Archival Spaces

395: Far From the Revolution

Archival Spaces 395

White Russians in Hollywood

Uploaded 20 March 2026

**Emil Jannings, William Powell in *The Last Command* (1928, Joseph von Sternberg)**

A still photograph from Joseph von Sternberg’s The Last Command (1928) perfectly captures the mixture of reality and fantasy, of historical truth and aesthetic expression that is so much a part of Hollywood cinema and its White Russian colony: Standing in a World War I trench, Emil Jannings in costume as a Tsarist general looks intensely off screen, his sable drawn, the movie extra’s degradation already marking his face, his actions frozen in his own fantasy. He is seen almost incidentally at the bottom Left side of the image, while somewhat incongruously, the greater part of the image shows “Russian” soldiers standing relaxed on the set below a barbed-wire cordon, as William Powell, playing the movie director and former victim of the general, chats with them from his director’s chair above. It is the ironic pathos of defeat and degradation which captures our imagination in this story of royal blood in exile in Hollywood, of fabulous wealth and power lost, of a fall from grace to the ordinariness of everyday life: Grand Duke Sergius Alexander of the Imperial Russian Army forced to work as a Hollywood extra in films about the very Revolution to which he had fallen victim. Almost a true story.

**Marlene Dietrich in *The Scarlet Empress* (1934, Joseph von Sternberg)**

After the Russian Revolution and the anti-Communist Palmer Raids in America, Hollywood fell in love with Russia before the Revolution, paying homage to the autocratic regime of the Romanovs, the same way it adored the ante-Bellum, racist South. Russian movies were in, and Russian exiles were happy to oblige. One of the minor characters in The Last Command is played by Sam Savitsky, formerly General Viacheslav Savitsky, above in uniform with Czar Nicholas II. Exiled to the Hollywood backlot, the ex-officer continued to play “bit parts” for over twenty years in films, like The Scarlet Empress (1932), Song of Russia (1944), and Northwest Outpost (1947). Sternberg himself reports that “I had fortified my image of the Russian Revolution by including in my cast of extra players an assortment of Russian ex-Admirals and generals, a dozen Cossacks, and two former members of the Duma…and an expert on borscht by the name of Kobyliansky.” Nicholas Kobyliansky, who received a screen credit on The Last Command as a technical advisor, was also hired in the same capacity for Lubitsch’s The Patriot (1928). Through intermediaries, he hired almost 600 Russians from Boyle Heights, an L.A. suburb, where the exiles congregated, only to nearly cause a riot when only half that many were needed for the film. Several White Army generals supplied local color when a Russian landscape was required: Major General Alexander Ikonnikoff, Gen. Theodore Lodijenski, Maj. Gen. Michael N. Pleschnikov, Maj. Gen. Bogomoletz, Lieutenants George Blagoi and Gene Walski were seen in films such as The Eagle (1925), Into Her Kingdom (1926), Midnight Sun (1926), The Cossacks (1928), or Rasputin and the Empress (1932).

**Raymond Keane, Michael Vivitch, *The Midnight Sun* (1926)**

Another true story: Like the tragic hero Duke Sergius in The Last Command, Valentina Zimina escaped from Russia via Vladivostok to become a promising young actress in such films as La Boheme (1928), Woman on the Trail (1927), and Scarlet Lady (1928). Having survived the notorious “Battalion of Death,” an anti-Bolshevik woman’s brigade in which she fought as a teenager, brutal Russian winters, and a Siberian prison, Zimina died of the flu at the age of 29 in her own luxurious bed in Hollywood.

Pola Negri in *The Woman From Moscow* **(1928, Ludwig Berger)**

In contrast to the Austro-German-Jewish refugees who arrived en masse after 1933, the White Russian exile community remained relatively small and at the periphery of film studio life. Several thousand souls, who held on to their language and customs, and their past in a city where history is forgotten immediately, where your own value is measured no further back than your last film. They formed their own club, the Russian-American Art Club, on Harold Way in Los Angeles. Local anecdotes invariably revolved around the Russian émigrés’ boundless capacity for self-pity. Since the movie tsars often came from Jewish villages in the Pale, where they had been subjected to Cossack pogroms, they had few sympathies for the White Russians, who often never rose higher than the proverbial movie extra. Various Russian Cossack troupes toured the country, presenting dances and horsemanship at circuses and dinner clubs. Indeed, Russian exiles populated the ranks of restaranteurs and workers in Los Angeles’ burgeoning service industry: chauffeurs, masseurs, confidence men. The sometime actor, “Prince Michael Romanoff,” known to actually be a Lithuanian Jew, told stories about old Russia “at your table,” at one of Hollywood’s most fashionable restaurants on North Rodeo Drive. The Mdivani royal family married to maintain their lifestyles, Prince Serge marrying Pola Negri, Prince David wedding Mae Murray. Many created fictitious biographies of Imperial Russian origin, and only a handful had ever worked in the pre-revolutionary Russian film industry.

**Yvgeni Petrov-Krayevsky in Stenka Razin (1908)**

Few of the most famous personalities from the pre-revolutionary period failed to make any impression in Hollywood. The greatest, Yevgeni Bauer, died in 1917, before the Revolution. Alexander Drankov, the pioneering Russian producer of Stenka Razin (1908), Crime and Punishment (1913), and He Who Gets Slapped (1916), went to Hollywood, but, like so many others, could only find work as a movie extra, according to a report by Victor Tourjannsky who visited him in 1928. He later opened a cafe in Santa Monica and lived out his days as a photographer in San Francisco.

**Ivan Mosjoukine *Feu Mathias Pascal* (1925)**

**Ivan Mosjoukine, Mary Philbin in *Surrender* (1927)**

The greatest actor of Russian cinema before 1918, Ivan Mosjoukine, worked steadily in France for the White Russian-owned Albatross Film Co., Paris, in such films as Le braiser ardent (1923) and Feu Mathias Pascal (1924), but was also briefly lured to Hollywood by Universal in 1926. He made one film, Surrender (1927), based on an old play “Lea Lyon,” playing a Cossack prince who falls in love with a Jewish girl in the Shtetl after raping her. Variety gave it only a lukewarm review, and the film failed to ignite the box office. Mosjoukine stayed on at Universal, even subjecting himself to a nose job and a name change to Moskine, ordered by Universal’s producers (who couldn’t pronounce his name), but when no more film offers came, he fled back to Paris. According to Mosjoukine, he was not willing to blindly obey the “cinema kings” and play in any script given to him, no matter how bad.

**Lionel Barrymore in *Rasputin and the Empress* (1932, Richard Boleslawski))**

394: 1960’s Avant-garde Film Program

Archival Spaces 394

Curating a 1960s Avant-Garde Program

Uploaded 6 March 2026

**Claes Oldenburg’s Snapshots from the City, performed during Ray Gun Spex at Judson Church, February 1960.**

For me, film archival work has always included curatorship through programming, making historical and therefore archival objects visible and accessible. While curator of the film department in what is now called the George Eastman Museum, I introduced this program at a “1960s photography” symposium in Rochester. “Avant-garde film in the 1960s” had its own blind spots. The argument for the program that the available evidence suggested these privileged white males constituted the canon was short-sighted. Today, I know I could have found avant-garde works, produced by people of color, by women, by LGBTQ people, in amateur film collections, in historical societies, archives not yet visible. To my own defense, I did program a Chicago Newsreel, which probably included persons of color among the makers. Below is my introduction, slightly edited, to the film program, the 1990s looking at the 1960s, now read from the 2020s:

**Black Panther Women, drilling, 1960s.**

No single film program can do justice to the 1960s, as they played themselves out in the basement haunts of the East Village, in Canyon cinema’s backyards in Berkeley, in the streets of Chicago, in the communes of California, but also in the manifestoes of the New American Cinema, the debates of the Free Speech movement, the reviews of Jonas Mekas in Film Culture, the demonstrations of the Peace movement, the Black Panther Party’s cry for revolution, the drug culture’s psychedelic illusions, the hard-driving rhythms of Rock & Roll and Soul. A myriad of contradictions – social, political, aesthetic, economic – mark the decade: a time of intense changes and strong continuities. So, how does one choose a program that encapsulates the 1960s? The present program privileges those films that seemed to be milestones but were actually enshrined in the official canon written by males, and thereby present merely a facet of the decade. And even in this selection, numerous canonized films are missing: Ron Rice’s homoerotic narratives, the dream films of Stan Brakhage, the semiotic films of Hollis Frampton, the kitsch-fantasies of the Kuchar Brothers, Ken Jacobs’ structuralist work, the films of the Black Panthers, Jonas Mekas’ personal diary films, Paul Sharits’ cinematic poems.

From the vantage point of a post-structuralist, post-modernist, feminist, and progressive consciousness, 1960s avant-garde and independent cinema appeared to be dominated by a few young white guys, middle-class, well-educated, socially aware, but with a lot to learn. With that in mind, I would like to start at the beginning of the decade with Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray.

Cosmic Ray (1962) Where would MTV be today without Conner’s experimental, rapid-fire montage, rhythmically edited to the beat of a music track? Like one of those crazy Coke commercials, which features an image every 1/4 second, four images a second, 120 images in a thirty-second spot, Conner’s film causes information overload. Back in 1960, it was something new. Today’s kids are bored if the cutting is any slower. Conner’s film also makes exclusive use of found rather than original footage, decontextualizing the images, creating new meanings through their juxtaposition. In terms of its images, Cosmic Ray features an almost complete catalogue of 1960s iconography: Black music, comics, Native Americans, sex, War, military parades. In its use of the flicker effect and an endless repetition of academy leader, sound bleeps, and other technologically-based film images, Conner’s work is also self-reflexive, a metafilm, articulating a discourse on the possibilities of cinema.

Mass for the Dakota Sioux (1964) by Bruce Baille uses multiple exposures to create a complex, many-layered point of view in the same way that Conner uses montage. Structured as a Catholic mass, complete with Gregorian chants, Baille’s film, indeed all of Baille’s work, is a eulogy for man’s ruptured relationship to nature. The Native Americans of the film’s title never in fact make an appearance in the film, but are present as a structuring absence, as a metaphor for man’s former integration with and place in a natural environment. Baille quotes Black Elk: “Behold a good nation walking in a sacred manner in a good land,” before cutting to endless housing tracks.

Relativity (1966) Ed Emschwiller once said that he would love to be a camera. Indeed for him the camera is an extension of his body, swooping, swaying, constantly moving, discovering, probing, thrusting, even violating spaces. Made over a three-year period, Relativity takes a cosmic view and a microcosmic view of the universe: from the golf ball to the galaxy in two shots. Given the extreme physicality of Emshwiller’s moving camera, it is not surprising that he seems most interested in experiencing the textures of life, caressing a field of flowers, a pig’s innards, and miles of computer wires with the same fascination. More than other directors, Emshwiller gives his voyeuristic drive completely free rein, unabashedly scopophilic, implicating the viewer in his extreme subjectivity. True to many 1960s filmmakers, though, the medium is the message, the image is the idea.

Chicago Convention Challenge (1968) The Newsreel was founded in December 1967 in New York by a group of filmmakers, organizing a collective to record contemporary events in opposition to the ideological thrust of the American mass media. The Newsreel films look like battle footage, extremely grainy, without synchronous sound, almost consciously unprofessional, all overlaid with a first-person narration in manifest opposition to the disingenuous objectivity of the evening news. Chicago Convention Challenge, Newsreel # 17, was in many ways a diary film from the point of view of the grunt in the street, rather than from the podiums of power, covering the “Days of Rage” in those August nights of the 1968 Democratic National Convention. True to leftist politics, the film also contains its own critiques, uncertainties, and mistakes, thereby creating a sense of immediacy, of the process of history unfolding. The whole world was watching.

Soc. Sciences 127 (1969) Danny Lyon’s first film begins and ends with its hero, the tattooist/photographer Bill Sanders, lecturing on tattooing in what appears to be a college classroom. This is, in fact, only a ruse, since Lyon subsequently makes clear that Sanders’ knowledge is hardly taught in an institution of higher learning. The latter exists ostensibly to produce knowledge in a “production-profit” system. Sanders, on the other hand, turns his knowledge against the institutional conception of education when he quizzes a female client on the Latin root of “fellatio,” while ornamenting her naked breasts. For Danny Lyon, Sanders is a scientist, a philosopher, a documentarian. His polaroids mimic the scientific method of inquiry, of taxonomy, of classification. Like his near namesake, August Sander, Bill Sanders uses photographic media to capture human bodies. Each image is framed similarly. They are hung with thumb-tacks, side-by-side, row-by-row, for comparison and classification. While the institutions of learning utilize classification as an instrument for social control, Sanders’ photographs are not rarified: They are throw-away objects, as ephemeral as the serendipity at their root. They are indices of a freedom beyond institutional control.

393: Cinema Novo

Archival Spaces 393:

The Reception of Cinema Novo in America

Uploaded 20 February 2026

*Antônio das Mortes* (1969, Glauber Rocha)

A year ago, on 14 February 2025, Carlos Diegues, one of the best-known directors of the Cinema Novo movement, died in Rio de Janeiro at the age of eighty-four. The young Brazilian film directors who, in the early 1960s, joined together to resist neo-colonialist domination of their national cinema by Hollywood can be considered the first “Third World” cinema to become a part of the canon of cinema history.

A popular world film history that pays homage to the Cinema Novo movement is Douglas Gomery’s History: A Survey (1991), which argues that Cinema Novo’s most productive period lasted less than a decade; it arguably ended in 1968 with the repressive Fifth Institutional Act, after a CIA-backed military coup in 1964. Indeed, Gomery sees Glauber Rocha’s Antonio das Mortes (1969) as the “end of Cinema Novo.” David A. Cook’s A History of Narrative Film (1981/90), on the other hand, discusses the work of Glauber Rocha, Ruy Guerra, Nelson Pereira dos Santos, Carlos Diegues, Paulo Saraceni, Leon Hirszman, and Joaquim Pedro de Andrade. Cook breaks down Cinema Novo into three distinct phases: “radical optimism and proletarian revolt”(1960-64), “reassessment and disillusion” (1964-68), and “symbolism and mythological allegory” (1968-72). Ironically, the founding of Embrafilm, a company controlled by the Ministry of Culture, eventually led to the worldwide success of Brazilian cinema in the 1970s, involving many Cinema Novo filmmakers, including Diegues’s Xica de Silva (1976) and Bye Bye Brazil (1979), extremely expensive films, mixing magic realism with extravagant visual style, highlighting racial minorities on the margins of society.

*Vidas secas* (1969, Nelson Pereira dos Santos)

The first Brazilian Cinema Novo films reached the United States in the early 1970s, when the core left-wing movement was already a fact of history, some of its directors having gone into exile, like Glauber Rocha and Ruy Guerra. Thus, the reception of Cinema Novo in the United States has always been historical, always a matter for academics and art cinemas in New York, rather than an intended popular cinema. The reasons for the neglect include the initial unwillingness of American film distributors/exhibitors to open themselves to foreign, but especially Third World cinema. It was not until the early 1980s that certain Cinema Novo directors and their Brazilian successors achieved popular commercial success in the United States with films such as Diegues’ Xica, Bye Bye Brazil, Bruno Barreto’s Dona Flora and Her Two Husbands (1978), and Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1980). This late popularity abroad certainly paralleled developments in Brazil, where Cinema Novo had mostly been rejected by the public.

*Donna Flora and Her Two Husbands* (1978, Bruno Barreto)

Why did the American reception of Cinema Novo take so long? Throughout the 1960s, Variety’s film critics had been sending back reports to America from film festivals in Venice, Cannes, and Berlin of a new Brazilian cinema. Variety‘s first review of a Cinema Novo film had appeared as early as July 1962 when their film critic, Gene Moskowitz, noted with astonishment that Rocha’s Barravento (1962) been made by a “20-year-old boy.” Even more astonishingly, Guerra’s Os Cafajestes (1962) had won the Grand Prix in Cannes. Over the next eight years, Variety reviewed no less than twenty Cinema Novo films, many of which were winning prizes at festivals. While the critics were skeptical of the commercial chances for these films, many of the reviewers were impressed with their originality and thought the films might find a place in the art cinema market. Typical is the review for Hirszman’s The Deceased in September 1965: “It is technically good and is an off-beater… but it’s worth special handling and personal placement for possible returns via buff (cinephile) audiences.”

*A Casa Assassinada* (1971, Paulo César Saraceni)

However, not a single Brazilian film was distributed commercially in the United States until June 1969, when Pereira dos Santos’ Vidas Secas opened at the New Yorker Theater. Previously, Cinema Novo had only been screened at the New York Film Festival in 1967 and during a one-week program at the Museum of Modern Art in October 1968. In April 1970, then, Antonio das Mortes opened in New York, distributed through an independent distributor, Grove Press International, followed by Rocha’s Terra em Transe (1967). Several weeks earlier, Frederic Tuten had published the first popular account of Cinema Novo in Vogue and The New York Times, “A Far Cry From Carmen Miranda,” which simultaneously proclaimed the end of the movement, while praising de Andrade’s Macunaima (1969) as the best Brazilian film to date.

*Macunaima* (1969, Joaquim Pedro de Andrade)

***Os Cafajestes*** **(1962, Ruy Guerra)**

Given this situation, it is not surprising that Cinema Novo films were soon being booked at commercial cinemas in New York as retrospective packages, e.g., at the 5th Avenue Cinema in September and October 1971, when numerous films were introduced to the American public. Distributors, catering mostly to the 16mm academic film market, began distributing Cinema Novo to cinematheques, museums, and colleges, e.g., New Yorker Films, which picked up over twenty Brazilian films from the 1970s and 1980s. Another important step in the wider dissemination of Brazilian films in the United States was Embrafilm’s hiring of an American representative in New York, Fabiano Canosa, who worked with the distributor, Unifilm, to look after Brazilian film interests.

***A Falecida*** **(1965, Leon Hirszman)**

Despite this increased activity in the theatrical and non-commercial film market, it was to be another several years before the reception of Brazilian cinema would be reflected in serious film journals. For example, a sympathetic, critical introduction to Cinema Novo appeared in the left-wing journal, Jump Cut, Nos. 21 (1979) and 22 (1980), in which Randall Johnson and Robert Stam presented two special sections, “Brazil Renaissance: Beyond Cinema Novo.” Their argument for the delayed reception of Cinema Novo in the United States was: “While Hollywood dumps its waste products on Brazil, the Brazilian film industry, although the third largest producer of feature films in the`West,’ has difficulty getting its best products even seen on its own multi-national-dominated TV screens, not to mention non-Brazilian screens.”

In the 1980s, then, Randall Johnson published no less than three English-language books on Brazilian cinema: Brazilian Cinema (1982, co-edited with Robert Stam), Cinema Novo x 5 (1984), and The Film Industry in Brazil (1987). All three books historicized Cinema Novo in the context of the Brazilian film industry as a whole, arguing that the movement must be seen in the long term as the beginning of modern Brazilian cinema, rather than as an isolated phenomenon.

392: Czech Silent Cinema

Archival Spaces 392

Czech Silent Film History

Uploaded 6 February 2026

Back in Summer 2023 (Blog 326), I wrote about a Czech film playing at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival, The Organist at St. Vitus Cathedral (1929), directed by Jan S. Kolár. It is an amazingly atmospheric melodrama, shot mostly in real locations around Prague’s Hradčany Castle, its magnificent Cathedral, and Alchemist’s Alley, as well as other Mala strana locations, the medieval quarter on the left bank of the Vltava River. I’ve now been asked by Dennis Bartok of Crocodile Films to write an essay for a new Blu-ray release of two other Jan Kolár films, including The Arrival From the Darkness (1921) and St. Wenceslaus (1930), as well as a number of shorts. Kolar is not as well-known as other Czech directors, such as Gustav Machatý (Ecstasy, 1932) and Karel Lamač (Saxophone Suzi, 1928), possibly because his directorial career ended with the advent of sound. However, Czech silent cinema in general has been ignored by film historians.

One searches in vain in classic film histories for assessments of Czech cinema of the 1920s, even though Prague’s annual film production had been steadily increasing since 1918-19, reaching admirable figures for such a small country. Neither Georges Sadoul nor Gregor/Patalas discusses Prague cinema. If Czech film is mentioned at all, e.g., by René Jeanne and Charles Ford, it is only in connection with Gustav Machatý, whose two art films, Kreutzer Sonata (1926) and Erotikon (1929), were screened internationally. Paul Rotha wrote that films made in Czechoslovakia were unknown, apart from Machatý’s Ecstasy. Only Jerzy Toeplitz mentions other trends, such as the sentimental comedies of Lamač or the nationalistically tinged biographical films of Svatopuk Innemann, while quoting Czech film historians Karel Smrž, Myrtil Frída, and Jaroslav Brož, all of whom favored the so-called “cosmopolitan direction” of Machatý. The Czech émigré historians Mira and Antonin Liehm confirm the dismissive opinion of some Czech film historians regarding the entire silent film production when they write that, despite the considerable number of Czech film productions, “…the films grew to display increasing provincialism, oriented more and more solely to the domestic viewer’s desire for cheap entertainment and even cheaper nationalism.” Meanwhile, Czech film specialist Peter Hames dedicates only a few lines to Machatý, but at least acknowledges that 1920s film production still needs to be researched.

*Daughters of Eve* (1928, Karel Lamač), with Anny Ondra

*Erotikon (*1929, Gustav Machatý) with Ita Rina

Part of the problem is that international film historiography only promoted art films, while the emergence of a national culture in commercial cinema was ignored. Yet, with an annual production of approximately 26 to 38 feature films a year, the Czech silent film industry’s output was only slightly exceeded by the Czechoslovak “New Wave” of the 1960s.

It is also important to consider that surviving Czech films present the opportunity to study an entire national film production, which is hardly possible for any other film-producing country. An informal survey shows that 163 feature films from the years 1920 to 1930 still survive, while 101 are lost. Thus, the Czechs have managed to preserve more than 60% of their national production, while approximately 90% of German and American film production from the silent film era has disappeared. This survival rate allows for an analysis of Prague’s film production in a breadth and depth that is unmatched. Today, after Czech cinema achieved worldwide acclaim in the 1960s, after three Czech films won Oscars, and after the domestic film industry has now again been operating under capitalism for 37 years, 20 to 22 feature films are produced annually, accounting for approximately 23% of the films shown in the Czech Republic. Perhaps, therefore, a new historical approach is needed to account for the specific historical circumstances of Prague film production in the 1920s.

*Colonel Svec* (1930, Svatopuk Innemann)

Born in 1918 out of the embers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the first Czechoslovak Republic featured an American-style democratic constitution, a highly industrialized economy, and a strong middle class. In the 1920s, Czech film producers financed a significant number of films, which were directed solely at the domestic market, being produced cheaply enough to forgo foreign sales in their amortization plans. The Czech model of cultural autarchy thus complicates the widely held notion that all national film production needs an export market. A recurring criticism of those Czech films with foreign releases concerned the numerous intertitles, which were characterized as anachronistic. One reviewer, e.g., complained about the “overabundant, conflict-creating, and conflict-resolving titles” in Kreutzer Sonata. However, it must be remembered that before 1918 and the founding of the Republic, all films screened in the Austro-Hungarian Empire had to have German titles or dual-language titles. It can therefore be argued that the overabundance of Czech intertitles played an important role in creating a sense of national, cultural identity and provided pleasure for Czech speakers, previously denied expressions of their own language.

I would therefore like to propose some working hypotheses to stimulate research into Czech silent film, focusing on the national rather than the international, on genre production rather than art films. 1. Czech film producers of the 1920s financed films that recouped their costs in the domestic market, without necessarily focusing on the international market. 2. Commercial genres, such as comedies and melodramas, but also, on a more sophisticated level, film adaptations of Czech literary works and historical films, dominated Prague’s film production. 3. Both comedies, melodramas, and historical films conveyed specifically Czech values that contributed to identity formation. 4. National themes and popular ideas were prioritized to enhance popularity domestically. 5. The survival of a large portion of Czech film production allows for a broad-based content analysis of Czech films, specifically to suss out cultural obsessions.

Hopefully, the Blu-ray release of the Kolar films will stimulate interest in further Czech silents, e.g., the films of Thea Červenková (The Grandmother, 1921), Premysl Prazský (Batalion, 1927), Karel Lamač (Sins of a Woman, 1929), Svatopuk Innemann (Colonel Svec, 1930), and Karel Anton (Tonka of the Gallows, 1930), even if these names are unpronounceable for English speakers.