Оборона Севастополя / The Defense of Sevastopol
R: Vasiliy Goncharov, Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. B: Vasiliy Goncharov, Aleksandr Khanzhonkov. K: Louis Forestier, Aleksandr Ryllo. D: Andrey Gromov, Vladimir Maximov, Alexandr Goncharov, Ivan Mozzhukhin, Pavel Biryukov, Boris Borisov, Olga Petrova-Zvantseva, Nikolay Semenov. P: Khanzhonkov. RUS 1911
Russian intertitles
“The Defense of Sevastopol (Russian: Оборона Севастополя, or Воскреслий Севастополь) is a 1911 historical war film depicting the siege of Sevastopol during the Crimean War, and is one of the most important films in the history of Russian cinema and cinema in general. (…) It was the first full-length film produced in the Russian Empire and was premiered on October 26 at the Livadia Palace of Tsar Nicholas II. It was also the world’s first film recorded using his two cameras. The film was also notable for its use of special ‘sound effects’ (gunshots and cannon fire) and for using real military veterans as consultants.”
Academic Accelerator
“Aleksandr Khanzhonkov (1877–1945) brought to the screen the first feature film in the history of Russian cinema, The Defense of Sevastopol, in 1911. Founder of the largest and most successful film studio in pre-revolutionary Russia, Khanzhonkov also built a chain of luxury movie theaters and launched two magazines to promote his directors and stars, mastering the vertical-integration model used more effectively by Hollywood studios in later decades. Aleksandr Aleksejevich Khanzhonkov was born August 8, 1877, in Makiivka, a city in the Donetsk Oblast of Ukraine. His family was of Don Cossack ancestry, a distinct group with a 500-year-long history of military service to the Russian and Ukrainian states, and his father was a career officer in service to the Imperial Russian Army. Once he came of age, Khanzhonkov dutifully followed family tradition and entered the officers’ training academy at the Novocherkassk Military School in nearby Rostov Oblast. (…)
Khanzhonkov served in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 and may have suffered an injury that permitted him the chance to take early retirement. Enamored of the new short films that were captivating audiences in St. Petersburg and Moscow, he invested his 4,000-ruble pension payout in a venture that sold film projection equipment from Europe to theater and exhibitors. He did not make the first Russian short film; that honor went instead to Aleksandr Drankov, a photography-studio owner from St. Petersburg, who finished and screened his film Stenka Razin in October of 1908. This ten-minute film included scenes based on the eponymous Russian folk song. Khanzhonkov followed quickly behind Drankov with Drama v tabore podmoskovnykh tsygan (“Drama in a Gypsy Camp near Moscow” ), which was screened in December of 1908.
The first film studios in Russia were outposts of two major French trailblazers, Pathé and Gaumont. Cultural critics, however, contended that Russian writers, directors, and actors were best suited to adapt and interpret Russian literary classics for the screen. Over the two-year period in 1909–10, Khanzhonkov acquired two smaller film companies, Globus and Kinerus, and began to aggressively recruit talent from a Moscow theater group, the Vvedensky People’s House. One of his most significant early hires was Pyotr Chardynin, an established stage actor and director who became one of the first acclaimed filmmakers in the history of Russian cinema history. Vasilii Goncharov was another early pioneer of Russian cinematography who worked for Khanzhonkov, delivering a 1909 short film based on the Pushkin work Mazepa while Chardynin adapted Pushkin’s more famous Queen of Spades story for 1910 release. Under Khanzhonkov, Chardynin helmed a screen version of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls for Khanzhonkov’s venture along with Fyodor Dostoevsky classic ‘The Idiot’, released respectively in 1909 and 1910. (…)
Khanzhonkov’s tour-de-force and the project that cemented his status in the history of Russian cinema history was Oborona Sevastopolya (The Defense of Sevastopol), the first full-length feature film made at a Russian studio. Co-directed by Khanzhonkov and Goncharov, it set out to resurrect the bloody and divisive Crimean War battle of 1854–55, which served as a turning point for foreign relations between imperial Russia, Great Britain, France, and the Ottoman Empire. Khanzhonkov’s epic, with its [originally] 100-minute running time, was one of the longest movies ever made when it premiered before in at the Livadia Palace, Tsar Nicholas II’s summer residence in Yalta.
Many of those who worked under Khanzhonkov in the pre-revolutionary period emerged as the top names in Russian cinema in the first decades of the 20th century. In addition to Chardynin and Goncharov, there was Yevgeni Bauer, who also came from the Vvedenskii troupe and had both acting and set design experience. Bauer pioneered the use of much larger interior camera shots and other techniques later adopted by other filmmakers. Two of his bestknown works for Khanzhonkov’s studio were Nemye svideteli (‘Silent Witnesses’), a 1914 film, and The Dying Swan, a ballet-set tale of love and madness first screened in 1917. Khanzhonkov’s hires also included animation pioneer Wladyslaw Starewicz, the creator of stop-motion animation. Starewicz’s landmark masterpiece, Mest’ kinematografičeskogo operatora (Revenge of the Kinematograph Cameraman), was produced for Khanzhonkov’s company. (…)
Aleksandr Khanzhonkov
“While the market was dominated by French companies, notably Pathé and Gaumont, local institutions made sporadic attempts to win over the audience. They ranged from the allowances from the Imperial Russian Technical Society in 1897/98 for purchasing a film projector and opening the departments of ‘scientific cinemas’ in the regions of the empire to a special congress of ‘useful entertainment’, convened in Kharkov in 1915 by the local Literacy Society. (…) The years before the First World War saw the appearance of such ‘useful’ films, produced in some cases against market rationality. In 1911, the Khanzhonkov film company, one of the largest in Russia at the time, organized a ‘scientific department’, making The Defense of Sevastopol (1911), a 100-minute feature film, which included staged scenes from the Crimean War (1853- 1856) interspersed with photographs of military actions and takes of the Crimean War veterans. A year later saw the production of the historical film 1812 glorifying the victory over Napoleon, and the moralizing Alcoholism and its consequences. Both were the early examples of the future directions in the so-called ‘cultured’ cinema: history (inspiring and patriotic) and everyday customs (outlining desired and non-desired behavior).”
Oksana Sarkisova: “Life As It Should Be?” Early Non-fiction Cinema in Russia
medien & zeit
Historical background:
>>> Siege of Sevastopol (1854–1855)
>>> WAR
THE EARLY SILENT ERA 1895-1915