Esfir Shub
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Esfir Shub (1894-1953) was a Soviet film director and editor.
Born in Ukraine, Shub had a lifelong, though strained, friendship with Dziga Vertov, whom she met in the early 1920s. Vertov and Shub met when they were both employees of Goskino, the Soviet state-run film-production company. Shub was a film re-editor for Goskino; she edited several Western films according to Goskino standards, including Fritz Lang's Dr. Mabuse.
In the early 1920s, Shub began a lifelong study of Russian pre-revolutionary history. Her study resulted in the documentary film considered to be her masterpiece, The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927), the first in a trilogy that was completed by The Great Road (1927) and Lev Tolstoy and the Russia of Nicolai II (1928). In 1932, Shub completed the first Soviet documentary film to employ sound. She was a pioneer in the use of historical footage, and in recreating historical scenes in order to shoot new footage.
