Esfir

We could begin in the living room of ESFIR, a 16mm film made in 2020 by Cynthia Madansky. Within its paint-stripped walls, five young women are set in motion by minorrituals and routines. One woman gets up from her chair, goes to one of the windows, and selects three roses from an assortment of plants on the sill. Gathering them together, she moves to the center of the room and lays the little bouquet on a table. At the other window, meanwhile, another woman takes up a cloth and scrubs the glass, before walking the length of the space to dust the steps of a ladder in its corner. She crosses the room again and puts down the cloth; reaching her arms above her head, she interlaces her fingers, stretching toward the ceiling. One paces back and forth for a while, her heels beating time on the bare floorboards. One sits at a desk, shuffling mail, cups, other small objects. One perches on the ladder and flicks through an album of photographs. Skirting the furniture as well as one another, the women are consumed in their tasks, and they never look directly at each other.

Yet their actions are no less purposeful, or coordinated,for their air of improvisation. After the woman lays the roses on the table another woman soon picks them up, arranging them in a vase; papers get passed from one pair of hands to another; again and again, the women swap places as they track incomplete, iterated circuits of the room. The tableau keeps its equilibrium, in static long shot, throughout thisincidental choreography, this choreography of incident.

​The women are preparing for something—but for what? Or whom? A provisional space, separated from another by a gauzy white curtain, and full of moveable objects—chairs to flowers, papers to dust—the room resembles what it is: a film set. Which is perhaps to call housework a kind of stagecraft, or filmmaking a kind of hospitality. Figuring the material conditions of her own work through the women’s shared, quasi-domestic labor,Madansky makes arrangements for the film we’re watching, the film we’re about to watch. But she also makes arrangements for a film that has never been made, and that isn’t exactly being made now. For ESFIR is an interpretation of an unrealized film called “Women,” conceived between 1932 and 1934 by the Soviet filmmaker Ėsfir’ Shub. “I want to make a film about women to demonstrate that only the proletarian revolution, the new conditions of labour, the new social practice completely closes the account of the history of ‘the women’s question.’” Shub’s words, from a 1933 article describing the aims and methods of her project, interrupt ESFIR’s housekeeping (filmkeeping) at intervals, given in a Russian voiceover and translated to English on intertitles. After its opening scenes, the long middle section of Madansky’s film is composed of portraits of four women in various cities in Russia and Siberia. Yet while these portraits looselyfollow the model Shub devised for her film—in which particular women’s lives, their struggles and their hopes, were meant to represent the experiences of the modern woman in the Soviet Union and her liberation from class oppression and sexual objectification under the Bolsheviks—ESFIR preserves “Women” as an unfinished project, poignant in its failure as well as its promise. Not realizing Shub’s film, not completing it, Madansky knows her work is as much a way of disrupting Shub’s plans as of enacting them. It can’t help but be another kind of refusal, on top of the many rejections Shub’s proposalsreceived from film industry officials in Moscow in the 1930s—if a refusal in a vastly different register of feeling.

 Unmade by Shub, the script will always be unmade by Shub, an object lesson in the exigencies of all film work—and, indeed, of the gendered valences of cinematic(un)production, along with the histories we tell of the same. Is it for this reason that ESFIR concludes with a table reading of Shub’s scenario? The women who once rearranged the living room now sit, sharing a pot of tea, at a table crammed into a narrow kitchen. They take turns reading excerpts from Shub’s script, beginning and ending with its opening scene, a montage of female figures drawn from painting, film, and news media. The treatment of “Women” opens with a parade of “multi-colored Madonnas, Venuses, Gretchens, and Susannas,” portraits framed with the question, “What is a woman, this sphinx, this riddle of a century?” By contrast, ESFIR closes with this question, its answer endlessly deferred. Reading the scenario, the women make further preparations for a film that is both past and future, never quite present. We might even say that they await the arrival of Shub herself, a guest who won’t show up. 

Like the script’s relation to the complete film it imagines—the script as itself an open question, an invitation that elicits no response—ESFIR is somehow precursory to the unrealized project that inspires it. Still, as the women pause from their reading, pick up their pens, and scrawl notes we can’t read on the papers lying before them on the dining table, ESFIR evinces historical incompletion as rich potential, as raw materials for contemporary film practice—not to mention film scholarship.

— Alix Beeston and Stefan Solomon