The silent Il’inskii: mask and its affects

ABSTRACT Igor’ Il’inskii (1901–1987) was a celebrated Soviet comic actor, whose work in silent-era cinema has often been underestimated. Even in defining the specific features of his character acting and his screen mask/s, no single view has been formulated among film scholars. This article aims to reveal the main principles of Il’inskii’s acting in Soviet films of the silent period in order to define the relationship between his screen image and masks. To this end, I first explore the perspective of scholars who have written about Il’inskii as well as biographical details of his creative life; moreover, I analyse the character design in the films in which he appeared from 1924 to 1930. The article reveals the particularities of his screen existence and formulates them in the style of an actor’s portrait; the features of Il’inskii’s acting and the affect that it generated emerge in this process. In addition, the article proposes an explanation for the missing consensus in defining Il’inskii’s character acting and screen image through a study of the complexity and inconsistency of character acting and ‘naturalness’ in Il’inskii’s anthropology. Finally, the concept of a childlike playfulness is suggested to describe his mask.