Soviet genius of filmmaking showcased

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/02/2002 (8807 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Alexandr Ptushko, a pioneering animator, filmmaker and mechanical tinkerer, has been called The Soviet Walt Disney and The Russian Spielberg.

Not only do these monikers not make a lot of sense — Steven and good old Walt being such quintessential representatives of late Western capitalism that it’s hard to imagine a communist equivalent — but they don’t begin to describe Ptushko’s quite unique genius, which pushed the edges of technical innovation from the 1930s right up to his death in 1972.

Even in the explicit service of Soviet propaganda — and the four rarely-seen samples being showcased at Cinematheque this weekend and the next are full of labour-capital allegories and hymns to the glorious revolution — Ptushko’s work is so vivacious and funny, so chock-full of intricate, ingenious energy, ravishing formal beauty and wonderfully cheesy artifice that politics seem kind of beside the point. To put a liberal bourgeois dilettante spin on things — and I hope Ptushko will forgive me — these films prove that if you put Stalin’s stringent regulations and a real artist into the cinematic mixer, the joyous creative spirit will somehow come out on top.

The New Gulliver (Noviy Gulliver) of 1935 was one of the first full-length animated films made anywhere in the world. In this loopy mixture of live action and puppetry, a Young Pioneer who has been awarded a copy of Jonathan Swift’s book for his revolutionary ardour falls asleep and dreams of coming to the rescue of a Lilliputian society embroiled in class struggle.

The teeny-tiny corrupt clerics, thuggish army officers, fawning aristocrats, lackey court performers and the imbecile king — who lip-synchs to pre-recorded speeches — are made of jointed metal skeletons fitted with brilliantly expressive wooden masks for faces. The oppressed factory workers are made of appropriately earthy plasticine. Every scene evokes sheer wonder at the detailed, obsessive, time-crunching process that is stop-motion animation.

The Stone Flower (Kaminey Tsvetok) of 1946 showcases another technical breakthrough. Using Agfa film stock that had been confiscated from the Germans, this surreal fairy tale was the first Russian feature to be made in colour — and how!

A mixture of traditional folklore, resplendent musical numbers, soundstage “nature” (all spray-painted plaster rocks and gaudy paper flowers), fab low-tech effects, and yet another look at tyrannical landowners and downtrodden serfs, this is a gorgeously artificial film.

Next weekend, Cinematheque screens Viy, a horror-fantasy extravaganza based on a Gogol story, and Sadko, a Russian version of the Sinbad saga, once hacked up — and stripped of all Soviet references — by Roger Corman and a young Francis Ford Coppola, but seen here in its untouched version.

Most film fans have probably seen flashes of Ptushko’s visionary achievements in works by Ray Harryhausen, Terry Gilliam, Jeunet and Caro and Nick Park. Now you can see the originals, finally pulled out of Cold War obscurity for capitalist audiences here in North America.