Alexandre Alexeieff

Alexandre 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. Alexandre had two older brothers, Vladimir and Nikolai. Vladimir committed suicide after contracting syphilis, but 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. Alexieff's father died mysteriously in Baden-Baden, Germany on an official trip at the age of 37. After the death of his father, Alexieff and his family went to live with his mother's brother-in-law near Odessa, then to Riga and finally settled in the town of Gatchina, Russia near Saint Petersburg. Later, they would move to the nearby town of Lesnoi. While in Riga, Alexeieff saw a film for the very first time which made an impression on him. 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.

In 1923 he married Alexandra Alexandrovna Grinevskya (1899–1976), an actress at the Pitoeff theatre who had been sent to Paris in her childhood because she was the illegitimate daughter of a St. Petersburg dignitary. 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, his wife took his tools and taught herself how to engrave in order to financially support the family. While the invention of the pinscreen is often credited to Claire Parker and Alexeieff, Alexandra Grinevskya was the first to help Alexeieff build the pinscreen, with the help of her eight-year-old daughter.

Claire Parker (1906–1981), 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 [instead] 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. They moved to Paris and rented several artist studios where 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. 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 (En passant), with funding from the National Film Board of Canada. It was released in 1944. The four returned to France in 1946.

When Parker and Alexeieff returned to Paris, they made a number of advertising films. Alexeieff invented a technique called Totalization of Illusory Solids or simply Totalization. This process involves filming a moving object at long exposures to capture the trace of the path of motion. The resulting image gives the appearance of a solid object. For example, the path of a pendulum filmed in this fashion would appear to be a solid semicircle. This technique gave their advertisements a unique look. Alexeieff and Parker also continued to make films using the pin screen. In 1962, they used it to make the prologue to Orson Welles' film adaptation of Franz Kafka's novel The Trial. This marks the only mainstream, widely distributed film that Alexeieff and Parker were involved with. The pin-screen was not animated for this sequence. Instead still shots were filmed while Orson Welles read Kafka's parable "Before the Law" over it. 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 film tells the story of a Russian official who loses his nose and the adventures of the nose itself as well as the barber who finds the nose. On 7 August 1972, Alexeieff and Parker were invited back to Canada in order to demonstrate the pinscreen to a group of animators at the National Film Board of Canada. This demonstration was filmed, and released by the NFB as Pin Screen. This film appears on disk 7 of Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition, along with Pinscreen Tests (1961). In the same year, they also released another film again, based on Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. This film used two pinscreens. In front of the main pinscreen, they installed a second, smaller one. This second pinscreen could be rotated thus giving more of an illusion of three-dimensionality. However, the film was never completed. Their last film, Three Moods (Trois thèmes), was made on the pinscreen, and first shown in Milan, Italy, in March 1980. It was based on three works by Mussorgsky. Parker died in 1981 in Paris, and Alexeieff followed Claire by a year. The two are buried in Nice, France. He and Parker left no children. Although Alexeieff and Parker strove to create serious works of art and shunned any commercialization in their films (excluding their paid work doing advertisements, of course), when asked what her favorite films were, Parker answered "The ones with Tom Mix and his beautiful white horse!"

Alexeieff is most famous for his invention of the pinscreen which he used to make about 6 short films. The pinboard on which Alexeieff created his films is an upright perforated board, three by four feet, into which a million headless steel pins have been inserted. When the pins are pushed forward and lighted obliquely, they create an entirely black surface on the front of the Pinboard. When they are pushed back, the white of the board shows through. In between the pins create various shades of grey. The first prototype of the pinscreen was made by Alexandra Grinevsky with the help of her daughter Svetlana. It consisted of a canvas perforated with a grid into which pins were inserted. Later on Claire Parker and Alexeieff built the first large pinscreen which was used to film Night on Bald Mountain. The Parker family paid for the construction of it. Alexeieff never made sketches before he created the images on the screen. He conceived each of the stages on the positive side of the screen while Claire worked on the back side of it. Small man made tools were used to produce various patterns on the board. Such everyday instruments as forks, spoons, knives, brushes, cups, prisms and rolling pins were used. Each of the frames was created one at a time, in a process that required delicate, painstaking attention to detail. The only follower of Alexeieff, Jacques Drouin of the National Film Board of Canada, has made several films using this technique, most notably Mindscape (Le Paysagiste).

Alexeieff at the Pinboard (1960) – documentary filmed in their Paris studio Portrait of Alexeieff (1971) – documentary by Maurice Debeze. Pin Screen (1972) – documentary of a pinscreen demonstration at the National Film Board of Canada Dreams about Alfeoni (2002) - documentary by Vladimir Nepevny