About the Project

The main goal of the project is to create the most complete electronic collection of all the narrative film texts that were published in Russia before 1917. Firstly, there are cinematographic librettos, brief descriptions of films that were published in the press and cinema programs. Secondly, the collection will include pre-revolutionary screenplays among them unpublished film scripts that are held in literary and theatrical archives.

Early Russian film prose became the foundation of Russian film scripwriting, and occupied a special place in Silver Age culture, and yet it is unknown to the reader. Moreover, philologists are not well acquainted with it, and even film historians do not know very much about Russian cinematic prose of the 1910s.

The new electronic collection of early Russian librettos and screenplays will allow philologists, film historians and all humanities scholars to work with a large set of texts which have been difficult to approach. Furthermore, this material will make it possible to produce a new typology of early Russian film plots and to define the peculiarities of its language and its role in Silver Age culture.