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The Lost Czarist Films
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20596 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 1992 |
1,379 Words |
| Author
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Elliott Stein
Elliott Stein is a film historian, critic, and writer
currently living in New York. |
For true film buffs, the cinematic revelation of the year has not been some noisy new blockbuster from Hollywood but a remarkable series of rare Russian silent films. Under the title Silent Witnesses: Russian Cinema before the Revolution, the retrospective played to full houses at New York's Museum of the Moving Image for six weeks earlier this year and is currently touring museums and film archives across the country.
Nearly the entire history of Russia's pre-Revolutionary cinema lay hidden in the vaults of Gosfilmofond, the Soviet state cinema archive, for over seventy years. Officially damned as works of "cosmopolitan bourgeois decadence," these films, some of them extraordinary masterpieces, were like political prisoners. While they were preserved by the Soviet authorities, they had "officially" ceased to exist. They became non-films--for the outside world and even for Russian film scholars. They were not seen or written about and were barely remembered. The only cinema was Soviet cinema, we were told, not just the works of noted directors Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin, but all the dreary films of Stalinist socialist realism that followed in their wake.
Enthusiastic film scholars are now unanimous: The major discovery of the current "czarist" film series has been the outstanding quality of the work of Evgenii Bauer, a director who had been heretofore merely a footnote to film history. Bauer, who died in Crimean exile in 1917, was a master of psychology and can now be seen as one of the greatest filmmakers of early European cinema. His work with actors reveals a sensitivity for characterization and performance never attained by the Soviet cinema.
The arrival of this unique series to Western screens is not due to glasnost alone. It resulted from persistent efforts by the directors of Italy's Pordenone Silent Film Festival. In the last decade, this festival has grown from a local affair in a small Northern Italian town into a major international event, attracting hundreds of scholars and film historians from around the world.
Paolo Cherchi Usai, cofounder of the Pordenone Festival, told me:
"Many times in the past we had tried to get in touch with Gosfilmofond. No response. We kept at it, and it was only recently, when the cultural world in the ex-Soviet Union loosened up, that through some Russian colleagues we were invited to come to Moscow for viewing sessions in January 1989. Gosfilmofond, in a suburb about forty miles from the
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