The Childhood of Maxim Gorky

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky (1938)

Детство Горького

Young Maxim grows up under the czarist regime with his grandparents as guardians. Continually demeaned by his martinet grandfather, Maxim is drawn to his warm-hearted grandmother, who instills in him the willingness to pursue his writing muse.

Date of release
1938-09-27
TMDB
6.0 / 10 (29)
Runtime
1h 40m
Genres
Drama
Director
Mark Donskoy
Collection
The Gorky Collection

Casting

Interesting facts

  • Based on: My Childhood

The Childhood of Maxim Gorky is a 1938 biopic based on the first part of Russian and Soviet writer Maxim Gorky's three-part autobiography, My Childhood. The film shows the earlier years of Alexei Peshkov, better known as Soviet's famous Maxim Gorky; it takes the audience through Alexei's experience at his maternal grandparent's home in the town of Nizhny Novgorod. Alexei interacts with family members, workers of his grandfather's dye factory and local orphan children, all of which impact him.

Production

Soyuzdetfilm is a film studio that was created specifically to create films for children. It was founded in 1936 inside Moscow in hopes for a “new stage in film entertainment for children (Field 1952, 135)”. Earlier adults would have acted as children in tragic scenes.

Donskoy worked well with the child actors as he did not push them into doing too much rehearsal. He believed that it is important to not overwork the child-actors and prevent having to teach the children too much. If the child is “overtrained” they often overact on camera.

To get the proper emotions, Donskoy would use personal memories to get the actors into the right mood to show strong emotions in the film.

It is said that he would record various scenes without the children realizing they were being filmed.

The film was shot in Nizhny Novgorod, where Gorky spent his childhood.

Read on Wikipedia · Text from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0. Data from Wikidata.

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