On the occasion of the Day of Russian Cinema the Presidential Library offers materials dedicated to the cinema of the early twentieth century

The Day of Russian Cinema is celebrated in our country on August 27, 2016. This year is entirely dedicated to the national cinema, however it has another significant jubilee - 120 years since the first movie screening, which took place in the St. Petersburg Aquarium Garden in 1896. Shortly before the holiday the Presidential Library has completed building and presented on its website a thematic collection On the Year of Russian Cinema. It included the official documents, the studies, and a variety of visual materials (posters, event ads, flyers, cards, etc.), revealing different aspects of the development of the national cinema, as well as representing the actors and particular movies, more than 500 items overall. Some of the pieces relate to the beginning of the cinematography era in the Russian Empire.

The book by Vladimir Gotwald entitled the Cinematograph (“live photograph”), released in 1909 and represented in the collection, tells a history of cinematograph. The author describes in detail a relatively new phenomenon for those years - a beginning with a way of proceeding of the motion pictures, film fixing, and film development to the fairly distant prospects of the cinematography.

Gotwald, in particular, notes the tremendous benefits that cinema brought to the medicine, education, awareness raising, fashion design and religion, emphasizes its invaluable contribution into the development of science. One of the chapters of the author’s book is titled the "Wonders of the cinema", in which he reveals the secrets of movie production more than a hundred years ago. So, we can find out that while the filmmakers of the lime were trying to save on the film production, they, at the same time, were leveling up the imaginative photo-realism of their movies. According to the researcher, “instead of making the actors learning a complex crowd scene, they shoot real people, and get a slice-of-life movie out of it.”

That is how in the early XX century Vladimir Gotwald imagined a future of the “motion pictures”: “This cinematograph of the future seams to look like that: small matte glass screen is attached to a wall in a private apartment. Near is a small horn, barely projecting out of the wall, and a nice, exquisitely polished box underneath. Instead of our awkward bookcases, aluminum round boxes are laid out the light shelves… To read any work, it's enough to take an appropriate box, take a movie out of it, put it in a box on the wall and turn a small lever: the sounds will flow from the horn, and on the screen these sounds will be illustrated by life itself.”

Featured on the Presidential Library Internet resource silent feature shorts of the early twentieth century would be a beautiful illustration of a large-scale work by Vladimir Gotwald Cinematograph (“live photograph”). There are some feature films based on the works of Mikhail Lermontov - Boyar Orsha (1909), Vadim (1910) and Bella (1913), a satirical movie Down with the German Yoke (1914) and patriotic story Glory to Us, Death to the Enemies (1914). These presented by the Presidential Library movies are courtesy of the Russian State Film Fund.

To look at the actors of the era of silent movies is also possible owning to the albums, added to the funds of the Presidential Library On the Year of Russian Cinema. One of them includes digitized copies of rare postcards, featuring the portraits of Russian artists of the last century, from a private collection of N. V. Balachenkova: there are Ivan Moskvin, Ivan Mozzhukhin, Vera Malinovskaya, and, of course, an outstanding cinema diva Vera Kholodnaya. The second album included a beautifully executed black-and-white images of these artists of the Soviet period, who has been working in already sound motion pictures production, such as Lyubov Orlova, Boris Babochkin, Nikolai Cherkasov and others.

Another part of the gathering - about a hundred digitized posters, offered by the first in Russia national electronic library, are courtesy of the Lenfilm Production Studios. They review all Lenfilm’s rich history, from the movies of the beginning of the XX century (the pre-revolutionary silent feature films with Vera Kholodnaya and Witold Polonsky) to the releases of recent years of Alexander Sokurov and Alexey Herman Jr.