In this week’s Story from the Museum Floor, Piotr from the Visitor Team explores the fascinating intersection between Entomology and early film making through the pioneering work of Władysław Starewicz.
For more on our Entomology collections please take a look the Curator’s blog.
Back from the Dead
Another year has passed and the Paper pumpkins, grinning at us as they hang from the trees are now several months behind us. Back in the Halloween season of 2019 we had a very successful screening of The Nightmare before Christmas here at the Museum in our Living Worlds gallery. Conceived and produced by Tim Burton, and directed by Henry Selick, this 1993 classic has been attracting new audiences and enjoying a cult following since its first release, more than 27 years ago. What I am also sure of is that probably very few people will wonder where and how it all began. And I am absolutely certain that even fewer viewers – if any – will trace it back to a town in Lithuania, 110 years ago. But let us start at the beginning.
Władysław Starewicz in 1930 (source)
Władysław Starewicz
The name Władysław Starewicz (aka Ladislas Starevitch, Ladislas Starewitch or Vladislav Starevich – amongst other configurations) might not sound familiar to an average cinema lover these days, yet at the peak of his popularity he was well known and admired in Europe and America, and four different nations would make claims to the artist and his work. Lithuanians would say that he spent most of his childhood and adolescence in Lithuania, and that he started making films there; Russians, that his career really started in Russia; the Polish would emphasise his important Polish roots and Polish nationality; whereas the French, that he made his greatest films and spent half of his life in France. ‘The magician’, ‘the alchemist’, ‘the bug trainer’, ‘the puppet master’ – who was that man?
Most of what we know about Starewicz comes from his unpublished memoirs, written after World War II (in Polish). There, on the first page, he succinctly explains himself:
‘Identity card says: STAREWICZ WŁADYSŁAW – son of Aleksander and Antonina née Legiecka; born in Moscow 8.8.1882, of Polish nationality; profession – animated puppet manufacturer. Has wife Anna and two daughters: Irena and Janina. Has lived in France since 1920. Not naturalized’.
Starewicz’s parents both came from Polish minor nobility in the Kaunas region, Lithuania, and were in hiding after his father had participated in the January Uprising in 1863. His mother died when he was 4, and his father, fearing the boy’s Russification were he to stay in Moscow, decided to send him to his Polish grandparents, Jakobina and Aleksander Legiecki, in Kaunas.
The building of the Kaunas Gymnasium which Starewicz attended until the second grade (source)
Even from the days of his early childhood Starewicz showed a significant liking for ‘histrionics’ (as he called it in his memoirs) for drawing, satire, acting and making things. His passion for nature also became apparent at a very early age, which soon also made an appearance in his artistic work. Like most boys around that age, Starewicz was very interested in novelties, and at the time all modern things seemed related to cinematography. Naturally, he began to experiment with moving images. For instance, when he first came across the magic lantern, still in the gymnasium in Kaunas, he quickly made his own, also painting the pictures for it, and then organised projections for the local kids. And when he got a book with the phases of movement drawn in the margins, he placed similar drawings in all his school textbooks. To the outrage of the teachers and parents – soon the whole class got ‘infected’ with the flip book bug.
An exceptional home
It needs to be mentioned here that Starewicz grew up in a rather exceptional atmosphere in his grandparents’ home, which without doubt had a significant impact on the formation of his interests and creative talents. He often recalls it in his memoirs with great sentiment and emotion.
Although the Legiecki family was quite large, the atmosphere in the house was very harmonious, and everyone was keenly interested in arts and natural science. The house was full of tamed wild animals. For the starling, grandfather whistled the nightingale song in the morning and played Chopin on the flute in the evening. The grouse started to make his display calls as soon as aunt Kazimiera played ‘his favourite song’. There was also a magpie, the whole lot of small birds chirping on the veranda, and a little fawn. Grandfather Aleksander painted watercolours of birds, other animals and flowers. Uncle Marian made large copies of oleographs with oil paints, and aunt Kazimiera played the piano, sang and danced. Little Starewicz often went to the meadows with uncle Teofil to catch butterflies. This favourite pastime of his was soon about to change the path of the boy’s education.
One day, instead of attending the obligatory Orthodox mass, Starewicz went to catch butterflies by the Neman. For this impudence and lack of respect he was expelled from the second grade of the Kaunas Gymnasium with so called ‘wilczy bilet’ – a note from the head teacher preventing a student from enrolling into any other school. He had to continue his education in Dorpat (now Tartu in present-day Estonia), which was in a different educational district. His teachers there were quick to notice and employ his many talents in various ways: his painting skills were used in the preparation of slides, his love for satire and caricature in the school paper, and the insect preparation skills in the biology room.
After finishing the gymnasium, Starewicz moved to Vilnius where he studied painting for a year at Ivan Trutnev’s Drawing School under Stanisław Jarocki. It was the only professional art training he would have but, like he said, he did not benefit much from it and moved back to Kaunas, where he found employment as a clerk in the Treasury Office. Again, because he would not take bribes, he was not a favourite of his office colleagues and decided to leave after a while.
Into the arts
In 1905, the first cinema called Bovy was opened in Kaunas. Starewicz, having the reputation of a very talented artist, got permission to see all films for free, in return drawing cinema posters and postcards. He had surely seen the newsreels of Pathé, Gaumont, the short fiction, like the fantastic trick productions of Georges Méliès, and exciting geographical films. During this time, he also painted saints in churches, designed sets and costumes for amateur theatre shows in which he also played, and published satirical drawings in the local press as ‘Muchoboj’ (‘Fly Killer’). His caustic style was feared across the whole town.
Towards the end of 1906, Starewicz married Anna Zimmermann, who owned a hat shop in Kaunas. Her hat making and sewing skills were to prove invaluable in the later stages of his career.
Władysław Starewicz, his wife Anna, and family friends Maria Skórska and Adela Skórska, Kaunas, 1910 (source)
Starewicz continued collecting and preparing insects, and was very passionate about nature and the local culture of the region, with its vibrant mix of Poles, Lithuanians and Belarusians. He was friends with Tadas Daugirdas, the director of the Kaunas City Museum. It was probably Daugirdas who first encouraged Starewicz to take up photography and filming. At some point Daugirdas offered Starewicz a job with the Museum. Initially, he photographed local folk rituals, monuments and landscapes, but after a trip to Moscow in 1909, where he managed to buy a film camera, he started shooting ethnographical and entomological films for the Museum.
Tadas Daugirdas at the Kaunas City Museum (source)
How did he get the idea of making a puppet film?
One evening, while walking in the meadows, he noticed two male stag beetles (Lucanus cervus) wrestling over a female. He wanted to film them for the Museum, but he needed good lighting, so he moved them to his makeshift studio at home. Here however, the beetles would not cooperate:
‘When I tried to film the fight of live stag beetles over a female, it turned out that after switching on the spotlights they froze motionless. So I came up with the idea of putting my knights to sleep. I separated their legs and antlers from their trunks, and then put them back in the right place with the help of thin wires. Prepared in this way dead beetle puppets I dressed in costumes, knee-high boots, and put rapiers in their hands’.
He was now able to revive the beetles on film. He started changing the position of his characters, phase after phase, shooting frame after frame in succession, modelling their movement on a wooden plank covered in plasticine. It was June 1910, the birth of the stop-motion puppet film. This experimental episode of insect life was 15 meters long (probably around 3 minutes), and the author called it The Fight of the Stag Beetles (Walka Żuków Jelonków, also known simply as Lucanus Cervus).
Stag beetles (Lucanus cervus) from the Entomology collection at Manchester Museum (source). You can watch the fight of living stag beetles here.
The moving image
Starewicz was not the first to use the technique of stop-motion in his films. It is usually attributed to James Stuart Blackton, a British-American who founded Vitagraph Studios in Brooklyn, New York in 1897. Blackton’s short film The Haunted Hotel was screened in Paris in 1907, where it proved immensely popular, which caused a demand for more films using its incredible object animation techniques. According to some accounts the film was carefully studied frame by frame by Émile Cohl of the Gaumont Film Company (founded in 1895 – the oldest film company in the world), who in this way discovered the technique for himself. It is believed that his Animated Matches (Les Allumettes Animées, 1908) and the memory of the flipbooks at school inspired Starewicz to use dead beetles as puppets.
A short video explaining the beginning and the idea behind the stop-motion animation.
Starewicz was so pleased with the results of his first experiment that he carried on working with beetles and made another film, now longer (8 minutes) and with a true narrative – based on the Greek myth of the beautiful Helen of Troy – The Beautiful Leukanida (Piękna Lukanida).
The film was noticed by the Russian producer Aleksandr Khanzhonkov of A. Khanzhonkov & Co, a leading film company in this part of Europe at the time, who bought it from Starewicz. The premiere took place on 26 March 1912 in Moscow and was a huge success, which resulted in Khanzhonkov inviting Starewicz to work in his studio in Moscow.
It was a most interesting and dynamic period in Starewicz’s life. He had just turned thirty, and he took his wife and little daughter and moved to Moscow, where over the next two years he made further animated films, all of which screened with huge success and many even sold abroad – as the first Russian films ever. For instance The Ant and the Grasshopper (Strekoza i Muravei), based on Ivan Krylov’s retelling of the famous Aesop’s fable which premiered on Christmas Day in 1912 in Copenhagen, was distributed in a record (for the times) number of 140 copies. A special reel, packaged in a silver box, was sent to Tsar Nikolai II, who enjoyed it so much that he issued a special award for Starewicz. Perhaps his most accomplished animation from this period is The Cameraman’s Revenge (Miest Kinomatograficheskovo Operatora, 1912).
Insect love: at the Gay Dragonfly night club (left) and at the Hôtel d’Amour (right). Stills from ‘The Cameraman’s Revenge’ (source). You can also watch the film online here.
Mr & Mrs Beetle
The film tells the story of Mr. and Mrs. Beetle, who ‘have too calm a home life’. In search of spontaneity and change, they both indulge in extra marital affairs. Mr. Beetle ‘is restless and makes frequent trips to the city’ where he visits a certain night club. There, he meets the beautiful dancer, Miss Dragonfly, ‘who understands him’. One night he heartlessly steals the Dragonfly away from her lover, Mr. Grasshopper. Oh if he only knew the Grasshopper was a cameraman! Devastated Mr. Grasshopper begins his plot of revenge by following Mr. Beetle and filming his affair with the Dragonfly, including the love scene at the Hôtel d’Amour. When Mr. Beetle returns home after his busy trip to the city, he happens to catch his wife with her lover – the Artist. Mr. Beetle throws a fit – he smashes things, chases the artist out of the house and gets pretty rough with Mrs. Beetle. Eventually though, as generous as he is, Mr. Beetle forgives his wife and takes her to a movie. And this is where the carefully planned revenge unfolds… The projectionist is none other than the heartbroken Mr. Grasshopper! He runs the footage of Mr. Beetle and Miss Dragonfly having their fling. The insect audience absolutely loves this spontaneous slice of life. When it comes to the love scene shot through the key hole, they all stand up and start cheering, but Mrs. Beetle, having a different opinion, chases her husband straight through the movie screen and out of the theatre. A melodrama parody with a cast of insects, one can clearly see Starewicz’s eccentric, dark sense of humour here, and how he plays with different conventions and cinematographic cliché.
Witnessing the impossible
It is difficult to overstate how shocking and sensational these early insect films were in their day. Audiences had literally never seen anything like them. The films of Blackton, Cohl and others showed everyday objects moving around seemingly of their own accord, but that was easily identified by audiences as ‘trick photography’. As one writer puts it:
‘Starewicz’s films showed something of another order entirely: convincing footage of alarmingly realistic-looking insects and animals coming to life and moving with a fluidity and naturalism that seemed to equal anything seen in nature. Viewers were mystified and entranced. His films seemed to embody the grandest possibilities of the medium: the chance for curious audiences to see something impossible’.
The journalists and the public began to compete in coming up with the most fanciful explanations of Starewicz’s films, the prevailing one being that the author succeeded in training live insects to act. He was proclaimed a genius, nicknamed ‘the magician’ and ‘the bug trainer’, and his popularity quickly grew.
Starewicz actually enjoyed this reputation of a magician or eccentric alchemist who brings dead objects to life in his home laboratory. In the early days of his career, just for fun, he used to take advantage of the fact that the public was not aware of how stop-motion animation works and sometimes introduced himself as Professor Lzhets (‘Professor Liar’) who, by using scientific methods, teaches his pupils how to act. On other occasions he would tell tales how his insects are powered by an internal system of tiny gears and pulleys.
While waiting for a dedicated animation atelier at the Khanzhonkov studios, Starewicz started to direct fiction films. It is interesting that his first fiction film, full of novel techniques and tricks, was clearly inspired by A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la Lune, 1902) by Méliès, and even had the same title – A Journey to the Moon (Puteshestvie na Lunu, 1912). His venture into live action cinema proved very successful, and even won him awards, as for his adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Terrible Venegance under the same title (1913), he won a gold medal at the International Exhibition in Milan in 1915. Over the next few years, apart from Gogol’s, Starewicz adapted many works of the Russian (A. Pushkin, M. Lermontov, A. Ostrovsky) and Polish (J. I. Kraszewski, J. Żuławski) classics.
Aleksandr Khanzhonkov, who produced the majority of Starewicz’s films during the Russian period of his career (source)
A short video showcasing an exhibition titled Metamorphosis: Fantasy Visions in Starewitch, Švankmajer and the Quay Brothers, which took place at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona in 2014, can also be seen here.
Piotr Korpak
Stay tuned, the second part of this fascinating story will be coming soon. And for more on our Entomology collections please take a look the Curator’s blog.
Find out more:
The exhibition http://www.cccb.org/en/exhibitions/file/metamorphosis/45068
Danks, A. (2004) ‘Ladislaw Starewicz and The Mascot’. Senses of Cinema
Gilliam, T. (2001) ‘The 10 best animated films of all time’. The Guardian
Gliński, M. (2019) ‘The Father of Stop-Motion Animation: A Secret Polish History’. Culture.pl
Hałgas, I. (2011) ‘Władysław Starewicz’. In: ‘Twórcy’. Culture.pl
Kaunas City Museum. (no date) ‘About: History of the Museum’. Kaunas City Museum
Miškinytė, R. et al. (2008) The Bug Trainer
Visit Kaunas (2017) ‘Meet Vladislav Starevich, the Animation Wizard’. Kaunastic News
Włodek, R. (2004) ‘Władysław Starewicz’. Internetowy Polski Słownik Biograficzny
Zakrzewski, P. (2018) ‘Władysław Starewicz – The Bug Trainer’. Culture.pl
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