PINSCREEN FILMS

THE PINSCREEN TECHNIQUE

(Sources: “Pinscreen” by Marcel Jean, Wikipedia, National Film Board of Canada)

In the early 1930s, engraver Alexandre Alexeïeff, a Russian émigré living in France, decided to go into filmmaking. Wishing to make films with an aesthetic faithful to the line and shading of his engravings, he invented a new type of device: the pinscreen.

The pinscreen consists of a white screen pierced by hundreds of thousands of pins that can slide back and forth, each in its own...