In this week’s Story from the Museum Floor Visitor Team member Piotr continues his fascinating exploration of the intersection between Entomology and early film making through the pioneering work of Władysław Starewicz.
Check out the first part of the story here. And for more on our entomology collections have a look at the Curator’s blog.
Out of the real world he created the world of fantasy
When World War I started in the summer of 1914, Russia was separated from the rest of Europe by the German frontline. Since foreign films were unavailable, there was a huge demand on the local filmmaking industry. The so called Skobelev Committee got the monopoly on producing war reels, but the same organisation also established a fiction film department. Film directors working for the studio were given exemption from military service, which may have been the reason why Starewicz joined the Committee and made films during the war. During this time he shot a few pacifist grotesques and fairytales, perhaps the best known of these is The Lily of Belgium (Liliya Belgii, 1915), which featured both live acting and animation. Starewicz directed fiction films for a few years, and being greatly inspired by folk beliefs, the supernatural and horror stories, his plots were often full of mystery, witchcraft, or tricks of the devil.
The witch Solokha and the Devil on the roof of her hut (source), and the blacksmith Vakula riding on the Devil’s back on his way to get the Tsaritsa’s shoes for his beloved Oksana (source), from Starewicz’s adaptation of N. Gogol’s ‘The Night before Christmas’ under the same title (1913).
Starewicz created the majority of his fiction fairy tale films during the most terrible time – the period of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Russian Civil War. Trying to escape the horrors of the civil war Starewicz and his family, like Khanzhonkov, fled to Yalta, in Crimea, where there was a large community of filmmakers and artists. The period of 1918-1919 was particularly difficult – there was no money, no film stock, no food – and yet it was then, when Starewicz shot his most fascinating fairy tale films, with huge numbers of actors and mass scenes, which give the viewer a feeling that their author was desperately longing for a world of his own. He had no puppets, but he had a camera and out of the real world he created the world of fantasy. But that was the end of Starewicz’s work on Russian territory. When the Red Army started to approach Crimea in 1919, Starewicz, being a conspicuous favourite of the Tsar and a supporter of the counterrevolutionary White Army, followed the other members of the creative community and emigrated.
A Stranger in a foreign world
He first stopped in Milan, where he was to work with a group of Russian actors at the new Ikarus-Film studio. However, the studio never began its operation, and in 1920 penniless Starewicz – his family’s belongings contained in just two suitcases – arrived in Paris. The situation here was generally very difficult, as the city was full of Russian filmmakers searching for work. It is quite remarkable how he managed to settle down, a man with no connections, no knowledge of the language, a stranger in a foreign world. Starewicz differed from his fellow émigrés in that he did not need a lot to organise the production of new films. He did not require any special equipment, and his camera, his incredible skills and his crew – his wife and daughters – were always with him. It seems it was all he needed to establish himself on this new ground. After a short period of working as a camera operator, he settled in Fontenay-sous-Bois, outside Paris, where he developed his atelier.
Starewicz in France. Visible behind is a fragment of the poster for his first French animated film (source).
In France his animated films gradually increased in length and complexity. They often featured a multitude of different puppets, many of which had an almost human ability to show different emotions. It was here, at his home studio, where he created some of his greatest films.
Starewicz started the French chapter of his career with In The Claws of the Spider (Dans les Griffes de L’araignée, 1920). The film proved successful beyond expectations, and opened a gateway for Starewicz to continue making his puppet animation films. Some of the best known from this period are Frogland (Les Grenouilles qui Demandent un Roi, 1922, an adaptation of a fable by J. de La Fontaine), The voice of the Nightingale (La Voix du Rossignol, 1923) and The Town Rat and the Country Rat (Le Rat de Ville et le Rat des Champs, 1927, based on another fable by La Fontaine). The hand coloured The voice of the Nightingale, which featured a mix of live action and animation, was awarded the Hugo Riesenfeld Medal (the forerunner for the Oscar awards) for being ‘the most novel short subject motion picture in the USA during the year 1925’. It was then, when Starewicz began receiving offers from Hollywood.
Starewicz’s daughter Janina (Nina Star) on the set of ‘The Voice of the Nightingale‘ (source).
Complete control over his own magical worlds
Hollywood is considered the dream for all filmmakers and in fact many European filmmakers emigrated to the USA and Hollywood during the 1920s. The Americans wanted him there; they wanted his incredible skills and his unique imagination. But Starewicz, even though clearly fascinated with Hollywood, knew he would never adapt to their ways of working. Above all, he considered himself an artist with a calling and did not want to ‘industrialise’ his work. His house in France was his studio, and his family was his crew. His wife made costumes for the puppets, his older daughter Irena helped with the puppets and wrote scripts, and his younger daughter Janina starred in his films together with the puppets as Nina Star. Starewicz could not work in a big team, he created his fantastic worlds with his own hands and it was extremely important for him to have complete control over them, otherwise – he believed – the whole magic of his films would vanish. So he consequently kept rejecting American offers and continued making his uncompromising films in France.
Starewicz and his daughter Irena on the set of ‘The Tale of the Fox’, 1930 (source).
Fairy tales, fables and adding sound
In 1930 Starewicz made his first film with sound, The Little Parade (La Petite Parade) based on the fairy tale The Steadfast Tin Soldier by Hans Christian Andersen. The same year he also finished work on something he considered to be his masterpiece – the world’s first feature length stop-motion puppet film, The Tale of the Fox (Le Roman de Renard), based on the fable Reynard the Fox by J. W. von Goethe, but he struggled to find a producer who would cover the costs of adding sound to it for many years.
While searching for a distributor, Starewicz used the puppets he and his daughter made for The Tale of the Fox to shoot some further adaptations of La Fontaine’s fables. During this time he also made The Mascot (Fétiche-mascotte, 1933) which proved very popular with both audiences and critics, and received many positive comments from journalists and other figures of the creative world (notably H. G. Wells). All of that enabled Starewicz to make a few sequels to the adventures of ‘Duffy’ the mascot.
Left: the awkward moment when you try to catch the missing bit of your tail in a mouse trap – a still from ‘The Town Rat and the Country Rat‘. Right: the mother’s tear is just about to bring the doll puppy to life – a still from ‘The Mascot‘ (source). You can watch the films online here (French only) and here.
In the 1930s Starewicz was at the peak of his success. He was famous in many countries and his works were popular. He enjoyed a huge interest of the press and conferences about his work were organised in France. The German film company Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA) finally decided to add sound to his masterpiece, which premiered as Reineke Fuchs on 28 April 1937 in Berlin. In mid-1939 he signed a contract with Stefan and Tadeusz Katelbach, the founders of a newly formed Polish film production company Kohorta, which he was to lead. And yet, at the moment when Starewicz had so much creative power, splendid professional experience, his family business was functioning perfectly, sound in cinematography created new possibilities, and he was likely to rise to an even higher level in his creative development – the outbreak of World War II ruined all his plans and hopes.
War and changing fortunes
Although, despite many difficulties, The Tale of the Fox finally got its French version, it only premiered in 1941 when the war operations were already underway and even though it was popular with the audience, Le Roman de Renard was not widely distributed. During the war Starewicz and his daughter Irena were forced to shoot commercials, most of them for French, but some also for German companies.
Stills from ‘The Tale of The Fox’ showing the remarkable ability of Starewicz’s animal puppets to show human emotions. The Lion and the Lioness (source), and Reynard the Fox trying to talk the Wolf into mischief (source). You can watch the film online here.
In 1946 Starewicz returned to animation. His films were still popular and he started winning awards again – for instance his first colour feature film Fern Flower (Fleur de Fougère, 1949, based on I. Kraszewski’s fable Kwiat Paproci) won the first prize as an animated film at the 11th International Children Film Festival in Venice in 1950. However, the critics and film historians usually agree that it was not the same Starewicz anymore. During this period he suffered major financial difficulties and had to resort to shooting commercials again. He never managed to complete his many feature length projects – an adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare, his most ambitious, The Creation of the World (La Création du Monde), on which he had worked since 1930 and which he saw as a culmination of his creative career, or his last film, a comedy Like Dog and Cat (Comme Chien et Chat).
According to his relatives, Władysław Starewicz passed away silently, peacefully, in his own bed, surrounded by his family and friends, in his house in Fontenay-sous-Bois on 26 February 1965.
A plaque in memory of Władysław Starewicz on the wall of what used to be the Kaunas City Museum while he lived in Kaunas. The metal sculptures of Starewicz’s favourite insect characters from his early films – the ant, the grasshopper, and a stag beetle – were made by Zenonas Baranauskas and installed in 2014 (source).
A master of his craft
Like all of the greatest filmmakers, Starewicz did more than just create films; he mastered his craft and used it to invent an utterly unique, self-contained world, one that reflected his own artistic vision. The critics often point to the fact that despite being a pioneer of a whole new genre of film, his works were never simple or naïve, and his poetics seemed fully-fledged right from the start. Existing somewhere in between the realms of disturbing adult darkness and innocent childlike whimsy, when we watch Starewicz’s films today, it is sometimes unclear if they were intended for children or adults.
He not only created the new genre, but also gave it its distinctive feel by infusing it with the sense of surrealism, grotesque and macabre, now so apparent in the work of such artists of auteur cinema as Jan Švankmajer or the Quay Brothers, to name a few. For instance, even though their plots are very different, one can see clear parallels between Starewicz’s The Mascot and Švankmajer’s Alice (Něco z Alenky, 1988). Terry Gilliam included The Mascot on his list of the ten best animations of all time, while Wes Anderson paid homage to Starewicz’s The Tale of the Fox in his own Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) – the influence of which is still very clear in Anderson’s new animation, Isle of Dogs (2018).
A short video about Starewicz’s life and legacy
The cinematic path began by Starewicz, though in a refined way, has progressed throughout the century with the talent of many artist-filmmakers who work predominantly, but not exclusively, in the medium of stop-motion animation. Thanks to them, as well as historians and preservationists, Starewicz’s legacy can be remembered and appreciated. So, when you watch an animated puppet movie next time, think about ‘the puppet master’ Starewicz, how his love of entomology, great imagination, excellent experimentation skills, and how connection to his local museum led to the birth of this wonderfully creative genre.
Piotr Korpak
With special thanks to Dmitri Logunov, the curator of our Entomology Department, for his help with deciphering one mysterious Russian word.
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
Stories from the Museum Floor 