Mikhail Tsekhanovsky

Biography

In 1941, during the bombing of besieged Leningrad, a fire broke out in the Lenfilm archive. It destroyed the almost fully shot “The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda”, conceived as Mikhail Tsekhanovsky’s first feature-length film, with music by Dmitri Shostakovich. What survived was the “Bazaar” fragment, sixty metres of film, about two minutes, with verses by Alexander Vvedensky.

In his diary Tsekhanovsky called the fate of the film a catastrophe.

He was born on 26 May (7 June) 1889 in Proskurov, in Podolia Governorate. His father, Mikhail Yurievich, an Actual State Councillor, lawyer and sugar manufacturer, emigrated in 1918 to Germany and then to Paris, where he died; his mother, Zinaida Grigorievna, died in 1899 at the age of thirty-two. The boy began drawing at the First St Petersburg Gymnasium. In 1908–1910 he studied sculpture in a private studio in Paris; in 1911–1914 he was a law student at St Petersburg University but did not complete the course, studied at the Academy of Arts, and in 1918 graduated from the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture. For the next five years he served in the Red Army: posters, agitation trains, decoration of cinemas and clubs, sculpture, scenery for a front-line theatre; in 1920–1922 he headed the art studio of the Smolensk Red Army University. In 1923 he returned to Petrograd, drew posters for foreign films and taught.

From 1926 Tsekhanovsky illustrated children’s books for Raduga and the children’s section of Lengiz, alongside Lebedev. His field became the popular science book, and his drawing, like that of Solomon Telingater, followed El Lissitzky’s constructivist method. He illustrated Ilya Ionov’s “Topotun and the Book”, M. Ilin’s “Pocket Companion”, Boris Zhitkov’s “Hurricane” and “Telegram”, and Marshak’s “Seven Wonders” and “The Adventures of the Table and the Chair”. The most important was Marshak’s “Post” (1927), verses about a letter that chases Zhitkov around the world; biographers agree that the book is edited according to the laws of cinema and is all movement. He also published “film books”, “Ball”, “Bim-Bom” and “Train”: if you flicked the pages quickly, you got a tiny animation. I think that after them the move into film was only a matter of time.

In 1928 Sovkino signed a contract with him for a film of “Post”, and until 1936, and then in 1938–1942, he worked as an animation director at the Leningrad studio of Sovkino, later Lenfilm. He learned the craft as he went, together with Ivan Druzhinin and his wife Vera Tsekhanovskaya, who had trained as animators; the result was a mixture of drawn animation and cut-out work, then called flat marionettes. The silent “Post” appeared in 1929, and in 1930 the sound version, with music by Vladimir Deshevov and text by Daniil Kharms. It was the first Soviet animated sound film and the first to be widely shown both at home and abroad; a hand-coloured print became the first Soviet colour film. New, too, were the diagonal angles and the rhythm of the drawing, matched to the sound. It is said that Frank Lloyd Wright showed “Post” to Walt Disney.

In 1929, together with Evgeny Sholpo and Arseny Avraamov, Tsekhanovsky stood at the origins of “drawn sound”, in which the soundtrack is drawn directly onto the film. In 1931 he made the experimental “Gopak” and “Pacific 231”; in the second, ten minutes long and set to Arthur Honegger’s music, shots of the conductor and orchestra are cut together with the motion of a locomotive’s parts. In one of his articles he argued that animation is neither puppet theatre nor cinema but a new spatio-temporal kind of fine art.

The Tsekhanovskys embarked on “Balda” in 1932–1933; Shostakovich wrote the music and Vvedensky the verses. In November 1934 the composer noted that writing music for this tale was easy and cheerful. In 1936, after the article “Muddle Instead of Music”, the work had to be stopped; the studio had troubles of its own, and critics found that the mechanically linked movements of the black-and-white characters did not suit the lofty style of Pushkin’s tale. The footage went into the archive. In 2005 the scattered, unfinished score was restored by Shostakovich’s pupil Vadim Bibergan.

The colour “Tale of a Silly Little Mouse”, after Marshak and again with music by Shostakovich, came out in 1940. Tsekhanovsky survived the siege; in 1942 he and his wife were evacuated to Samarkand, and he moved to Soyuzmultfilm, where he worked for the rest of his life. After the war he became one of the main advocates of “eclair”, as rotoscoping was called: filming live actors over whom the characters are then drawn. His prize-winning fairy tales of 1948–1960 are built on it: “The Rainbow Flower” (1948) at Mariánské Lázně, “The Tale of the Fisherman and the Fish” (1950) at Karlovy Vary, “The Frog Princess” (1954) at Mar del Plata. In “Fox, Beaver and the Rest” (1960) Sergei Mikhalkov read his own fables, holding sheets of paper with characters that came to life. “The Wild Swans” (1962), after Andersen, became the first Soviet widescreen animated feature. His last work proved to be a new “Post” (1964), with scenes taken straight from the 1929 version. That same year he became an Honoured Art Worker of the RSFSR.

Mikhail Tsekhanovsky died in Moscow on 22 June 1965 and was buried there. The film “Ivan Ivanych Fell Ill…” was completed and released in 1966 by Vera Tsekhanovskaya; she also preserved the diaries he had kept since the 1920s. In 2013 Nikolai Izvolov and Sergei Kapterev found “Gopak” in a Czech film archive and showed it at the Belye Stolby festival.