Une nuit sur le mont chauve

I have seen this film several times. It is my favorite pinscreen animation by Alexander Alexeieff and his wife. It is a stunning piece of work and can be thought of as the ultimate demo for the pinscreen.

I wish the films were in better place or that some megolomaniac would do something similar on one of the remaining pinscreens.

See my notes for "The Nose" (La Nez) to see more information on the pinscreen and the couple who used it.

flipping channels, late at night, stumbled upon this obscure gem. i have been around a few blocks in my time, and this has to be one of the strangest, eeriest flicks i have ever seen. morphing, 3-dimensional shapes, bizarre and addicting. i want to buy this but can't find it anywhere. what tim burton would have done had he been alive in the thirties.

ever wondered why the BEEP Walt Disney made such a horrific sequence at the end of Fantasia? well, don't hesitate to watch Une Nuit sur le Mont chauve, because everything you thought was scary about that animated Disney sequence will now be altered in a real life short movie. here we see games with the death and corpses and witches more than the devil on the mountain himself. it's quite frightening, to be exact. it surely scared the hell out of me (really). the music and the nonstop animation with puppets go to an extreme corporation together, while they blend in a lot of troubling scout camp teachers and fire woods from the depths of hell. you want to be scared? go watch this short movie, it will change your definition of horror movies completely.

Une nuit sur le mont chauve (1933)

**** (out of 4)

Also known as A NIGHT ON BALD MOUNTAIN, this pinscreen short from Claire Parker and Alexandre Alexeieff is so wonderful and so ground-breaking that their names deserve to be remembered right up there with Walt Disney. If you think that's too much praise then I'm going to guess that you haven't seen this film. It took eighteen months to complete and you can tell that by the images on the screen.

Pinscreen animation is the use of a screen with moveable pins. Just the thought of making animation like this boggles my mind but UNE NUIT SUR LE MONT CHAUVE does a masterful job of it and it's really hard to believe that this here was made in 1933. It's amazing how wonderful the images look and in fact you could argue that they're much better than a lot of what we see today. The earlier portion of the film deals with a lot of dark subjects and it's perfectly put to the music of Mussorgsky. As great as that looks, I was even more impressed with the later part of the film where there are a lot more whites used. Just check out the sequence with the white horse.

Lyrical, dark, exceptionally interesting animated film. Occasionally charmingly inarticulate but some very special images here. Inspiring work from an early woman director. Saw it last night as part of the Unseen Cinema: Early American Avant-Garde Film 1893-1941 series playing here in Austin. See it if you get a chance.