Designing Russian Cinema : The Production Artist and the Material Environment in Silent Era Film

This book highlights the significant role that production artists played when Russian cinema was still in its infancy. It uncovers Russian cinema’s connections with other art forms, examining how production artists drew on both aesthetic traditions and modernist experiments in architecture, painting and theatre as they explored the new medium of cinema and its potential to engender new models of perception and forms of audience engagement. Drawing on set design sketches, archival documents and film-makers’ memoirs, Eleanor Rees reveals how less-canonical films such as Behind the Screen (Kulisy ekrana, 1919) and Palace and Fortress (Dvorets i krepost´, 1923), were remarkable from a design perspective, and also provides new readings of well-known films, such as Children of the Age (Deti veka, 1915) and Strike (Stachka, 1925). Rees brings to light information on significant but understudied figures such as Vladimir Egorov and Sergei Kozlovskii, and highlights the involvement of well-known figures such as Lev Kuleshov and Aleksandr Rodchenko. Unlike the majority of late Imperial directors and camera operators, many early-Russian production artists continued to work in cinema in the Soviet era and to draw on practices forged before the 1917 Revolution. In spanning the entire silent era, this book highlights the often overlooked continuities between the late-Imperial and early-Soviet periods of cinema, thus questioning traditional historical periodisations.

Eleanor Rees received her PhD in January 2020 from University College London (UCL), having previously undertaken a BA and MA in History of Art at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Her doctoral research was funded by the Wolfson Foundation and the Design History Society. Her chapter 'Comfort and the Domestic Interior in Early-Soviet Cinema of the 1920s' is forthcoming in Pat Kirkham and Sarah Lichtman (eds), Interiors: Film and Television (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

Birgit Beumers is Professor Emerita in Film Studies at Aberystwyth University, UK, and currently holds a DFG-funded research grant on Central Asian film industries at the University of Passau, Germany. Her publications include A History of Russian Cinema (2009) and Performing Violence (with Mark Lipovetsky, 2009). She has edited a number of volumes, including The Cinema of Alexander Sokurov (2011, with Nancy Condee), and Cinema in Central Asia: Rewriting Cultural Histories (with Michael Rouland and Gulnara Abikeyeva, 2013), and Sexuality, Nudity and the Body in Soviet Cinema (with Eugénie Zvonkine and Catherine Géry, 2026). She is editor of the online journal KinoKultura and of the scholarly journal Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema.