The Muse as Producer

Lilia Brik and Soviet-Jewish Documentary Filmmaking in the 1920s

Abstract

In July 1926, the influential figure known as the ‘muse of the avant-garde,’ Lilia Brik (1891-1978), exchanged letters from Moscow with her collaborator and romantic partner, the poet Vladimir Maiakovskii (1893-1930), while he was travelling. Brik’s letter was about a new organisation called OZET (The Society of Jewish Workers) and the film Evrei na zemle / Jews on the Land (Abram Room, USSR, 1927). It would come to be the first, and only, agitprop film that Brik and Maiakovskii worked on together during their brief careers in cinema. The organisation OZET provided funding for the film, which was produced jointly by the studios Sovkino and VUFKU (All-Ukrainian Photo Cinema Administration). Brik was invested in the project of Jewish emancipation through her work with OZET, and Brik and Maiakovskii worked with director Abram Room and screenwriter Viktor Shklovskii to document the resettlement project of Soviet Jews building an agricultural commune in Crimea. This 18-minute film depicted the successful assimilation of Jewish colonists as they developed a flourishing farming community from previously undeveloped land. This article argues that understanding Brik’s involvement through her identity as a Soviet Jewish female filmmaker is important for contextualising the film’s enduring significance in the histories of early Soviet cinema. For her, creating a film about the inclusion of Jews – a historically oppressed minority in Imperial Russia – within the Soviet project of collectivisation was one of the ways to promote the Jewish cause in the early Soviet Union.