The Work of Montagesses

Esfir Shub seated behind Tatiana Kuvshinchikova in the editing room of the 3rd factory of Goskino. Courtesy of Muzei Kino.

This week we present a 1927 text by Soviet filmmaker Esfir Shub that turns from montage as an aesthetic theory to montage as a workplace, foregrounding the women whose technical skill, visual memory, and collective discipline kept the film factory running. Translated by Alla Gadassik and first published in English in 2018 in Apparatus Journal (special issue No. 6: Women at the Editing Table, edited by Adelheid Heftberger and Karen Pearlman), Shub’s account remains a rare first-person, manifesto-like text on women’s editing labor in the early Soviet studio system.1

I wish to tell about the important living organism of the film factory, about the montage department, and chiefly about the montagess (montazhnitsa).2

In my line of work, I’ve come into close contact with the montagess of rentals, the montagess serving the director, and the montagess of negatives, whose work is highly specialized. The labor of a montagess and her role in the production process is not widely known, and yet it is a large department with a well-organized workforce.

What does a montagess of rentals do? Come, enter the montage room at Sovkino. Right now, this is a large brightly lit room furnished with editing tables, though still primitively equipped. Film winders spin ceaselessly. Despite good ventilation, the air is filled with the sweet, syrupy scent of acetate and acetone. Her head bowed, arms ceaselessly moving, eyes intensely focused on the film strip, the montagess is at work.

What is she doing? The less experienced one reviews films after they are shown on screen — she patches the tears; checks the perforations; carefully and deftly trims down edges broken by the machine; curves the trimmed ends to prevent further damage, doing so skillfully, so as not to cause jitter on screen; removes frames already destroyed by the projector; cleans the celluloid and neatly rolls it back onto reels. And thus ceaselessly, reel after reel for the entire workday.

Montagesses who serve editing directors work separately. Tatiana Levington and I were probably the first people to hold the job of re-editing foreign films. Western and American films had to be ideologically corrected, which meant changing the plot and the editing structure of the film, as well as writing new intertitles. The work was done using just one print, which was then passed to the montagess, who would use this sample to accurately rework the negatives of all other copies. This demanded from the montagess a perfect knowledge of the positive print, the ability to accurately determine the action of each shot (and frame) in isolation, and visual memory.

Over the course of three years I re-edited roughly 300 pictures. There were some months when I suddenly had to prepare 10–15 pictures for release, each one in several copies. There were pictures that required very complicated re-editing. The work took place in a small, cramped, airless rentals office at the Goskino studio on Bol’shaia Dimitrovka.3 During all those years my assistant montagess Prokhorova never once made a mistake; she worked in a highly organized manner, using a carefully planned system. I must admit to picking up many of my production skills during this period. In 1925 I transitioned to directing the editing of Soviet-made pictures, and since 1927 to independent work in non-played film.

This is where the montagess becomes absolutely indispensable in one of the most crucial moments of the director’s work—the editing of the film. The montagess prepares all material for the picture according to the script, establishing its primary subjects in roughly the following order: wide shots, medium shots, close-ups and establishing shots of each scene, with all takes following in succession. All material is then reviewed by the director or the director-editor together with the montagess. She removes all the rejected takes. She then lays out all the remaining material for editing, according to a particular system that is highly personal to every director-editor. Following instructions by the director or director-editor, she groups certain sections of film, strips away unnecessary frames, and continues her very technical and very painstaking work alongside the director or director-editor until the conclusion of the entire editing process.

During my own work as author on the pictures Fall of the Romanov Dynasty and The Great Road, my assistant T. Kuvshinchikova helped me enormously. The two of us spent 7–8 months reviewing roughly a thousand positive and negative prints; following my instructions, she selected fragments, systematized them thematically, helped me file all material according to my classification system, which is based on primary thematic montage attributes, and did all the very technical and very demanding work with the aged celluloid over the course of editing these films.

Now, onto the last and most important division of the montage department, the department of negatives. The montagess of negatives is a most highly qualified employee. She uses the director’s positive print to assemble and edit the film’s negative cut, as well as compile a montage list. A complete knowledge of all the negatives, an immense visual memory, a fully rationalized system based on years of professionally acquired skills—these qualities distinguish montagesses of negatives, who are responsible for an accurate assembly of negatives based on the director’s control print, as well as for all subsequent copies of the film. Nowhere, not in any other department at the film-factory, would you find the same organization and planning as in the department of negative editing. Eyes and scissors work with great intensity, since we still have no devices for reviewing negatives, nor machines for splicing. Industrious organization, sharpness of vision, formidable visual memory, an agility and quickness of the hands—these qualities distinguish montagesses, who perform a major, important, scarcely noticed and little-recognized part in the making of a picture.

Yet montagesses are not just distinguished by the high industrious quality of their specialized labor. They are all, with rare exceptions, highly discerning about the quality of the film as a whole. In the screening room, when montagesses of negatives review the director’s control cut before starting the assembly of negatives, their evaluation of a picture is almost always unerring. Their reception of a picture is immediate and at the same time professional. I would even say the following: if the negative cutters like a picture, then it is undoubtedly well-made.

One more thing about montagesses. This collective of women workers delights us with its political harmony, social activism, and a sense of absolute camaraderie toward one another.

1927

Translated by Alla Gadassik