Vassil Gendov

Biography

Vasil Dimov Gendov—actor, dramatist, unstoppable force—was born in Sliven on 24 November 1891. By 1905 he had already slipped into the wings of Sofia’s “Tears and Laughter” and the National Theatre, an apprentice haunting the boards where he would soon debut as Robert Pfeiffer in O. Ernst’s “Educators”. Two years in Vienna’s Theater School “Otto”, then a brush with Berlin’s AIKO studios, sharpened a hunger that Rose Popova’s travelling troupe fed between 1910 and 1912. On 13 January 1915 (old calendar) he stepped in front of—and behind—a hand-cranked camera and delivered Bulgaria’s first home-grown screen laugh: “Bulgarian is Gallant”, a Max-Linder-flavoured romp he wrote, directed and carried on his own shoulders. The country’s feature-film clock began ticking that day. War and instability could not stall him. In 1919 he welded actors into the nation’s first professional guild; two years later he and his wife, Zhana, launched the Sofia Itinerant Theatre, a restless caravan of plays he managed, staged and starred in. Cooperatives followed—Yantra Film pooled scarce resources—and in 1931 he rallied filmmakers into their own union. Archives mattered too: 1948 saw him hatch the Museum of Bulgarian Cinematography. The twenties roared around him: Gendov produced, acted, hustled finance, wrote fiery newspaper columns and still found time to persuade a sound crew to roll into Karlovo in 1932. The result: “The Revolt of the Slaves”, the country’s first talkie and the earliest screen tribute to national hero Vasil Levski. He kept memories as well as making them, leaving behind the memoir “Thorny Path of a Bulgarian Film”. When the projector finally stopped on 3 September 1970 in Sofia, the pioneer who had willed a national cinema into being took his last bow.