Alexander Alexeieff (1)

Alexandre Alexandrovitch Alexeieff (Russian: Александр Александрович Алексеев Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Alekseyev (sometimes credited as Alexander Alexeieff or Alexander Alexeïeff or Alexandre Alexieff); 18 April 1901 – 9 August 1982) was a Russian Empire-born artist, filmmaker and illustrator who lived and worked mainly in Paris. He and his second wife Claire Parker (1906–1981) are credited with inventing the pinscreen as well as the animation technique totalization. In all Alexeieff produced 6 films on the pinscreen, 41 advertising films and illustrated 41 books.

Early life
Alexeieff was born in the town of Kazan in Russia. He spent his early childhood in Istanbul where his father, Alexei Alexeieff, was a military attaché.

Alexeieff had two older brothers, Vladimir and Nikolai. Vladimir caught syphilis from a Moscow actress with whom he had an affair. His mother forced him to remain in his room and not touch his brothers. The pressure of this was such that Vladimir shot himself. Before he died, he wrote a note to Alexandre saying, “You are very talented. You must keep on drawing.”His second brother, Nikolai, disappeared in Georgia, Russia, during the Russian Revolution of 1917. He was never heard from again; the family suspected that he died of typhus.

In his unpublished memoir Oublis ou Regrets, Alexeieff wrote that he rarely saw his father due to the fact that he was often away on missions. He took a daily walk with his mother when he was forced to speak in French instead of Russian. The rest of the time he was under the care of a nanny. Alexieff's father died mysteriously in Baden-Baden, Germany on an official trip at the age of 37. He was shot by a Turk, probably because he knew too much about the Middle East. His mother traveled to Germany without telling the children where she was going or why and only when she returned did Alexeieff learn that his father had died.

Later life
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 parable "Before the Law" 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. The film tells the story of a Russian official who loses his nose and the adventures of the nose itself as well as the barber who finds the nose.

On 7 August 1972, Alexeieff and Parker were invited back to Canada in order to demonstrate the pinscreen to a group of animators at the National Film Board of Canada. This demonstration was filmed, and released by the NFB as Pin Screen. This film appears on disk 7 of Norman McLaren: The Master's Edition, along with Pinscreen Tests (1961).

In the same year, they also released another film again, based on Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. This film used two pinscreens. In front of the main pinscreen, they installed a second, smaller one. This second pinscreen could be rotated thus giving more of an illusion of three-dimensionality. However, the film was never completed.

Their last film,Three Moods (Trois thèmes), was made on the pinscreen, and first shown in Milan, Italy, in March 1980. It was based on three works by Mussorgsky.

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.

Although Alexeieff and Parker strove to create serious works of art and shunned any commercialization in their films (excluding their paid work doing advertisements, of course), when asked what her favorite films were, Parker answered "The ones with Tom Mix and his beautiful white horse!" wiki

Director (19 credits)
1980 Three Moods (Short)
1972 Tableaux d'une exposition (Short)
1966 L'eau (Short)
1963 Le nez (Short)
1960 Divertissement (Short)
1958 Anonyme (Short)
1957 Cent pour cent (Short)
1955 La sève de la terre (Short)
1954 Nocturne (Short)
1952 Masques (Short)
1951 Fumées (Short)
1944 Chants populaires nº 5 (Short)
1943 En passant (Short)
1938 Balatum (as Alexandre Alexeieff)
1938 Huilor (Short)
1938 Les oranges de Jaffa
1935 La belle au bois dormant (Short)
1935 Parade de chapeaux (Short)
1933 Une nuit sur le mont chauve (Short)
IMDB

Enlaces completados:
OK Le nez (Alexander Alexeieff & Claire Parker, 1963)

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