Toons Around The World, Stop-Motion Style: The Incomparable Wladyslaw Starewicz

Since the 2014 International Festival Of Animated Film at Annecy is presenting a retrospective of stop-motion master Władysław Starewicz (1882-1965), Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog blog shall also pay tribute to this visionary filmmaker.



It is noteworthy that the late, great producer-director-animator and historian Michael Sporn devoted his October 3, 2007 post to Wladislaw Starewicz, A.K.A. Ladislaw Starewicz, Ladislas Starevitch, Ladislaw Starevitch and Ladislaw Starewitch.



Michael wrote, "When I was young I had a 16mm print of The Revenge of the Kinematographic Cameraman, and I think I must have watched that print a couple of hundred times. I was absolutely intrigued with the accomplishment he had done in 1912 and felt, then, that it was on the same level as Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur."



Sporn continues, "I’ve seen a number of his films at the Museum of Modern Art and was completely taken with his technique and craft in the film, The Magical Clock (1928) (aka The Little Girl Who Wanted to Be a Princess). The film includes some amazing combinations of Live Action with stop motion animation."



When someone innocently asks this blogger, Paul F. Etcheverry (A.K.A. Psychotronic Paul), "what's your favorite film?" one response that always gets the conversational ball rolling is, "that love triangle tale in which all the characters are dead insects - LOVE IT, LOVE IT, LOVE IT!"



Now generally that will stop the boring conversation dead in its tracks and enable Your Blogmeister to grab a few more pungent cheeses and hors d'oeuvres (and as long as no one actually finds out this blogger's favorite films would actually be gorgeous, pristine uncut 35mm nitrate prints of the entire Starewicz film series featuring Duffy The Mascot, A.K.A. La Fetiche).



On the rare occasion that someone follows up by asking who would actually make a movie starring dead insects, the short answers go something like this:

• Moscow-born innovator of stop-motion animation
• Produced films in Lithuania, Russia and France over six decades
• An entomologist by training, inspired to make animated films by the groundbreaking works of fellow visionary and filmmaking/animation pioneer Émile Cohl

That would be the incredible Władysław Starewicz.



Fascinated by zoology, Starewicz began his career as a documentary filmmaker for the natural history museum at Kovno, Lithuania.



Starewicz wanted to dramatize a fight to the finish between stag beetles, but the bugs, nocturnal creatures that they were, fell asleep whenever the lights came on. Solution: make dead insects into puppets by replacing the beetles' legs with wire, attached with sealing wax to their thorax. It worked - and started Starewicz on a new career in animation. Stop-motion technique was born - before Willis O'Brien, before Charley Bowers.




The finished film, "The Battle of the Stag Beetles", A.K.A. Lucanus Cervus, released by the Aleksandr Khanzhonkov studio of Moscow, followed the masterpieces by Émile Cohl among the first animated films.



In 1911, Starewicz left the Kovno natural history museum, moved to Moscow and began making stop-motion animated shorts for Khanzhonkov. The best known of these early Starewicz films is still the 1912 insect infidelity tale The Revenge Of The Kinematograph Cameraman.



The beetles (not Beatles), grasshoppers and more would be the unwitting and unlikely stars of numerous Starewicz films in 1911-1914, including Insects' Aviation Week, Four Devils and Voyage To The Moon.



He made the transition to live-action features and would be a prolific live-action director in the World War I years, before the Starewicz family fled Russia during the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Władysław would resume his animation career in Paris, setting up shop in the former studio of Georges Méliès.



Władysław Starewicz changed his name to Ladislas Starevich, moved into a villa in Fontenay-sous-Bois, and spent the rest of his life there, continuing his work as a filmmaker, inventor, puppeteer and originator of stop-motion animation technique.



One of the studio's most ambitious films is The Tale Of The Fox, A.K.A. Le Roman de Renard, a feature that took took ten years to plan and eighteen months to produce.



Assisting in many of the elaborate stop-motion animation productions: Władysław's daughter, Irina Vladislavovna Starewicz.



After acting as Nina Starr frequently in the studio's silent films, Irina would contribute both animation and story to many of its brilliant sound movies.





Favorite of all the delirious, wildly imaginative fever-dreams of the great Wladislaw Starewicz? The answer remains The Mascot (A.K.A Duffy The Mascot, La Fetiche).



The epic stop-motion film remains the closest thing imaginable to a Hieronymus Bosch painting translated to the medium of puppet animation. Even though The Mascot post-dated Rene Clair's Entracte, and the Dadaists and Surrealists, it could teach all of them a thing or two about how to be truly surreal.



Léona Béatrice Martin-Starewitch has been the caretaker of her grandfather's legacy; she maintains the archives and preserves his original puppets and writes the official Wladyslaw Starewicz website.



She is responsible for curating several DVDS released in France by Doriane Films, including the feature The Tale Of The Fox. Due to the Region 2 encoding, these WILL NOT play on the Region 1 DVD players that are the standard in the United States and Canada.



One will require a region-free or multi-region PAL/NTSC DVD player to view these official releases from the Starewicz archives.



Monsieur Blogmeister appreciates what Doriane Films is doing and includes these releases, along with any retrospectives of The Morecambe And Wise Show, as persuasive reasons to purchase a region-free DVD player!



For stop-motion animation mavens here in the U.S. who do not have multi-region PAL/NTSC players, there was a DVD release available from Milestone Video - now, unfortunately, out-of-print - which featured a selection of the Eastern European stop-motion master's filmmaking genius. It's well worth scouting around for a used or remaindered copy.



These DVDs and occasionally a used copy of The Cameraman's Revenge And Other Fantastic Tales are available for purchase from Amazon. They also can be ordered from the Doriane Films website.



Era Film produced a documentary about him titled The Bug Trainer. Don't know if it has been released theatrically or on DVD in the United States yet, however, but look forward to seeing it.



After the Annecy Festival, there will be screenings by Institut Français of “Les Fables de Starewitch d’après La Fontaine” at the Yokohama Festival in Kanagawa, Japan, which transpires from June 28th to July 4th.



Wladislaw Starewicz remains one of the singularly most brilliant, original and innovative minds in the history of animation.

Who are our favorite stop-motion animators here at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog? One would be the surrealist Jan Švankmajer!



Darkness Light Darkness (1990) by Jan Svankmajer (mp4 360p) from cnc-asso on Vimeo.





Another stop-motion master is the great Henry Selick!



Henry Selick - ON THE SET PRODUCING CORALINE

Quay Brothers - The Cabinet of Jan Švankmajer

The following DVD can still be ordered via Amazon.com.



For more info, check out Eric Schneider's piece, Entomology And Animation: A Portrait Of An Early Master: Ladislaw Starewicz in Animation World Magazine, as well as this scholarly article penned for the Senses Of Cinema website by Adrian Danks, president and co-curator of the Melbourne Cinémathèque.

































The Brothers Quay! bros quay the comb

Today's Fun Fact

Eighty years ago today, on December 3, 1930, at a screening of the new, provocative feature film by surrealists Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, L' Age D'Or (A.K.A. The Golden Age), members of the pro-fascist organization The League Of Patriots went on the offensive, attacking members of the audience and hurling ink at the screen. As if merely breaking up the screening and beating up attendees were insufficient, the brownshirts also destroyed art works on display in the lobby by Dalí, Joan Miró, Man Ray, Yves Tanguy and others.



The first question that comes to mind would be just what Dalí and Buñuel's dadaist epic, did to make the bluenoses in 1930 go berserk, at least two years before goose-stepping fascist groups truly became the rage throughout Western Europe.



Well, for starters, there's the ol' subject (referred to by one of this blogger's favorite movie director-writers, Preston Sturges, as "Topic A") of sex. The kind of kinky seen in L' Age D'Or and strongly implied in Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel and G.W. Pabst's films, never quite hit the silver screen on Main Street U.S.A., but unabashed sexiness reigned in commercial movie theatres via the popular pre-code romps starring Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer diva Norma Shearer, Jean Harlow and other early 1930's favorites.

L'Age D'Or, yes indeedy do, was the first of many Buñuel "love letters" to the Roman Catholic Church, calculated to offend, thumbing its cinematic nose at convention every step of the way; it was less overtly violent than its predecessor, Dalí and Buñuel's short surrealist film Un Chien Andalou (The Andalusion Dog), but demonstrated quite a bit more interest in fetishes and obsessive sexual urges. In both films, all societal, moral and religious taboos were fair game. Of course, the snotty, Pavlovian response from present-day movie buffs, brandishing Criterion Collection and Kino International DVDs is. . . WTF do you expect from a Luis Buñuel flick - freakin' Mary Pollyanna Poppins Of Green Gables On The Prairie?



The following excerpt from L' Age D'Or is, without a doubt, beloved by sculptors and shoe salesmen alike.



L' Age D'Or was officially banned a week later. Save for one unpublicized screening at New York City's Museum Of Modern Art in 1933, it did not have its official U.S. premiere until November 1, 1979 at the Roxie Cinema in San Francisco. Buñuel would, with the exception of the 1932 documentary Land Without Bread, not make another film until Los Olvidados in 1950.



Now one can see Dalí and Buñuel's anarchic opus, complete with further background info, in its entirety on YouTube. In evidence throughout the dadaist, finger and toe-sucking extravaganza: pungent irony, revulsion for upper-crust decadence, and the creative, striking uses of the camera, framing and editing that would be notable throughout Buñuel's filmmaking career.

Keep in mind just who was offended by L'Age D'Or, modern art in general, and just about anything threatening the social order (except - inevitably - wars, always regarded as not just A-OK but peachy by zealots, censors, hypocrites, would-be moralists, corrupt politicians and especially weapons profiteers).




Want something offensive? Hmmmmm - let's see. How about the craven cowardice of those who protected priests who committed molestations? How about the treatment of women in Moslem nations? How about suicide bombers and jihadists of all denominations? Now that's offensive!

And for the rest of this year, I promise to return to levity on this blog. Please forgive me, readers!