Encyclopedia of Early Cinema（Part Y）.pdf

Encyclopedia of early cinema 1018 Y Yermoliev, Iosif b. 1889; d. 1962 distributor, producer, Russia Yermoliev was born to a wealthy and distinguished Moscow merchant family. After attending Moscow University, he joined Pathé-Frères in 1907, as a translator turned business executive at the French company’s distribution agencies in Moscow, Rostov-on- the-Don, and Baku. As Pathé curtailed its activity in Russia, Yermoliev was encouraged to launch his own business. In 1911, he co-founded an independent distribution agency in Rostov and, in 1912, started his own production company in Moscow, where he built a technically advanced studio and published a trade journal, Proektor (Projector) to promote his films. With Pathé’s continued assistance, he soon became one of three main players in Russia’s film industry. Yermoliev’s first productions were mainstream crime films—In the Maelstrom of Moscow (1914)—but soon after managing to contract Thiemann’s best director, Yakov Protazanov, and Khanzhonkov’s principal star, Ivan Mosjoukine, the company developed a distinct studio style guided by Yermoliev’s notion of what was currently fashionable. Whereas earlier he had appeared in a variety of comic and romantic roles, Mosjoukine now was cast as a neurasthenic male with a steely gaze and broken eyebrows separated by a doleful vertical wrinkle, complemented by the shadowed eyes and blasé manner of his female partner, Natalia Lisenko. The company’s prestige productions were high-culture screen versions of literary classics such as The Queen of Spades (1916), after Pushkin, or Nicolai Stavrogin (1915), adapted from Dostoievsky’s The Demons, but Yermoliev was best known for his penchant for stories wit