ARKHANGELSKOYE. FREEZE Automatic translate

Thanks to films shot on the territory of the famous estate of the Yusupov princes, in the interiors of the Arkhangelsk Palace, the Gonzaga Theater or using museum objects, the image of an ideal Russian noble estate was established in the minds of the domestic viewer, regardless of whether this viewer had actually been to the museum or not.

Over the past hundred years, Arkhangelskoye has more than once become a location for filming feature films. Archival documents allow us to show the creative process of leading Soviet and Russian directors and production designers, as well as how the relationship developed between the museum, higher authorities and film studios. As for the public, it will be extremely interesting for them to find out how the filming was carried out in the park and in the palace, as well as which objects from the museum’s collection found their place on the screen, demonstrating the film’s correspondence to the era, style, focusing the viewer’s attention on the utilitarian functions of the objects, which the museum considers primarily from an artistic point of view.

The status of a museum, received in 1919, preserved the buildings, decoration, and collections of Arkhangelsk, which from that time on more than once became the location for filming. The ancestral noble nest is not a faceless scenery, but a full-fledged participant in feature films, authentic links of national history that have come down to us, connecting the present with the past.

Up to a certain point, the filming of game scenes took place in museum exhibitions in order to reliably convey to the viewer the authentic style and atmosphere of the era. Archival documents restore the process and show behind the scenes, the so-called back stage. Basically, Arkhangelskoye was used for filming by the Mosfilm film studio and them. Gorky, occasionally - Lenfilm, Belarusfilm and others. It’s interesting to see how the same objects “migrate” from one film to another, confirming their choice by production designers and directors as style- and meaning-forming objects that most reliably convey their ideas about the era, setting, and time to which the film is dedicated. or another film.

In the summer of 1926, the shooting of the silent film “General Line” (“Old and New”) by Sergei Eisenstein and Grigory Alexandrov took place on the estate’s ground floor; alas, this fragment was not included in the final version of the film. In 1946, Prince N. B. Yusupov’s dormez (a carriage for long journeys) will become a significant element of the historical and musical biographical film “Glinka” directed by Leo Arnshram. Among the most important films filmed on the territory or using objects from the collection of the Arkhangelskoye Museum-Reserve: “The Thieving Magpie” (1958), “White Nights” (1959), “An Ordinary Miracle” (1964), “Anna Karenina” "(twice, 1967, 2009), "War and Peace" (1965-1967), "The Noble Nest" (1968), "The Star of Captivating Happiness" (1975), "Say a word for the poor hussar" (1980), "Fathers and children" (1984), "The Merry Widow" (1984), "Viva, midshipmen" (1987), "Oligarch" (2002), "Andersen. Life without love" (2006), "Barvikha" (2009), "Notes of the forwarder of the Secret Chancellery" (2010) and others.

Sketches, drawings and archival documents stored in the Museum of Cinema and the State Film Fund document the creative process, from idea to film frame. The museum exhibits complement fragments of well-known feature films, which have long and firmly taken their place in the golden collection of Russian cinema.

“Our current understanding of how and where the heroes of Russian classical literature and historical characters lived is formed not only as a result of familiarity with the texts, but often, first of all, relies on the visuals created by the country’s leading directors, such as Naum Trakhtenberg and Ivan Pyryev, Erast Garin and Alexander Zarkhi, Sergei Bondarchuk and Andrei Konchalovsky, Vladimir Motyl and Lev Kulidzhanov, Eldar Ryazanov and Svetlana Druzhinina, Pavel Lungin and Sergei Solovyov, and others. The film myth about what a traditional Russian noble estate looked like was born through the plots of classical Russian literature, based on the texts of Herzen, Tolstoy, Turgenev. And over time, this visual sequence has turned into our mental code, allowing the viewer to unmistakably determine that the plot belongs to historical events in Russia in the 19th century, personified on the silver screen by the Arkhangelskoye estate and its collections,” says curator Olga Nestertseva about the exhibition.

In a parallel program to the exhibition, films related to Arkhangelsk will be shown.