The Presidential Library will digitize posters to create a film chronicle

In 2016, the Year of Russian Cinema, the Lenfilm and the Presidential Library are going to publish an album "100 film posters of Lenfilm", timed to the 120th anniversary of the first public film demonstration in Russia and the recent centennial of the famous film studio, founded in 1914.

Currently, the first Russian national electronic library is digitizing posters provided by the "Lenfilm" studio. They will join the electronic collections, and will also be published in a form of a special book, which will be a chronicle of the national cinema, because it was in St. Petersburg that the national cinema arose.

Posters tell its entire history, from the Skobelev Committee movies to modern works. The films are “aged” from the early 20th century (pre-revolutionary silent films starring Vera Kholodnaya and Witold Polonsky) to the films of recent years by Alexander Sokurov and Herman Jr. Given the state of the old movies, some of them will be restored using the modern equipment of the Presidential Library before digitization.

The Soviet cinema began with the propaganda "poster" films. Let us remember the "mount films" of Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein, Lev Kuleshov. It was this kind of films that brought to life the posters of mounting type, when the collision of portrait images, of particular parts and stills produces a graphic solution representing the essence of the film.

Let us look more closely, for instance, at the poster featuring the film of Joseph Heifetz "Big Family" delivered to the Presidential Library for digitization. In the center of it there is Matvei Zhurbin with his grandson in his arms, surrounded by a large family. Among the characters we recognize young Alexei Batalov, Clara Lucko, Ekaterina Savinova... They are all against an impressive background of the ship on the side of which there is engraved the name of "Matvei Zhurbin." The poster, in fact, conveys the content of the other large-scale Lenfilm’s work, "Everything is left to people." The poster of this film, too, will join the collection of the Presidential Library.

The abovementioned poster, representing a counterpoint to what is happening on the screen, is fundamentally different from the most common type of cinema visual products - diligent realistic illustration. The basis of it is usually represented by a close-up of the main characters, recognizable actors’ faces that will attract the audience.   

An example of such a presentation can be posters for the film "Cinderella" beloved by many generations of film-goers in a magically beautiful scenic incarnation of Eugene Schwartz and for the film of Friedrich Ermler and Edward Johanson, "Katka – a paper rennet", one of the earliest works of the studio, which was called originally the “Leningrad Film Studios” under the "headline" "Sovkino Production."

It is clear that the most valuable are visual materials printed before 1930. Among them, there is the poster for the first Lenfilm’s work "Consolidation" (1918) and posters for the films of FEKS studio produced in the 1920s by filmmakers G. Kozintsev and L. Trauberg, as well as the posters for the masterpieces of 1930's, such as "Chapaev" by brothers Vasilyevs, a trilogy about Maxim by G. Kozintsev and L. Trauberg, "Komsomolsk" by S. Gerasimov.

The collection, which is now being digitized by the Presidential Library, contains all types of posters. There is also an "intellectual" poster, becoming the global trend, the author of which, without being a primitive copyist, offers every person to "decode" his work in his own way. This kind of presentation of his works is preferred by Alexander Sokurov and some of his younger colleagues.

Film-poster is not just an intermediary between the film and the audience. It largely determines the box office, and is responsible for the historical accuracy and completeness of the richest biography of Lenfilm. And since it is in many respects the biography of the country, it would be logical to create such an unusual "cinema" collection of the Presidential Library, the content of which consists of materials on the history of Russian statehood and related areas. Equipped with the latest information technology, the Presidential Library will do everything in its power to provide the Russian cinematographic heritage to millions of fans of our cinema in the world.