Marking the 320th anniversary of St. Petersburg: Lenfilm - the first film studio in the city and the country

This year the "most intentional city" of our country, St. Petersburg, marks its 320th anniversary. Designed by Emperor Peter the Great, the city has never ceased to amaze contemporaries since its inception especially the speed with which construction was going on, the beauty, achievements of science and culture. It was here that the first electric street lighting in the country appeared, and here in the Aquarium Theater in 1896 the first film show in Russia took place - just a few months after the famous film show of the Lumiere brothers in Paris. The first Russian state film factory appeared here in 1914, which, having undergone a series of transformations and renaming, turned into Lenfilm two decades later.

The Presidential Library’s collections allow everyone to touch the history of our cinema, to study the history of the creation of famous films in Leningrad, to see posters for films that have become the hallmark of the Leningrad Film Studio.

It is worth noting that the first Russian feature film was shot near St. Petersburg, on Lake Razliv in 1908. It was the film The Low Freemen (another name is Stenka Razin and the Princess).

Since the 1920s, Grigory Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg began working at the Leningrad film studio (the name Lenfilm appeared only in 1934), who, after experimental theatrical productions and a couple of short films in 1926, shot the film The Overcoat based on the script by Yuri Tynyanov, which became one from the masterpieces of Soviet silent cinema. In the future, their names were associated with the flourishing of Lenfilm and cinema in the country as a whole. The directors filmed the trilogy The Youth of Maxim, The Return of Maxim and Vyborgskaya Storona.

The Leningrad cinema of those years is a folk film in which communist ideas are reflected in primordially Russian character traits - a thirst for a common cause, the desire to work for the good of one's neighbor. At the same time, in the 1930s, the Vasilyev brothers were shooting Chapaev at Lenfilm, V. Petrov - Peter the Great, S. Gerasimov - Seven Brave Men. Their posters are available on the Presidential Library’s portal.  

The library’s collections contain a screenplay and other materials about the creation of the two-part political drama directed by Friedrich Ermler The Great Citizen (1937, 1939). The plot of the film was based on the official version of the life and death of Sergei Kirov at that time.

Lenfilm continued to work during the war years. At the beginning of the Great Patriotic War, film studio workers began to produce combat film collections. At the highest level, it was decided to evacuate Lenfilm from the city, which was threatened with encirclement. According to the archive documents available in the library’s collections, the orders of the chairman of the Government Commission for the evacuation of the Lenfilm film studio, its employees and equipment to the Kazakh SSR are dated August 15 and 17, 1941. That is, the echelon with filmmakers managed to leave for Alma-Ata literally in the last days before the siege closed. The work continued: during the war years, the films Air cabman, Actress, Heavenly Slug were created, which soon became part of the studio’s gold foundation and fell in love with the audience. The film studio of the hero-city returned to the military theme later.

Shooting films, preparing them for release did not always go smoothly even in peacetime. This happened with the TV series Confrontation, based on the novel by Yulian Semyonov at the Lenfilm studio in 1985. The Presidential Library has preserved the script and director's development of the film by Semyon Aranovich. The reading room provides the letters “about comments on the acceptance of the television film “Confrontation”, 1985.

The Presidential Library’s collections continue to receive digital copies of interesting and previously inaccessible materials on the history of our country and the history of Russian cinema, which is inextricably linked with it. The library’s portal features the collection Marking the Year of Russian Cinema, which includes more than 600 depository items such as official documents, studies, posters, postcards that spotlight the stages of development of Russian cinema from 1914 to the present.