Pyotr Chardynin, whose real name is Krasavchikov, was born in 1991 into a peasant family. In 1991, he was admitted to the Music and Theater School of the Moscow Philharmonic Society. He began his career as an actor and director in provincial theater companies. He achieved his first success by directing Hamlet in 1900. .
In 1908, Pyotr Chardynin met Khanjonkov, for whom he starred in the film Russian Marriage of the 16th Century directed by Vasily Goncharov. .
Pyotr Chardynin made his first film in 1909. The oldest surviving film of his was also made in 1909, Dead Souls (a 160-meter film produced by Khanjonkov). Until 1919, Pyotr Chardynin made approximately 200 films, of which around thirty have survived to this day. .
Alongside his work as a director, Pyotr Chardynin traveled throughout Russia showing talking pictures. In fact, he played the role of a "barker" who commented on the films during the screening. .
In 1910, he created the "first theater on the water - Theater of Two Masks." He staged farces, vaudevilles, and plays of horror. But Chardynin quickly abandoned the theater to devote himself solely to cinema. He then became Khanjonkov's main director. He brought some of his actors with him, including Ivan Mosjoukine. . .
"Unlike Bauer or Starewitch, Chardynin's style was in no way eccentric, but was distinguished by the intelligent and consistent application of "authorial" techniques." His interest in constructing images in deep diagonals (Vadim, The Idiot) became Chardynin's favorite form of staging in the mid-1910s: at the climax of the drama, the hero appears in a deep perspective and, having attracted the viewer's attention, slowly approaches like Hamlet before the monologue (The Precipice (Obryv); The King, the Law and Liberty (Karol, закон и свобода); Mirages (Миражи)). In the films The Precipice and The Brothers (Братья), the director tried for the first time to show a scene indirectly: a gunshot that is fired off-screen is described by filming trembling characters. The first close-ups appeared in Tchardynin's work as early as 1911 (Lights but does not heat (Светит да не греет)). Also in The Precipice, we can see a surprising discovery: the transition from a medium shot to a long shot to make the viewer feel the emptiness of the space surrounding the forgotten grandmother Tatiana Markovna. Tchardynin does not subscribe to the aesthetics of the "Bauer school": the devices of cinematic language only interest him to the extent that they can have a psychological significance. . .
In 1916, Pyotr Chardynin left Khanjonkov's studio, where Bauer had a prominent role in directing. He joined Kharitonov's studio. .
In 1920, at Kharitonov's request, he went to Rome and then to France at the invitation of the Gaumont company. In the autumn of the same year, he arrived in Berlin, where he worked as a director for both cinema and theater. From 1921 to 1923, he shot four films in Latvia, where he received a visit from a representative of the VUFKU (Administration of Photography and Cinema of Ukraine), who convinced him to return to Russia. He then worked in Odessa (at the VUFKU), where he worked on a series of Ukrainian historical-revolutionary films. .
In 1926, the twentieth anniversary of his film career was officially celebrated. But in the early 1930s he was sidelined and died in 1934 of liver cancer.
This biography makes extensive use of the biography published by Yuri Tsivian and Rashit Yanguirov in Velikikinemo (2002).
