Esfir Shub

Esfir Shub, also referred to as Esther Il'inichna Shub, was a pioneering Soviet filmmaker and editor in both the mainstream and documentary fields. She was one of few women to play a significant role behind the scenes in the Soviet film industry. She is best known for her trilogy of films, Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), The Great Road (1927), and The Russia of Nicholas II and Leo Tolstoy (1928). Shub is credited as the creator of compilation film. Esfir Shub was born into a family of landowners. She studied literature in Moscow, but after Revolution she began to attend the classes at the Institute for Women's Higher Education and then got a job as a 'theater officer' at the State Commissariat of Education. In the theatre she worked in collaboration with the famous avant-garde director Meyerhold and the poet Mayakovsky, who was one of her friends. Shub joined the Goskino film company and met Dziga Vertov. Their professional friendship was lifelong, but stormy. Shub shared his belief in film's intrinsic ability to reveal aspects of reality not visible to the naked eye, but she became engaged more in the interpretation of the historical world than in only contemporary matters. First Shub worked as a re-editor of foreign films for Soviet distribution. In 1927 (the tenth anniversary of Revolution) she made her first documentary film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). This film was the first part of the trilogy, which also consists of The Great Road (1927) and Lev Tol…