Abram Room

Abram Matveyevich Room (28 June 1894 in Wilno, Russian Empire (now Vilnius, Lithuania) – 26 July 1976 in Moscow) was a Russian film director.

Room's best known film is Bed and Sofa (1927) after a screenplay by Lev Kuleshov and Viktor Shklovsky. In the film, a woman who is married to a construction worker has an affair with their lodger. The film tracks the evolution of a housewife into a strong liberated woman, which was very unusual for its time. Another notable title is The Ghost That Never Returns (1929)

In 1923 he became a member of Vsevolod Meyerhold’s Theatre of the Revolution. The first movie he directed was The Vodka Chase in 1924.

He directed the first talking picture in the Soviet Union, the 1930 documentary The Five Year Plan. The other films he directed were Traitor (1926), Ruts (1928), Criminals (1933), Squadron No. 5 (1939), Invasion (1945), V gorakh Jugoslavii (1946), School for Scandal (1952), The Garnet Bracelet (1965), Belated Flowers (1972), and The Untimely Man (1973).

Cited in the german book "Texte zur Theorie des Films" (Albersmeier 1998, p.304) [texts about theory of film]: "A. Room, declared opponent of the concept of S. Eisenstein, postulated in his essay »Moï kinoubeždenija« (My beliefs of film) in: Sovetskij ëkran, 1926, m. 8, p. 5: »Prior importance in film must be the living human...« [in german: »Vorrangige Bedeutung kommt im Film dem lebendigen Menschen zu...«], exactly that what Eisenstein declined."

External links

• Abram Room at the Internet Movie Database
• Abram Room at Find a Grave.