© Cica, Annecy — Dreamland, Paris — Cinémathéque Française, Paris, 2001.

One of the most prized purchases from this year's trip to Annecy is the new book entirely about animator and artist Alexandre Alexeieff, whose work was the subject of a retrospective and exhibition at the 2001 festival. Edited by Italian animation historian Giannalberto Bendazzi, Alexeieff: Itinerary of a Master is even denser than the author's fact-packed animation history volume, Cartoons: 100 Years of Cinema Animation, because it devotes over 300 pages to the work of one animator.

Considered one of the "masters" of experimental animation, Alexeieff began making animated films at age 30, when he invented the pinscreen, a board with thousands of tiny holes in it, each one with a metal pin inside. When a light is shone on the screen at an angle, the protruding pins cast shadows of varying length onto the board, which when viewed from a distance (and photographed) create varying shades of gray. By making subtle movements of the pins in between photographing frames, he was able to create animated films resembling the etching techniques he had mastered earlier in his career.

Published in French and English by Dreamland, a European publisher specializing in comics and animation, Alexeieff: Itinerary of a Master is a compendium of 15 essays by Bendazzi's colleagues: animator Yuri Norstein, composer Michele Reverdy, filmmakers Dominique Willoughby and Claudine Eizykman, scholars Robin Allan, Guy Fihman, Marco Fragonara, Nikolai Izvolov, Oleg Kovalov, Georges Nivat, Anne Saint-Dreux and Cecile Starr, as well as Alexeieff's daughter, Svetlana Alexeieff-Rockwell and grandson, Alexandre Rockwell.

Bendazzi's introduction seems to have been written by him in English, and reads much like a conversation with a non-native speaker. I wonder if it would be more coherent if he had written the book in his native Italian and had it translated by a professional. The following essays vary greatly in style, from fawning praise to intellectual analysis, often overlapping in subject matter. It doesn't seem like Bendazzi "assigned" the topics to the writers, and as such the book lacks overall coherence. I found the most interesting reading to be those chapters that offered facts, anecdotes and quotes from the artist rather than just pure analysis.

For me, the primary value of the book lies in its 200-plus crisp illustrations in color and black-and-white; reproduced etchings, beautiful still frames from films, photographs of the artist, his studios and equipment, friends and family. Many of the images are quite large -- half-page or filling two-page spreads -- offering an incredible amount of detail.

Many of Alexeieff's book illustrations for novels by Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Poe and Pushkin are reproduced in the book. The meaning of these illustrations are explored in Nirat's essay, while Fragonara's goes into great detail about the techniques he used, such as xylography, etching and aquatinting. The toxic chemicals he used for these methods caused him severe illness early in life, as recalled by his daughter in her chapter of personal memoirs. Svetlana Alexeieff-Rockwell's essay also details the emergence of Claire Parker into her family's life, first as a protégé and later as "the other woman" who became Alexeieff's wife and creative partner.

It was around the time that "talkies" or sync sound films were becoming mainstream that he decided to illustrate music through films, rather than literature through books. Izvolov's essay explores Alexeieff's identity as a mystic and prolific inventor, noting that his idea for the pinscreen actually struck him during a crisis where he felt that his inspiration had deserted him after years of book illustration. He notes that later, Alexeieff and Parker invented a technique called "totalization," which was a way of creating "illusory solids" with long exposures of moving lights on pendulums, that looked very much like the images produced on an oscilloscope. The technique was used to great effect in commercials, which took most of the couple's creative energy following their return to France after WWII. In fact it is their commercial work that places them in the context of their animation contemporaries John and James Whitney, Mary Ellen Bute and Norman McLaren who were experimenting with similar animation concepts.