Elizaveta Svilova and Meyerhold’s The Picture of Dorian Gray
Elizaveta Svilova is among the best-known film editors of Soviet cinema. Her name is inseparable from that of her husband, director Dziga Vertov: she worked with him throughout his career and, according to modern scholarship, was the co-author of his films. Yet the story of Svilova before Vertov remains almost unknown. She was one of the barely visible figures who connected two cinematic worlds: pre-revolutionary silent cinema and new avant-garde cinema that emerged after 1917. Her career allows us to see how technical routines of early film production were transformed into a creative language of Soviet montage.