A Woman With a Movie Camera

Introduction by Robert Rosen

I first met Marina Goldovskaya during the period of perestroika in the Soviet Union when I was part of a delegation of scholars sent to Moscow to negotiate formal cultural relations between our two countries in the field of film studies. Here was a film-maker whose courageous documentary films on past abuses of power were hailed as nothing less than events of nation-wide importance.  A woman who climbed to the top of her field in a male-dominated television industry.  A film artist who wrote scholarly books embodying the much vaunted but seldom achieved ideal of uniting theory and practice.  And, most of all, I met a gracious, generous and articulate individual whose commitments and humanistic sensibilities came from the heart.  I knew then that I desperately wanted Marina to come to UCLA to build our documentary program, to teach our students and, most of all, to serve as a role model for what it means to be an engaged film maker.  In retrospect I still cannot believe how profoundly lucky we are that this actually came to pass.
 
As a maker of documentary films Marina embraces a unique mixture of seemingly contradictory characteristics that are in fact complementary.  Others may praise her work for different reasons, but personally what I admire most is the dialectical tension between a humanistic sensibility that is intensely personal and a critical awareness that is broadly social. In the House on Arbat Street (1993), she manages to capture in their full integrity the beliefs and idiosyncratic personalities of a score of people who had lived in a large Moscow apartment building over a period of more than seventy-five years. But, when integrated into the overall context of the film, these separate testimonies add up to a whole that is far greater than the sum of its parts; nothing less than a masterful summary of the history of the Soviet Union from its inception through its demise with all of the tragic contradictions laid bare.  The Prince is Back (1999) is an intimate and sympathetic portrait of a hopeless dreamer restoring an abandoned ruin in the hope of reclaiming his pre-revolutionary family identity.  But, true to her dialectical agenda, the personal once again provides a window onto the social, in this instance a period of unrest and street demonstrations when disquieting uncertainty about the future results in an escapist nostalgia for an irretrievable past. The Shattered Mirror (1992) may be Marina's most unapologetically personal essay focusing warmly on many of her dear friends, but what I took away from the film most of all was the vision of a woman with a movie camera braving danger in the streets of Moscow to record and, by her film making, to protect Russia' s fragile hold on new-found political rights.  I do not believe it is a coincidence that Marina selected Peter Sellers as the subject of her most recent film - - a wildly creative boundary-breaking theater director for whom artistic, humanistic and ideological objectives are inextricably intertwined.
 
These same intriguing complexities define Marina as a person as well.  Warmly personable,   considerate, and exceptionally loyal to her friends, students and colleagues, she also displays an iron-willed commitment to honesty and the integrity of her work.  Over the years I have seen her anguish over whether or not a particular shot did justice to the motivations of a person or the complexity of an event.  I have witnessed the intensity of her quest for an underlying narrative thread that would tie hundreds of hours of footage into a coherent story, but never at the sacrifice of truth.
 
I am proud to have known Marina Goldovskaya for more than a decade as a friend, colleague, mentor and film artist ”A Woman With A Camera” will enable you to get to know her as well.  

Her story is one worth telling.


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Robert Rosen
Professor,
Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television 


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