The Historical and Source-Based Aspects of Studying Early Russian Silent Film Posters of 1908—1919

The Russian State Library holds one of the largest collections of Russian posters. Film posters from the time before the cinematography nationalization in 1919 are presented there in more than 250 sheets. Most of them advertise Russian films, more than a third — foreign ones, 25 sheets — documentary cinematography and newsreels of the Russian branch of the French firm “Pathé Brothers”.Recently, there has been a growing researchers’ interest in this period. Active popularization is being carried out by holding exhibitions and publishing catalogs of the largest collections, this phenomenon is discussed in detail at the beginning of the article.As well as cinematography, a film poster is a synthetic work. It represents a piece of graphic art, which is a commercial advertisement for another type of art. This research is aimed at studying film posters as a historical source that can tell us a lot: about characteristic social trends, about filmmaking as a process and about films themselves, about tendencies in the visual arts, about advertising of that period in general and about itself as a new type of advertising in particular.The article shows the history of the film poster formation as a product of commercial advertising and its subsequent development into a separate type of spectacular poster. There is analyzed its potential as a source on the history of cinema. In conclusion, the film posters are presented as a reflection of the era and society, which reacts to fundamental changes in the country.