Hope — A Red Cross Seal Story
R: Charles Brabin. B: James Oppenheim. D: George Lessey, Gertrude McCoy, William West. P: Edison Company. USA 1912

“When the film was made in 1912, tuberculosis was still the leading cause of death in the United States, as it had been throughout most of the nineteenth century. Known familiarly as consumption, for the wasting weight loss that followed initial bouts of coughing, the frightening disease was finally traced in 1882 to the tubercle bacillus. Although the death rate from TB had been declining even before then, urbanization and workplace changes at the start of the twentieth century conspired to make the disease more of a social problem. Once TB was identified as a bacterial contagion, sweatshops and urban tenements crowded with new immigrants were recognized as breeding grounds, and polluting smoke from factories was understood as increasing susceptibility. The popular thought was that tuberculosis was a ‘city disease’ — and that the more affluent living in small towns needn’t worry overmuch about it. (…)
Edison’s films with the National Association for the Study and Prevention of Tuberculosis had become ‘an annual holiday feature’. Hope was the third of six one-reelers, released each November or December from 1910 through 1915 and tied to Christmas Seal campaigns. Arguably the most successful public health fund-raising promotion of all time, Christmas Seals had been introduced modestly in the United States in 1907, with 30,000 of the adhesive stamps, emblazoned with the double-barred-cross emblem of the tuberculosis fight, selling for a penny each, and intended for holiday envelopes.”
Scott Simmon
National Film Preservation Foundation

Slava Nam, Smert’ Vragam
(Glory to Us, Death to the Enemy)
R: Jevgenij Bauer. D: Ivan Mozzhukhin, Dora Tschitorina. P: Khanzhonkov. RUS 1914
Print: CINEMATEK
Engl. subtitles

Jevgenij Bauer
“He was especially recognized for designing sets for theatrical productions, a talent that eventually brought him into the cinema when he designed the sets for Drankov and Taldykin’s commemorative historical film, Trekhsotletie Tsarstvovaniya Doma Romanovykh (The Tercentenary of the Rule of the Romanov Dynasty), released in 1913. Encouraged by Drankov and Taldykin, Bauer, then 48 years of age, graduated to directing for their company. After making four films for them, he went over to Pathé‘s Star Film Factory for whom he made an additional four films. Then in late 1913, he moved to the Khanzhonkov company where he remained for the rest of his career. As an artist, he quickly came to the fore, with his films proving very successful with Russian audiences and critics. He worked in a variety of genres including comedies, patriotic subjects, social dramas, and tragedies of psychological obsession. (…)
Bauer’s series of patriotic war pictures were made in response to the conflict with Germany and included Slava Nam, Smert’ Vagram (Glory to Us, Death to the Enemy), produced in 1914 with the great star of the early Russian cinema, Ivan Mozzhukhin, in the lead. Perhaps the most outstanding of these topical films is Revoliutsioner (The Revolutionary), made in 1917 just after the February Revolution overthrew the Tsarist regime. It deals with a revolutionary who is sent into Siberian exile in 1907 and is liberated a decade later with the fall of the Romanov dynasty.”
William M. Drew

>>> on this site: Jevgenij Bauer-1, Jevgenij Bauer-2,  Jevgenij Bauer-3