Director
Born 1901, Russia
 
Died 1982
Alexandre ALEXEIEFF
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Александр АЛЕКСЕЕВ
Alexandre ALEXEIEFF / ALEKSEEV
Filmography (extracts)
 
Director
1963 - The Nose (Нос) [animation, 11 mn]

Other films
1933 - Une Nuit sur le Mont Chauve / Ночь на Лысой горе
1935 - La Belle au Bois Dormant / Спящая красавица
1936 - Opta Empfangt L'Orchestre automatique
1936 - Parade des Sools
1937 - Étoiles Nouvelles
1943 - En passant / Мимоходом
1951 - Essais Pendulaires
1952 - Fumées
1953 - Masques
1954 - Nocturne
1954 - Les Rimes
1954 - Pure Beauté
1955 - La Sève de la Terre (film publicitaire pour Esso)
1956 - Quatre temps (blizzard) 1956 Bain d'X
1956 - Osram
1957 - Cocinor 1957 Nescafé 100%
1958 - Constance
1958 - Anonyme 1960 Etudes de Solides Illusoires
1960 - A propos de Jivago / По поводу Живаго
1961 - Automation 1961 Divertissement
1964 - L'Eau
1972 - Tableaux d’une exposition / Картинки с выставки
1980 - Trois thèmes / Три темы
 
Sites : IMDb, Chapaev, animator.ru

Author :

Awards :
The Nose :
- 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.
- Honorable Mention, Film of High Quality,French National Center for Cinematography, 1963.

Biography
The following informations are extracted from the article : Alexandre Alexeieff on Wikipedia Alexandre Alexandrovitch Alexeieff was born in Razan (April 18, 1901) and died in Paris (August 9, 1982).
He spent his early childhood in Istanbul where his father, Alexei Alexeieff, was a military attaché who died mysteriously in Baden-Baden, Germany on an official trip at the age of 37. Alexeieff's family settled in Gatchina, a suburb of St. Petersburg and later moved to nearby Lesnoi.
Alexeieff entered the Cadet School of Saint Petersburg at the age of seven. His favorite course was drawing.
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 then to Southampton. During the crossing a storm forced them to anchor in the French Riviera. Alexeieff decided to stay in France and started by working designing and painting sets for the Pioteff Theater.
In 1923, he married Alexandra Alexandrovna Grinevskya (1899–1976), who had been sent from St. Petersburg to Paris in her childhood. Their daughter Svetlana was born in 1923.
Claire Parker (1910–1981), 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 Parker (1910–1981), an American art student, 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.
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 symphony by Modest Mussorgsky, his Russian favorite composer. 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.
Alexeieff was hired by a German film group in Berlin to lead an animation studio in 1936. He made a few animated films for German products and returned to Paris right before the Anschluss, the German annexation of Austria.
Alexeieff divorced Alexandra Grinevsky and married Claire Parker in 1940 after they arrived in the States. Alexandra and Svetlana lived separatly. 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. Interestingly, the pin-screen was not animated for this sequence. Instead still shots were filmed while Orson Welles read Kafka's Prologue to The Trial 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.
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.
In all Alexeieff produced 6 films on the pinscreen, 41 advertising films and illustrated 41 books.
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. 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.
 

Photos and videos

L'écran épinglé