about this site

This site is a place to store and show photos that are not mine, most of them are cinema stills from old Russian movies. Either I simply like them or I’m studying them for some reason.

In case you’re interested, the name of the site, “in the kingdom of shadows”, is how Russian writer Maxim Gorky described his visit to a Lumiere Brothers cinema in 1896. This is what he said:

Last night I was in the Kingdom of Shadows.

If you only knew how strange it is to be there. It is a world without sound, without colour. Every thing there—the earth, the trees, the people, the water and the air—is dipped in monotonous grey. Grey rays of the sun across the grey sky, grey eyes in grey faces, and the leaves of the trees are ashen grey. It is not life but its shadow, It is not motion but its soundless spectre.