Cinema of the Russian Empire
 | This article needs additional citations for verification. (January 2024) |
The Cinema of the Russian Empire (Pre-reform Russian orthography: Синематографъ Россійской Имперіи) roughly spans the period 1907 - 1920, during which time a strong infrastructure was created. From the over 2,700 art films created in Russia before 1920, around 300 remain to this day.
The beginning of cinema in Russia
![[icon]](/File:Wiki_letter_w_cropped.svg){kind=small} | This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (January 2011) |
In April 1896, just four months after the first films were shown in
The first Russian movies were shown in the Moscow Korsh Theatre by artist Vladimir Sashin. After purchasing a Vitagraph projector, Sashin started to make short films, which by August 1896 were being demonstrated to theatre audiences after the theatre performance had ended.
Development
Film in Russia became a staple of fairs or rented auditoriums. After the Lumières came representatives from
In 1907, the journal Kino was first published. Kino was the first Russian periodical devoted to the cinema.
Ladislas Starevich made the first Russian animated film (and the first stop motion puppet film with a story) in 1910 - Lucanus Cervus. He continued making animated films (some of which can now be bought on DVD) until his emigration to France following the 1917 October Revolution. He was decorated by the Tsar for his work in 1911.
Competition from French, American, German, Danish, British and Italian companies, distributing their country's wares to the eager Russians, developed, but the indigenous industry made such strides over the next five years that 129 fully Russian films - even if many of them were comparatively short - were produced in 1918 alone. In 1912, the
Tsar Nicholas gave some special assistance to the makers of "The Defence of Sevastopol" and a few similar films, but the industry was not nationalized nor governmentally subsidized or otherwise controlled. There were also only a few rules of censorship on a national level - such as not making the Tsars characters in a dramatized film - but the filmmakers were largely free to produce for the mass audience; local officials might be more stringent in censoring or banning films.
The arrival of World War I in Russia in 1914 sparked a change. Imports dropped drastically, especially insofar as films from Germany and its allies left the market rapidly. Russian filmmakers early on turned to anti-German, "patriotic" films, often hastily made, even being filmed while the scripts were still being written, filling in the gap: in 1916, Russia produced 499 films, over three times the number of just three years earlier, and more of feature length. Russia's allies, in turn, began to import some of the more striking product, including further films by Protazanov and Yevgeni Bauer, a specialist in psychological film, who both impacted, among others, the burgeoning American film industry. Adversely, Russian companies were forbidden to send cameramen to the "front", and war footage had to be imported from France and England: some Russian concerns combined footage from these with enacted war material to create faux documentaries. Also, the Skobolev Committee was established by the government to oversee the making of newsreel and propaganda films.
And then came the
Ironically, the last significant Russian film completed, in 1917,
See also
Readings
- Yana Hashamova, Pride and Panic: Russian Imagination of the West in Post-Soviet Film (Intellect Books, 2007)
References
- ISBN 978-0-8108-6072-8.