Hidden Figures

Autor: Drubek, Natascha
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2021
DOI: 10.17892/app.2021.00013.284
Popis: This text is the first submission to a new section in Apparatus, called The Book Lab. These are the introductory chapters of the first part (6 parts are planned in total) and the conclusion of the book "Hidden Figures. Rewriting the History of Cinema in the Empire All the Russias." This text receives its own DOI and can be quoted as a pre-print. Feedback on this pre-print is welcome. They can be sent to the author's address: drubek@zedat.fu-berlin.de. In recent years, analyses of the suppression of female names have shown how incomplete our conception of the founders as well as creative participation of women is, especially in the early history of audiovisual media. This also applies to the first decades of cinema in the Tsarist empire. However, it is not only the names of women that have been and continue to be withheld, but also those of film pioneers who do not fit into the narrative of national or ideologised historiography as it emerged in the Soviet era. In "Hidden Figures", I explore the significance of the non-national character of the early productions in search of those figures of the first decade who founded cinema in the Romanov Empire, yet have been neglected by historiography. And this was all happening before the official "year of birth", which to this day is given as 1908. Cinema in the "Empire of All the Russias" began much earlier, in the form of the use of cameras, but also in the fierce reaction to the medium. Thus, the history of imperial film censorship starts as early as May 1896 with the arrest of the cameramen of the Lumi��re company in Moscow in view of a politically unwelcome film reportage about the victims on the Khodynka field. The history of film production in Russia picks up soon after in connection with film commissions at the court of Nicholas II and elsewhere in the empire. Why were these earliest films - some of which have survived to the present day - and the names of their makers, Polish subjects of the Tsar (Matuszewski, Jagielsky and others) not included in an integral film history? The October Revolution obviously played a role here, because many of the early pioneers were no longer in the country after 1918, so they were not included in Soviet historiography as emigrants, citizens of another country or enemies of the state. This raises the question of the extent to which today's accepted "Russian" film history is still marked by (post-)coloniality.
Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe, No. 13 (2021): Putting the Empire to Music. The Phenomenon of Vocal-Instrumental Ensembles (VIA)
Databáze: OpenAIRE