A Moving Subject

CHAPTER 7

The First Reviews of A Night on Bald Mountain^*

A Night on Bald Mountain (Une nuit sur le Mont Chauve) was shown in Paris in 1933, with a critical success that had few equals for a short film of just over eight minutes. It had been made in eighteen months of hard work by Alexandre Alexeieff (Kazan, 1901–Paris, 1982) and by his partner Claire Parker (Boston, 1906–Paris, 1981), photographing frame by frame the images that were created utilising a tool invented by Alexeieff himself and called écran d’épingles (pinscreen).

* First published in Immagine – Note di storia del cinema, Nuova serie, nn. 38–39, Rome, 1997.

It was a white, square board on which 500,000 retractable black pins were fixed. They were illuminated by two light sources ...