The Sleepwalker Awakes

Lucrecia Martel's tough, unmissable "The Headless Woman" hits DVD, as does a collection from a pioneer of pinscreen animation.

2009 was clearly some kind of animated film crest-point; I’d count at least three Hollywood mainstreamers, beginning with “Up,” as significantly more interesting than their demographic sell-frenzy indicated (if “WALL-E” was a napalm strike against modern consumerism, then “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” is a Sadean vision of greedy American food lust gone batshit, making “La Grande Bouffe” look like Beckett by comparison).

Of course, “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” “Coraline,” “9,” “Ponyo” and Oshii’s “The Sky Crawlers” were beautiful and crazy little beasts, and “Avatar” is whatever “Avatar” is, I don’t know, I’m not seeing it. But look at last year, too (“Waltz with Bashir,” the aforementioned “WALL-E”) — amid the dross of modern animation, the “Madagascar” and “Ice Age” sequels, larger ideas and visual strategies are jimmying their way in, without even contributions from Švankmajer or the Quays.

The history behind the present day is half Disney populism and half obsessive-monk aesthetics, and it’s the latter half — exemplified at the moment by the overdue portfolio of films of Alexandre Alexeïeff — that needs to enter the literacy requirements for anyone engaged by the form.

One of the four or five animators always mentioned by the Quays as a precursor, Alexeïeff was an influential graphic designer and poster artist in Europe before emigrating and, with his second wife and collaborator Claire Parker, spent some 50 years exploring various animation styles. (Still, the total filmography barely adds up to a full hour and a half, including his most widely seen piece — the opening credit sequence for Welles’ “The Trial.”)

The most famous mode for Alexeïeff was his “pinscreen,” which was not unlike the panel-with-suspended-pins they sell as kids’ novelties today, except it was the size of a blackboard and was custom-built with real pins, which you couldn’t see in the final imagery — only the shadows they cast, depending on how deep or shallow they’re positioned. The Alexeïeff films made this way — “Night on Bald Mountain” (1933), a sublime version of Gogol’s “The Nose” (1963), etc. — have a cobwebby feel and haunted, ashen, tidal movement that no other filmed imagery has ever had. The fact of real shadow and its manipulation on an almost molecular level to create the simulation of movement — in fact, the use of shadows to simulate other shadows — is hardly something one could replicate on a computer.

The Facets disc of Alexeïeff ephemera is pretty definitive — it includes the major shorts, the raft of promotional ads he and Parker made for movie theaters, using traditional stop-motion figures (one written by Jean Aurenche), a suite of sketches and tests, and a clutch of documentaries about the artist animating and also simply making art.

“The Headless Woman” (Strand Releasing) and “The Animation of Alexeïeff” (Facets) are now available on DVD.

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