“Victor Trivas shared with his older travel companion, Granowsky, his Jewish origins and a slightly unusual turn in context of Russian migration: an exile by choice, at first – and differently from the majority of Russian refugees – he had joined the Revolution. At the end of the war he was active as set designer in several Moscow’s theatres, mostly Granowsky’s Yiddish Theatre. Thus Trivas participated in a post-Revolutionary attempt to integrate the specificity of Yiddish tradition in the life of new-born Soviet Union, after the harassment and pogroms of Czarist Russia. Jewish aspirations would also be depicted in a film directed by Granowsky, Jewish Happiness (1925) and shown last year in Il Cinema Ritrovato. Granowsky’s and Trivas’s departure in the mid-twenties was a quite unmistakable signal of the outcome of that ambitious project”.

Francesco Pitassio

“According to his words, Victor Trivas had filmed about twenty films until 1930 in Berlin, Prague, Stockholm, Vienna and Budapest. In 1930 he made his first film as director, in a Czech-German co-production, Aufruhr des Blutes. The film was shot mostly in exteriors, thus voluntarily mortifying the scope and skills of a set-designer: ‘The ideal would be a film without set-designers’ […].

In 1933 Victor Trivas said in an interview that he could not picture independent cinema: cinema is the product of an industry and must find a way to reach its consumers. However in the cinema industry – he took UFA as an example – he felt the lack of a laboratory dimension, of a space set aside for the unforeseable, inspiration and experiment. Often the fact that independent filmmakers from the 20’s had a certain influence from a formal perspective on the industry has been overlooked, but this attempt was only partially successful. Small production companies such as Akkord-Film (Aufruhr des Blutes), Resco (Niemandsland), short-lived Film Kunst AG (Das Lied von Leben) – and maybe we shoul also add Terra (Der Mörder Dimitri Karamazov) and Tobis (Die Köffer des Herrn O.F.) – seemed to have been more open than UFA.

Jeanpaul Goergen, Künstlerische Avantgarde. Visianäre Utopie, in Fantaisies russe. Russische Filmmacher in Berlin und Paris 1920-1930, ed. by Jörg Schöning, München, Text + Kritik, 1995