Documentary film about early years of Russian cinema: its first directors, cameramen, producers and actors. Includes rare fragments of pre-revolutionary feature films, newsreels and Starewicz's animation.

Based on the novel of the same name by Ivan Goncharov. Raisky falls in love with his second cousin Vera, but she coldly rejects his advances. He soon learns that Vera is having an affair with exiled official Mark Volokhov, with whom She is secretly dating. One day, Vera, in a fit of passion, gives herself to Volokhov, which she immediately regrets doing. Raisky and Tatyana Markovna suffer along wi...

A female doctor is so busy with her work that she has too little time for her fiancé. He falls in love with a waitress and the two have a child. Though considered by some to be a proto-feminist yarn, the film dwells on the consequences that equal rights for women may generate rather than openly champion suffrage. Similar in to Ibsen's The Doll House in many ways, the film provides mannered, solemn...