Other formats

    Adobe Portable Document Format file (facsimile images)   TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Salient: An Organ of Student Opinion at Victoria College, Wellington, N.Z. Vol. 12, No. 1, February 23rd, 1949.

The Stone Flower

The Stone Flower

"Fantasia" was a lovely thing, a triumph in its time, but colour photography has entered another era since then. Walt Disney and the Hollywood technicians would seem for the moment completely out distanced by the creators of "The Stone Flower," a Russian fairy tale. Using the new processes developed by German technicians, the Moscow Film Studios produced this picture in 1945. It was awarded first prize at the Cannes Cinema Festival the following year. This production is a landmark in the history of film technique; it is equally remarkable as a work or imagination, artistry, good taste. Now, three years after it was made, it has been screened privately in New Zealand, by courtesy of the Russian Legation. Why it is not yet showing publicly, with an English sound-track, is difficult to understand, for in its way "The Stone Flower" is a work of International importance an great as Olivier's "Hamlet."

Pavel Bazhov won the Stalin prize for fiction with his collection of poetic fairy tales, "The Malachite Casket," among which is the legend of the Stone Flower. The book became at once a best-seller in the USSR and its sixty-year-old author delivered public readings of his stories. They are tales Bazhov heard from an old-time prospector, myths of a peasant community in the Ural mountains, back in the bad old days of serfdom. Life among these folk centred round the copper mines. The theme of the legend is of a young stone-cutter enchanted by his craft, absorbed in a search for the true virtue of the stone in which he worked. Lost to his master, wife and village acquaintances, the artist is enthralled by the Mistress of the Copper Mountain: until his wife enters the magic mountain, breaks the spell and leads him out of bondage.

The allegory is the old one of Man in the clutch of his creative talents: "La Belle Dame Sans Merci has thee in thrall." The legend is a masterly blend of the commonplace and the magical. It does not fail to portray the realities of feudal life—poverty, the whip, the petty autocracy of the local steward, and also cheery intercourse at the market-place, moments of song and dance in the traditional embroidered costumes; cruel, bleak, winter lanscape and also crocuses in the woods in spring.

The people of the film are flesh and blood, unlike Disney's cartoons forms, but they are idealised to suit the spirit of the fantasy. The scenery likewise compromises between natural and stylised forms, to make magic credible in its realistic setting. It is lavish, but not lush; the effects are infinitely more subtle than the best things in a Disney show; the colours are soft, pastel luminous. Perhaps it was because the new techniques are so perfectly adapted to a fantastic picture that "The Stone Flower" was the choice of the Moscow producers, and not another film of social propaganda. These delicate shades, this impressionistic camera work, would be ill-used portraying a bigger and better textile factory. Anyway, it was time we were reminded that magic isn't banned, in Russia. For such a delightful imaginative production we may be truly thankful.

Jean Gawn.