Editing (for) Elizaveta: talking Svilova, Vertov and ‘responsive creativity’ with Karen Pearlman

Abstract

In the past few years, Studies in Australasian Cinema has both witnessed and facilitated rigorous critical scholarship with respect to film production. This illuminating and invigorating aspect of contemporary screen studies necessarily foregrounds an explicitly theoretical awareness in filmmaking and specific production practices. At the same time, this nexus awakens historical figures, production roles, and stylistic developments that offer new, creative and politicised responses to the ways in which film history is documented and understood. Karen Pearlman’s short filmWoman with an Editing Bench, first exhibited in 2016, celebrates the lesser known and even less acknowledged editing style and oeuvre of Elizaveta Svilova (who edited Vertov’s iconic 1929 film Man with a Movie Camera and many others), whilst exploring her relationship with Vertov against Stalin’s censorship of cinema in the late 1920s. What follows is an interview with Pearlman, who wrote, directed and edited the film.