9 February 1895 year
Born in Moscow Fedor Otsep - director and organizer of film production in the USSR. Popularizer of Russian culture
To remain silent about cinema when it needs to be shouted about means to be unaware of either the spirit of modernity or the psychology of the masses.
The parents are the owners of an umbrella factory.
He studied at Moscow University and worked as a journalist, writing film reviews for the first film magazine, "Kino-Teatr i Zhizn."
In 1915 he began working in cinema: first as an assistant on the set of a newsreel, then as a scriptwriter for a director Yakov Protazanov. He wrote the scripts for his films "Nikolai Stavrogin", "The Queen of Spades", and "The Damned Millions".
He acted not only as a production organizer but also as a promoter of cinema. He criticized the Congress of People's Theater Workers for its silence on the "question of cinema."
While we, the intelligentsia, were deciding the question, “Is cinema an art or not?”, while we were discussing its competition with the theater, the people, in the broadest and most general sense of the word, accepted cinema.
(Proektor magazine, 1916)
I tried myself as a poet.
Cinema is a chatterbox, cinema is a reveler,
But his deception is dear to us,
When he throws from the darkness
Your smiles on the screen!
After the October Revolution, he wrote the screenplay for Protazanov’s “Aelita,” the first Soviet science fiction film.
He wrote the screenplay for one of the first Soviet comedies about the NEP period, "The Cigarette Girl from Mosselprom." He also wrote "The Collegiate Registrar" (Pushkin's "The Stationmaster").
He held the post of deputy chairman of the artistic council at the People's Commissariat of Education. He was one of the directors of Mezhrabpom-Rus, the only non-state film company at the time (the future Gorky Film Studio).
The repertoire of all Russian cinemas is terrible: never before has cinema been such a cesspool of vulgarity
(from a letter to the Council of People's Commissars, 1922)
In 1926 he made his debut as a director, together with Boris Barnet made the film "Miss Mend" based on the adventure comic book by the Soviet writer Marietta Shaginyan (She worked under the pseudonym "Jim Dollar"). The film became a box office success, but was too reminiscent of Westerns.
Look, passerby, at this grave:
In it Otsep Fedor -
And a scandal happened to him:
He's "Jimmy Dollar"
exchanged during his lifetime
For small change
(magazine "Soviet Screen")
In 1927 he filmed a drama about pre-revolutionary Russia, “Earth in Captivity,” with his wife, Anna Stan, starring. I inserted intertitles (slides with captions) in the spirit of Soviet propaganda:
"For cows to milk well, they need to be looked after."
"Fruitless labor on a joyless land"
In 1929 he went to Germany to work on the German-Soviet film “Living Corpse” (“Legal Marriage”) based on the play Leo Tolstoy. The premiere there was a great success, but in its homeland it was met with criticism.
The film did not reach the level of an interpretation that would correspond to the goals of Soviet cinematography.
(magazine "Literary Critic")
In 1931 it was filmed Dostoevsky And for the first time, with sound. The film "Dmitry Karamazov: The Assassin" was shot in Germany, and German film critics saw it as a harbinger of Hitler's rise to power.
Evgeny Zamyatin, who worked with Ocep on the script for the film Anna Karenina (it was never released), compared him to the Führer:
It's very difficult to work with Ocep - he's as stubborn as Hitler!
He worked successfully in commercial films.
In France, he filmed "Ghosts of Paris." He adapted the novella Stefan Zweig "Amok" and Pushkin's "The Queen of Spades." In Italy, "Princess Tarakanova," starring a stellar cast (the film was called "Principessa Tarakanova" in Italian). His spy drama "Gibraltar" was even shown in the post-war USSR.
During the German occupation he fled from Paris, but was interned by the French police. He spent several months in the camp until France's defeat, after which he emigrated to the United States.
In 1943, together with Henry Kesler He filmed the Hollywood war comedy Three Russian Girls, based on the plot of the Soviet film Frontline Girlfriends.
His most recent films were shot in Canada: Father Chopin, The City of Rumors, and The Fortress.
He died in 1949, at 54, from a heart attack, in California (according to another version, in Ottawa).