Russia

Abstract

The Lumière film technology created in the mid 1890s in France — and the Lumière brothers’ actuality films — may not have reached Russia until 1905, nearly a decade after the technology was introduced in many other nations. Under Tsar Nicholas II, Russia was slow to industrialize, and political unrest was nearly constant as an underprivileged and repressed working class faced difficult working conditions. These citizens began to organize against the bourgeois class and the ruling royalty. Notwithstanding the fact that the country was politically aligned with France (despite antagonistic relations in the Crimean War and the Napoleonic invasion), the filmmaking movement stalled. It was once thought that the film industry in Russia before the Bolshevik Revolution (1917) consisted mostly of European imports, as companies such as Lumière, Gaumont, Pathè and Danish Nordisk had large distribution branches. However, once the Russian film archives were opened to the West in 1980, nearly 1,720 films were found that had been made before 1917. The history of early Russian filmmaking is still unfolding.