ANIMATION STUDIES

Alexandre Alexéieff

In the essay the author traces the lifeline and the career of the famous pinscreen animation artist Alexandre Alexéieff. Alexandre Alexéieff (Aleksandr Pavlovich Alekseev) was born on 18th April 1901 in Kazan, in Czarist Russia. His father accepted the post of naval attaché at the Russian embassy in Constantinople, where Alexéieff spent a happy childhood. After his father’s death, the family returned to Sant Petersburg in 1906. There he trained at Cadet Academy to become an officer. His drawing master at the Cadet school encouraged him to draw from imagination, and that decisively influenced Alexéieff’s later life path. Along with other cadets he was exposed to hardship during the First World War, and after the war, he chose to live in Paris. There he occasionally worked as a set designer, becoming the part of Parisian art circles. He married Alexandra Grinevsky in 1923. Being in contact and having affinity with surrealist poets, he started to illustrate a number of books (the first being Soupault’s book on Guillaume Apollinaire). To Alexéieff, the concept of illustration was that of free, independent reinterpretation of the literary text, and he mostly dealt with the texts that he felt the strongest bonds with. Alexandre and Alexandra’s marriage wasn’t happy. In 1930 he met an American, Clare Parker, and their collaboration eventually ended in a lifetime bond. Inspirational collaboration with her became a hidden but powerful engine behind Alexéieff’s work, especially when they embarked on filmmaking. Inspired by the avant-garde filmmaking in 30’s Alexéieff and Claire constructed a ’pinscreen’, a board (a ’screen’) densely packed with thousands of moveable pins. Pushing and pulling pins in and out in degrees and lighting them with an oblique light source they could deal with a shaded graphic surface of immense subtlety. And, changing the graphic surface in minute steps and shooting each of them by the animation camera, a pictorial animation could be achieved. Parker financed Alexéieff’s first pinscreen animated film — Une nuit sur le Mont Chauve, which won a critical acclaim, but not a commercial exploitation. The film was done in a manner that would become an Alexéieff’s pattern: it was a pictorial fantasy based on a music piece — a Mussorgsky’s symphony A night on the bare mountain. To survive, Alexéieff and Parker went into advertising producing a number of commissioned animation commercials. During the Second World War a couple moved to the USA, where Alexéieff did some illustrating job and a commercial mediated by his admirer, Norman McLaren. Further experimentation was undertaken after they returned to Paris, in 1950. The result was ’illusory solids’, an effect achieved by connecting a tracing source (a chrome-plated metal sphere, which glowed when strongly illuminated) to an oscillation of a compound pendulum. Alexéieff used the effect in his commercials (Fumées, 1952). In between his long-term work on his personal film The nose, Alexéieff made a prologue animation for the Orson Welles feature film TheTrial. In 1972 Alexéieff appeared for the first time at an animated festival with the film Tableaux d’une exposition (Zagreb Animated Film Festival), but gained no recognition for it. But it was a masterpiece of non-narrative animation, interweaved with well-honed visual hints and with unimaginable dynamic inventions. After his last, less successful film Three themes, Claire Parker began to show the first symptoms of bone cancer in the spring of 1981, and after a great deal of suffering she died in Paris on October 3rd that year. Alexandre Alexéieff, beaten, survived her less than a year. He died on August 9th 1982.
The article is accompanied by a filmography of Alexéieff’s auctorial work as well as with his commercials.
ANALYTICAL CONTENTS: Portrait of the artist as a young man; Les années de bohème; Illustrate or create; Cherchez la femme; The Pin Screen; The Pin Screen (two); The Pin Screen (three); Une nuit sur le Mont Chauve; Few see it, many talk about it; A life in advertising; America and back; Illusory solids; The two giants; The Nose; Return to Mussorgsky; The Moon Is Down; Notes; Alexéieff’s Filmography

Giannalberto Bendazzi