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[RARE CINEMA EPHEMERA FROM SOVIET UNION] Vecher starinnoy fil’my [i.e. Evening of Old Films]

Item #2752

Leningrad: Tea-Kino-Pechat’, 1928. 4 pp. 24,3x18,2 cm. Fold marks, closed tears, tale of the spine neatly restored with a tape, but otherwise in good condition. Scarce. 1 of 3,000 copies. Text in Russian. According to the colophon, the booklet was published by the Leningrad branch of “Tea-Kino-Pechat” and was officially sanctioned for print under the censorship permit Leningrad Oblastlit № 1144.

An extremely rare program for the curated Soviet retrospective screening “Evening of Old Films”, likely organized in Leningrad in 1928. At the time, the Soviet film industry was shifting away from the cult of Hollywood stars toward the promotion of Soviet film directors and actors, presenting Soviet cinema as a superior alternative to Western film culture. The event traced the development of the film industry from 1903 to 1928 and juxtaposed “old” Western and pre-revolutionary Russian films with “new” Soviet productions.
The booklet opens with a list of eight films selected for the screening, including “Pathe-Journal” (1911), “Prence’s Triple” (1910), “Tight Shoes” (1911), “Mysterious Armor” (1906), “Chaplin in the Bank” (1916), “The Death of Lincoln” (1903), “Be Silent, My Sorrow, Be Silent” (1916), and “Battleship Potemkin” (1926). The list is followed by a sharply ideological essay dismissing early Western and Russian cinema as “bourgeois” entertainment devoid of social substance. While acknowledging the technical talent of international filmmakers, the text presents their works as products of a “cinematographic infancy,” contrasted with the revolutionary maturity and technical superiority of Soviet cinema. The final section provides concise pedagogical descriptions of each film included in the program.
The program features black-and-white portraits of Charlie Chaplin, Sergei Eisenstein, and Max Linder, as well as a horizontal photomontage designed as a film strip, combining halftone portraits of silent film characters with a graphic depiction of a tripod-mounted movie camera.
Our copy likely belonged to a film society member or a cinema enthusiast involved in Leningrad’s cultural circles in the 1920s.

No copies found in Worldcat.

Price: $450.00