Esfir Shub (Surazh, Russia, 1894 - Moscow, Russia, 1959) was a director, editor and pioneer in the cinema of the revolutionary period. An active collaborator of the LEF (Left Front of the Arts) and a member of the Oktiabr (October) group, Shub stood out within the Soviet avant-garde movement of the 1920s and created a work that is inseparable from the historical, social and political context she went through.
This framework, on the one hand, brought with it significant changes that opened up the possibility of theorizing and conceiving art, in general, and cinema, in particular, as machinery, as work, as Kinofábrica. In the early years of the 1920s, Shub wrote a series of manifestos in which she questions the present and future of documentary cinema, the kind that, for the filmmaker, is capable of filming events, of filming life unexpectedly. On the other hand, gender equality and the ideological emancipation that occurred after the October Revolution allowed women filmmakers to make films that do not necessarily respond to "women's issues." In this case, Shub embarks on that stunt and poses a discursive mark on the cinematographic heritage of the time; a discursive mark that also emerges from her manifestos.
The purpose of this dossier is to present a selection of the manifestos written by Shub, translated for the first time into Spanish, and to introduce her theoretical conceptions about the making of non-fiction films, understanding that they are fundamental when thinking about documentary cinema made by women.
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