Bela

I have written elsewhere of how the rediscovery of early film during the last twenty or so years has been a wonderful voyage of discovery. Bela is another example. Until recently the film was, I think, not even minimally recorded on IMDb but now it is (minimally) here and available on the internet to watch. It is a short (about 20 mins) and a dramatisation of the first story in Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time. The version I saw did not have titles (it does not really need them and the omission is almost certainly deliberate) so it helps if one is familiar with the novella (as anyone in Russia would have been).

It is directed by Andrej Gromov, a major actor for Khanzonkov (the company name given here is simply the full title of the Khanzonkov company - Akcionernoe Obscestvo A. Khanzhonkova I K) who took important roles in the films of Vasili Goncharov and then the great Yevgeny Baur (he plays the artist in the magnificent 1917 film The Dying Swan).He would seem to have left after the Revolution which ended his career (his last film was in 1918) as he died in Latvia in 1922.

Of the three films he is record here as directing, this is, as far as I know, the only one available but we can perhaps hope that Bratja 1913 and Sumerki (Twilight) 1917 will eventually arise from the ashes.

This short is simply a beauty and knocks anything made by D. W. Griffith into a cocked hat. The cinematography (by Aleksandr Ryllo) is superb and, with regard to mise en scène, one can easily see that Gromov had already learned a great deal from working with Bauer.

As in the novel the story is told as a flashback-relation and we therefore start with a frame where three men (the "narrators" of the novel) are having tea together....

Th first novella of the Lermontov "sketch" novel on which the film is based tells the story of a romantic but cynical army officer, Pechorin (played by Gromov himself) who, while on duty in the Caucasus - he has actually been exiled there on account of a duel but this is another story - falls for a beautiful Circassian maiden (Bela) and, through bribing her brother, is able to overcome her shyness and make her his mistress. He soon tires of her - "the love of a little savage is hardly worth more than that of a noble lady. One tires of the the ignorance of the one as easily as the coquetry of the other" and neglects her. Meanwhile a horse stolen by Pechorin from a brigand - the main bribe to the brother in the book - leads to her being kidnapped by the vengeful outlaw. Pechorin and the brother go in pursuit.....

The film tells the story impressionistically in a manner of a tone-poem, concentrating on the plight of the young woman and mingling naturalism and stylization in a way that prefigures by a good decade rather similar films that would later be made in France and Germany.

Absolutely a joyful discovery.....and next?