ALEXANDRA KHOKHLOVA
The name of Alexandra Khokhlova (1897-1985) has been associated with that of Lev Kuleshov since their meeting in 1919. According to the title of their dual biography, their work together spans “50 years of cinema” (50 let v kino, Iskusstvo, Moscow 1975). Granddaughter of Pavel Tretyakov, founder of the gallery that bears his name, Khokhlova was part of artistic circles since early childhood, became an actress in 1916, and shared Kuleshov’s career with only one interruption. Since the essays by Eisenstein and Viktor Shklovsky, which were largely dedicated to her fundamental originality as an actress, little attention has been devoted to the rest of her work, and her brief career as a film director from 1929 to 1931 has been ignored. After the failure of Zhurnalistka (The Journalist), a film that Kuleshov built around a modern woman character (named after her), Khokhlova’s appearance on screen was tacitly but strictly forbidden. The official reason was that she was “ugly and skinny”. “For the second year in a row, Khokhlova is out of work. And for a second year Kuleshov is not filming”, her admirer Eisenstein objected. “The idea of a woman-master, of an artist equal in rights, is not given recognition” (Kak ni stranno – o Khokhlovoi, “Kino”, 30 March 1926, then However Odd – Khokhlova!, in Selected Works: Writings, 1922-1934, vol. 1, Tauris, London- New York 2010). Shklovsky suggested to Khokhlova that she should direct Delo s zastezhkami. After that she was offered Sasha, based on an original screenplay, which she would film in Leningrad. “At the time,” she wrote in her autobiography, “a woman film director was a rare thing, so the union asked me if I would like the whole crew (assistants, coworkers) of Sasha to be women. I had to answer that I wasn’t particularly delighted to have men on my team, but it all depended on which men and women, and that I only experienced social difference in regards to men once a year, on 8 March, and that other days I let both men and women work with equal rights”. After the documentary Igrushki (Toys), considered lost today, she went back to Kuleshov. She was an assistant on Gorizont (Horizon), and actress and assistant on Velikiy uteshitel (The Great Consoler). She stayed with him for the rest of his life, working as a ‘second director’ or ‘co-director’ in his last fiction films (from 1940 to 1944), and like him she returned to teaching. After Kuleshov’s death in 1970 she took care of the publication of his works.

Irène Bonnaud and Bernard Eisenschitz