The Magic Of Ladislas Starevich: The Magic Of The Re-Animator

The most eccentric filmmaker of the silent era, re-animating dead bugs, rats, frogs and more to tell a story. These shorts will amaze you!

Ladislas Starevich and daughter creating these amazing films with dead bugs, rats and frogs... and they are wonderful!

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Quote: Starevich was born in Moscow in 1882, and by the time he was 28 years old he was the director of the Museum of Natural History in Kovno, Lithuania. He made his first films there, using the new cinema technology to capture animal behaviour. He wanted to film stag beetles fighting, but as soon as he turned on the stage lighting the beetles, who are nocturnal, went to sleep. So Starevich decided to recreate the fight using the beetles’ carapaces. He replaced the legs with wire, held in place with sealing wax on the thorax, and used stop-motion techniques to bring the battle to life.

In 1911 he moved to Moscow and made a lot of films, live action and stop-motion. He often used dead insects as his characters in his animations, but after World War One he emigrated to Paris, and started to make longer, fantastical films using puppets. He began to experiment with sound and colour, and he mixed live action with stop-motion. Any place that his imagination took him, he managed to recreate on the screen. His films saw success around the world. He died in 1965.

When Starevich’s insect films were first shown in London the newspapers reported that living insects were trained to play the parts, and you can see how that would seem to make sense, much in the same way that flea circuses were believed to be real. How else could they drive cars, have fights, paint pictures, serve drinks on little trays, even kiss each other? But, of course, it’s the manipulation of these insect corpses that gives the whole thing a bit of a macabre feel now. Those black wiggling legs give me the shivers, but add an element of fascination to it. Read Den Of Geek article here

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Behind the paywall FINAL CHAPTER: Hollywood (1980) Episode 13 “End of an Era” [A Celebration of the American Silent Film] [LaserDisc]

Sound comes in and silence goes out.