The role and status of the film script in the early Soviet film industry is certainly a subject ripe for analysis. What was the role of the written word in creating the moving image? How did the profession of script writing develop, and how was it understood as part of the filmmaking process? This, indeed, was a live debate in the 1920s, which is the period that Sergei Ogudov chooses as his focus. Some of the most influential of formalist literary theorists (Iurii Tynianov, Viktor Shklovskii) not only theorized the question of the relationship between word and image, but themselves wrote screenplays. Given this, it seems surprising that Ogudov’s book is the first sustained attempt to approach the early Soviet screenplay through both a historical and a theoretical lens. Published as part of NLO’s pleasing Kinoteksty series, this is a well-produced and welcome book.

This book presents itself as a corrective to histories of the avant-garde, which, Ogudov suggests, over-emphasize the power of the director. In focusing on the script, however, Ogudov proposes not only to uncover the role of the scriptwriter. He is also interested in how models of language shape both the theory and the practice of moving image making. Although the book is in part a history of the screenplay, its principal hope is that analysis of the screenplay enables a new theoretical reading of the early film image. Drawing on (recent) narratological theory, Ogudov implicitly returns us to the early questions posed by the formalist Boris Eikhenbaum in his early work on the relationship between film and language.

The book’s challenge to existing histories of the avant-garde is particularly evident in Part I, which unfolds as a series of case studies. Drawing on archival sources, Ogudov traces the genesis of canonical films such as Sergei Eisenstein’s Bronenosets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin, 1926) and Vsevolod Pudovkin’s Potomok Chingiskhana (Storm over Asia, 1928), and lesser-known works such as Fridrikh Ermler’s Oblomok imperii (Fragment of an Empire, 1929) through their evolving screenplays, showing how words took shape on screen as image. There is much rich material in these chapters. We discover how Eisenstein’s reworking of Nina Agadzhanova-Shutko’s “literary scenario” for Battleship Potemkin was an exercise in narrative “rhythm” which, in its emphasis on speed and dynamism, preceded the director’s work with the visual image. The analysis of Ermler’s Fragment of an Empire traces the evolution of perspective from the “narrator” to the protagonist, showing the role of the script in enabling that film’s revolutionary presentation of the inner life and emotional trauma of war veteran Filimonov. In each case, the work with the screenplays provides useful nuance to existing readings of the films.

Part II turns to sustained discussion of Aleksandr Rzheshevskii, who produced screenplays for (among others) Iurii Zheliabuzhskii’s V gorode vkhoditʹ nelʹzia (It is Not Permitted to Enter the City, 1928), Pudovkin’s Prostoi sluchai /Ochenʹ khorosho zhivetsia (Simple Case/Life is Good, 1930–33) and, fatefully, for Eisenstein’s unfinished Bezhin lug (Bezhin Meadow, 1937). It is in these chapters that Ogudov’s theoretical interests are most clearly evinced. Existing analysis of Rzheshevskii has largely followed contemporary debates in underlining the relative freedom of his so-called “emotional” screenplays, in contrast to the prescriptive framing of “iron” scripts (in which the words of the script gave clear directorial instruction, detailing precise shots). Rzheshevskii’s scripts were marked by suggestive language, to serve as a stimulus for the director and cameraman’s imaginations—and particularly for the notation of mood and feeling. While he does not reject these readings of Rzheshevskii’s “emotion,” Ogudov’s narratological approach draws on concepts of focalization and narrative perspective and orality. Noting how Rzheshevskii was known for the powerful oral performances of his scripts, he makes “orality” (understood in a narratological sense as indicating an immediacy of personal experience) into the center of his analysis. He focuses attention particularly on Rzheshevskii’s use of language, noting poetic devices such as rhythm, and considering how they gave rise to particular types of image and montage.

At times, the lengthy theoretical sections sit in somewhat unwieldy relation to the subsequent readings of the film images, and better integration of these two elements could have made the arguments stronger and easier to digest. However, the care of the work with the scripts, and the ambition of the framing, make this a valuable contribution.