Unreal cinema of the USSR: naturalistic models and landscapes without computers

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-01-16 18:34

Probably, many will be surprised that in some Soviet films the special effects were no worse than in many foreign films of that time. Take, for example, the science fiction films "The Road to the Stars" and "Planet of Storms" directed by Pavel Klushantsev: how smoothly and believably dynamic objects move in them in space. Something similar was realized by Stanley Kubrick in the legendary film "A Space Odyssey of 2001" only ten years later in 1968.

In order to show spaceships in a naturalistic way, designers and decorators built special models, working out every detail. Then the operator moved the camera, so that the impression was created that the ship was floating in space. Sometimes the models were hung on a thin line and rotated by hand against the background of the starry sky. It sounds ridiculous, but in fact it turned out to be a very realistic picture.

In order to recreate objects in the background of the landscape, a professional artist stepped in. For example, for a castle standing on the top of a cliff, they took a real mountain, put glass in front of it and painted a medieval building on it, combining it with the outline of the landscape. Then the operator brought the camera so that it "looked" at the glass through the eyes of the artist, and from there he was already filming the take.

And if you need to believably shoot a whole flotilla of sailing ships the way Peter I saw it? For this, many small but very realistic models of ships were built and launched into the water. The operator, using the principle of perspective, made a real miracle and at the exit the Soviet viewer would never have guessed that the sailing ships were actually fake. Films with airplanes and military equipment were shot on the same principle.

The period of the 1970s was marked by the release of such masterpieces of Soviet cinema as Tarkovsky's Solaris with its extremely realistic ocean planet and Moscow-Cassiopeia by Richard Viktorov with his unmatched scenes of astronauts being in a state of zero gravity. The secret of the plausibility of the graphics in these films is ridiculously simple - perfectly matched locations, carefully created scenery, masterful camera work, and, of course, the director's talent.

For example, in order to convey the effect of weightlessness in the film "Moscow - Cassiopeia", the Yalta Film Studio built from scratch a 360-degree decoration of a spacecraft. According to Novate.ru, the camera was rigidly fixed to the platform and rotated along with the corridor. The astronauts were suspended on a thin rope so that the impression was created that they were hovering in space.

But since the 1980s, Soviet special effects in the pursuit of Lucas' Star Wars have noticeably slowed down. It is enough to watch the film "Orion's Loop" to make sure that the school of combined shooting of the USSR took a big step back, and even the cult picture of Richard Viktorov "Through hardships to the stars" could not save the day.

Closer to the collapse of the Soviet Union, the first digital special effects began to be used in our cinematography, but by that time Western technology in technical terms had advanced a lot. "Terminator", "Back to the Future" - these and other legendary films left no chance for Soviet directors. On the other hand, in the USSR, they did not try to focus on entertainment - our films fell in love with hundreds of viewers for something completely different.

ENVIRONMENTAL TRANSFORMATION, OR THE LOOK OF THE METROPOLIS

“Journey to the Moon” (1902) by J. Meliesa is not only one of the first science fiction films, but also one of the first films with special effects.

The first film experiments on the transformation of reality were still not free from the burden of their ancestors - theater and circus. It is no coincidence that former circus performer Georges Melies became the founder of science fiction. He used complex moving sets and mechanisms (mounted in his studio near Paris in a huge building of the former greenhouse). Lunar landscapes and revived constellations, the depths of the sea and polar icebergs - these huge backdrops were conventional theatrically, which, however, did not destroy the deliberately bohemian style of "cinema extravaganza".

The same deliberate theatricality was characteristic of “Soviet” Mars (“Aelita”, 1924), in the style of Meyerhold and Tairov's productions. But here, the avant-garde artists Isaac Rabinovich and Alexandra Exter were already making full use of the model decorations. And subsequently, all the same lunar landscapes (German “Woman on the Moon”, Soviet “Space Voyage”) or grandiose cities of the future (“Metropolis” by Fritz Lang, “The Image of the Coming” by H. Wells) began to be constructed on a smaller scale.

And when it was necessary to combine actors and models in one frame, they began to use purely cinematic methods: “perspective alignment”, “RIR-projection”, “wandering mask”.

The famous “Metropolis” (“Metropolis”, 1927), which brought worldwide fame to Fritz Lang.

Perspective alignment: Shooting two or more objects at a sufficient distance from the point where the objects appear to be standing side by side - this distorts the visual perception of the size of the objects. Gandalf at Bilbo's (“The Fellowship of the Ring”) - a perfectly executed old trick with a perspective combination. RIR-projection: Shooting objects against the background of the screen, on which panoramic plans are displayed. The “blue room” (or “green wall”) method used in all modern tapes is the result of the evolution of RIR projection in the digital age. Wandering Mask: Blends foreground objects “cut out” from the frame with a background that was captured separately. This method was often used in older films to depict car chases (with a view of the characters in the car). In the famous Imperial speeder race through the forests of Endor (Star Wars: Return of the Jedi), traces of a wandering mask are visible.

Boris Karlov as Frankenstein's Monster (“Frankenstein”, 1931).

The masters of fantastic scenery were sometimes more talented than the others - after all, they took science fiction seriously, unlike, for example, administrators who did not favor this genre.

The post-war boom in space has spawned an entire world of cinematic solar system. American George Pal and Russian Pavel Klushantsev, with documentary accuracy (and similarity to each other), created caravans of silver rockets that transport astronauts in all-metal spacesuits to toroidal orbital stations. It even came to curiosities that the rockets invented by the artist were forbidden to shoot, so as not to divulge military secrets (!) (By the way, the same problem arose before - with the Goebbels censorship of “Woman on the Moon”).

In the painting "Woman on the Moon" ("Frau im Mond", 1928) censors saw the secret project "V-2".

But who remembers today the films "Direction - the Moon", "The Road to the Stars", "Conquest of Space", "Towards a Dream" (try to guess which of these trivial names were invented in the USSR, and which - in the USA!) … American models are kept in the museum, and ours - after the death of the artist Julius Shvets - were written off and destroyed.

But it was then that many ingenious tricks were developed, which were later used in the classics: "A Space Odyssey" by Stanley Kubrick and "Youths in the Universe" by Richard Viktorov. For example, the rotating decoration of the station, imitating walking in magnetic boots on the walls and ceiling.

It took a quarter of a century for filmmakers to begin to appreciate the waste material and create all kinds of "Disneylands" in which the cinema set returned to its original - theatrical-booth - function.

Bulky backdrops have outlived their time, and all sorts of optical tricks have appeared, allowing the flat to be voluminous, and the small one - gigantic. Otherwise, there would be no such spectacles as "Star Wars". George Lucas's full-fledged co-author was the master of special effects John Dykstra, who created such a convincing world of habitable space that subsequently not one of the space epics could do without his participation - "Battlestar Galaktika", "Star Trek", "Vitality", "Invaders from Mars "…

And the use of computer graphics generally confused the criteria of illusion and objective reality …

OBJECT TRANSFORMATION, OR INCREDIBLE CONG

"King Kong" ("King Kong", 1933) - one of the first films about giant monsters.

All the same Melies created the first film monster - a giant ("To conquer the pole") in full size, which grabbed people with mechanical hands and swallowed with a mechanical mouth. This bulky attraction was still of a purely fairground origin. However, it was Melies who discovered purely cinematic tricks. For example, a freeze frame that allowed the Selenites exploding from the impact in Voyage to the Moon to disappear.

It was one step from here to time-lapse photography and a new genre - animation. This step was taken by our compatriot Vladislav Starevich in the film "The Beautiful Lucanida", who animated (that is, invested "anima" - the soul) of insect dolls, so skillfully that the audience was sure that they were trained living creatures. Apparently, this was the first time in the history of cinema when fiction became indistinguishable from truth and “fantastic reality” was born.

True, animation soon became a separate kingdom. Big cinema began to use the possibilities of combining live actors and puppets. And there appeared, for example, "New Gulliver" by Alexander Ptushko with plasticine midgets. And in the United States, Willis O'Brien half a century before Spielberg created his “Jurassic Park” - first in the silent film adaptation of The Lost World, and then in the immortal King Kong (1933). His school was continued by Ray Harrihausen in the series about Sinbad and “A Million Years BC”.

Although Melies' monumentalism did not become a thing of the past, they continued to build titanic creatures (when finances allowed). The same Ptushko refused animation and preferred the big Serpent Gorynych, in each head of which there was a soldier with a flamethrower (“Ilya Muromets”). And Professor Boris Dubrovsky-Eshke for the film "The Death of a Sensation" (1932) built ten two-meter robots on electric motors controlled by a man from the inside (!). This was neither before nor after, nor with us, nor with them.

In the genius "A Space Odyssey 2001" ("2001: A Space Odyssey", 1968) Stanley Kubrick first applied the solutions that have become textbooks for science fiction. And he received a well-deserved "Oscar" for this.

The galaxy of modern "monster creatures" are no longer lone handicraftsmen, but the heads of special laboratories for creating monsters. The most prominent of them is the Italian Carlo Rambaldi, who started with the mythological “peplums” (“Perseus and Medusa”) and “spaghetti-horrors” (“Dark red”), collaborated with Andy Warhol in the films about Frankenstein and Dracula, and then became a father (literally "Pope Carlo") for the characters of Spielberg - the Alien ("ET") and his closest "relatives" ("Close Encounters of the Third Kind").

But Spielberg's dinosaurs were created by another “sorcerer of the twentieth century” - Phil Tippett. For him, these were seeds - after that huge tribe of aliens, which he invented for the "Star Wars" trilogy, two dragons ("Dragon Winner" and "Dragon Heart"), Howard the Duckling and many others.

Today, computer actors are already beginning to replay the living (for example, in new episodes of "Star Wars") and often become the title characters of films ("The Incredible Hulk"), from objects to becoming subjects.

TRANSFORMATION OF THE SUBJECT, OR DOCTOR FREDDY FRANKENSTEIN

New fantastic characters were also created mainly by old means - for example, costumes. The Horned Selenites in Voyage to the Moon were played by acrobats from the Foley Bergères, hilariously jumping and grimacing. Since then, the "couturier" has been as sophisticated as they could - just remember the actress in the feather costume of the phoenix bird ("Sadko").

When they opened a close-up, they remembered about the makeup. At first, the actors had to make up themselves. By the way, this is what Lon Chani became famous for. During the period of silent Hollywood, he outplayed all the screen freaks - vampires, werewolves, Quasimodo, the phantom of the Opera - for which he received the nickname "The Man with a Thousand Faces." Chaplin is credited with the authorship of the famous joke: "Careful, do not crush the cockroach, it may be Chani in a new make-up."

But then professional make-up artists appeared - sometimes genuine artists. For example, Jack Pierce to do ancient funerary rites. But his image became canonical and was repeated from film to film. Later, Pierce created no less classic wolfman and mummy.

Although the natural data of the actor also played an important role. Not wanting to offend the masters of cinema, I will note that Karloff looked like a dead man even without makeup, and our George Millyar looked like Babu Yaga. It was technically more difficult to visually transform a person into a monster in one shot. The simplest method was double exposure (repeated shooting on a photographic plate / film), but it did not give a complete illusion, and new methods were invented, often keeping them in secret. So, to this day, it is not known how deep wrinkles appear on Dr. Jekyll's face before turning him into Mr. Hyde in the 1932 film. They talk about color filters, but the secret is lost …

Lon Chani, Master of Reincarnation.

Today, with the in-line production of plastic tentacles and plastic fangs, it is difficult to keep secrets, and even not so relevant. After all, a modern make-up artist does not want to remain in the shadows, and sometimes overshadows the actor, becoming a star himself. For example, Rob Bottin, who began by disguising an actor as a monkey (King Kong, 1976), as a werewolf (Howl), as gnomes and goblins (Legend), with the effects of distortion and decay of living flesh (Beast, "Eastwick Witches", "Interior Space"). But his finest hour struck when he came up with a simple, like everything brilliant, “knight of the XXI century” - “Robot-policeman” clad in armor. Subsequently, Bottin became indispensable as a master of "invisible" makeup, that is, such that the viewer did not notice him - in the thriller "Seven" and the action movie "Mission Impossible".

TRANSFORMATION OF THE IMAGE, OR STEP OF THE CREATOR

The advent of computer technology in cinema is comparable in epoch-making to the invention of sound. Today, of course, you can shoot the old fashioned way. But at the same time, one must be aware of the deep periphery where such a movie will be located.

The computer helped to bypass the whole stage of filmmaking - the materialization of miracles from improvised means in front of the camera (in order to immortalize them on film and immediately throw them into a landfill). Now any, the most incredible ideas can be born directly on the screen.

Cinema has finally ceased to be the only Screen Art, having risen in line with television and computers. And the fantastic image finally ceased to be just a reflection of sham reality, and became itself - an invention, completely independent of the frailty of cinematic life.

Man has come even closer to the rank of the Creator. One more step, and … But that's a completely different story.

In "Hulk" ("Hulk", 2003), the appearance of the main character is entirely created on the computer.

Howard the Duck (1986) is one of the weirdest films from Lucas Films.