Почта России & other News

The last few weeks have been busy, and at long last I have finally finished my photography / portfolio website, pavlinaya.net. The good news is, in April I am expected to begin Russian courses at the ProBa Language Centre in Saint Petersburg! I will undertake the work/study program, a unique exchange program which offers intensive Russian language for English instructor from a native speaker (such as myself). At the moment, I have all plane tickets booked and am awaiting my official invitation letter so that I might apply for the visa. It will be my second visit to Russia and I am looking forward to intensive study once again. I had initially planned to take courses here in the U.S. but due to lack of enrollment, they were cancelled. Thankfully I discovered this program which will be much better, and instead of moving to a larger city in the U.S. temporarily just for the sake of a Russian course, I thought, why not just return to the country itself?

I learned the German language mostly through social interaction in my work as an au-pair, coupled with intermittent courses at the local Volkhochschule in Vienna. What helped me most greatly was having penpals with whom to write on a nearly daily basis. I found writing out my thoughts in a foreign language helped me to rapidly increased my understand for linguistic structure and daily use.

Speaking of penpals, today I have received in the post a lovely gift from one of my dear Russian friends in Saint Petersburg. During my visit in December, I noticed a beautiful handmade ring that she was wearing featuring the famous animated hedgehog from Hedgehog in the Fog / Ёжик в тумане, Yuriy Norshteyn's wonderful Soviet-era animated creation of a Russian fairytale. I was so impressed by the little ring, my friend decided that I must also have one. We went searching all over the city, from handmade boutique to boutique looking for it, but alas they were all sold out! So then she promised to send me one as soon as she could find one. Thankfully the package arrived today and now I own one of the cameo-style rings! I am grateful that we didn't find it  because our search lead me to discover many boutiques and the Handmade Bazar in the city, which luckily was happening during my short two week stay.

She also sent me some wonderful chocolates! вкусный! I hope that as I learned German previously with my penpal's help, having such wonderful native speakers as friends will aid me greatly to learn the language. Now I just await to apply for my visa before I am off again to Russia. I've been researching more and more about Russian crafts and hope to update very soon with more articles on my findings, as well as my experiences. 

Why Animation Should Be Considered A "Folk Art", part I

It is without a doubt that one of greatest new art forms of the 20th Century was cinema, the moving picture.  This is a well agreed upon fact among cinema enthusiasts and art historians alike. One area that remains a small moving blip on the cultural academic radar is that of Animation, cartoons, or the drawn / animated film. Its near ubiquitous presence has almost pervaded any kind of deeper academic study in a broader sense; while film and cinema have branched out to become their own unique foci of academic inquiry, animation remains an in-between, under explored topic which lives in the limbo of pop culture and high art, much like the topic of folk art itself.

When delving into the notion of animation-as-art, it is nearly impossible to miss the great impact the Eastern Europe, former Soviet states and Russia have had upon its development and innovation towards a higher form of art above mere 'cartoon'. There are perhaps many reasons for this development, rooted both in tradition and political atmosphere of the time. It opens many questions and lines of inquiry, namely the ever persistent debate between "art" and "pop culture" and the essence of what exactly makes the work worthy or good. In the Western world, animation is often looped in with cinema studies, but in reality, the art of animation takes its elements from drawing, sculpture and even music and dance, based upon rhythm and moment being one of its key elements. 

In Russia, animation has remained a fruitful experimental ground, ever producing and reinventing itself with new techniques, and often breaking away from the typical lighthearted subject matter of Western cartoons into a more philosophical and self-reflexive exploratory narrative. I am curious to learn more about the history of animation in Russia, and how exactly they first perceived this art form, and how it was received. Is it similar to the screaming, horrified, fleeing audiences of the Western world's Gertie the Dinosaur (1914)? This historical question is one that begs to be answered.

One thing which is obvious is that one of the undisputed pioneers of animation was the eccentric Russian-born Polish nobleman, Владисла́в Алекса́ндрович Старе́вич - Władysław Starewicz. Often cited as the inventor of "stop motion" puppet animation, even Starewicz's earliest cartoons seemed to address more complex story lines and began to draw upon fairytales and the fantastical as their inspiration, but unlike the early animations of the West, Starewicz's technique has a lifelike quality that is not draw merely from the fact that he used puppets and three dimensional objects alone, but that his observation and understanding of motion and time are, to this day, incredibly lifelike and subtle. We see this even in one of his earliest works, The Insect's Christmas - «Стрекоза и муравей» (1913). 

Although the subject matter appears childish and fanciful upon first glance, the elegance and lifelike quality of the insects is clearly not one meant to entertain in a superficial, comical way. Unlike the early cartoons of the United States and the Western world, Starewicz seems to strive to use the medium to bring a dignity and almost a deepness of soul to the creatures he so adores; the insects are seen not as entertaining jesters for a peering audience, rather the film has an almost documentarian feel, as if he filmed a secret life of these animals that we never knew existed, and the film does not seem surreal, but rather quite realistic and intimate, like a view into the habit and customs of an intelligent and civilized race.

In contrast, Gertie seems somehow bumbling, and what's more important, serving completely to break the "fourth wall", using animation not as a tool to create a new world, but as a device to exploit the novelty of the medium. In it's day, this worked brilliantly. The audience of Gertie was astounded and disturbed by this new and strange moving image, that seemed almost nightmarish and surreal to them. Whereas, the audience of Insect's Christmas, perhaps watched with an awe of a more delightful kind, and it is not the shocking and novel factor that one notices in this work, but the delicate talent and exquisite craftsmanship of the artist Starewicz. We might consider Starewicz to be among the Gutenberg of invention: not only did he innovate a groundbreaking new concept, he also produced some of the best work in the history of the media: a benchmark of quality yet to be surpassed, and a standard of craft that remains an educational foundation for the craftsmen of this art to this day.

Thus concludes my first exploration of this topic. More to follow soon!