diziler the circle

In 1911, in the suburb of Katerynoslav (modern Dnipro), director and cameraman Danylo Sakhnenko shot the first feature film of national production - "Zaporizka Sich". Since the beginning of the 20th century, preference was given to the famous plays: "Natalka Poltavka", "Naymichka", "Moskal the Magician", "Bohdan Khmelnytskyi". Pre-revolutionary cinema brought popularity to many actors, but Vira Kholodna, who was considered the queen of the screen at that time, was singled out.

At the same time, an extremely interesting phenomenon is forming in the art of cinema - the "star system". In fact, each genre of game cinema had its own "stars". In the melodrama, they were F. Bertini, E. Santos, M. Jacobini (Italy), A. Nilsson (Denmark), V. Kholodna and I. Mozzhukhin (Russia), R. Valentino (USA); in an adventure film - Musidora (France), W. Hart and D. Fairbanks (USA); the success of the comic drama was associated with the name of the great French actor M. Linder, whose creative output had a significant impact on the development of this genre in world cinema in general and on the work of the world comedy classic Charlie Chaplin in particular.

Ukrainian cinematography was started way back in 1896, more than 125 years ago. The first film was shot by Alfred Fedetsky in Kharkiv in 1896, but it was not like the cinema we are used to. The tape was entitled "Transfer of the Miraculous Icon of the Mother of God from the Kuryaz Monastery to the Kharkiv Pokrovsky Monastery." She (title) immediately describes the plot of this two-minute long work. Thanks to this tape, A. Fedetskyi became the first Ukrainian cameraman of documentary films. A little later in the same year, he organized the first public screening for Ukraine, where he demonstrated three-minute documentary stories. At the same time, screenings of French films started in Lviv.