Assassinat du grand-duc Serge (1905)

Interesting facts

L'assassinat du grand-duc Serge, is a 1905 French silent short film directed by Lucien Nonguet, and distributed in English-speaking countries under the titles Assassination of the Grand Duke Serge and Assassination of the King of Serbia. The film is a docudrama dramatising the re-enactment of the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia that had taken place a few months before in Moscow.

Production

Since 1903, Lucien Nonguet had been in charge at Pathé Frères of the filming of re-enacted newsreels and had already released in August 1904 a film about a political assassination in Russia, L'assassinat du Ministre Plehve, relating the assassination in July 1904 of Russian Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve. The film had met with great public success.

Pictures of the assassination of Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich were published in the international press shortly after the event.

Lucien Nonguet explained that he based the reconstitution of the murder scene on one of these pictures, using an old horse carriage that he had had dismantled with some pieces broken and partially burned.

A journalist of Le Matin visited the Pathé studio in Vincennes in February 1905 and gave a detailed description of the filming, detailing under the title "People, you are being deceived!" the tricks used to produce re-enacted newsreel, that some viewers might have been regarding as real.

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