Une nuit sur le mont chauve

flipping channels, late at night, stumbled upon this obscure gem. i have been around a few blocks in my time, and this has to be one of the strangest, eeriest flicks i have ever seen. morphing, 3-dimensional shapes, bizarre and addicting. i want to buy this but can't find it anywhere. what tim burton would have done had he been alive in the thirties.

I've always enjoyed the music of Mussorgsky. This is a challenging piece. If only the quality of the print were better. Some of the more significant events were badly muted by age. Not too many years later, Disney approached the same piece and made it more slick. I didn't know this little film even existed.

Lyrical, dark, exceptionally interesting animated film. Occasionally charmingly inarticulate but some very special images here. Inspiring work from an early woman director. Saw it last night as part of the Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941 series playing here in Austin. See it if you get a chance.

Seven years before Disney used Modest Mussorgsky's Night on Bald Mountain in Fantasia, Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker used it in this pinscreen animation short, a surreal classic. The theme of the original composition is a witch's sabbath on the Slavic holiday of St. John's Eve, celebrating the birth of John the Baptist six months before Christ. The extraordinary images that fly by in this animation with such vitality are not simple to interpret, but one gets the sense of devilish forces gathering on a wild night, preceding a battle. One also wonders how in the world these artists managed to create this using their pinscreen board (even given 18 months), as there is such variety in the textures and images, some hazy, some three dimensional, all highly artistic. Disturbing, phantasmagoric, and ultimately peaceful, it had me watching it several times, and wondering if I should give it an even higher rating.

Une nuit sur le mont chauve (1933)

**** (out of 4)

Also known as A NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN, this pinscreen short from Claire Parker and Alexandre Alexeieff is so wonderful and so ground-breaking that their names deserve to be remembered right up there with Walt Disney. If you think that's too much praise then I'm going to guess that you haven't seen this film. It took eighteen months to complete and you can tell that by the images on the screen.

Pinscreen animation is the use of a screen with moveable pins. Just the thought of making animation like this boggles my mind but UNE NUIT SUR LE MONT CHAUVE does a masterful job of it and it's really hard to believe that this here was made in 1933. It's amazing how wonderful the images look and in fact you could argue that they're much better than a lot of what we see today. The earlier portion of the film deals with a lot of dark subjects and it's perfectly put to the music of Mussorgsky. As great as that looks, I was even more impressed with the later part of the film where there are a lot more whites used. Just check out the sequence with the white horse.