A two part documentary about the first five decades of Russian cinema: from its birth to 1953 - the death of Stalin and the first seedlings of the thaw. The film covers the most important milestones of cinema. Its introduction as a lowbrow entertainment, the impact of WWI and revolutions on the film process. The principal masters - Kuleshov, Vertov, Eisenstein - and their discoveries in film language at the turn of the 1920-30s. The arrival of sound. The evacuation of the Soviet film industry during WWII and the heroic work of the wartime documentary crews. Restricted film production and early signs of the thaw in the late 1940s - early 1950s. Film historians and art critics, directors and screenwriters put the history of cinema in a broader context, considering the path that the country took from Tsarist Russia to the totalitarian state under the rule of Stalin.
Nikolai Izvolov (born in 1962 – Kostroma, USSR) is a Russian film historian and cinema theorist, researcher of film archives and specialist in reconstruction of the “lost” films. He's known by his reconstructions of Dziga Vertov's Anniversary of the Revolution (2018), The History of the Civil War (2021) and Man with a Movie Camera (2024). Author of the books Phenomenon of Film: History and Theory (2001) and Unknown Pages of Russian Avant-garde Cinema (2021). Since the beginning of the 1990s, he has been teaching the course Practice of Work in Film Archives for students of the Film Studies department in VGIK (All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography). In 1992, he collaborated with Chris Marker on the Alexander Medvedkin’s biopic The Last Bolshevik. Together with Natasha Drubek-Mayer he developed a creative method of film reconstruction ‘Hyperkino’ and applied it to the archives of Dziga Vertov, Alexander Medvedkin and Lev Kuleshov: Lenin Kino-Pravda (1996); Stop Thief! (1998); The Story of Tit… or the Tale of the Large Spoon (2000); Engineer Prite’s Project (2001); Alcoholism and Its Consequences (2001); Dokhunda (2006).