Filmographies

Filmographic references were prepared by film scholar Alexander Deriabin based on all available filmographies and catalogs relevant to the period:

Kino-biulleten’ Kino-komiteta Narodnogo komissariata prosveshcheniia: ukazatel’ kartin, prosmotrennykh otdelom retsenzii Kinematograficheskogo komiteta Narodnogo komissariata prosvesh’eniia, vyp. 1 and 2. Moscow, 1918.

Deriabin, Alexander, and Valerii Fomin, eds. Letopis’ rossiiskogo kino 1863–1929. Moscow: Materik, 2004.

Mislavskii, Vladimir. Faktograficheskaia istoriia kino v Ukraine, vols. 1 and 2. Kharkiv: Toring-plus, 2013.

Semerchuk, Vladimir. V starinnom rossiiskon illiuzione . . . annotirovannyi katalog sokharanivshikhsia igrovykh i animatsionnykh fil’mov Rossii (1908–1919). Moscow: Gosfilmofond Rossii, 2013.

Sovetskie khudozhesvennye fil’my. Annotirovannyi katalog, vol. 1. Iskusstvo, 1961.

Velikii kinemo: Katalog sokhranivshikhsia igrovykh fil´mov Rossii 1908–1919. Moscow: NLO, 2002.

Vishnevskii, Veniamin. “Katalog fil’mov chastnogo proizvodstva.” Sovetskie khudozhesvennye fil’my. Annotirovannyi katalog, vol. 3. Iskusstvo, 1961, 248–305.

Vishnevskii, Veniamin. Khudozhestvennye fil’my dorevoliutsionnoi Rossii. Moscow: Goskinoizdat, 1945.

Deriabin and his colleagues (Peter Bagrov, Viktoriia Safronova, and Irina Zubatenko, among others) updated information from these catalogs based on various sources, mainly original ones. Collecting materials for the database helps to add information to the filmographies and, in some cases, it results in correcting mistakes. For example, it is a well-known fact among historians of pre-Soviet cinema that Elizaveta Thiemann, the first credited film director in Russia, played the role of Alexandra Tolstoy in the film The Passing of the Great Old Man (Ukhod velikogo startsa; 1912) that she co-directed with Yakov Protazanov. This is stated in the widely used Veniamin Vishnevsky’s reference guide of early Russian films. However, when we collected all the images connected to the film including the photograph kindly provided by Elizaveta Thiemann’s daughter-in-law Jeanette (figs. 1 and 2) and compared them with promotional stills for other films in which Thiemann starred (fig. 3), it became clear that the woman who played Alexandra Tolstoy in the film was not Elizaveta. She probably was tested for the role (and the photograph from the family archive features the testing), but the studio ended up hiring an actress who looked more like the real Alexandra Tolstoy (fig. 4).

We have not yet updated the database by adding information on this and other filmographical findings. This is a task we will work on later when we collect more information on what should be updated and corrected in Deriabin’s version. Later on, filmographies will be updated regularly, and all the database users willing to provide relevant information are welcome to take part in this process.