In After the Facts we have what feminist film theory never achieved in the 1970s — a theory of women’s editing practice. Theorization in After the Facts is not only in Karen Pearlman’s voice over commentary — “Facts become thoughts,” “These edits are my thoughts.” But her theorization is in the cutting itself, is rhythmically patterned theory. After the Facts is about cutting “to find” and finding in the cut. It is a practiced theory. Or, even better, it is a creative practice of a theory of editing. And even more, After the Facts is a celebration of the theory and practice of creative cutting, itself exquisitely cut to draw attention to cut-on-action technique using dancers in alternation with workers. After the Facts is not just a lesson in cutting; it is a lesson in how to see the cut. And, too, it’s a lesson in what to “cut into” the scene, although the compilation film, to which this is an homage, entails an additive process: one shot + another shot + another.

The content of After the Facts is that of the very historical found footage cut by Soviet women, those legendary cutters like Esfir Shub who elevated women’s agricultural labor to the level of artistry while reminding us that it is still work. After the Facts is a meditation on Shub’s invention of the compilation film so long associated with The Rise and Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927). Yet After the Facts is a sly homage to the Shub film that should have been canonized — Today: or Canons or Tractors? (1929),  film so incendiary that police confiscated when it was screened in Newark, New Jersey, in 1932.

After the Facts stimulates the field, challenges it to return women to the top, taking as its premise that to start with “women in the early industry” is to transform motion picture filmmaking as a historical field. If we start  with the women who worked, especially in the Soviet revolutionary society, surprise, surprise — everything looks different. Instead of Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov we have the triangulation of Esfir Shub, Vertov’s wife Elizaveta Svilova and Vertov sandwiched between the two female tour de force editors. And no longer can it be claimed that Vertov’s classic is “his” alone. Svilova is all over The Man With a Movie Camera (1929) — on the screen, and, where montage theory maintained we should “look”— between shots as well as within each shot. After the Facts demonstrates that there are more places to “look” than we “thought to look,” especially if we are looking for women working at editing. She is in the shot/reverse shot patterning controlled by the close up of our smiling Soviet heroine, a young female non-actor representing the “point of view of the revolutionary class.”

What we have here is “theoretical research” on the historical film text. After the Facts demonstrates nothing more nor less than a new theory and practice of historical research —no traditional “fact-finding.” Think how After the Facts treats found footage with both reverence and license. For here is an editing experiment that takes us beyond close text analysis to the re-creation of the work of creation, following the lead of the original footage to discover its conceptual and political premises.

Thus After the Facts works as counter factual, imagining another motion picture film history and asking “what if”? So “what if” the famous editing experiment had not been called  the “Kuleshov effect”? After the Facts re-names that conceptual discovery the “Editor’s effect,” crossing out Kuleshov’s name in a gesture of re-attribution. While the original “Kuleshov” experiment is lost we should not mourn it but instead embrace After the Facts. The dour face of Ivan Mouzzhkin has been replaced with the cheerful face of the young female Soviet who “looks” and “sees,” illustrating the political power of the conceptual cut. We see what she sees and she sees women working, playing, dancing, watching, washing clothes, and washing faces.

Bio Jane M. Gaines is Professor Emerita of Literature and English, Duke University, and currently Professor of Film, Columbia University. Author of three award-winning books, Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (North Carolina, 1991), Fire and Desire: Mixed Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago, 2001), and Pink-Slipped: What Happened to Women in the Early Film Industries? (Illinois, 2018), she received the Distinguished Career Award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies in 2018. Recent publication is on documentary activism, intellectual property in the internet age, the history of piracy, and most recently has critiqued the “historical turn” in film and media studies.