The first attempt to collect film librettos in a scholarly database was made by me and my former students at the Higher School of Economics University, Moscow. At the beginning of 2018, I launched a research team project, Early Russian Film Prose. The principal aim of this group was to gather the most complete collection of Russian film librettos from 1908 to 1917. The database we have built is now available online (please feel free to check out the journal related to the database contents which is available in English). Currently, it contains 886 librettos, and twenty-one prerevolutionary periodicals have been reviewed to collect them.
However, in many ways, this database is imperfect. The new project should use a different corpus of librettos. First, the database includes librettos of films produced before 1917; the new one will also have librettos from 1918 to 1921. Second, since the first database was published, many new librettos from 1907 to 1917 have been found. Also, we constructed the 2018 database according to a hierarchy of periodicals that does not appear relevant anymore. Following this system, when we had different versions of the same libretto, we always chose the one published in Sine-Fono. This journal was indeed the main film periodical in the Russian Empire, and that is exactly why it did not have enough space to publish the most complete versions of librettos. As one can see now, the Sine-Fono librettos are often slightly shortened and usually lack lists of film parts that could be found at other sources. From this perspective, Sine-Fono should be the last source to take a libretto from; in most cases, it seems reasonable to look in other sources when possible. One should consider each case individually, compare all versions, and choose the one which is the most complete.
Each newly found libretto helps to fill in a gap in the history of pre-Soviet cinema. However, some findings seem to be particularly significant if they help to get a better understanding of the key films and trends of pre-Soviet cinema. For instance, the 2018 base has only one libretto for Evgeni Bauer’s canonical film Silent Witnesses (Nemye svideteli; 1913). The main plot line of the film is the relationship between the master Kostritsyn and his maid Nastya whom he abandons to marry a lady of his circle. The libretto from the old database published in the journal Vestnik kinematografii ends as follows:
When Nastya with swimming eyes saw her masters [Kostritsyn and his wife] off to the railway station and returned to her duties, her aching heart sank, and the poor girl burst into tears. But even then she did not find any sympathy... In her cold, dispassionate voice, the old mistress Kostritsyna [the seducer’s mother] reminded her that “she shouldn’t be spoilt,” and advised her to be more attentive to her responsibilities.
“Opisanie novykh kartin,” Vestnik kinematografii, no 89/9 (1914): 64-65.
In addition to this libretto, the new database has another version published in the journal Sinema with a completely different ending which explains the film’s title (by the way, Silent Witnesses became the title of the first international catalog of early Russian films[3]):
When the weeping Nastenka told her father her secret <…> when she said that she would soon become a mother and that it was the fault of their master Pavel Kostrichin, the old man, wiping away an oncoming tear, consoled Nastya:
“Don’t cry, Nastenka... Don’t cry, dear...” he whispered. “Nothing can be done. Everything is the master’s will... We, Nastenka, are only witnesses...
“Opisaniia kartin,” Sinema no 9 (1914): 26-27)
Neither the Vestnik kinematografii libretto nor the film itself has any indication of the heroine’s pregnancy. The ending of the film differs significantly from both librettos; in the film, Nastya sees Kostritsyn and his wife off, and then we see her sad walk around the empty and gloomy house. Neither the old mistress nor Nastya’s father appear in the film’s last scene. Overall, now we have three alternative endings for this classical film, and none of them has a suicide or murder. These findings reveal an important tendency in the evolution of pre-Soviet cinema. As Yuri Tsivian noted, it had a strong tendency to tragic endings (the so-called “Russian endings”). As we gathered more materials for the database, we saw that this tendency was declining with time.