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NEW ABSTRACT PROCESS
Night on the Bare Mountain is the result of a year's experiment to achieve a new method of production related in some ways to the animated cartoon, though the relationship is one rather of contradiction than of similarity.
In cartoon production, one drawing is traced on the drawing which preceded it, and it is relatively easy to move the lines or surfaces with the necessary precision. The serious drawback lies in the impossibility of reproducing with precision in a series of drawings the grey tones or shadings in movement. In other words, the animated cartoon corresponds to a line drawing. And this drawing is rather summary because of the large number of pictures to be made.
Now Alexeieff has arrived at a means of creating a film, made by hand, but analogous to an engraving, containing all the finesses of tone and shading. The idea of filming a single picture, artificial and mobile, has existed for several years. Starting on this principle of a single picture being capable of indefinite modification, we have realized a process absolutely supple from all points of view and allowing the artist to put in film form everything the imagination can conceive.
At first it would seem easy to make a picture with charcoal, in oils, or with the aerograph, and to retouch it after taking each picture with a camera turned frame by frame; but none of the materials existing in painting, engraving or drawing would permit of retouches so numerous and so delicate as the film demands.
The invention of a material both sensitive and resistant, offering all the shades of grey, was the problem. This material we eventually found, and it is the basis of the process in question.
The picture is made on a screen of considerable dimensions, with the aid of this material which allows of all possible effects and surpasses in brilliancy and delicacy of tint everything that is known in engraving. The picture is then modified as the successive stages are photographed.
The scenario of Night on the Bare Mountain was based on the music of Mussorgsky recorded on a gramophone record. With the aid of a stop watch, the music was analysed and timed phrase by phrase to a fifth of a second. A study of the orchestra score enabled lis to perfect this exactitude to a twenty-fourth of a second. Thus the pictorial and musical compositions are intimately bound together and the visual image derives its form and evolution from that of the music.
Claire Parker, A. Alexeieff. 34