Carolina López Caballero connaît bien l’œuvre de L. Starewitch. Déjà en octobre 2000, Carolina a organisé à Sitges dans le cadre du Festival International de Cinéma de Catalogne une rétrospective proposant vingt-trois films (des périodes russe et française), une exposition de marionnettes et de décors et l’édition d’une brochure sur L. Starewitch et son œuvre ; voir : http://pagesperso-orange.fr/ls/sitges.htm
Puis de janvier à mars 2008, une nouvelle présentation de quinze films, dont les dernières restaurations, au Musée d’Art Contemporain de Barcelone ; voir : http://pagesperso-orange.fr/ls/id-Barcelone%20maca.htm
Voici le texte publié dans le catalogue In
Praise of the Shadows :
The
Four Films in the Exhibition. A Review.
By
Le Roman de Renard / The Tale of the Fox (1929-1941)
This is Ladislas Starewitch's only feature-length
film and the most ambitious piece he ever completed.
Le Roman de Renard is a Herculean work of stop
motion animation which features more than one hundred animal puppets dressed in medieval costumes — themselves
worthy of an Oscar. The Starewitch family
started work in 1928 with producer
Louis Nalpas. Under the direction of Ladislas, his wife Anna Zimmerman produced the wardrobe, while his daughter Irène penned the script
and assisted with the camerawork. The animation was ready in under two
years; however, the definitive soundtrack did
not arrive until 1941. Starewitch obsessed over the cinematography and wanted
the sound to be of the same quality as the image.
Despite numerous difficulties, and with World War II still raging, Starewitch (with new producer Roger Richebé)
managed to finish the film, with a full
soundtrack and dialogue in French,
more than ten years after filming had begun.
Another less finished version exists in German (Reinicke Fuchs) from
1937.
The film tells the story of a cunning, treacherous
fox who succeeds in becoming prime minister after abusing the trust of
all of the other animals, including the lion king. In terms of storyline and technique
Le Roman de Renard / The
Tale of the Fox is a detailed and
elaborate work; it is also visually stunning. It is a tale of tales, the
narrative a kind of matriuska where
stories are contained within stories.
At the beginning of the film, a monkey cranks
up a cinema projector and begins to narrate the
principal story of the fox, however, within the story each animal has his or her own story to tell about the
misdeeds of the fox, and furthermore, for every
short story the fox's lawyer tells another in defence of his client. The stories take place within stage
sets which are more elaborate than any seen in his short films, and he
uses puppets of different sizes to get more expressive shots. "Ces acteurs auront des jeux
de physionomie qui feront comprendre
aux spectateurs ce qu'ils pensent." ("These actors will have facial expressions
which will allow the audience to see
what they are thinking.") American slapstick and the
best of Soviet editing are combined in
the final scenes of the film, which are full of action and humour.
Starewitch,
a great lover of moralising tales, never missed an
opportunity for political commentary. On this occasion, in the final sequence
of the film,
he satirises the pact between Pétain and Hitler during World War II
with a similar pact between
the lion and the fox. The film was censored in countries like
The
artificiality of the medium of film is acknowledged throughout: from the beginning where the monkey narrator starts
the film projector, until the end, where a pair of
hands (those of the director presumably) positions
the card saying “fin”. There are anachronistic
details which also draw
our attention to the fact that this is a work of fiction; for example, the radio
broadcast where a commentator describes the
fight between the wolf and the fox,
when we are supposed to be in the Middle Ages. Another example is the system of levers
that the fox uses to defend his castle — which looks
like a complex industrial mechanism for shifting railway tracks — a
little incongruous in a medieval castle.
For
the definitive French version, some extra scenes
were recorded to enhance the sound, such as the scene of the cat singing to the
queen. Starewitch loved silent cinema and
believed, like Jean Renoir
and F. W. Murnau, in the possibilities of a language
which was yet to be fully exploited. Thus he accepted the arrival of
sound, yet more out of obligation than as an
artistic choice. In his second talkie
(in contrast to his first, La Petite Parade / The Little Parade, which
according to Starewitch "est un film muet, que l'on pourvoit
aujourd'hui d'une partie sonore nullement prévue
lors de la réalisation" ("is a silent film, parts
of which are today provided with a
soundtrack that was not foreseen
during its making")
the sound in Le
Roman de Renard is an integral part of the film.
The
sinister effect caused by animal characters who, despite being dressed
as men and women retain
certain animal movements and gestures, is unique and characteristic of all of
his work. The anatomical accuracy of his
animal figures, the realism of their
fur coats and other details, e.g. the sighs
of the love-struck queen, the vixen suckling her
young, etc., brings something sensual and tactile to the cinema screen,
more sophisticated that anything since achieved by computers.
Comment naît et s'anime une
cinémarionnette is a moving document for
animation lovers, showing the author
manipulating the puppets from Le Roman
de Renard with
his daughter Irène, whose name would appear alongside his own in all of
his subsequent films.
Fétiche Mascotte / The Mascot (1933)
Starewitch's most famous short film. A sick little girl,
whose mother scrapes together a living by making
dolls, asks for an orange which her mother cannot
afford. Her faithful little cloth dog decides to
attempt to fulfil her wish, but has to overcome a
myriad of difficulties, including at one point meeting the devil himself. The sophistication of, for
example, the sequence filmed in the city with its back-projected
recordings running in the background is reminiscent of avant-garde films such
as Walter Ruttman's
The melodrama of the opening scenes and the
appearance of the puppy protagonist could be offputting to a contemporary
audience; yet, immediately after this, the
film wins viewers over, thanks in part to the appearance of the
fantastical, evil creatures encountered by the puppy, very close to the
world that Tim Burton and Jan Svankmajer have created in their work. Starewitch's artistry and technical
virtuosity has been admired by filmmakers
like Nick Park and Terry Gilliam. In fact,
Gilliam has said that this film is in his top ten favourite animations of all time, and is reputed
to have said, on seeing the original puppets, that
he would love to have worked with the Russian master.
Starewitch, for his part,
was familiar with the work of artists like Grandville, Rackham and Kley.
Starewitch had successfully employed in
earlier works the literary device
whereby a young girl sleeps while wonderful things take place. These
include the wonderfully titled La Reine
des papillons / The Queen of the
Butterflies (1927), where a young girl becomes queen of the butterflies for
one night; La Voix du rossignol / Voice
of the Nightingale (1923), where another girl cannot tell if she has dreamed
the story of the nightingale or if it actually happened; or L'Horloge
magique / The Magic Clock (1928), where a
little girl is transformed into a princess. In Fétiche, when the
little girl wakes up, she finds the puppy in her
arms and wonders whether the whole adventure was actually a feverish
dream.
Fétiche was
so successful that the puppy starred in a series of
subsequent short films with titles like Fétiche
prestidigitateur/The Ringmaster (1934)
and Fétiche se marie / The Mascot
Wedding (1935).
While these other films are also of
high quality, they fail to match the mastery of the original and are more
childish in character. They announce what
would prove to be the overall tone of the final episode of Starewitch's career. Fétiche, the puppy dog rag doll,
with all his fears and weaknesses, is nevertheless
the strongest character of all Starewitch's films. Perhaps today, had he
had a little more commercial sense (in the
style of Walt Disney), he would have the Mount Olympus of theme parks
dedicated to his works, and have seen his image converted into lucrative
merchandise.
Le
Rat des
villes et le rat des champs / Town Rat, Country
Rat (1926)
Starewitch's extraordinary
adaptation of La Fontaine's
fable (1621-1695) about rats living in the so-called “roaring
twenties”. The film illustrates the sharp contrast between town
life and country life. The country rat is bowled over by the spectacle
of traffic and by the incredible music hall with its
naughty dancers (one of whom could well have been
inspired by the exotic Josephine Baker), although
in the end he realises that the city is not for
him. It is a hymn to modernity, a work inspired by the glamour (and the misery) of the entertainment
business. The film is entertaining, and short — an ideal introduction
to Starewitch's world for a contemporary audience. This was not the first time that
Starewitch had extolled the virtues of the countryside
by juxtaposing it with the evils of the big city. In Dans les Griffes
de l' araignée / The Claws of the
Spider (1920), for example, he shows the tragic end that awaits a fly who decides to leave his village
for the bright lights of Paris. Le Rat des villes et le rat
des champs / Town Rat, Country Rat
is an adaptation of the original fable with some new and fun twists.
The city rat has a car accident in the country,
and the country rat tows him back to his mansion in
Amour
noir et
blanc / Love in Black and White (1923)
A satire on
Carolina
López Caballero, 2008
First
published in Paolo Colombo, William Kentridge, et al., In
Praise of Shadows, exh. cat. (
Copyright
: Carolina López Caballero. Translation by Jonathan Brennan, Courtesy of the
[1] In Praise of the Shadows, catalogue de l’exposition organisée à l’Irish Museum of Modern Art de Dublin, Irlande, du 4 novembre 2008 au 4 janvier 2009, 152 pages.
François Martin :
Ladislas Starewitch, « Cinema…
makes the dreams of the imagination visible », pp. 48-51 ;
Biofilmographie, pp. 145-147
Carolina López Caballero : The Four Films in the
Exhibition, pp. 52-57
A propos de cette exposition, voir : http://pagesperso-orange.fr/ls/ja-Dublin08.htm