Two new films have been recently identified with the help of materials available in the Daydreams database: Zhidovka-vykhrestka (1912, Vladimir Krivtsov) and Zelionyi pauk / The Green Spider (1916, Alexandre Volkoff). Zhidovka-vykhrestka belongs to an influential subgenre of imperial Russian cinema, the so-called “drama of the Jewish life.”
Elizaveta Svilova is among the best-known film editors of Soviet cinema. Her name is inseparable from that of her husband, director Dziga Vertov: she worked with him throughout his career and, according to modern scholarship, was the co-author of his films. Yet the story of Svilova before Vertov remains almost unknown. She was one of the barely visible figures who connected two cinematic worlds: pre-revolutionary silent cinema and new avant-garde cinema that emerged after 1917. Her career allows us to see how technical routines of early film production were transformed into a creative language of Soviet montage.
Compiled from multiple catalogues and filmographies, the Daydreams database continues to expand and engage new sources. This note provides an overview of some of the latest additions to Daydreams and the researchers’ work behind it. While some of the newly added films have not been discovered or formally annotated before, others simply come from the sources not previously covered by the database.
Our work on the database has been guided by the hope that it might assist in identifying films long considered lost. A recent discovery linking unidentified nitrate fragments from Cineteca di Bologna to a film by Evgenii Bauer not only expands the archival record but also brings into view the canonical director’s engagement with a form of sensational melodrama with which he is not typically associated.
The following text is an English translation of an article by Georgian film scholar Dr. Paata Iakashvili (1955–2022) published in 1977 in Georgian-language journal Kino [კინო]. It provides little-known facts and personal accounts about the lost film ბერიკაობა-ყეენობა/ Berikaoba-Keenoba (1909, director Aleqsandre Tsutsunava).