Part I unit 1. The beginnings of russian cinema (1908-1919) the arrival of the kinemo, 1895-1907

On 4 May 1896, the cinematograph was presented at a fairground in the Aquarium Park in St Petersburg (nowadays the territory of the city’s film studio, Lenfilm). In Moscow it made its debut at a fair in the Hermitage Theatre and Gardens on 26-th of May. The first Russian shows featured short films made by the Lumieres, including their film demonstrating the arrival of a train at a station, (Arrival of the Train at La Ciotat, 1895).

By March 1897 the cinematograph was touring Russian towns, acquainting the people with the new attraction and providing cheap entertainment. At the end of the nineteenth century, France had a clear monopoly on the Russian film market. The companies Gaumont and Pathe exhibited their films, as no rental system existed. The cinema programmes usually lasted forty-five minutes, presenting a range of films; initially viewers could move in and out during the programme, but as time went on they had to wait for the beginning of the programme and the foyer became a necessary part of the cinema, which until then could be a makeshift installation in somebody’s apartment, as was frequently the case. The attraction of the cinematograph grew rapidly. Cinemas increased in number and size: seats numbered around twenty-five at the beginning and reached up to 800-1,000 by 1917. Before the war there were 1,400 cinemas in Russia, all with seating capacities of 300-800 people.

Censorship was applied only to images of the tsar (because it was unclear how they would be presented in the context of a programme), pornography and, after 1905, to demonstrations and events of the French Revolution that could lead to political agitation. The Church, opposed to the cinema in general, also restricted the demonstration of religious themes on screen.

It became clear that Russia had the potential for its own domestic production. Russia had cameras, laboratories and the facilities to make its own films, and numerous Russians had gained experience in working for the French companies with businesses in Russia.

Russian Film Production, 1907-1914

T he breakthrough for Russian film production came in 1907, when Alexander Drankov (1880-1949), an official Duma photographer, opened an office in St Petersburg and announced that he would make films that would offer authentic views of the country. Pathe and Gaumont immediately followed suit, opening their own production studios in Russia. Russian film production thus began on a professional level.

In 1908 Drankov produced the first Russia feature film: Stenka Razin (Ponizovaia vol’nitsa, dir. Vladimir Romashkov, Drankov Studio). It was released on 15 October 1908 – the date normally given as the birthday of Russian cinema. The film told of the popular folk hero and rebel Stenka Razin, but it focused on his emotional life. The film exploits the exotic settings that were so popular in Romantic literature, capturing from a series of angles with the statically positioned camera how the boats float on the Volga as the crowd watches from the shore.

The former army captain Alexander Khanzhonkov (1877-1945) competed with Drankov. Khanzhonkov’s role for Russian film production is unique in that he skilfully recruited young Russian talents – directors, designers, animators and actors, and made films that aimed at an aesthetic development of cinema. His first production, The Gypsy Camp (Drama v tabore, directed and filmed by Vladimir Siversen, Khanzhonkov 1908), was a documentary-style film with rich exoticism and real gypsies performing an attempted abduction from a gypsy camp.

Before the rise of the actor as star of the silver screen, however, Khanzhonkov ventured on the first large-scale historical epic on celluloid and the first full-length Russian feature: The Defence of Sevastopol (Oborona Sevastopol’ia) was premiered in 1912. Russian cinema had explored the genres of documentary, historical accounts and epics, and literary adaptation. Before becoming a fully-fledged artistic medium it had to assimilate two further important genres: comedy and melodrama.

The concern with emotional dramas of young women forced to sacrifice their love for the sake of arranged marriages became a dominant theme in early Russian cinema, although the genre of melodrama would flourish fully in the films of Yevgeni Bauer (1865-1917). The Peasant Lot (Krestianskaia dolia. dir. Goncharov, Khanzlionkov 1912) explores the impossibility of love for a young peasant woman.

As cinema was exploring the various genres possible in documentary and artistic films, the art of animation arrived in Moscow’s Khanzhonkov studio. In 1912 Khanzhonkov brought to Moscow Wladyslaw Starewicz (1882-1965), who had attracted attention as designer and photographer in his native Kovno (now the Lithuanian Kaunas, then Poland). Starewicz made a series of feature films for Khanzhonkov, but he gained even wider acclaim as the master of puppet animation. His animated films, such as The Cameraman’s Revenge (Mest’ kinematograficheskogo operatora, Khanzhonkov 1912), The Dragonfly and the Ant (Strekoza i muravei, Khanzhonkov 1913), and the part-animated, part live-action film The Lily of Belgium (Liliia Bel’gii, Skobelev Committee 1915), were parables of modern life set in the world of insects and flowers. Moreover, they were fine and subtle parodies and satires on the dominant cinematic genres of the time, from melodrama to costume spectacle.

TASKS