Olga Preobrazhenskaia's THE PEASANT WOMEN OF RIAZAN Screening at MoMA

STILL: OLGA PREOBRAZHENSKAIA’S THE PEASANT WOMEN OF RIAZAN (1927). SOURCE: THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART.

On Sunday, October 29th, at 2pm, and later, on Tuesday, November 7th, at 7pm, Olga Preobrazhenskaia’s 1927 film THE PEASANT WOMEN OF RIAZAN will play at the Museum of Modern Art in the program After Alice, Beyond Lois: Mining the Archive with the Women Film Pioneers Project. More than 100 women filmmakers, from both the silent and sound era, are featured in GME’s distribution library, including Preobrazhenskaia. Her film is currently available to the North American university market, from GME, in the six-disc Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack EARLY WOMEN FILMMAKERS: AN INTERNATIONAL ANTHOLOGY.

As noted in MoMA’s program notes:

Set in a rural Russian village in 1914, just before the start of World War I, this visually striking and rhythmic silent melodrama follows two women, Anna (Raisa Pužnaja) and her sister-in-law Vasilisa (Emma Cesarskaja). While Anna suffers tragically after her violent, domineering, and traditional father-in-law (Kuz’ma Jastrebickij) rapes her, Vasilisa asserts herself as part of the new social order… This version, from Eye Filmmuseum, is a distribution copy from the 1980s… circulated by the Dutch feminist film distribution company Cinemien.

The first screening of THE PEASANT WOMEN OF RIAZAN will feature live piano accompaniment by Amanda Cattel, while the second screening will feature accompaniment by Ben Model and be introduced by Jane Gaines. Gaines, a feminist film scholar, founded WFPP — the Women Film Pioneers Project — in 1993, which was later acquired by Columbia University Libraries in 2013 as a digital publication and film archival resource. Gaines first envisioned the project as a multivolume book series. Since then, and thanks to the tireless work of its contributors, editors, library colleagues, and many graduate student research assistants (as well as international archivists and curators), WFPP has published articles on the careers of over 300 women — and counting — who worked behind the scenes during cinema’s first few decades. After Alice, Beyond Lois mirrors WFPP’s global scope and interest in the diversity of women’s creative output during the silent era.

Preobrazhenskaia remains a little-known yet fascinating figure in early Soviet cinema. A theater actress who trained at the Moscow Art Theatre before making her film acting debut in 1913, she became a very popular pre-Revolution film star. In 1916, she made her directorial debut with BARYSHNYA-KRESTYANKA and reportedly taught at the first Soviet state-run film school and directed children’s films prior to making THE PEASANT WOMEN OF RIAZAN (1927). Little is known about her after the early 1940s, when Stalinist purges seem to have halted her career. Similarly, co-screenwriter Olga Vishnevskaya’s life and career requires further research.