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Nikolai Izvolov

Nikolai Izvolov

Production

Biography

Nikolai Izvolov (born in 1962 – Kostroma, USSR) is a Russian film historian and cinema theorist, researcher of film archives and specialist in reconstruction of the “lost” films. He's known by his reconstructions of Dziga Vertov's Anniversary of the Revolution (2018), The History of the Civil War (2021) and Man with a Movie Camera (2024). Author of the books Phenomenon of Film: History and Theory (2001) and Unknown Pages of Russian Avant-garde Cinema (2021). Since the beginning of the 1990s, he has been teaching the course Practice of Work in Film Archives for students of the Film Studies department in VGIK (All-Russian State Institute of Cinematography). In 1992, he collaborated with Chris Marker on the Alexander Medvedkin’s biopic The Last Bolshevik. Together with Natasha Drubek-Mayer he developed a creative method of film reconstruction ‘Hyperkino’ and applied it to the archives of Dziga Vertov, Alexander Medvedkin and Lev Kuleshov: Lenin Kino-Pravda (1996); Stop Thief! (1998); The Story of Tit… or the Tale of the Large Spoon (2000); Engineer Prite’s Project (2001); Alcoholism and Its Consequences (2001); Dokhunda (2006).

Known For

Anniversary of the Revolution
6.8

A chronicle of the Russian Revolution of 1917, from the bourgeois democratic February Revolution to the great socialist October Revolution and the final triumph.

Anniversary of the Revolution

1918
The Last Bolshevik
7.6

A documentary on Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin, examining his tumultuous career, the rediscovery of his masterpiece Happiness, and Russia's struggles over the course of the 20th Century.

The Last Bolshevik

1994
Anna Karamazoff
5.1

The story of a woman returning from a labor camp. She is looking for a person, on whose denunciation she was arrested, in order to take revenge on him, but having completed her judgment, she realizes that revenge is meaningless.

Anna Karamazoff

1991
The Bug Trainer
4.0

The Bug Trainer explores Starewitch’s creative ideas and concepts of his work, along with opinions from film critics and other animation directors to help us understand why he is considered one of the greatest creators of the animation world.

The Bug Trainer

2009
Searching for the Lost Pochta
N/A

Travelogue of two film historians Nikolay Izvolov and Sergey Kapterev who visit world film archives around the globe in search of a lost sound version of one famous Soviet cartoon. It's "The Post" made by Mikhail Tsekhanovsky in 1929 and based on a poem by Samuil Marshak. At first "The Post" has been released in a silent form and later Tsekhanovsky remade it with experimental music and narration by Daniil Kharms. At that moment it was the first Soviet sound cartoon and it was a success all over the world. Russian film studies consider "The Post" to be of great importance and artistic value but unfortunately it's still lost. Only the silent version and the 1964 remake are still known and available.

Searching for the Lost Pochta

2014
The History of the Civil War
4.3

The epic story of the Russian Civil War (1918-21): the White Terror, the counterrevolutionary uprisings, the guerrilla war, the Kolchak front, the Wrangel front and the Kronstadt rebellion. Chaos and violence, devastation and death.

The History of the Civil War

1921
Dreams about Alfeoni
N/A

Alexander Alekseev, Alyosha, Alfeoni ... artist, animator, inventor. The author of "Night on Bald Mountain" — one of the most mysterious films in the history of animation and the inventor of a unique device — a needle screen . He did the first color commercials and the prologue to the Orson Welles film "The Trial". He made dreams come true and subordinated reality to his own imagination.

Dreams about Alfeoni

2002
A History of Russian Cinema. The Birth of the Myth.
N/A

A two part documentary about the first five decades of Russian cinema: from its birth to 1953 - the death of Stalin and the first seedlings of the thaw. The film covers the most important milestones of cinema. Its introduction as a lowbrow entertainment, the impact of WWI and revolutions on the film process. The principal masters - Kuleshov, Vertov, Eisenstein - and their discoveries in film language at the turn of the 1920-30s. The arrival of sound. The evacuation of the Soviet film industry during WWII and the heroic work of the wartime documentary crews. Restricted film production and early signs of the thaw in the late 1940s - early 1950s. Film historians and art critics, directors and screenwriters put the history of cinema in a broader context, considering the path that the country took from Tsarist Russia to the totalitarian state under the rule of Stalin.

A History of Russian Cinema. The Birth of the Myth.

2023
The Return of Vertov
5.0

The film deals with intellectual activities which are usually hidden from the human eye. It concerns doing research in film archives, searching for missing films and bringing them back to life. It is a documentary about the work of Dziga Vertov, a prominent soviet director, and the restoration of the director’s original concept of the films Anniversary of the Revolution (1918), The History of the Civil War (1921), Man with a Movie Camera (1929).

The Return of Vertov

2024
We Come From Cartoons. 100 Years of Russian Animation
N/A

No description available.

We Come From Cartoons. 100 Years of Russian Animation

2012
No image
N/A

No description available.

Сукровица

2005