Ivan Ilyich Mozzhukhin, usually billed using the French transliteration Ivan Mosjoukine, was a Russian silent film actor, writer and director. Born in Kondol, in the Saratov Governorate of the Russian Empire (present-day Penza Oblast in Russia), Ivan Mozzhukhin was the youngest of four brothers. His mother Rachel Ivanovna Mozzhukhina (née Lastochkina) was the daughter of a Russian Orthodox priest, while his father Ilya Ivanovich Mozzhukhin came from peasants and served as an estate manager for the noble Obolensky family. While all three elder brothers finished seminary, Ivan was sent to the Penza gymnasium for boys and later studied law at the Moscow State University. In 1910, he left academic life to join a troupe of traveling actors from Kiev, with which he toured for a year, gaining experience and a reputation for dynamic stage presence. Upon returning to Moscow, he launched his screen career with the 1911 adaptation of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata. Mosjoukine's most lasting contribution to the theoretical concept of film as image is the legacy of his own face in recurring representation of illusory reactions seen in Lev Kuleshov's psychological montage experiment which demonstrated the Kuleshov Effect. In 1918, the first full year of the Russian Revolution, Kuleshov assembled his revolutionary illustration of the application of the principles of film editing out of footage from one of Mosjoukine's Tsarist-era films which had been left behind when he, along with ...
A foundling is left in front of the home of a rich aristocratic bachelor during the Nice carnival. The marquis adopts the child but soon finds that he cannot cope, so he employs a nanny who turns out to be the child's real mother. Just as the two have fallen in ... (more)
A foundling is left in front of the home of a rich aristocratic bachelor during the Nice carnival. The marquis adopts the child but soon finds that he cannot cope, so he employs a nanny who turns out to be the child's real mother. Just as the two have fallen in ... (more)
A doctor kills and embalms a woman in order to preserve her beauty. (more)
A doctor kills and embalms a woman in order to preserve her beauty. (more)
A perverted town mayor who murders a young girl and, overcome by guilt, commits suicide. Based on the short story La petite Roque by Guy de Maupassant. (more)
A perverted town mayor who murders a young girl and, overcome by guilt, commits suicide. Based on the short story La petite Roque by Guy de Maupassant. (more)
Alcoholism and its Ill-Effects was considered to be one of the most popular science propaganda (or educational) films produced in Russia before the revolution of 1917. Alexander Khanzhonkov, the most prominent Russian film producer of that era, financed a special ... (more)
Alcoholism and its Ill-Effects was considered to be one of the most popular science propaganda (or educational) films produced in Russia before the revolution of 1917. Alexander Khanzhonkov, the most prominent Russian film producer of that era, financed a special ... (more)