Memorie come montaggio: Scritti scelti da Žizn' moja – kinematograf (1972) di Ėsfir' Šub

Memories as Montage: Selected Writings from Žizn' moja – kinematograf (1972) by Esfir Shub The paper presents, for the first time in Italian, an annotated translation of three seminal writings by Esfir’ Shub, a pioneer of Soviet documentary cinema and a key figure of Russian Constructivism. Through the adoption of the ‘border’ as a heuristic category, the study explores Shub's work as a liminal space where the encounter between heterogeneous systems — past and present, archival traces and critical interpretation — generates new architectures of meaning. The selected texts — I opjat’ – chronika (The Newsreel, Once Again, 1929), Choču delat’ fil’mu o ženščine (I Want to Make a Film about Woman, 1933), and Vstreči (Meetings, 1940) — are analyzed to trace the trajectory of a filmmaker who transformed montage from a technical procedure into a rigorous method of historiographical inquiry situated on the threshold between documentary truth and authorial responsibility. In her rework of Tsarist-era footage, Shub articulated a new dramaturgy of non-fiction, thereby developing a poetics grounded in the ‘truth of the document’ and the ethical urgency of testimony. The critical introduction also examines the militant quality of Shub’s prose, characterized by parataxis, repetition, and a marked oral dimension aimed at shaping a new spectator culture. The translations seek to preserve these stylistic features and their pragmatic force. By making these texts available in Italian, this paper provides access to key primary sources for understanding the theoretical development of compilation film, its role within Soviet avant-garde culture, and, not least, the intellectual and artistic contribution of women at the frontiers of modern visual language.