Actors - Ivan Mozzhukhin

Home > Listing Index > Actors > Ivan Mozzhukhin

	Actors - Ivan Mozzhukhin

Ivan Ilyich Mozzhukhin (September 26/October 8 in the Julian Calendar, 1889–January 18 1939) was a leading Russian silent film actor. He was born in Penza, Russia and studied law at Moscow State University. In 1910 he left academic life to join a troupe of traveling actors from Kiev, with which he toured for a year, gaining experience and a reputation for a dynamic stage presence. Upon returning to Moscow, he launched his screen career with the 1911 adaptation of Tolstoy's The Kreutzer Sonata. He also starred in A House in Kolomna (1913, after Pushkin), Nikolay Stavrogin (1915, after Dostoyevsky), The Queen of Spades
(1916, after Pushkin), and other adaptations of Russian classics.

His most lasting legacy, however, is his appearance in Lev Kuleshov's montage experiment which demonstrated the Kuleshov Effect. Kuleshov assembled his montage experiment from old footage of one of Mozzhukhin's Tsarist films which had been left behind when the Tsarist film production company fled the country in 1917.

At the end of 1919 Mozzhukhin arrived in Paris and quickly established himself as one of the top stars of the French silent cinema. Using the French spelling of his name, Mosjoukine, he starred in one successful film after another. Handsome, tall, and possessing a powerful screen presence, he won a considerable following as a mysterious and exotic romantic figure.

Career in France

The first film of his French career was also his final Russian film. L'Angoissante Aventure (The Harrowing Adventure) was a dramatized record of the difficult and dangerous journey of Russian actors, directors and other film artists as they made their way from Crimea to the chaos of Ottoman Turkey in the midst of the post-World War I fall of the Sultanate. The group was headed by the renowned director Yakov Protazanov and included Mozzhukhin's frequent leading lady Natalya Lisenko (billed in France as Nathalie Lissenko), whom he married and later divorced. Their ultimate destination was Paris, which became the new capital of most of the exiled former aristocrats and other refugees escaping the civil war and Bolshevik terror gripping Russia. The film was completed and released in Paris in November of 1920.

Mozzhukhin's film stardom was assured and during the 1920s, his face with the trademark hypnotic stare appeared on covers of film magazines all over Europe. He wrote the screenplays for most of his starring vehicles and directed one of them Le Brasier Ardent (The Blazing Inferno), which was praised for its innovative and inventive concepts, but ultimately proved too surreal and bizarre to become financially successful. Styled like a semi-comic Kafkaesque nightmare, the film has him playing a detective known only as "Z" hired by an older husband to follow his adventurous young wife. The plot, however, was only the device which Mozzhukhin and his assistant director Aleksandr Volkov (billed in France as Alexandre Volkoff) used to experiment with the audience's perception of reality. Many of the scenes seem to be taking place on sets that are disconcertingly larger than normal and one particularly striking staging has the husband entering the detective agency to find a synchronized line of men, presumably detectives, all wearing tuxedos and gliding about in formation. Mozzhukhin received praise for his enthusiastic acting and display of emotion.

He died of tuberculosis in a Neuilly-sur-Seine clinic. All available sources give his age as 49 and year of birth as 1889. However, his gravestone at the Russian cemetery in the Parisian suburb of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois is inscribed with the year 1887.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Ivan Mozzhukhin ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article Ivan Mozzhukhin; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay