Alexandre Alexandrovitch Alexeieff (Russian: Александр Александрович Алексеев;[1] 18 April 1901 – 9 August 1982) was a Russian-born artist, filmmaker and illustrator who lived and worked mainly in Paris.
He and his second wife Claire Parker (1906–1981) are credited with inventing the pinscreen as well as the animation technique totalization.
In his unpublished memoir Oublis ou Regrets, Alexeieff wrote that he rarely saw his father due to the fact that he was often away on missions.
[2] His mother traveled to Germany without telling the children where she was going or why and only when she returned did Alexeieff learn that his father had died.
She first went to stay with her brother-in-law near Odessa, then she went to Riga and finally settled in the town of Gatchina, Russia near Saint Petersburg.
He was surprised to find that the image which was projected on the screen could be seen reflected in the lens of the projector, which happened to be close to where he was sitting.
[3] When he was seven years old, he was dragged through various government offices by his mother to wait in line in order for the widow to collect the meager pension which had been allotted to her.
A boy he knew once told him, ”My mother left too, she never came back!” In Gatchina, Alexandre often walked alone along the wooden fences of the road nearby.
He often called to his brothers who were playing on the other side and said, "Mama died you know... We will have to be kept in school from now on!” He realized later that his mother had sacrificed herself for her sons.
[3] However, his mother did return and Alexeieff's family settled in Gatchin, a suburb of St. Petersburg and later moved to nearby Lesnoi.
The teacher would also ask them to portray events such as dance or a holiday feast, or read them text and have the students illustrate it, a task Alexeieff particularly enjoyed.
[3] While in the Cadet School, Alexeieff founded a literary magazine which contained works created by students.
When the Russian Revolution of 1917 began with general strikes in St. Petersburg, school was closed for three days and Alexeieff returned home to Lesnoi by train.
In 1921 Alexeieff was forced to leave the city of Ufa where he had spent the summer with his maternal uncle in order to cross Siberia with a group of cadets.
During one of the crossings, a storm forced them to anchor in the French Riviera where Alexeieff jumped ship holding on to a letter of recommendation to the Russian set designer Sergei Soudeikin who was living in Paris.
[4] In 1923 he married Alexandra Alexandrovna Grinevskya (1899–1976), who had been sent to Paris in her childhood because she was the illegitimate daughter of a St. Petersburg dignitary.
[5] In order to save the name of his aristocratic family, Alexandra's father had not married the mother of his child.
Instead, the baby was taken away from her mother at the age of two and adopted by her father's sister Katia who kept a musical salon in Paris.
When Konstantin Stanislavski came to Paris and saw her acting, he offered to have her go back to Russia but Alexandra refused, remaining by Alexeieff's side.
She recalled later, "I figured I would meet an old, dignified man with a white beard... but [instead] I saw this tall, brown, handsome, aristocratic 30-year-old guy.
She was more patient with Alexeieff and praised him frequently while Grinevsky looked the other way[2] Claire was quoted by her biographer as saying, “"Between us, he's the genius.
The theme of Mussorgsky's composition and the film is a witches' Sabbath on the summer solstice on Mount Triglav near Kiev.
Newspaper articles were positive, artists and film critics felt that the team had succeeded in creating a more serious type of animation, moving away from cartoons.
Therefore, he packed their old Ford automobile and the family fled south in order to pick up visas at the US Embassy in Bordeaux.
This process involves filming a moving object at long exposures to capture the trace of the path of motion.
The Nose, based on Nikolai Gogol's satirical short story was released in 1963 and marks the first narrative film made on the pinscreen.
The pinboard on which Alexeieff created his extraordinary black and white films is an upright perforated board, three by four feet, into which a million headless steel pins have been inserted.
"[6] Itineraire d’un Maitre consists of essays by Yuri Norstein, Nikolay Izvolov, Oleg Kovalov, Georges Nivat, Claudine Eizykman, Guy Fihman, Dominique Willoughby, Svetlana Alexeieff-Rockwell as well as Alexandre Rockwell.
(English translation: Night on Bald Mountain) English Translation: Concerning Zhivago Won the Count de Lanua Prize at the International Art Film Festival, Knokke-Le-Zoute, Belgium 1964 Awarded Diploma of the International Short Film Festival, Berlin, 1964.
My Illustrated World directed by Jean Mouselle English Translation: Pictures at an Exhibition Honorable Mention, High Artistic Quality, French National Center for Cinematography.