Alexandre Alexeieff
Alexandre Alexandrovitch Alexeieff was a Russian-born artist, filmmaker and illustrator who lived and worked mainly in Paris. He and his second wife Claire Parker are credited with inventing the pinscreen as well as the animation technique totalization. In all Alexeieff produced 6 films on the pinscreen, 41 advertising films and illustrated 41 books.
Early life
Alexeieff was born in the town of Kazan in Russia. He spent his early childhood in Istanbul where his father, Alexei Alexeieff, was a military attaché.Alexeieff had two older brothers, Vladimir and Nikolai. Vladimir caught syphilis from a Moscow actress with whom he had an affair. His mother forced him to remain in his room and not touch his brothers. The pressure of this was such that Vladimir shot himself. Before he died, he wrote a note to Alexandre saying, "You are very talented. You must keep on drawing". His second brother, Nikolai, disappeared in Georgia, Russia, during the Russian Revolution of 1917. He was never heard from again; the family suspected that he died of typhus.
In his unpublished memoir Oublis ou Regrets, Alexeieff wrote that he rarely saw his father due to the fact that he was often away on missions. He took a daily walk with his mother when he was forced to speak in French instead of Russian. The rest of the time he was under the care of a nanny. Alexieff's father died mysteriously in Baden-Baden, Germany on an official trip at the age of 37. He was shot by a Turk, probably because he knew too much about the Middle East. 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.
After the death of his father
In his memoirs, Alexeieff describes the tribulations his mother went through after the death of her husband. 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.While in Riga, Alexeieff saw a film for the very first time. This made a big impression on the boy. 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. He later realized that the image on the lens was the original one.
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. ”Wait for me here, be a good boy, I shall be back!” she said as she asked the boy to sit and wait on a chair. When she left the room where her son was, he feared as the door closed behind her that she might never return! 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. However, his mother did return and Alexeieff's family settled in Gatchin, a suburb of St. Petersburg and later moved to nearby Lesnoi.
Cadet Corps School
Alexeieff entered the Naval Cadet Corps in Saint Petersburg at the age of seven. His favorite course was drawing. His art teacher taught the students how to draw from memory. He would pass various objects, such as a violin, through the class, remove it and ask the students to draw it. This early training became extremely valuable for Alexeieff later on in life when he became an illustrator. 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.While in the Cadet School, Alexeieff founded a literary magazine which contained works created by students. His friends did not take this project seriously. However, Alexeieff was able to petition for funds and also obtain access to the library which was very valuable to him.
His older brother Vladimir was also a student at the Cadet school. They rarely met but their names were engraved on the wall of the school for having been the best students in their class. Nikolay, who was deaf in one ear, never attended the academy with his brothers.
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. However his brothers Nikolai and Vladimir had not returned and his mother was in a state of panic. Eventually, his brothers did return having been caught as bystanders in a fight between the police and revolutionaries. Shortly thereafter, he received word that Tsar Nicholas the Second had been arrested and abdicated. When Alexeieff was in his teens, he was attracted to communism. However, the arrest and execution of his mother's brother by the Bolsheviks led him to rethink his position.
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. They landed in Vladivostok, where they took the last boat of the Tsar which was in the harbor. The boat went to Egypt where it was purchased by the British who kept the crew in order to transport coal from Southampton to Cairo. 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. Alexeieff started by working designing and painting sets for the Pioteff Theater. He lived in Montparnasse, a bohemian area of Paris.
Life in Paris
In 1923 he married Alexandra Alexandrovna Grinevskya, who had been sent to Paris in her childhood because she was the illegitimate daughter of a St. Petersburg dignitary. 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. Her mother was given a ticket back to Poland, her native country.When she grew up, Grinevskaya left her aunt to become one of the main actresses in the avant-garde Pitoeff Theater. 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. Their daughter Svetlana was born in 1923.
Alexeieff became well known in this period shortly after illustrating his first rare books. However, he lost one of his lungs while using nitric acid to do his aquatints and was forced to spend two years in a sanatorium. During that time Grinevsky-Alexeieff took his tools and taught herself how to engrave and became the bread winner for the family. While the invention of the pinscreen is often credited to Claire Parker and Alexeieff, Grinevsky-Alexeieff was the first to help Alexeieff build the pinscreen, with the help of her eight-year-old daughter.
Parker and Alexeieff
Claire Parker, a well-to-do American art student and graduate of MIT came to France in 1931 to study art. She saw Alexieff's work in a bookshop window and got the name of the artist as well as his address from the owner of the bookstore. She was so impressed she arranged to meet him and came to Vaux-le Penail where the Alexeieffs lived. She recalled later, "I figured I would meet an old, dignified man with a white beard... but I saw this tall, brown, handsome, aristocratic 30-year-old guy. Our first lesson ended on the banks of the Seine, hand in hand; and there was never a second one.".Alexeieff and his wife agreed to take Claire as a boarder and as a student. After a few months, Claire became Alexeieff's lover. Grinevsky accepted the situation with difficulty. They moved to Paris and rented several artist studios on The Left Bank. They collaborated on various projects. When they started to make films, Claire became the camera person and Grinevsky built and painted the props and sets for the films. However, after the first large pin screen was built, Parker and Alexeieff worked on it alone.
Alexeieff, Parker and Grinevskaya made about 25 stop motion-animated commercials to sustain themselves financially, though they reportedly did not see much difference between their "artistic" and "commercial" films. At times, when making traditional animated films and commercials they also had a fourth partner, animator Etienne Raik. Although most of the commercial and art films are credited to Alexeieff and Parker, it is difficult to separate the contributions of each of the individuals who had formed Alexeieff's team. The group included Alexandra Grinevsky, Etienne Raik, Pierre Gorodich and Georges Violet.
Both Grinevsky and Parker greatly contributed to the success of the films. Alexandra was more critical and had a sharper eye, Claire had better technical and mathematical skills. She was more patient with Alexeieff and praised him frequently while Grinevsky looked the other way Claire was quoted by her biographer as saying, “"Between us, he's the genius."
After building the first large pinscreen, Alexeieff and Parker began work on the first pinscreen film in 1931, Night on Bald Mountain, an adaptation of the piece by Modest Mussorgsky, his favorite Russian composer. The theme of Mussorgsky's composition and the film is a witches' Sabbath on the summer solstice on Mount Triglav, located near Kiev. However the film is less narrative and more poetic, a succession of images rather than a story. The film took the couple two years to make.
The technique of the pinscreen made it impossible to erase any of the images that had been shot after having drawn them. Once an image was shot, it was impossible to correct it. One had to wait until the film was back from the laboratory. Therefore, two years of work had been conceived in the dark so to speak. Adding to the impermanence of the pinscreen itself, Alexeieff made no sketches for the film, composing each shot in his head and filming them immediately.
The reception at the Pantheon Theater in Paris was extremely encouraging. 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. However, it soon became apparent that working on the pinscreen was time-consuming and therefore costly to use. Consequently, major studios never offered to use the pinscreen with the exception of the National Film Board of Canada.
In 1936 Alexeieff was hired by a German film group in Berlin to lead an animation studio. He made a few animated films for German products and returned to Paris right before the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria. When the Germans invaded the Netherlands and Belgium in 1940, Alexeieff expected to have German film producers come and ask him make propaganda films which he would have refused to do. Therefore, he packed their old Ford automobile and the family fled south in order to pick up visas at the US Embassy in Bordeaux.
Alexeieff divorced Alexandra Grinevsky and married Claire Parker in 1940 after they arrived in the States. Alexandra and Svetlana lived separately. In 1943, they moved to Canada and produced their second pinscreen film, In Passing, with funding from the National Film Board of Canada. It was released in 1944. The four returned to France in 1946.