The year 1924 marks the turning point in the history of Soviet cinema, when Lev Kuleshov, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Fridrikh Ermler, Abram Room, Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg made their avant-garde debuts. None of these directors were particularly appreciated by the general public. For the “masses”, the event of the year was the release of Dvorets i krepost, a historical melodrama based on a true story of Mikhail Beideman, a revolutionary who was arrested in 1861 and sent without a trial to the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, where he spent 20 years in isolation and developed a mental illness. Aleksandr Ivanovsky started his film career in 1918, right after the revolution. Yet, he very much belonged to the old school, was not in the least interested in montage, eccentrism or other fashionable cinematic theories, and soon became one of the unspoken leaders of the so-called “traditionalists” in Soviet cinema. Their goal was to make commercially successful pictures, ones that could compete with foreign releases – cinéma de qualité, if you will.

Ivanovsky began on stage as an opera director, and the avant-garde systematically criticised his works for their operatic ponderosity, a lack of cinematic dynamics and a heavy emphasis on intertitles which, his opponents claimed, had to convey the emotions the images lacked. He indeed relied on big theatrical names (the cast of Dvorets i krepost includes such stage legends as Kondrat Yakovlev and Yuri Korvin-Krukovsky) and lavish sets. The latter are of particular interest here, because the palace part of the film was shot in the Hermitage – formerly the Winter Palace, the residence of the Russian czars, – and many props and costumes were borrowed from the museum, much to the horror of its employees, some of whom still remembered the assassinated Aleksandr II and his son Aleksandr III.

For decades, the phenomenal success of this film puzzled scholars. Yet, the only accessible copy was a “dupy” black-andwhite print of a later re-release. Luckily, a stunning nitrate print of the German distribution version survived at the Bundesarchiv. With its crisp photography and an excessive use of tinting and toning (equally impressive in the fireworks sequence and the grim interiors of the fortress), it is much more cinematic than we were led to believe.

Peter Bagrov