova – actress, television presenter, filmmaker and public figure – positioning her between Soviet and Russian cultural values; and Irina Makoveeva explores the representation of women through the lens of Svetlana Proskurina and Vera Storozheva.
A whole new generation of women filmmakers has been emerging recently on the art-house scene. In 2015 alone, over half of the Kinotavr competition represented women’s films: Nataliia Meshchaninova’s The Hope Factory (Kombinat Nadezhda), Oksana Bychkova’s Another Year (Eshche odin god), Nigina Saifullaeva’s Name Me (Kak menia zovut), Anna Melikian’s Star (Zvezda), Angelina Nikonova’s Welkom Home, Svetlana Proskurina’s Goodbye Mom (Do svidaniia mama), Vera Kharybina’s Ask Me (Sprosi menia) and Tamara Dondurei’s documentary 21 Days (21 den') all ran in the main competition. Alongside, there is a whole range of women producers who are key to the Russian film industry: Natal'ia Ivanova, Sabina Eremeeva, Ul'iana Savel'eva and Natal'ia Mokritskaia, Elena Glikman, Marina Razbezhkina, Natal'ia Drozd and many more. So the role of women both in creation and production is steadily on the increase, and hopefully we will have alerted scholars to a field for further research.
The first issue of each volume traditionally includes a film script. This time, we have a unique piece – not by a female scriptwriter, but based on a play by a woman writer, Ol'ga Pogodina, and translated and introduced by a female scholar, Daria Ezerova, whom I thank for her initiative, energy and impeccable work. This is a script for an unrealised film project that Aleksei Balabanov planned just after completing Cargo 200 (Gruz 200), titled Clay Pit, which transposes some of Balabanov’s key themes into a world dominated by women, as Daria Ezerova highlights in her preface. The script is published here for the first time, with kind permission by Nadezhda Vasilieva, whom I thank for her generosity. I should also like to thank Ol'ga Pogodina for agreeing to this publication.
I should like to take this opportunity to thank the journal’s production team, especially Laura Huxley and Rebecca Hill; and I should like to welcome Balaji Shanmugam, who will have to deal with all sorts of peculiarities of Russian transliteration and other ‘special friends’. I am grateful to my editorial and advisory boards, and of course to the peer reviewers who staunchly lend their expertise to the journal.
Editor