The will of chance Vasily Goncharov, a philistine originally from Voronezh, was a well-known theater lover and even offered his plays for production, which were censored and rejected. He wrote dramatic scenarios based on life events. In the 1900s, Goncharov suffered a severe psychological trauma after the death of his wife and even ended up in a hospital. Since 1906 he worked as the head of the node station Malorossiyskaya on the Vladikavkaz railway, along the way fond of cinema. At this time, he came up with the idea to diversify his plays with "film illustrations".
It is known that Goncharov collaborated with many film entrepreneurs: Alexander Drankov, Paul Timan, Alexander Khanzhonkov. With the latter, he began to work in 1909 and immediately shot the films “Song about the merchant Kalashnikov” (1909) and “Russian wedding of the XVI century” (1909). Goncharov used an unusual directing approach: he worked with a stopwatch, stacking each scene in the allotted time. Thus, the shooting turned into a continuous race, because of which the entire film crew suffered great inconvenience. Khanzhonkov, in order to correct the exotic ways of Goncharov’s work, introduced for the first time in the world the position of assistant director, whose task was to restrain the emotions of the director.
The short film “Russian wedding of the XVI century” tells the story of a young boyar who accidentally overturned a wagon with a hawthorn. When he comes home, he meets parents who want to marry him. In accordance with tradition, it is impossible to see the bride before the wedding. What was the surprise of the boyar, when after the wedding he recognized in his bride a stranger, whom he met on the road!
Goncharov, who has a weakness for historical melodramas, saturates every action in the film with Old Russian ritual, depicting the whole process of the wedding. The film involves artists of the Vveden People’s House (A. Goncharova, P. Chardynin, A. Gromov, V. Stepanov, etc.), who later, together with Goncharov, entered the permanent troupe of Khanzhonkov’s studio. The small role of the groom's father was played by Peter Chardynin, Goncharov's first assistant and in the future one of the most famous pre-revolutionary Russian film directors.
5 out of 10