The historiography of early cinema in the Russian Empire has a remarkable history of its own. First attempts to conceptualise pre-revolutionary cinema were made by Soviet film scholars who mostly branded the films decadent and reactionary. Despite certain ideological prejudices, several important Soviet works, such as Veniamin Vishnevskii’s fundamental catalogue from 1945 and monographs by Romil Sobolev and Semen Ginzburg from the 1960s, helped to preserve important accounts of this early film culture. Western publications were scarce until the rediscovery of 286 early films at the Soviet State Film Archive Gosfil’mofond and their subsequent presentation at the Giornate del Cinema Muto Festival in 1989. After the reemergence of these films, interest in the cinematic legacy of the pre-Soviet period grew both in the Soviet Union and abroad. Since then, scholarship on Russian Imperial cinema has developed in various directions, with the topic of gender politics receiving increasing attention in recent years. Building on articles by the feminist film scholars Miriam Hansen (1992) and Heide Schlüpmann (1992), Rachel Morley’s pivotal book Performing Femininity was published in 2017. It was followed by various articles written by the participants of the Research Team Project “Early Russian Film Prose”, led by Anna Kovalova (Andreeva 2020 and 2022; Gudkova, Kozitskaia et al. 2020). In 2022, the representation of women was the focus of the conference The ‘New Woman’ in the Cinema of the Russian Empire, held at the University of Basel, and in 2023, Svetlana Smagina dedicated some chapters of her insightful Russian-language monograph Novaia zhenshchina v kinematografe perekhodnykh istoricheskikh periodov / The New Woman in the Cinema of Transitional Historical Periods to pre-revolutionary cinema. However, to the best of my knowledge, there is no comprehensive scholarship specifically on cross-dressed women in Imperial Russian cinema. This subject offers an interesting perspective on the representation of femininity as well as on ‘female masculinity’ on screen.1 This article therefore aims to provide an overview of the examples of female to male cross-dressing and to map out the possible conventions behind its usage in Imperial Russian cinema, while also exploring whether the trope of cross-dressing contains meanings that are not obvious for a modern-day viewer.
The history of Russian Imperial cinema is still fragmented, as its canon tends to gravitate primarily towards distinctive and innovative dramas, especially the works of the celebrated director Evgenii Bauer. Many frivolous comedies and less artistically ambitious dramas remain understudied even though they have the potential to broaden our understanding of mainstream early film culture as well as its undercurrents. The paucity of studies about less prominent dramas and films of lighter genres is an unfortunate omission – after all, what can be more promising for a feminist critique than a film titled Masculine Girl, Feminine Man? This film, Muzhestvennaia devushka, zhenstvennyi muzhchina (Władisław Lenczewski, 1916, Russian Empire), is currently considered lost.
By seeking out traces of cross-dressed performances not only in extant films but also in those that are lost, I hope to expand and nuance our understanding of gender expression for women on the early film screen. My interest in the non-extant part of early film heritage resonates with Allyson Nadia Field’s The Archive of Absence: A Manifesto for Looking at Lost Film. Field argues that “scholarly writing is [...] disproportionally weighted towards extant films”, but with more than 80% of early films considered lost “it is irrational to perpetuate extant-centric film history” (Field 2015: 23). This is also true for the early Imperial Russian film heritage, with its approximate 15% survival rate. The extant-centric cannon of Imperial Russian film history cannot fully reveal the variety of ways in which women were represented on screen. Turning to other media in the absence of the moving images themselves can be productive for broadening the scope of analysis.
Instead of choosing several exemplary films, I aim to present (even if only briefly) all the pre-revolutionary Imperial Russian films featuring cross-dressed actresses that I have so far managed to trace. In my analysis, I focus specifically on cross-dressing, on its place in the diegesis and the way it was perceived, while not including performances with the early cinematic representation of lesbians (which requires a separate, thorough analysis that I hope to conduct on another occasion). However obvious this link – and cross-dressing’s potential for challenging gender norms in general – seems for a modern-day viewer, it was not necessarily as evident for film audiences one hundred years ago. The best illustration of this difference in perception might be the case presented in Robert A. Rushing’s article on cross-dressing women in Italian silent cinema. While recent reactions to a 1915 film Filibus (Mario Roncoroni, 1915, Italy) celebrate it for featuring either “one of the first lesbian characters in the history of film”, or a transgender character, not a single contemporary review of the film even mentioned cross-dressing (Rushing 2021: 88). The conservative Italian audience of 1915 simply did not see anything out of the ordinary in the protagonist’s gender disguise.
As Laura Horak has noted, “[r]eading cross-dressed women as embodiments of contemporary concerns flattens and sometimes misrepresents the cultural work that they were doing in their own times” (2016: 2). Understanding what these images were communicating to the viewers of the 1910s is essential, since cinema not only reflected contemporary norms and expectations towards gender expression but also actively formed them. In my analysis, I take the reactions of the 1910s film press as a point of departure in an attempt to reconstruct the conventions of cross-dressing in Russian Imperial cinema, carefully testing the intuitive hypothesis of whether each of the performances was really subverting any gender norms of its time.
A rich lady, Vera Nikolaevna, hires a new maid, who proves to be an indispensable, efficient worker, skillful at massage, manicure and other services. The Count, who has been unsuccessfully courting Vera Nikolaevna, shows his real face: he tries to take Vera Nikolaevna by force. The maid comes to her mistress’s rescue and drives away the attacker with jiu-jitsu. After the police arrive, however, it is revealed that Vera Nikolaevna’s maid is actually an escaped male convict in disguise. Vera Nikolaevna is outraged: a strange man has watched and touched her in her most intimate moments. Her pride is also wounded: “Is she really so uninteresting that the male criminal maid [prestupnik-gornichnaia] was so indifferent to her?” (Daydreams Database 2023a).
This is a brief summary of the libretto of the lost film Ia ne veriu v dobrodetel’ zhenshchiny / I Don’t Believe in a Woman’s Virtue (Nikolai Kozlovskii, 1916, Russian Empire). Vishnevskii’s catalogue of pre-revolutionary films mentions that the film is loosely based on a story by Guy de Maupassant (1945: 122) – apparently it is the short story “Rose” (1884) that concerns the fall of a convict disguised as a chambermaid (but lacks the plot-line of the lady’s violent suitor and the jiu-jitsu attack).