Moscow Clad in Snow

The Kremlin, sleighs drawn up in rows, a fish market, the rich taking the air in Petrovsky Park, a line of women on skis: eight minutes of a city that did not know it was being kept. Joseph-Louis Mundwiller shot it for Pathé in the winter of 1909, in slow pans and four parts with no story. Eight years later the people in that market are the subject of every Soviet film in this catalogue.