Abram Room was born in Lithuania, in Vilno, in 1894. He studied neuropsychology from 1915 to 1917 in Petrograd. After fighting in the Red Army, he worked as a dentist and then as a journalist. In 1919 he turned to the theater, which he already attended as an amateur at university. Until 1923 he was the director of the experimental children's theater in Saratov, then, in 1924, at the Revolutionary Theater in Moscow. He approached the cinema in 1924 by making short advertising films. As part of an anti-alcohol campaign, he also shoots a comedy Hunting the Underground Distillers.
With his first film, made in 1926, The Bay of Death , he immediately established himself as a leading filmmaker. Indeed, he immediately manifests a powerful vision of history supported by a great lyrical talent in the use of the image and the choice of angles, frames, cutting. The following films confirm his gifts. The audacity of the subject and the image come together in Three in a basement (1927) and in Cahots (1928) which deal with the new sexual morality. In 1930, The Ghost Who Does Not Return aroused admiration: he was compared to Fritz Lang for his sense of geometry, but also to Resnais for the mixture of dream and reality. , to Orson Welles for the human type he had created in the person of the plainclothes police officer. A pioneer, in 1928 he made the first Soviet sound film Le Plan des grands travaux , a documentary.
Room affirmed that the vocation of cinema was to represent contemporary life: "preeminence, he said in 1925, belongs to living men". He is interested in psychology, facial expressions. His style is characterized by continuous cutting, long shots ( The Bay of Death contains one of 2 minutes and 12 seconds).
He died in Moscow in 1976.
