Mikhail Tsekhanovsky

In 1923 Tsekhanovsky demobilized and returned to Saint Petersburg (then Petrograd, renamed to Leningrad in a year) where he continued the art career. Among his projects were cinema posters that advertised foreign movies. He also taught art at the Tavricheskaya Art School. In 1926 he joined a group of book illustrators headed by Vladimir Lebedev which specialized on children's literature. Tsekhanovsky's area was popular science. His distinguishable "industrial" art style influenced by Lebedev and the constructivism aesthetic brought him fame.[6][7]

In 1927 he illustrated the Post poem by Samuil Marshak about a letter that followed his friend Boris Zhitkov in his adventures around the world. The book saw many re-releases and has been since considered the peak of Tsekhanovsky's craftsmanship. Biographers agreed on that the book itself was designed according to the rules of film editing and was "full of movement". The artist also produced a number of flip books, thus his turn to animation was only a matter of time.[1][6]

In 1928 Sovkino signed a contract with him for an animated film based on Post. Tsekhanovsky, unfamiliar with the media, collaborated with Ivan Druzhinin and his own wife Vera Tsekhanovskaya, both professionally trained beginning animators. They had to improvise on their way and ended with a mix of traditional and cutout animation (called flat marionettes at the time) that brought Tsekhanovsky's unique vision to life.[6] The silent version of Post was released in 1929, and in 1930 a musical score by Mikhail Deshevov was added along with a voiceover and some text by Daniil Kharms, while the positive was colorized by hand. It became the first Soviet animated color and sound film, while also the first to gain domestic and international acclaim.[1][3] Frank Lloyd Wright showed it to Walt Disney as an example of thought-provoking animation.[8]

For the first time Soviet press started talking about animation as a new form of art, which was in fact director's original intention. As he wrote in his critical essay From Murzilka to Big Art, filmmakers of that time took animation for a "secondary, creatively insignificant offshoot of the big art of cinema, but not as a branch of graphics and painting, not to mention a separate form of art... Technical, professional and artistic processes of building a graphiс film are entirely different from the filmmaking process... Animation is not a filmed marionette, not a puppetry, not a theatre, not cinema... It is a new spatiotemporal type of fine art".[9]

In the same essay Tsekhanovsky brought up the subject of unity of animation and sound, as well as the concept of graphical sound which he is credited with inventing way back in 1929.[10] While Arseny Avraamov and others started developing the idea actively, Tsekhanovsky went his own way. The 1930 version of Post already featured a rhythmical picture synchronized with the pre-recorded sound, making it a separate, independent element of the film.[6] In 1931 he directed two experimental "naturophotographic" live shorts Gopak and Pacific 231 made as attempts to illustrate a national dance and Arthur Honegger's orchestral work by synchronizing visual imagery with music.[10][11]

All this inspired Mikhail and Vera Tsekhanovsky to launch their most ambitious project: an animated opera The Tale of the Priest and of His Workman Balda based on the fairy tale in verse by Alexander Pushkin with a heavy Rosta posters influence. It was conceived in 1932 as the first traditionally animated Soviet feature film that used the "album method" of animation, with characters drawn on paper instead of celluloid.[6] In 1933 Tsekhanovsky invited Dmitri Shostakovich to create the score and Alexander Vvedensky to write lyrics.

Shostakovich loved the opportunity to compose an innovative satirical opera with abstract characters led by his music and not by someone else. He called it "a fairy tale full of ardor, ease and joy, and writing music for it is just as easy and joyful". As Tsekhanovsky wrote during September 1934, "...he works incredibly fast without losing quality. True artist. True craftsman. Now it's up to me. I must create something worth of his music. I must. Balda is the only project where I can show what I'm capable of". They recorded 15 scenes by November.[12]

Yet problems started early into the production. Tsekhanovsky, still inexperienced, was always behind the composer, facing organizational and financial problems. First attempts to close Balda by Lenfilm date back to 1933. In March 1936, studio executives persuaded the composer to reorchestrate his score from a symphony to chamber orchestra. Around the same time the infamous Muddle Instead of Music article was published in press, condemning Shostakovich's opera. All this paralyzed the work, and the project was officially closed.[12][13]

Nevertheless, Tsekhanovsky compiled four finished parts and the rest of material into a full movie. It wasn't released, but shelved instead "for better times" which never happened, as it was destroyed in fire caused by the 1941 bombings of Leningrad that hit Lenfilm. Vera Tsekhanovskaya managed to save only a small Bazaar segment. Shostakovich regarded the film's score among his best works ever done: "There are a number of pieces I'm happy with. Especially Balda — from start to finish".[12] In 2005 one of his students restored the 50-minute score and released it to public.[14]