Soviet theater and cinema

Sonoike, Kinnaru (園池 公功).

Sovueto engeki no inshô (ソヴエト演劇の印象). [An Account of Modern Soviet Theatre].

Tokyo: Kensetsusha, 1933.

192pp. [2] with 92 b/w photographs.

23.5 x 16 cm. Original cardboard slipcase, photo-illustrated buckram boards.

sold

Detailed analysis of the more recent trends and developments (early 20th century) in Russian/Soviet avant-garde theatre and film, by Japanese theatre director and critic Kinnaru Sonoike (1896 – 1972). The author had been invited to the SovietUnion the previous year, where he had visited various theater and saw productions in Moscow and Lenningrad. The fourthchapter deals with Soviet cinema, and includes Sonoike’s observations about his meeting with filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin, experiences going to the movie theater and visiting the Moscow film school. The images dislay a wide range of production designs ranging from proletarian scenes, soviet realism, to more avant-garde expressionist type of staging. The final group of images is of soviet films, including stills of the famous “Odessa Steps Sequence”, from Sergei Eisentein’s landmark film Battleship Potemkin. Additional in-text b/w lithographic illustrations of set designs and caricatures of theatre figures, as well as some tables and charts, throughout.

The book designer Yamawaki Iwao (1898-1987) graduated from Bauhaus, and was an apprentice of Mies van der Rohe and Wassily Kandinsky.

Slipcase with some staining to the corners.