SHINEL (1926)

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Film details

Featuring

Andrei Kostrichkin Sergei Gerasimov Yanina Zheimo
Directors

Grigori Kozintsev Leonid Trauberg
Country

USSR
Year

1926
Genre

Drama
Type

Film
Category

Fiction

Alternative titles

The OVERCOAT Alternative
The CLOAK Alternative

Introduction

“One of the earliest cinematographic attempts at psychological analysis – to look into a person’s internal world and convey his unspoken thoughts and dreams.”
Neya Zorkaya, The Illustrated History of Soviet Cinema, 1989

A great masterpiece of Russian literature, Nikolai Gogol’s The Overcoat would have been familiar to much of the audience of Grigori Kozintsev and Leonid Trauberg’s adaptation. This allowed the directors considerable creative licence, notably in their portrait of early nineteenth-century Russia as an authoritarian hellhole, where petty clerk Akaky Akakievich dreams of a new overcoat.

Kozintsev and Trauberg make inspired use of what was then Leningrad to convey the feel of imperial St Petersburg. Their treatment owes at least as much to the grotesque stylisation of German Expressionism as it does to the work of their Soviet contemporaries.

Kozintsev and Trauberg would continue to collaborate for the next twenty years.

Cast & Credits

Cast
- - Akaky Akakievich
    
    Andrei Kostrichkin
  - cast member
    
    Sergei Gerasimov
  - cast member
    
    Yanina Zheimo
  - cast member
    
    A. Eremeeva
  - cast member
    
    A. Kapler
  - cast member
    
    Gal, Emil
  - cast member
    
    V. Plotnikov
  - cast member
    
    Pyotr Sobolevsky
Credits
- Direction:
  - Director
    
    Grigori Kozintsev
  - Director
    
    Leonid Trauberg
  - Assistant Director
    
    I. Chpis
  Production:
  - Production Company
    
    Leningradkino
  Writing:
  - Screenplay
    
    Tinyanov, Yuri
  - Based on two stories by
    
    Nikolai Gogol
  Photography:
  - Director of Photography
    
    Andrei Moskvin
  - Director of Photography
    
    Yevgeni Mikhailov
  Design:
  - Art Director
    
    Yevgeni Yenei