[ecrea] Cfp - Apparatus - Journal for Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe

    /Apparatus. Film, Media and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern
    Europe/:


    Call for papers for the themed issue

*Revealing the Invisible: Women and Editing in Central and Eastern 
European Film *

Guest edited by Adelheid Heftberger and Karen Pearlman


Women have been a vital part of film production since its beginning. 
However, their history in all its richness has not been adequately 
studied.^i <#sdendnote1sym>This themed issue of /Apparatus - Film, Media 
and Digital Cultures of Central and Eastern Europe,/scheduled for spring 
2018, will focus on women’s creative work, particularly in a 
significantly under-theorised aspect of film: editing.


Editors are regularly ascribed characteristics that align with 
invisibility. Mary Lampson (editor of films by Emile de Antonio and 
Barbara Kopple) for example, says, echoing many editors’ descriptions of 
themselves: “Many good editors are sort of introverted, shy people, 
observers of life.”^ii <#sdendnote2sym>Their sense of rhythm has been 
frequently praised, and of course the patience it needs to work through 
abundant material and interact with directors and other members of the 
production team. These industry standard descriptions raise questions: 
are these traits gendered (in fact or in perception)? Are they less 
valorised than the qualities ascribed to (usually male) directors? Are 
sense of rhythm and structure, and skills of observation being 
insufficiently recognised as significant creative contributions in the 
evaluation of films? Are the products of editing processes, which are 
coherent and compelling structures, rhythms, and styles in the movement 
of story, emotion, image and sound^iii <#sdendnote3sym>, being 
overlooked in the evaluation of film due to truisms about their 
‘invisibility’?


Is there a connection between the under-theorising of editing and the 
under-theorisation of women in film production? Editing is often 
described as the ‘invisible art’. Co-editor of this themed issue Karen 
Pearlman has proposed that good editing is /not /invisible, and to 
describe it as invisible is an industrial issue for editors who are also 
relegated to invisibility.^iv <#sdendnote4sym>Invisibility of women has 
been noted as a significant issue in disciplines of history, art and art 
history. Given that editing is one of the very few areas of film 
production that is even close to gender parity in employment, and that 
many classic films having been crafted by female editors,^v 
<#sdendnote5sym>the question arises: is there a relationship between the 
historical invisibilities of women and editors?

Soviet montage is one kind of editing which stands out in opposition to 
‘invisibility’. It is highly visible, and some of the female editors of 
the Soviet Montage period are relatively well known still (for example 
Esfir’ Shub or Dziga Vertov’s collaborator and wife Elizaveta 
Svilova).^vi <#sdendnote6sym>However others have been more or less 
forgotten (like Vera Khanzhonkova, the wife of the early film producer 
Aleksandr Khanzhonkov). We know from commentaries of their 
contemporaries that these women were respected as editors in their time. 
For example, in Sergey Yutkevich’s and Aleksandr Levshin’s scenario “A 
Film About Films”^vii <#sdendnote7sym>, which never got made, these 
three women were meant to feature as prime examples for creating 
innovative editing. It is also worth mentioning that both Shub and 
Svilova were working mostly on documentary films and even mostly with 
found footage. But even the “screen visibility” Yutkevich and Levshin 
were prepared to give to female editors, would not necessarily mean 
clearer understanding of the process as a whole, their collaborations 
with their colleagues and their degree of independence.

Visibility can - in Russia but arguably Central and Eastern Europe as a 
whole - also be understood as a language problem. Even though, for 
example, Shub left a substantial amount of writings, these writings have 
not been translated and thus have not been given serious research 
attention internationally. Language issues extend beyond simple 
translation issues though. For example, there is a question of how to 
read between the lines of the writing of Soviet women editors when they 
may have been writing with the knowledge that their words could be 
scrutinised by government censors. Significant questions also arise when 
we consider the kinds of writing and words that women use about 
themselves and their work. For example, in /Red Women on the Silver 
Screen/(1993)/,/Lynne Attwood writes about a Stalin Era women’s 
conference at which "delegates related the heroic feats of their 
husbands and discussed what they had done to help". By positioning 
themselves as helpers, rather than agents and credited creative 
collaborators, women add to their invisibility. Similarly editors 
commonly use language that draws a veil around editing processes with 
words like “instinctive” and “magic”^viii <#sdendnote8sym>.

Interviews with editors or editors own biographical and experiential 
accounts are highly relevant to the inquiries of this journal issue but 
they rarely explicitly address concepts, context and methodology. One 
disciplinary area currently engaging with the question of academic 
articulation of editing expertise is cognitive studies of the moving 
image.^ix <#sdendnote9sym>Finally, there is the language used in 
evaluating films or the processes of making them. Here the language 
generally positions the director as the decision maker about editing, 
when in fact, thousands of decisions are made by the editor before 
showing the director one decision to ratify. The editor makes many 
creative contributions through their embodied expertise and it would be 
incorrect to suggest that “the editor functions as a pair of hands 
/rather/than as a thinker in the editing process. ... editing is an 
instance of integrated cognition and action.”^x <#sdendnote10sym>Is 
attributing editing decisions to directors an entrenched systematic 
erasure of editor’s visibility?

How can unearthing the involvement of female collaboration, specifically 
editing, in film production change the way we write film history and 
regard the film canon? How much do we actually know about the presence 
of female editors in Polish Post-war cinema, Czech New Wave or 
DEFA-films, just to name a few famous currents within Central and 
Eastern European Cinema?

How do we have to change our research methods in order to achieve a 
valid “big data” basis if we need it for our research? How can film 
archives and/or online knowledge bases support and contribute such 
research? What are the possible advantages of computer aided tools and 
how can the data be interpreted in a meaningful way for the 
investigation into the proposed topic(s)?

In addition to a contribution to film historiography and uncovering 
archival sources which might shed light on female editors, there are 
many other possible topics which can be addressed:

  *

    Women and the history of editing

  *

    Critical evaluations of editing

  *

    Editing and authorship

  *

    Women editors in Central and Eastern European film industries (past
    and present)

  *

    Creativity in film editing

  *

    Historical and contemporary understanding of the difference between
    a ‘cutter’ (who assembles footage according to instructions) and an
    ‘editor’ who makes creative contributions and decisions

  *

    Power structures built into the positioning of women and the crew
    roles of editing, including, for example, questions of pay,
    authority, collaboration and credit

  *

    Particular partnerships and distinctive aspects of these
    partnership’s creative output

  *

    Backgrounds and training of editors

  *

    Women in the Soviet montage era and other contexts as editors,
    mentors, editor/directors, key thinkers

  *

    Representation (or not) of women, and of editors in national
    filmographies and narratives

  *

    Influence of editors in documentary film, studio style and auteur
    cinema in different countries / in film history

  *

    Editing and how rhythm, structure or film style are shaped, shared
    and perceived

  *

    Investigations of ideas about what is ‘women’s work’ including, for
    example stencil coloring, cutting and, recently, digital restoration
    or typical “female” jobs like knitting, sewing, typing or
    switchboard operators

  *

    film historical research, into how editors present themselves, in
    self-images, how they are described or assessed by others, and how
    their image developed

  *

    Other relevant questions and topics welcome

Abstracts (200-350 words) and a short biography should be submitted to 
Adelheid Heftberger ((_a.heftberger /at/ zem-brandenburg.de) 
<mailto:(a.heftberger /at/ zem-brandenburg.de)>_) and Karen Pearlman 
((_karen.pearlman /at/ mq.edu.au) <mailto:(karen.pearlman /at/ mq.edu.au)>_) by 
October 10, 2017 for consideration by the editors. For this themed issue 
we prefer abstracts in English, but Apparatus generally publishes 
articles in all of the languages of the region always accompanied by 
abstracts in English, German and Russian.

Selected articles will undergo an editorial and double blind peer 
reviewed process before final acceptance.

Deadline for abstracts: 10 October 2017

Notification of acceptance: 10 November 2017

Deadline for full articles: 10 February 2018


i <#sdendnote1anc>^See Leigh, Michele. 2015. “Reading between the Lines: 
History and the Studio Owner’s Wife.” In /Doing Women’s Film History. 
Reframing Cinemas, Past and Future, /edited by Christine Gledhill, and 
Julia Knight. Urbana.

ii <#sdendnote2anc>^See Anderson, John. 2012. “The ‘Invisible Art’: A 
Woman’s Touch Behind the Scenes”. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/movies/kim-roberts-kate-amend-and-other-female-film-editors.html.

iii <#sdendnote3anc>^See Pearlman, Karen. 2015. /Cutting Rhythms, 
Intuitive Film Editing. New York; London./

iv <#sdendnote4anc>^Ibid.

v <#sdendnote5anc>^See Cousins, Mark. 2016. “Scissor Sisters”. 
http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/scissor-sisters 
<http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/comment/scissor-sisters>, 
and Galvao, S. 2015. “‘A Tedious Job’ – Women and Film Editing”. 
http://critics-associated.com/a-tedious-job-women-and-film-editing/.

vi <#sdendnote6anc>^See Kukulin, Il’ia. 2015. /Mashiny zashumevshego 
vremeni: kak sovetskii montazh stal metodom neoficial’noi kul’tury/. Moscow.

vii <#sdendnote7anc>^See Yutkevich, Sergey, and Levshin, Aleksandr. 
1985. “Fil’ma o fil’me”. In /Iz istorii kino. //Dokumenty i 
materialy/11. 23–25, Moscow.

viii <#sdendnote8anc>^See Oldham, Gabriella. 1992. /First Cut, 
Conversations with film editors/. Berkeley; Los Angeles.

ix <#sdendnote9anc>^See for example: Pearlman, Karen. 2015. /Cutting 
Rhythms, Intuitive Film Editing. New York; London; /Pearlman, Karen. 
2017. “Editing and Cognition Beyond Continuity.” /Projections, Journal 
of Movies and Mind; /Pearlman, Karen. 2018. “Documentary Editing and 
Distributed Cognition.” In /A Cognitive Approach to Documentary Film/, 
edited by Catalin Brylla & M. Kramer, Basingstoke; Smith, Tim J. 2012. 
“The Attentional Theory of Cinematic Continuity”, /Projections Journal 
of Movies and Mind./

x <#sdendnote10anc>^See Pearlman, 2018.

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