Elena Butuşină

Babes-Bolyai University,

elena.butusina@gmail.com

 

 

The Little Grey Wolf Will Come to Heal the Wounds of the Red Era

 

 

Abstract: This article analyses the theoretical and stylistic background of soviet auteur animation, with its political and social implications. It presents the relation between the actual context and the possibility of subterfuge, and proves that, in order to avoid censorship, animators had to subvert and revisit poetic theories that could be tackled both according to the socialist system and against it. Given its strong impact on younger generations, Russian auteur animation developed a defense system that consisted of intense poetical, emotional and fragmentary content. This poetics of escapism explains the creation of the best animation film of all times – Yuri Norstein’s “Skazka Skazok”, whose leitmotif song inspires the title of the article.

Keywords: Soviet Union; Animation Movies; Yuri Norstein; Tale of Tales; Escapism, Authorship.

 

Motto: “The studio head thought he’d scare me with that bit of paper because he himself lived by those rules. That’s an illustration of internal and external freedom. He thought his external freedom gave him power over people. He didn’t know anything about inner freedom. He was chained to his masters. He was amazed and even frightened when I refused to change the film.”[1]

 

When it comes to animation, the question of negotiating boundaries of acceptance, stands for the subtlest changes taking place inside the process of creation. The figure of the animator or cartoonist is one that resembles, in many ways, that of an alchemist that negotiates degrees of understanding the world and the potential of inventing new rules and mechanisms for perceiving what lies behind it. The act of perception itself, with its essentially subjective and emotional background – both that of the public and that of the artist – motivates the author in his search, as well as the characters, within a world with second-level meanings. Although animation is, primarily, a matter of skills, it touches permanently upon important questions of semiotics and cultural studies. This article examines, therefore the manner in which Russian animation managed to develop and survive during the Soviet era, with an emphasis on the work of the celebrated artist Yuri Norstein and on his poetic masterpiece – the animation film Skazka skazok (a.k.a Tale of Tales). The peculiarities of Norstein’s approach stand for many artists’ refusal to submit to the ideological pattern of a totalitarian society and for their escapism into an alternative reality where truth pervades the expression and where one can almost freely interpret the multiple layers of meaning.

 

Context and subterfuge

 

A closer look at the social and political context in which Norstein produced his work reveals the strong attitude that artists like him had to oppose the principles of a system that stated socialist realism as a guiding line and asked for simplicity, forced optimism and positive heroes. Under these circumstances, what would the anti-hero look like and what ways out would an unconventional creator find in order to express his feelings towards and observations of the world he lived in? State cinematography was under the direct surveillance of the political regime, whereas animation was thought of as a particularly manipulative device during the socialist era, due to its direct effect on the younger, better educated generation. Centralized and quietly monitored at all times, shelved or hidden in the forbidden black box when too avant-garde or stylistically disobedient, animation works produced during the soviet area could not even reach the international festivals of their moment. A brief freedom was sometimes offered to the fortunate few that enjoyed prestige after winning international acclaim. In like situations, the artist would be free to work according to his own inspiration, yet it would not last long. But these cases were rare. Whereas not permitted a voyage abroad Norstein, for instance, when awarded the prize for the best animation film of all times, at the Zagreb World Festival of Animated Films (1980), could not be denied the prize either, in the face of the international community. A representative of KGB therefore went to Zagreb and received the prize on Norstein’s behalf. The animation was not popular at all inside the Soviet Union, and there had been no real state support behind its creation. The period to come found Yuri Norstein a true persona non grata in his own country, depriving him of the success he deserved and of the international interest to which, under normal conditions, he should’ve reacted promptly. Meanwhile, the Occident acquired a paradoxical vision of soviet animation, neglecting the various nuances the phenomenon was to acquire inside the totalitarian bloc – a fact most probably caused by the lack of communication between artists and the western audience that was always keen of getting a bit of exotic visions and stylistic renewal from the east. The projects and the traditions that animations stemmed from in Russia and in the oriental world were generally perceived quite monolithically by the Westerners. Bearing the powerful mark of the Russian artistic patrimony, from the iconic force of the image to the poetic kinship with Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and the subterranean trends during the communist regime, these creations might have seemed obscure, if not odd, to the western audience, as they asked to be watched through different cultural lenses. Nevertheless, animation did not confide too much of its meaning to words, as literature did, resting on a rather visual kind of emotion.

When Tale of Tales was created, during the ‘70s, it was first classified in children’s films and cartoons area of the cultural production, a previous point of official interest during the cinema of the Khrushchev Thaw. This was probably due to the filmic realist approaches to the young socialist generation and to its emergent problems. Estrangement from the world and from the family was expressed by the predilection for themes including juvenile crime, aggression and delinquency. The younger ones, children especially, were presented as though they were the real means by which the older generation could be changed. It was an image instrumented to the point that it actually used an innocent image in order to provide the public unconscious with socialist patterns of behaviour and thinking. Later on exploited successfully during the glasnost era, the idea that there is a hidden potential to violence in young people’s persona was used in films with the task of stigmatizing the weak and the apparently indifferent ones. But the most prominent fact here was the solitude, the misunderstanding and the isolation to which these people were subjected. The destiny of many auteur animation films realized during the 60s and 70s in the USSR and the trajectory of their characters prove the lack of integration and the alienating effects of society on the individual. Sometimes too subtle to be pointed out clearly, these “inadequacies” caused, on behalf of the Committee members, the invention of the weirdest pretexts for impeding the release of the picture. Unlike the literary samizdat, animation productions could not work too well when clandestine. Therefore, though paradoxical, ambivalent, or contradictory, they meant a lot at the time, as their reflections and related research went far beyond the official requirement. Nothing was accidental during the time, as one can see from today’s perspective, and the intricate puzzle completed by all the pieces re-creates, at a smaller scale, the general situation of negotiating creativity and obedience during the time.

During Khrushchev, the early 1960s were a sort of Belle Époque for the Russians. Yet, the central Committee of the Communist Party demanded, through the state decree of 1962, that “weak films” should not be realized anymore, as they were considered to be lacking in ideological value. What the state was after was simple, daily issues presented on the screen. On the other hand, an analysis of reality that would go too deep would not be tolerated, either. Soyuzmultfilm, the most important studio for animation in Russia, had been created in 1936 and primarily worked on productions rooted on soviet Russia folklore. Supervised by Goskino, the state committee for cinematography, this studio benefited, from time to time, from breaths of fresh air, as some of its heads took the part of the rebellious animators and assumed the position of virtual “pullers of wool” over Goskino’s eyes. This was the case of Natasha Abramova, script editor at Soyuzmultfilm, thus reckoned by Clare Kitson in her monograph dedicated to Norstein’s masterpiece[2]. The energetic figure of Abramova helped Norstein continue his work on the Tale of Tales, though the authorities got lost inside the film’s ambiguity and asked for huge modifications of its structure. The lack of correct administration of Goskino and the pressure exerted by the Russian Diaspora within the international circles, favored the granting of the State Prize to Norstein’s cartoon (though a preliminary condition had been that of accepting the changes decided by Goskino) and the running of the film in cinemas in Moscow and abroad. Yet, these isolated fortunate cases were shaded by the mainstream productions that exhibited the healthy principles of the socialist realism. Significantly enough, a detached viewer observes the survival of lonesome, abandoned, aphasic, homeless characters, one of which – Cheburashka – became the very emblem of the state animation studio. His identity speaks for itself: with no determined gender, name or belonging, Cheburashka was ultimately a useless piece of the greater soviet system and, only when obedient, was accepted within society and rewarded.[3]

In Norstein’s case, Goskino wanted Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, a writer certified by the state, to write the script. The documentation of the whole production shows that Norstein had actually worked so poetically and obscure that any specific authorship is denied. A critical eye discovers the script of Tale of Tales to be a strange mélange of Ana Akhmatova, Norstein and Petrushevskaya, in search of a sordid everyday that reveals its poetry. Anyway, the state’s decision could not be eluded so that, in order to start working on the project, Norstein changed the original script, but kept the frame that could make all these small histories converge. Thus, Goskino would accept the lack of clarity of the content, as long as the form endorsed such an approach. The relative openness of the Brezhnev era did not permit authors to be straightforward. From Norstein’s confessions, one learns that, apart from the attempt to dress truth with poetry on the part of the artist, there was “an enormous amount of secret strategy being planned by various upright groups in an attempt to subvert the political authorities. The Soyuzmultfilm branch of this mafia would support Tale of Tales throughout its pre-production and production and after it was completed, when it was rejected for distribution and shelved for a time.”[4]Perhaps the most important position there was the responsible for the script-editing unit, a position first occupied by Arkadi Snesarev and, later on, by animator Feodor Khitruk. These people were supposed to report to Goskino any visible transgression of the principles of socialist realism. But what could they do when it came to poetry and emotional unexplainable? Context worked intensely on filmic production during those years, and the risk was that, years after, when the animation films once censored were finally run uncensored on television, during the early years of the glasnost, the impact was not as strong as it would’ve been years before. There was a strange type of autopoiesis between the socio-historical background that generated the animation, the way audiences would have perceived it back then and the freed perspective of the 80s. The Tale of Tales is, finally, a story of its own time and it could not have been created somewhere else or in a different moment.

 

A poetics for escapism

 

It is important to note that that many of the films on adolescence in Brezhnevian Stagnation began to explore the role of childhood memories in a non-linear and, consequently, fragmentary manner.[5] During the 60s, animators began to experiment more with form and contents, focusing among other on the phenomenon of children’s alienation in the modern world. Apart from the thematic of decay, transgression and isolation, animation auteur films pleaded for a poetics of discreet transgression and subterfuge. What auteur animation films brought, as it turned out from the strong polemic with mainstream productions, was the idea of a second layer of interpretation, rooted in the film theories of Russian cinema pioneers. In their strong emotional impact, the camera movements transcend language and epochs, aiming at transmitting something beyond the present determinations of life. The influence of the ideological next to the emotional was a well-known fact during the soviet era. And the disputes of the patriarchs of Russian cinema, Eisenstein and Vertov, stand for it, bearing a powerful influence on the next decades. During the 20s, Dziga Vertov had also worked on politically infused animation in a cartoon called Soviet Toys. In his acknowledged masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov worked intensely toward creating the in-depth force of each frame. Beyond the everyday life scenes, in a succession whose speed is given by the absence of the inter-titles, the montage allows for the camera to become active and to generate multiple layers of meaning, some of which, of course, would unconsciously offer the subtle path to a certain manner of reading the film. Thus, the movements of the camera speak about the way the film was made, but also about the way it should be read. The creation of the intricate relation between the social, the political and the emotional probably had one of its first theoretical groundings in Vertov’s intention to assemble the cine-facts in order “to build up an impressionistic, ambivalent, and non-directive portrayal of life within the Soviet Union”.[6] The textual and perceptual indeterminacy reached by his cinema lead him to conceptualize something that the formalists had already explored: zhizn’v rasplokh (life caught unawares) and kinoglaz (film-eye – the attempt to capture the nebulous that lies beyond the facts of everyday life)[7]. Meanwhile, Eisenstein considered this approach to lack purpose and brought in the ideological in order to manipulate the spectator. The reflective film-eye that Vertov defended should be replaced by the film-fist (kinokulaki), Eisenstein believed, despite Vertov’s wish to educate a self-directed spectator, able to “scrutinize the impressionistic montage structure”[8]. Regarding the relation between reality and fiction, Norstein worked intuitively, confessing afterwards: “First I made the film, then I found out it was a metaphor! But for me it’s all reality!”[9] Obviously, Norstein’s work can easily be related with the work of these two theoreticians, whose impact on his own formation he acknowledged. Paradoxically enough, though Eisenstein’s poetics of fragmenting the visual text and choreographing the montage are carried further by Norstein, other concepts of the first one go rather against the grain when contrasted with works such as Tale of Tales. Eisenstein for instance associated pathos with the theory of dialectical and historical materialism, i.e. with the cinematic representations of socialist heroism, rooted in the revolutionary reality, rather than in the subjective world of an artist. Quietism and pathos, considered to be reflective and immersive, were, in this respect, “a residue of decadent bourgeois culture”.[10] Nevertheless, pathos must create in the audience an empathy between the viewing experience and the spirit of the film. When achieved properly, this moment leads to ecstasy (another concept central to Eisenstein’s film theory), “the spectator is lifted outside of himself (…) to an intense intellectual and emotional identity”.[11] Shklovsky’s ostranenie or cognitive distanciation, another concept at the core of the emotional experience, is one more theoretical lesson visible in Norstein’s work. But, whereas ostranenie pervades Tale of Tales, Eisenstein’s concepts are being re-visited, sometimes turned upside-down, revealing an ambivalence that stands, once again, for the way artists negotiated boundaries in order to express themselves freely. Although this poetic influence might not be deliberate, it demonstrates the creative kinship of some of Russia’s best cinematographers and the fact that the cultural and ideological background pervades their work unconsciously.

There is a strong bond between the micro-cosmic world captured by the camera of the animator and the small life he would live on the greater stage of the USSR. As a direct result, the realistic approach became multiform, given the various poetic experiments of the moment. The act of legitimizing a poetic cinema instead of the prose one had been a major matter for discussion during the 60s. It actually meant creating a contained image instead of a representational one. Reinvention, reorganization and revelation were what this new generation of directors sought. Paradjanov, for instance, believed that the visual language had to explain the event. Along with his colleagues, he wanted to reinvent time and the movements of the image. Tarkosvky tried to create the image of an eternal Russia in films that were both historical and meta-historical. The 60s witnessed a crisis in the realm of the cinema, mostly with external causes, and the answer Tarkovsky found was to push the boundaries of autobiography and lyricism. Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, on the other hand, reacted to this by trying to build the stage for a huge show in his cinematic work.[12] This is how a whole poetics of memory was borne, with the persistence of flash-back technique, almost a mannerism of the directors. One decade later, during the 1970s and the years to follow, Goskino supervised the film production both financially and ideologically. The authors had to obey this external policy (all of them bearing the mark of the membership in the Cinematographers’ Union), more or less silently waiting for an opportunity to reach the western world, and when this did not happen, they isolated themselves in passivity. The number of films shelved during those days, in view of a better day, is an illustration of this situation. Once again paradoxically, perestroika turned cinema into a guiding light in the process of cultural reconstruction intended by Gorbachev. May 1986 represents the date of the 5^th congress of Cinematographers’ Union, and the moment when Goskino lost its control over film production, being left only with an organizing function. Directors were, from then onwards, free to express themselves.

 

Authorship duplicity

 

The eastern animation stage has been dominated ever since by three major directions: Disney, Zagabria and the independent/ auteur/ out-of-style school. The identity of these schools was eloquent for the official and unofficial tendencies of animation production in the eastern bloc. Compared to Disney and approximately at the same time, Zagabria School brought a totally new approach to animation, as it introduced what Disney rejected, that is to say themes like death, old age, sex, illness, violence, social constraints. Their aesthetics was much more mature, assuming a past of artistic experiments with black humour, surrealism, boundless chromatic freedom and dissolution of fix definite shapes and contours.[13] Some critics even consider it one of the roots for what would later become ‘manga’ or pornographic animation, as it dealt with almost everything society stigmatized. This was a school as authors treated similar themes, yet never in similar manners. Before Disney and Zagabria, animation in the soviet space was first dominated by constructivism, with an emphasis on the individual turned into a robot, strongly manipulated. How could these approaches to mankind and to the individual survive such an era, when Starewicz’s animation, for instance, showing world as it was, apart from the ideological frames, were never welcomed? It is definitely one of the paradoxes that undermined the artistic creation of the time, allowing some huge moments of artistic freedom to live, and suppressing some other ones from their very birth.

German or Russian, dictatorships emphasized man’s submission to the world of the senses and to physicality by means of physical education, torture, the highly emotional style of official speeches, the support given to realist and naturalist cinema productions[14]. A natural counter-movement was the tendency to abstraction, whose subversive potential could not pass unnoticed by the authorities. Counter-mainstream artists went against the official ethic, stating man’s ability to free himself of passion and revealed the emotional depths of man’s soul. The visual analysis of these emotional depths had been thought of ever since Eisenstein who, writing about the natural and the artificial creation, considered the emotional landscapes to have a musical structure. He accused some of Disney creations, such as Bambi, of lacking a sense of music, though Walter Disney was a master in creating audio-visual equivalents of music by interpreting the internal graphic structure of music. The oriental legacy worked well in this case, as allusion becomes essential in the process of de-materialization of the landscape into emotion. The technique turns into a carrier of not only poetic messages, but of moral and ideological one, too. [15] It represented a way out for expressing true emotion without being accused of evident disobedience. Authors confirmed themselves by stressing their different position within the system.

The comparison with the West stands for both a silent competition sometimes, and for a search of one’s own expressive resources. Mainstream cartoon Nu, pogodi!, perhaps one of the best known for Romanian audience, was realized by a director whose self-acknowledged lessons were the western cartoons brought to USSR from Germany after WW2. The author, Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin, admired the straightforwardness of the westerners, despising the obscurity of the auteur mannerism. He had permanently dismissed the idea that there is any subtext to his creation (even those ideas stating that the confrontation between the Wolf and the Hare symbolized that between the working class and the Inteligentsia).[16] Authorship has always been essential, but during the soviet era, it was a matter of silent rebellion, too. Admitting the influence of the west, looking for the roots of one’s own folk identity or trying to build an identity of one’s own, were the general tendencies of the animators, and, according to their degree of subtlety and to their own luck, their creations managed to acquire visibility. Bendazzi,[17]one of the most renowned animation historians, supports the above mentioned idea by giving the example of the Czech artist Jiři Trnka, who, apart from the strong thematic, uses hieratic movements, lights and frames – essential elements for the message. This stylistic duplication of the message, meant to avoid the straightforwardness that would have provoked censorship, is a feature of most of the best animated films of the period 1960-1980. The alchemic technique animation offered situated the artist in a liminal state. In 1983, Romanian animator Zoltan Szilagy confessed: “the artist moves from this world to the other. When coming back from the other one, he sets it on paper or on film so that his contemporaries get to know it. The journey itself is dangerous because, if at his return, the artist is no longer understood, he will be marginalized just like the fool – the one that always lives on the other side of the world.”[18]

Stylistically and thematically related to Tarkovsky and Mikhalkov, with a strong Eisensteinian epic legacy, as well as a Chekhovian one, Norstein created egocentric (because marginalized) characters and surrounded them by a strong surreal dimension, turning his cartoons into poems that find themselves between dream and reality and revealing imagination as the basic function of mind when confronted with life and reality. Considering style to be only a plastic moment that an artist had to overcome, Norstein thought he was a re-interpreter of the true Russian tradition – a tradition that the so-called “folkloric” mainstream movies treated superficially. Though first labeled as belonging to a bourgeois subjectivity, Norstein always kept alive his interest in the psychology of the Russian people. Perhaps what stands for his strong identification with this heritage comes out from his own words: “What type of spectator do I have in mind when working? It might seem paradoxical, buy I rather think of myself”.[19] Thus, in a strange process of come-and-go, his creation opposed individual feelings and relationships to the collective manifestations of the time. The double-faced fact is that there is a strong dependence between the general atmosphere of that time in the USSR and the degree of symbolization and depth of the animations. To exemplify, Norstein confessed: “you should only work with the injured part. All the rest is meaningless. And you only get that feeling at home. It would certainly disappear if you went abroad. And the result would be nothing more than a very pleasant film (…). That’s why I can’t leave.”[20] The whole structure of the animation film Tale of Tales, as well as its technique, accentuates, poetically, the inner torment of its author. It is as if egos were to superpose on every inch of film so that, in the end, the question of authorship is too delicate and fragile to be separated, discussed and, as it had happened so often, censored.

 

A background for the best animation film of all times

 

The aesthetic principles discussed above offered the moving terrain for artists to negotiate their creations before the state authorities and before a public that was more or less aware of what lies behind the actual story. Before Norstein, it was the patriarchs of Russian cinema that started the process of negotiation, theorizing it and, surprisingly enough, not leaving any clear statement about their position. For the ones inside the USSR, clear statements, when against the system, were an almost impossible choice. This is the case of Feodor Khitruk, the head of Soyuzmultfilm during Norstein’s work on the Tale of Tales. An animator himself, Khitruk tackled themes like the lack of communication and human isolation in a manner that seemed to accuse the capitalist world for the situation; on the contrary, seen today, his preoccupation with the hierarchies, the permanent fear and the pressure exercised by the masses unveil well-known elements of the communist world. At the beginning of the Thaw, Khitruk even introduced in his Story of One Crime a rhetoric question: “Who is really guilty? We hope that the people who’ll decide the fate will see the film and understand everything…” The thing to understand is that, contrary to all beliefs, the apparent is fake. What Khitruk did while running Soyuzmultifilm was to preserve a frame for animation productions that would keep the authorities unaware and help the content maintain its ambiguity. Thus, his Man in the Frame parodies some bureaucrat’s incapacity to ascend a hierarchy in spite of the progressive negative remarks in his file (“no, no, no, was not, don’t have, didn’t participate, never arrested, wasn’t, he will not”). The character’s only accomplishment was the frame inside which his figure was content, one more reason to understand the series of negativities that the man had to undergo in order to fit the frame.

Fortunately, Norstein’s past had been one of an artist forbidden to fit the frame. In the early 1950s, he was not allowed to attend the drawing and painting club for youth because of his Jewish origin, and his father had been fired without any explanation, one of the reasons for his premature death. Failed when trying to become a student of Belle Arte and then forced to work in a furniture factory in order to survive, Norstein attended a short class in animation at Soyuzmultfilm. His first works, Heron and Crane and Fox and Hare, revealed his preoccupation for the marginal and the inadequate. Although treated with a maximum of respect to common sense and with great innocence, these subjects followed him throughout his career and they could not be denied the subtext. Unlike his fellow Andrey Khrzhanovsky whose Glass Harmonica and Once There Was a Man Called Kozyavin were totally censured and forbidden, Norstein wanted to both follow his credo and survive. For him, talent was a matter of survival during peace-time. “For in war-time everything is intense – everything is precisely defined, clear. The personal coincides completely with the public. Everyone knows what to do and how to live. But during peace-time, it’s easy in your everyday life gradually to lose your way. Everything gets forgotten very quickly.”[21] What Norstein sought, apart from artistic beauty, was the activation of an emotional memory – the only area of the collective mental whose ingenuity should react to the elements Norstein brought together in Tale of Tales. He appeals to a public sensitive to the memory objects preserve, using principles from both classical painting and post-revolutionary art. As a result, background and close-ups coalesce and, in between, the small actions happen, just like in real life, where Norstein had to work under the pressure of the authorities (the big, official history) and of his private memories (the transient world he tried to capture). There is a strong emphasis on motion and transition, whereas the translucent strata “humanizes the space”[22], rendering it intimate and fragile.

Extremely transgressive visually and subjective in its literary script (a time when the excessive use of the 1^st person singular was an act of great courage), the film’s central character is a domovoi, the shamanic wolf of the Slavs, the mythological ancient figure of home, tradition, memory and security, present in the most popular lullaby song for Russian children (the one inspiring the title of this article, too). The wolf’s quest in the obscure world of the after-war takes him to the point of finding an abandoned baby and finally taking him to sleep. The film is impossible to resume, but it presents a highly emotional portrayal of pre-war Russia and of the departing world of the 50s. The world in decay, visually presented within the aesthetics of ugliness, probably constitutes the result of Norstein’s documentation of the moment when the bulldozers removed the remains of his past – the street in the Ghetto where he had spent his childhood. The general atmosphere of the film was that of twilight, a time that Norstein associated with post-war Russia, while the calmness of the animated images was an extremely painful one. The irony of history made it possible for this elegiac cartoon to be run in front of the nation whenever there was a national tragedy, years after the fall of the communists. The literary script mentions Norstein’s reasons for choosing the loss of innocence as his main theme: “What we need to grasp is not so much that children hold the secret of happiness – but that we also hold that secret. Each of us has this, his own, secret, but we often keep it secret from ourselves…”[23] This phrase probably represents the strongest argument for a renewal of perspective over creation and life. It is a reversal of what socialist realism asked from the young generation: instead of a powerful, self-aware, progressive youth, Norstein designed a generation of young people able to scrutinize their vulnerabilities and their incapacity. There was a noticeable contrast with the hidden violence of the Communist propaganda cartoons, whose morality was oriented and stimulated by a single credo – the annihilation of individuality.

At the same time, such a message pervades time and questions our own impossibility of communication and self-censorship. It is finally an act of pleading for memory and the recuperation of the past, with all its flaws. Similarly, Yuri Norstein had previously worked with Khrzhanovsky for an animated trilogy on the unknown life of Pushkin; its first part was called I Fly to You in Memory and Norstein’s task had been that of animating the sequence of the imaginary meeting between the poet and tsar Alexander I. In the scene, the poet confesses his dream and, as a result, was exiled to Siberia. Fusing into his sketches the figure of other exiled artists (like those belonging to Acmeism), the animator expressed his belief in cultural permanence through poetry and, of course, opposed it tacitly to the rigidities of the socialist realism. Although the title Norstein considered appropriate for the film was The Little Grey Wolf Will Come, the paranoia of the political surveillance made him change it to Tale of Tales – from Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet’s poem with the same title. This inspiring poem foregrounds poetry as the ultimate salvation in front of death: “I write verses, / Praise God, we are alive! / The water’s shimmer strikes us in the face – / the sun, the cat, the plane tree and me, and our fate.”[24] At the end of the corridor of the house in Tale of Tales, there is a lighted street. This guiding light obsessed Norstein during the work on his best film. It is a mark of hope for a free day that the authorities do not seem to have noticed. But the initiating journey of the animator as creator of new innocent worlds had to undergo the moment of twilight. The same way, his other famous character, the small animal in Hedgehog in the Fog wondered if the white horse he glimpses from time to time ever lies down to sleep, or chokes inside the fog. “And he slowly began to make his way downhill to get into the fog… and see for himself what it was like inside there…”[25]

 

 

Bibliography

Aitken, Ian – European Film Theory and Cinema, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2001

Bendazzi, Giannalberto – Cartoons. Cento anni di cinema d’animazione, ed. Marsilio, Venezia, 1992

Beumers, Birgit – A History of Russian Cinema, ed. Berg, New York, 2009

Buttafava, Giovanni – Il cinema ruso e sovietico, ed. Marsilio, Venezia, 2000

Eisenstein, Sergej – La natura non indiferente, ed. Marsilio, Venezia, 2003

Jove & Soyuzmultfilm – Masters of Russian Animation, DVD vol. I-IV, Image Entertainment Studio, 2000

Kitson, Clare – Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales. An Animator’s Journey, John Libbey Publishing, Eastleigh, 2005

Marino, Bruno di (ed.) – Animania: 100 anni di esperimenti nel cinema d’animazione, ed. Il Castoro, Milano, 1998

 

 

Notes