Novaia zhenshchina v kinematografe perekhodnykh istoricheskikh periodov is part of the important new series in Gender Studies, launched in 2021 by Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (NLO), one of Russia’s foremost intellectual publishing houses. Edited by Mariia Nesterenko, the series, which currently comprises nineteen volumes, aims to introduce Russian-speaking readers to significant scholarship in gender studies and includes both newly commissioned translations of books by international academics and original work in Russian, such as this wide-ranging monograph by Svetlana Smagina, a researcher at the All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography (VGIK) in Moscow.

Smagina’s broad interest lies in how social upheaval in twentieth-century Russia and Europe led to the revision of established gender conventions; during periods of momentous change, she argues, the so-called new woman appeared in cultural texts. Defined as a protagonist who embodies progressive social values and a desire for emancipation, she was usually cast in roles that challenged contemporary patriarchal structures and occupied a marginal place in society: the prostitute, the femme fatale, or the dancer, for example. Smagina’s central thesis—that cinema responds to and reflects social change through such protagonists—underpins her analysis of the representation of women in films produced in the cinema industries of Denmark, Germany, France, the Russian empire and the Soviet Union. Smagina focuses on three key periods: the revolutionary transformations that began in the 1910s and continued apace, after 1917, in the 1920s; the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991; and the period of youth protests, in the 1960s, in Europe (Smagina lists the periods in this non-chronological order in the introduction [10]). Thus, the book’s first four chapters examine the image (obraz) of the new woman in Danish cinema of the 1910s (Ch. 1); in German cinema of the 1920s, 1930s and post-war 1940s (Ch. 2); in imperial Russian and Soviet cinema, from the 1910s to the 1930s (Ch. 3); and in the work of French New Wave directors, including Roger Vadim, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Agnès Varda, who came to prominence in the late 1950s and early 1960s (in the brief Ch. 4, 243–54). In Ch. 5, Smagina adopts a different approach, tracing how the socio-cultural values attached to the figure of the ballerina (understood in broad terms; some of the films she discusses feature performer protagonists who are not ballerinas) changed across imperial Russian, Soviet, and contemporary Russian cinema, represented by two films from 2017, Valerii Todorovskii’s Bol´shoi (The Bolshoi) and Matil´da (Matilda), Aleksei Uchitel´’s controversial romantic drama about the imperial ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska’s affair with Tsar Nicholas II, who was canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000.

At times, throughout the book, too much space is devoted to plot recapitulation; many of the films discussed (especially those made in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union in the 1910s and 1920s) are well-known and much written about in academic work published in English and Russian, including from the perspective of their treatment of their new women protagonists and their relationships with men. It is regrettable that Smagina does not engage with this existing work. Accordingly, the book is at its most compelling when its focus is analytical or devoted to films that have been less written about, for example the interesting section on the ballerina in Soviet cinema (273–314).

The book ends somewhat abruptly at the end of Ch. 5; there is no conclusion, and its overall analysis suffers from this lack, for while there is a unifying thread running throughout the monograph—the interest in cinematic representations of the new woman and her significance as a marker of social change—the reader is left wondering why these particular films, national cinemas and periods have been chosen over others. A concluding analysis of what light they shed on each other or of what we learn by considering them together would have been helpful. The reader is therefore left more with the impression of a series of stand-alone chapters than of a study with an overarching coherence.

The brief Appendix (343–55) contains extracts from articles published in the pre-Revolutionary cinema press. There is also a useful index of names. The absence of a general index and of a bibliography and filmography, is unfortunate, however; it makes locating references to sources and films a time-consuming task. These criticisms notwithstanding, this engaging book will be of interest to scholars and students of these periods and areas of filmmaking and to readers interested more broadly in cultural representations of women in transitional social periods.