This essay will focus on the 1929 film The Last Attraction (Poslednii attraktsion), directed by Ol’ga Preobrazhenskaia and Ivan Pravov. Ol’ga Preobrazhenskaia (1881-1971) is one of few female Soviet directors to have achieved any kind of global renown, both in her own time and since. Yet beyond her best known film The Women from Riazan Province (Baby riazanskie, 1927), her work remains little studied. This will not be an essay about Preobrazhenskaia as a specifically female director. In fact, her most interesting Soviet-era films were made in a creative partnership with Ivan Pravov. Pravov, some twenty years her junior, began working with Preobrazhenskaia in 1927; they were partners, in life and work, until the mid-1940s. Analysing The Last Attraction, I will reveal the complex interplay between these two directors’ varied but complementary cultural backgrounds. The film can be seen as a reflection on the relationship between political art and entertainment, and as a playful summation of its two directors’ experiences over the previous decade: their engagement, as actors and teachers, with the new State Institute of Cinema, and questions of dramatic art. The Last Attraction is a film about bodies, artifice and spectacle; it looks both back to the 1920s and forward to the emerging shapes of Soviet Socialist Realism. It is distinct amidst Preobrazhenskaia and Pravov’s oeuvre as an instance of direct engagement with the rapidly changing political environment – to which they fell foul in 1931.
Emma Widdis (Wed,) studied this question.