Performing Femininity

Oriental dancers, ballerinas, actresses and opera singers the figure of the female performer is ubiquitous in the cinema of pre-Revolutionary Russia. From the first feature film, Romashkov''s Stenka Razin (1908), through the sophisticated melodramas of the 1910s, to Viskovsky''s The Last Tango (1918), made shortly before the pre-Revolutionary film industry was dismantled by the new Soviet governme...