Upon opening the door to my apartment in Saint Petersburg, I am suddenly and completely blinded by golden light. An instant later, the bright rectangle dashes away from my face and, in a quick jolt, describes the edges of the bare hallway with its peeling stucco and an oval of a mirror.

While the names of Dziga Vertov and Sergei Eisenstein are bound to evoke some, even if mostly schematic, associations in the popular memory, that of Esfir Shub, their colleague and sometime mentor, draws an unfortunate blank.