Anna Karenina (1914): Reconstructing and Interpreting a Lost Russian Film

This article considers the problem of lost silent films, an issue that is particularly relevant to the study of Russian cinema. Most early Russian films have not been preserved, and it is nearly impossible to describe the film history of this period without them. Reconstructing films that have been lost or only partially preserved requires using every available source: stills, production photographs, reviews, memoirs, and so on. This article presents one such paper reconstruction using the example of Vladimir Gardin's Anna Karenina (1914), one of the most important Russian films of the mid-1910s. The results of this reconstruction prove that Anna Karenina was an innovative screen adaptation made in the spirit of the Silver Age that contributed to the development of the so-called Russian style in pre-Revolutionary cinema.