Programma speciale per gentile concessione della/Special presentation by courtesy of La Cinémathèque française
Carmen (Jacques Feyder, 1926)
Ce cochon de Morin (Viatcheslav Tourjansky, 1924)
Le chant de l’amour triomphant (Viatcheslav Tourjansky, 1923)
Le chasseur de chez Maxim’s (Nikolai Rimsky, 1927)
La dame masquée (Viatcheslav Tourjansky, 1924)
L’heureuse mort (Serge Nadejdine, 1924)
Justice d’abord (Jacob Protazanov, 1921)
La nuit du 11 septembre (Bernard Deschamps, 1919)
Le quinzième prélude de Chopin (Viatcheslav Tourjansky, 1922)
Cortometraggi/Shorts:
Harmonies de Paris (Lucie Derain, 1928)
Nocturne (Marcel Silver, 1926)
Introduction
The frequent historical misapprehension is to see Albatros as a cinema ghetto – a “Russian colony” in Paris. On the contrary, it rapidly came to represent a vital centre of progressive French cinema in the 1920s. While this exceptional group of émigrés – artists and technicians – brought with them the best traditions of the golden age of Tsarist cinema, at the same time they determinedly set themselves to integrate with the culture of their new setting: Mozhukhin himself said that, arriving in France, they found themselves learning all over again. Of more than 40 silent films made by Albatros, only one was from a Russian author and another a remake of a Russian production, and not a single film had a Russian setting or characters.
In its beginnings, the company that became Albatros was the creation of Josef Yermoliev (1889-1962), who had entered films as a projectionist for Pathé in 1907, and at the age of 24 set up his own company, which rapidly established itself as one of the major Russian producers. In the confusion and violence of Russia’s civil war, most of the private film firms moved to the sunny but already chaotic south. The Yermoliev company travelled to Kiev, then Odessa, and finally set up production in Yalta. In April 1919 however Yermoliev, seeing the writing on the wall, travelled to Paris to confer with his former employers, Pathé. Within weeks he had set up the production of La Nuit du 11 Septembre, and on 8 January 1920 returned to Yalta to collect the nucleus of his company. With the directors Protazanov and Volkov, the actors Mozhukhin, Lissenko, and Rimsky, the designer Lochakov, and the cinematographers Bourgasov and Rudakov, he sailed via Constantinople. By June 1920 they had reached Marseille and then Paris. The company was soon to be joined by other actors and by Viatcheslav Tourjansky, who was to be the most energetic director of the early years, and his wife Natalia Kovanko.
Yermoliev had brought for distribution the negatives of a number of his Russian films; and in November 1920 released the first production of the newly formed Société Ermolieff-Cinéma, L’Angoissante aventure, begun en route to exile and finished in the small glasshouse studio in Montreuil which Yermoliev had rented from Pathé.
In 1922 Yermoliev moved to Munich, selling his Parisian interests to the company president Alexander Kamenka – the major investor – and Noë Bloch. The name was now changed to Albatros. Kamenka (1888-1969) was the son of a Jewish financier and a keen amateur of the arts, though he had no apparent interest in cinema before meeting Yermoliev. Nevertheless, Albatros revealed him as an impresario of great energy and taste, and he was to be associated with films for the rest of his life (his last film, in 1960, was the first Franco-Soviet co-production, Normandie-Niéman).
The particular strength of Albatros was its status as a self-contained and self-sufficient studio, on American lines. Above all the company dazzled with the visual qualities of its films. Albatros set new standards of design, and gifted new art directors developed under the leadership of Alexandre Lochakov: Édouard Gosch, Boris Bilinsky, Albert Cavalcanti, César Lacca, and above all the Polish-born Lazare Meerson, who in his short life was to exert a profound influence on French cinema at large. The designers were complemented by the company’s gifted cameramen, masters of lighting,under the direction of the Alsatian pioneer Joseph-Louis Mundviller (1886-1967), who as a Pathé cameraman in Moscow between 1908 and 1914 (under the name George Meyer) shot many of the first Russian films. He worked at Ermolieff-Albatros from 1919 to 1924, when he joined Abel Gance’s production team for Napoléon. Albatros’ great concern for the visual also resulted in the production of outstanding posters, designed by Bilinsky, Jean-Adrien Mercier, and the future actor Alain Cuny. For a time Albatros published its own magazine, Kinotvorchestvo or (in its French version) Kino.
In 1924 Noë Bloch left Albatros to head the new Ciné-France-Film, the French branch of the European film consortium Westi. He took with him Mozhukhin and practically the entire Russian personnel except Nicolas Rimsky and the cinematographer Nicolas Rudakov. Undeterred, Kamenka turned to young or youngish French directors – Jacques Feyder, Marcel L’Herbier, René Clair, and Jean Epstein – who flourished in the civilized production atmosphere of Albatros, giving the company a new and no less brilliant phase of its history. The uncertainties of the late 1920s and the threatening onset of sound led Kamenka into a new policy of co-production. After 1928 the lease on the Montreuil studio lapsed. Of Albatros’ sound films, the most memorable was Jean Renoir’s Les Bas-fonds (1936). Following World War II (during which, as a Jew, he was forced into hiding), Kamenka re-established his company as Films Alkam.
One of Kamenka’s most imaginative gestures was to place his films in the care of the then recently-formed Cinémathèque française, through whose care and courtesy we are able to see them again today. The first stage of restoration was carried out in the 1980s by the late Renée Lichtig, a Jean Mitry Award-winner at the 2003 Giornate, whose personal commitment to the Albatros films was rooted in her life-long adoration of Albatros’ superstar, Ivan Mozhukhin. The current restoration project, celebrated in the present programme, with its careful restoration of original tinting, is under the direction of Camille Blot-Wellens.
Giornate audiences are already familiar with a considerable proportion of Albatros production – the great Mozhukhin vehicles, shown in 2003; since then, the Albatros films of Clair and Feyder; and, last year, Rimsky’s Paris en cinq jours. We hope, however, that the present selection will convince guests that there is still more treasure to come. - David Robinson
*Credit titles: The 1980s restorations found most of the original prints lacking the original credit titles, and Renée Lichtig endeavoured to replace these, most likely guided by Jean Mitry’s sometimes unreliable memory. In the notes which follow, we have endeavoured to correct some of the inevitable errors, with the indispensable aid of Lenny Borger’s incomparable documentation of the movements and migrations of the émigrés.
*Transliteration: In the credits heading the following notes, we have followed the French transliteration of Russian names, as they appear in the original company credits. However, in the text we use standard English or Italian transliterations as appropriate.
