在这部你的朋友短片片中,...[Lev Kuleshov] created a monument to her[Aleksandra Khokhlova] with Vasha znakomaya/Zhurnalistka, a film which premiered in Moscow on the 25th October 1927. A monument which unfortunately today survives only as a fragment of 358 meters (its fourth reel, the original length amounted to 1800m). The female protagonist, a scatterbrained, clumsy, impudent female journalist, answers to the name of "Khokhlova". She is a modern woman, in-your-face and interesting in both the way she dresses and the way she handles the men who surround her in her everyday working life: she writes almost all of them off as wimps but the one she loves, a functionary, proves to be a conformist: disappointment ensues. For Kuleshov, erasing intrigue leads to the possibility to focus attention on the details of ordinary life, to see the familiar anew. The mise-en-scène is unique, with razor-sharp contours and extreme lighting provided on the one hand by Aleksandr Rodchenko with his constructivist design of the materialistic world, and on the other hand by cameraman Konstantin Kuznecov with his "svetotvorchestvo" (light-making) already known from Po zakonu.
In a year filled with Revolutionary festivities, a film about Soviet ordinary life, not to mention one so in love with objects as to border on the realms of documentary yet still remain highly artificial, was something of a provocation. Not just for that reason did the critics condemn Vasha znakomaya, as they had done Po zakonu before it, as "formalist", even "immoral".
