Date of Birth: 16 March 1894 Birthplace: Surazhe, Chernigov, Ukraine (now part of Russia) Date of Death: 21 September 1959 Occupation: Filmmaker
Biography, by Elisabeth-Christine Muelsch:Given the scarcity of raw materials, caused by the many years of war on Russian soil (1914-1922), Esfir or Esther Shub decided to reedit existing newsreel stock. Through her work she illustrated that original documentary footage could be manipulated and re-contextualized, thereby providing a new reading of historical events. In doing so, she created a new film genre, the compilation film. Her work as an editor and film director promoted Soviet politics and created awareness about the exploitation of women in tsarist Russia. Thanks to her skillful editing techniques, she was able to juxtapose, in a form of “intellectual montage,” the role peasant women had to fulfill in tsarist Russia, and the new role women were able to take on after the Bolshevik revolution. To provide a “truthful” account of history, it was important for Shub to create a documentary out of un-staged materials and to make it better than a fiction film. She belonged to the “factualist movement” that prevailed in various leftwing artistic and cultural circles. Her second husband (1) was the constructivist Aleksei Gan, founder of the journal Kino-Fot that focused on documentary style photography and film, an important organ for constructivist such as Rodtschenko, Stepanova and Majakovsky (2). As Vladic Petric has pointed out “Shub […] ‘wrote’ the history of the Soviet revolution using authentic images as ‘letters’ for composing words and sentences while ‘typing’ them on her editing table (3).” Thus her editing table became the tool to (re-) write history and to provide direction for a new society in the making. Esfir Shub was born in 1894 in Surazhe, in the Ukraine, to a Jewish family of landowners, a rather uncommon phenomenon. The financial security of her family enabled her to receive a privileged education. She attended the local elementary school, but then went to Moscow to pursue her secondary and post-secondary education. After the revolution, Shub attended The Institute for Women’s Higher Education, where Moscow’s progressive scholars and social workers taught. She probably met Aleksei Gan when they both worked for the Theater Department of Narkompros (People’s Commissariat of Education). She then engaged in theatrical collaboration with Meyerhold and Majakovsky, before becoming a cutter and editor for GosKino (USSR State Committee for Cinematography), where she reedited Western European and American imports —at the time, these films made up over 90 % of the films shown in the USSR—so they would align with the socialist message. Her montage work at GosKino laid the foundation for her career as a film director. Her most well-known film remains the 1927 documentary/compilation film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, a film commissioned by Sovkino to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of the revolution. In order to make this film and the two ensuing soviet history films, Shub watched 1 Million meters of newsreel. Thanks to her ingenuity she was able to select the right clips, introducing them with leading title cards, and filling gaps by shooting old documents, photographs and objects. That same year she also edited Oleg Frelikh’s hugely successful film Prostitute, a film that showed how economic hardship could force women into prostitution, yet illustrating at the same time, how women could be saved thanks to the work opportunities afforded to them in a socialist state. Although the film criticized the New Economic Policy (NEP), it eventually was banned as too bourgeois. With the advent of sound, Shub gradually moved away from archival to newly shot material (e.g., Komsomol/Leader of Electrification, 1932).
1) Esfir Shub was supposedly briefly married to the civil engineer, Isaac Vladimirovich Shub. See Murray-Brown, Jeremy. "Esfir Il’inishna Shub." Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia. 1 March 2009. Jewish Women's Archive. (Viewed on September 30, 2018) <https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/shub-esfir>. 2) See here also Albera, François. « La chute de la dynastie Romanov: de E. Choub à C. Marker », Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, vol. 89-90, no. 1, 2008, pp. 20-29. 3) Vlada Petric, “ Esther Shub: Cinema is my Life,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies, vol. III, no. 4, Fall 1978, p. 446.