Expanded Cinémathèque: Reactivating Meyerhold’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

This practical seminar takes as its point of departure Vsevolod Meyerhold’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1915), a film adaptation of Oscar Wilde’s novel that is now considered lost. Recent scholarship shows that the film was not merely a marginal experiment, but one of the most distinctive works of pre-Revolutionary Russian cinema: Meyerhold’s first film, a major early Russian adaptation of foreign literature, and a work conceived around the “poetics of the image” rather than simple illustration. What survives today are not the moving images themselves, but a constellation of traces: the libretto, a list of intertitles, a literary scenario, reviews, memoirs, director’s notes, and around twenty surviving shots or production images. The seminar approaches this lost film not as an object to be reconstructed faithfully, but as an open cinematic score. Its archive will be treated as active material for performance, image-making, and montage. The project therefore moves between film history, acting practice, and artistic research. It asks how a film that no longer survives can return in another form: through bodies, gesture, intertitles, silhouettes, spatial composition, and contemporary editing. A second key focus of the seminar is Meyerhold’s approach to performance. Even in the surviving descriptions of the film, one can already identify central features associated with his broader practice: stylization, anti-naturalist composition, careful orchestration of bodies in space, and an emphasis on light, shade, and silhouette. Reviews of the studio scenes in Dorian Gray describe memorable black figures against a bright background and a visual organization based on contrast rather than realism. This makes the film an especially rich point of entry for introducing students to Meyerhold not only as a theatre director, but as an artist working at the threshold between stage and cinema.