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The History of Cinema: 1929

Greece - USSR

Hungary

The Singing Fool premieres at the Forum Cinema, the first screening of a sound film in Hungary. [ADD]

– The Star film production company goes bankrupt. [ADD]

– Kapal Kundala, directed by Priyanath N. Ganguly, becomes the first Indian film to achieve a ‘silver jubilee’ run of 25 weeks.   Indira Devi and Prabodh Bose star. [ADD]

– The Elphinstone Picture Palace in Calcutta becomes the first cinema in the East to be wired for sound.   The first sound film screened there is Universal’s Melody of Love.  [ADD]

– Prabhat Film Co (Kolhapur), Ranjit Movietone (Bombay), British Dominion Film Studios, Aurora Film Corporation and General Pictures Corporation (Madras) are all founded this year. [ADD]

– Russian national Ovanes Ohanian opens the Parvareshgahe Artistiye cinema (The Cinema Artist Educational Center) in Tehran. [ADD]

Alessandro Blassetti’s avant-garde documentary, Sole, premieres in Rome. [ADD]

– A new law bans any film from being shown in a foreign language. [ADD]

– Ilija Dzonov opens a cinema in Gevgelia, near his home town of Bogdanci, before holding further screenings in Strumica. [ADD]

The government passes a decree that all foreign films must be subtitled in Spanish, despite the fact that its largely illiterate population want integral dubbing. [ADD]

Riots break out over films shown with German subtitles. [ADD]

Jose Leitao De Barros’s documentary film Nazare, Praia de Pescadores is released. [ADD]

– A new law briefly bans any film from being screened in a foreign language. [ADD]

– A new law briefly bans any film from being screened in a foreign language. [ADD]

– Sergei Eisenstein, Ivor Montagu, Alberto Cavalcanti, Bela Balazs, Hans Richter and Walter Ruttman attend the International Congress of Avant-Garde Film held at La Sarraz. [ADD]

Vasili Kuzin’s documentary film Arrival of a Train in Dushanbe, the first to be filmed in Tajikstan, is released. [ADD]

– The country’s first cinema opens. [ADD]

– A. Vladycuk’s White Gold, a semi-documentary about collectivisation, is the country’s first feature-length film. [ADD]

Novyy Vavilon (The New Babylon), directed by Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg, premieres in Leningrad.   The film stars Elena Kuzmina and features music composed by Dmitri Shostakovich. [ADD]

Chelovek s kino-apparatom (Man With a Movie Camera), Dziga Vertov’s innovative study of a day in the life of a city and its people, premieres in Moscow. [ADD]

Sergei Eisenstein’s Staroye I Novoye (The General Line) is finally released three years after it was filmed. [ADD]

– The Association of Revolutionary Cinematography (ARC) is renamed the Association of Workers of Revolutionary Cinematography (ARRC) to support the cultural revolution by making ‘100% proletarian ideological film.’  [ADD]

Other Key Films of 1929

The Storm  [ADD]

Regen (Joris Ivens) [ADD]

Giuditta e Oloferne (Baldassare Negroni) [ADD]

Daigaku wa deta keredo (Yasujiro Ozu) [ADD]

Jujiro (Teinosuke Kinugasa) [ADD]

Laila (George Schneevoigt) [ADD]

Nad ranem (Aleksander Ford) [ADD]

Anything for a Smile [ADD]

Miner’s Happiness [ADD]

The Sinless Sinner (Kosta Novakovic) [ADD]

Po horach, po dolach (In the Mountains and Valleys) (Karol Plicka) [ADD]

Den Starkaste (Alf Sjoberg, Axel Lindblom) [ADD]

Xie he (Bloodstain) (Zhang Yunhe) [ADD]

Arsenal (Aleksandr Dovzhenko) [ADD]

Chiny I lyudi (Ranks and People) (Yakov Protazanov) [ADD]

Goluboy ekspress (The Blue Express) (Ilya Trauberg) [ADD]

Oblomok imperii (Fragment of an Empire) (Friedrich Ermler) [ADD]

Turksib (Victor Turin) [ADD]

Zhivoy trup (The Living Corpse) (Fyodor Otsep) [ADD]

The History of Cinema: 1929