📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 3 September
The first film Bulgaria ever made survives as one or two frames. Everything else of it burned. Vasil Gendov wrote it, directed it and starred in it, and he died on this day in 1970, having spent the back half of his life making sure the same thing did not happen to everybody else's work.
What happened on this day
He was born in Sliven in 1891 as Vasil Dimov Hadzhigendov, learned his trade at the Tears and Laughter theatre and the National Theatre in Sofia between 1905 and 1907, and made his stage debut as Robert Pfeiffer in a play by Otto Ernst. Then theatre school in Vienna, film study in Berlin, and a spell touring with the troupe of the actress Roza Popova. In January 1915 the first feature film made in Bulgaria was screened in Sofia. Bulgaran is Gallant was a light comedy, Gendov wrote it, directed it and played the lead, and people compared what he did on screen to Max Linder. Between 1915 and 1937 he wrote, produced and appeared in eleven films, which made him about as prolific as Bulgarian cinema got in that era.
He set up the country's first film production cooperative, Yantra Film, and then made the first Bulgarian sound picture, The Slave's Revolt, shot in Karlovo in 1932. He played Vasil Levski in it. His wife Zhana Gendova, who was in most of his films, was in that one too. It caused a diplomatic incident: the Turkish foreign ministry objected that the film showed what it called the imagined tyranny the Bulgarians had experienced under five hundred years of Turkish rule, and demanded an explanation from Sofia as to why it had been allowed out at all. The Bulgarian government declined to accept that it was anti-Turkish, on the reasonable ground that the events in it belonged to the Ottoman period and not to the Turkish republic.
Then the institutions. He got the first Union of Actors going in 1919, the Union of Filmmakers in 1931, the Museum of Bulgarian Cinematography in 1948. That last year the industry was nationalised on the Soviet model and Gendov, who had made the whole thing possible, was pushed into early retirement from directing. So he built the state film archive instead, the one that became the Bulgarian National Film Archive, and spent his time collecting other people's films, their posters and the press cuttings about them. He wrote his memoirs and called them the thorny path of Bulgarian film, which tells you how it had felt. He died in Sofia, and in 2015, a hundred years after his comedy played, the archive he founded put on a centenary exhibition for it.
Why this matters for British expats
Here is the part that should sit slightly badly with us. Bulgaran is Gallant was almost entirely destroyed in the bombing of Sofia in 1944, and those raids were flown by American and British crews. On the night of 10 January that year 44 RAF Wellingtons went over Sofia after 143 American B-17s had been over it in daylight. Fifty RAF bombers came on 16 March and about forty more on 24 March. The worst of it was 30 March, when some 450 American and British heavy bombers hit the city centre and destroyed three and a half thousand buildings. Bulgaria had declared war on Britain in December 1941, so none of this was unprovoked, but the plain fact remains that the country's first film is two frames partly because of aircraft flown by our countrymen. Gendov, incidentally, had once played Eugene Marchbanks in Shaw's Candida. If you want a sense of what the Bulgarian screen turned into afterwards, our guide to television and entertainment here picks up the thread.
Sources and further reading
Gendov's career, the cooperative he founded and the memoirs come from his entry on Bulgarian Wikipedia, with the English one carrying the surviving frames, the Turkish protest and the archive he built after 1948. The detail of the raids on Sofia is drawn from the Wikipedia account of the bombing of Bulgaria during the Second World War.