Les Films Albatross
Les Films Albatros , Production Albatros , Société des Albatros film or simply Albatross was the name of a French silent film - production company . It was founded in 1922 by the two Belarusians in exile, Alexander Kamenka (1888–1969) and Joseph N. Ermolieff , and existed until the outbreak of World War II .
After the October Revolution, Ermolieff emigrated to France with practically his entire workforce, where he was able to rally the Russian exile film scene in Montreuil from 1919 and initially produced films under his name. His deputy and co-founder of Albatros, Kamenka, took over the management of the new company in 1922, while Ermolieff set up another studio in Germany. There are several theories about the choice of a name for the company, for example that of a refugee boat called the Albatros or the Albatros as a symbol of Belarus. The company's motto was “Debout dans la tempête”, roughly in German: upright in a storm .
Names associated with the founding of Albatros are those of the producers Noé Bloch and Maurice Hache , the directors Victor Tourjansky and Alexander Wolkow , the film architect Ivan Lochakoff , the costume designer Boris Bilinski , and those of the actors Iwan Mosschuchin , Nathalie Lissenko , Nikolai Kolin and Nicolas Rimsky . In this early period, the films produced mainly addressed Russian topics, but Kamenka recognized the need to integrate into the French film community and to increasingly find French points of reference and French money and clients.
In 1924, several Russian colleagues left the film company while French-speaking staff joined it, including screenwriter Charles Spaak . Cooperation with established directors also increased, such as Jacques Feyder , Marcel L'Herbier and Jean Epstein . According to Spaak's judgment, Kamenka was the most successful French film producer of the 1920s. Several Albatros films have been awarded internationally, even to Russia, where the production company was little appreciated. From 1927 onwards, co-productions with other European film companies came after the French film industry fell into a crisis. The emergence of the sound film also caused problems for Albatros, since in addition to the star actor Mosschuchin, the majority of the remaining actors spoke French only with an accent.
With the beginning of the 1930s, the film production of Albatros declined. With the director Jean Renoir and his production Nachtasyl , however, she experienced another brief heyday in 1936. At that time Albatros was the oldest film production company in France.
Productions
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Individual evidence
- ^ Charles Drazin: The Faber Book of French Cinema . London: Faber & Faber, 2011. p. 44
- ^ A b Richard Abel: French Cinema: the First Wave, 1915-1929 . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984. p. 45
- ^ Michael Temple, Michael Witt: The French Cinema Book . London: British Film Institute, 2004. p. 31
- ↑ Claude Beylie: Une histoire du cinéma français. Paris: Larousse, 2005. p. 96