A still from Le Nez.

...In dreamed Saint-Petersbourg, monochromic frozen and deserted, the drama of the man without nose running hopelessly after this one is played idle, without a word, in the pure logic of the phantasm....

An animated adaptation of Nikolai Gogol's short story.

Alexandre Alexeieff was a Russian emigre (and mystic) living in Paris. Working as an engraver/lithographer with his wife Alexandra Grinevsky, he illustrated works such as Gogol's Tarass Boulba, Pushkin's The Queen of Spades, Joseph Delteil's On the River Amour, and volumes of Russian folk and fairy tales compiled by Tolstoy and Aleksandr Afanasev.

Alexeieff only became interested in filmmaking after seeing Fernand Léger's avant garde classic, Ballet Méchanique (1924). Through the patronage of an affluent young American art student, Claire Parker, he was able overcome recent setbacks and embark on the creation of the first pinscreen film, Night On Bald Mountain (1934). It was well received, and the affair between the married mentor and his younger patron/student became a lifelong companionship. Parker eventually became his second wife.

Alexeieff and Parker were close friends of Bethold Bartosch (who did special animation for Lotte Reiniger's Adventures of Prince Achmed and Fritz Lang's Kriemheld's Revenge). They supported themselves almost entirely by making commericals. Cinema commercials were the life blood of the French short filmmakers (more so than anywhere else in Europe), and the standard of their productions was comparably higher. Alexeieff saw little difference between his artistic and commercial endeavors. He said, "The important thing in life is to create. That's the only thing that interests me. If L'Oreal wants to sell a bar of soap, I don't think about the product but the invention I could achieve."

A still from Le Nez.

The pin screen (l'écran d'épingles) later evolved to have 1 million pins, or fine rods, set in a vertical white plate. It was lit obliquely with two lights, so that the pins cast shadows – the more the pins protruded the darker were the shadows, and where the pins were pressed completely in, the white surface prevailed. Claire Parker worked at the back (where she viewed the image as negative – it was also lit obliquely), pushing pins out by hand or with various tools to make the black and grey zones. Alexeieff at the front, where the camera was, pushed them back to produce white and grey.

The screen was changed and photographed one frame at a time, the resulting effect similar to mezzotinting.

In 1935 Alexeieff made the first Gasparcolor film in France – La Belle au Bois Dormant. Unable to use the pin screen for color work, he resorted to using puppet animation. Most of his commissioned work during the thirties were made in this way. Only in 1943 when John Grierson invited him and Claire Parker to go to Canada were they able to continue their earlier experiments.

Alexandre Alexeieff.

At the encouragement of animator Norman McLaren, they used a second screen (with one million pins) to make En Passant (1943), a fable about the animals of the field, for the National Film Board of Canada's Chants Populaires series. The extraordinary image of mutations which the pin screen allows were probably most widely seen in the 'Man at the Gate' prologue to Orson Welles' version of The Trial (1962).

There is nothing technically to prevent the pins from changing their apparent brightness as fast as the dots on a television screen, but Alexeieff's technique suggests almost slow-motion – the differences between images being almost as important and involving as the images themselves. In 1951 Alexeieff started work on a new series of films using 'pendules composés', a technique he described as follows:

We construct robots controlled by compound pendulums or motor-powered mechanisms, which themselves control the movement in space of a 'tracer', a small luminous object (a drop of glass – lit by a strobe). These tracer movements are recorded on a single frame by a long exposure, and form a 'totalized' solid. Then, after changing the parameters which govern the robot, a fresh series of trace movements is recorded on another frame – and so on. The degree of condensation is such that a final film of one minute may represent twelve hours of the tracer's movement. What is animated is not a natural solid, but a 'totalized' or illusory solid. Although this technique is used to sell coffee, petrol or cigarettes, it also aims at widening our metaphysical concept of the world.

Sève de la Terre (1955) is typical of this advertising work. In the center of a desert the letters "ESSO" rotate and disappear into the ground. In their place an "oil tree" grows – a derrick in the shape of a flowering bush. From its branches luminous drops appear, fall and burn with a white flame as they hit the ground. A single drop – trembles – changes color – vibrates into luminescent patterns. The patterns form the letters "ESSO" again, drops appear beneath each letter – they too fall. A pealing of church bells is heard throughout.

Parker died in 1981. Alexeieff took his own life in 1982. Their partnership spanned some 50 years.

There are a couple documentaries produced about them and their work, including Alexeieff at the Pinboard (1963) and The World of Alexander Alexeieff & Claire Parker: Pioneers of Pinscreen Animation. In 2001, Italian animation historian Giannalberto Bendazzi published an anthology of 15 essays about Alexeieff and his work. Alexeieff: Itinerary of a Master (Paris: Dreamland, ISBN: 2-910027-75-9) includes over 200 rare illustrations, photographs, and film stills.

Jacques Drouin.

With the exception of Alexeieff's grandson Alexandre Rockwell (who made Lenz and Four Rooms), Quebec native Jacques Drouin is one of the only film artists to have taken up the pinscreen, beginning in the mid-1970s with Alexeieff and Parker's actual pinscreen. His second pinscreen film Le Paysagiste/Mindscape (1976) won 18 awards at international film festivals. He also experimented with adding color to the technique, and circa 1978 began using colored lighting from two sources to produce the effect, as can be seen in a segment of Ron Tunis's film This Is Me (1979). In the mid-1980s, Drouin began collaborating with Czech animator Bretislav Pojar, combining color pinscreen with three dimensional animation and, later, metamorphizing backgrounds. In 1994, he used the pinscreen to make Ex-Child, an animated short included in Rights from the Heart - Part 2, a three part collection of films for children and adolescents based on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child. He is reportedly currently conducting research to combine pinscreen with computer animation.

(Notes from Experimental Cinema: A Fifty-Year Evolution by David Curtis (NY: Delta, 1971) and other sources.)