Russian Film Symposium 2002:
Imperial Fatigue 2. The Films of Aleksandr Ptushko

The Symposium is supported by the Ford Foundation, with assistance from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research, University of Pittsburgh, and Carnegie Museum of Art.

Carnegie Museum of Art and the Russian Film Symposium will screen a series of four films by Soviet director Aleksandr Ptushko in brand new 35mm, English-subtitled prints of the restored original Russian-language versions. These prints are the result of a seven-year long restoration project between the American Cinematheque (Los Angeles) and Seagull Films (New York), with support from the Trust for Mutual Understanding and George Gund III. The films include The New Gulliver (USSR, 1935), The Stone Flower (USSR, 1946), Sadko (USSR, 1953), and Viy (USSR, 1967).

All films will be shown at the Carnegie Museum of Art, starting at 7.30pm.

Repeat screenings

Aleksandr Ptushko (1900-1973) has frequently (and somewhat inaccurately) been called "the Red M?i?" and "the Soviet Walt Disney," not just for his pioneering work in stop-motion animation in his pre-World War II films, but also for the way his post-war acted films are grounded in the narrative traditions and national consciousness of Soviet (and now Russian) citizens.  In fact, Ptushko's films are as remarkable for their technological innovations as they are for their visual celebration of Russian oral epics, fairy tales, and stories.

Ptushko's filmmaking career stretches across three distinct periods of Soviet political and cultural history: from the onset of Joseph Stalin's "cult of personality" (1934-1953), through Nikita Khrushchev's Thaw (1956-1964), and into Leonid Brezhnev's Stagnation (1964-1982).  Despite the marked differences of these three periods of Soviet history in political administration, state control over the arts, and cultural practices, Ptushko consistently directed films that enjoyed enormous popular success with both the Party elite and the general public.  Surprisingly, there has been no systematic study of Ptushko's films either in Russia or in the West.

Aleksandr Ptushko ("an ordinary genius," by his own description) was born in Lugansk, Ukraine.  Between 1923 and 1926 he studied at the Moscow Agricultural Institute, supporting himself by working as a reporter, actor, and artistic designer.  In 1927 he started to work as a designer of puppets for use in stage and screen productions, but by 1928 he directed his first short stop-motion animation films featuring Bratishkin (a character who appears in several films, initially as a puppet, but later as a cut-out figure): Incident at the Stadium (1928; no print survives), The Encoded Document (1928; no print survives), A Hundred Adventures (1929; no print survives), and Film to the Countryside (1930; no print survives).

In 1932 Ptushko joined the faculty of the State Institute for Filmmaking (VGIK) in Moscow, where he taught until 1949 as director of the Artistic Department.  As part of his duties at the Institute, Ptushko also wrote several monographs on film aesthetics and techniques that were aimed at specialists and general readers: Special Techniques of Filming (with L. Sukharebskii, 1930), Animation (1931), Composite and Trick Filmmaking (with N. Rynkovyi, 1948), and The Miracles of Cinema (1949).

In 1932, Ptushko also made the first sound puppet-animation film, The Lord of Daily Life, and in 1935 (two years before Walt Disney released Snow White!), Ptushko directed New Gulliver, the first full-length feature film in history to combine live-action footage with stop-motion animation, using more than 3,000 separate puppet characters, "most of them around three inches high. Variously made of clay, rubber, metal, wood, and cloth, each puppet had from two to 300 heads, depending on its expressions. Thus the puppets had to be manipulated and shifted, frame by frame, in a highly labor-intensive technique Ptushko called ?multiplication'"(J. Hoberman, "Plastic Fantastic," The Village Voice, 19-25 December 2001).  While serving as the head of Mosfilm's Puppet Animation Section, Ptushko directed several additional animation films, including The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish (1937) and The Jolly Musicians (1937).  In his last film of the pre-war period, The Golden Key (1939), Ptushko returned to combining stop-motion animation with live-action footage.

After World War II Ptushko turned to adapting texts (oral and written) for the screen: The Stone Flower (1946), Three Meetings (co-directed with Sergei Iutkevich and Vsevolod Pudovkin, 1948), Sadko (1953), Il'ia Muromets (1956), Sampo (1959), Scarlet Sails (1961), The Tale of Lost Time (1964), The Tale of Tsar Saltan (1966), and Ruslan and Liudmila (1972).  He also served as artistic director and filming supervisor for Konstantin Ershov's and Georgii Kropachev's debut film Viy (1967), based on Gogol''s story.

Ptushko's popularity with cinema-goers reached its apogee during the post-war stage of his career, starting with The Stone Flower―the most attended film in the Soviet Union in 1946 (more than 23 million viewers)―which won the International Prize for Color at the Cannes Film Festival.  The film was also awarded the USSR State Prize in 1947.  At the Venice Film Festival in 1953, Ptushko's Sadko received the Silver Lion, the festival's most prestigious prize.  In 1956, Ptushko released Il'ia Muromets, the first Soviet film shot in stereo and for the wide-screen (CinemaScope).  This film also made the Guinness Book of World Records for using the largest number of horses in a single film (over 11,000).

The popularity of Ptushko's films was not limited to viewing audiences in the Soviet Union.  Although his films were based on Russian fairy tales and fantastical stories, Ptushko's originality of visual composition, intermixing of puppets with live-action sequences, and strong narrative drive allowed his films easily to cross national and cultural boundaries.  In the United States, several of his films were re-edited, re-photographed from the original CinemaScope format to distorted pan-and-scan versions, and dubbed into English: Sampo was severely edited and released commercially as The Day the Earth Froze; Il'ia Muromets was shortened and released as The Sword and the Dragon.  Perhaps the most famous story of Ptushko's assimilation into American film culture concerns the fate of Sadko.  In 1962, Roger Corman, the undisputed "king of B-movies," purchased the rights to the film and shot a short, inexpensive "American" introductory sequence.  He then hired Francis Ford Coppola to recut the Russian original.  The film was released in the US as The Magic Voyage of Sinbad.

In 1969, four years before his death, Aleksandr Ptushko was awarded the honorary title of People's Artist of the USSR.