Music,Memory and Narrative: The Art of Telling in Tale of Tales

Abstract

Skazka Skazok/Tale of Tales (Yuri Norstein, 1979) has delighted and puzzled audiences and critics ever since its release. It presents a series of beautifully-animated episodes that seem to make narrative sense at the micro-level and that appear to fit together as a whole, but leaves the audience bemused as to why this should be so. The article discusses the history and context of the film, arguing that the ways in which sound and, particularly, music are deployed in relation to its visual elements provide powerful clues and cues as to the film’s over-arching narrative significances. Close analysis of the film’s music, sound and visuals reveals teleological underpinnings that are realized by means of alignment and re-alignment of music and image, leading to a new understanding of how the film and its success can be interpreted.

Introduction

There are so many ways to tell a story. It is easy to tell a story so that an audience grasps what is being told; it is more difficult to tell a story so that the audience is unsure what story is being told; even more difficult to tell a story so that the audience is in doubt about whether a story is being told; and perhaps most difficult is to tell a story so that by the end the audience is not certain that a story has been told at all. Yuri Norstein’s luminous animated film Tale of Tales (Skazka Skazok) appears to fall into all these categories simultaneously; for AS Byatt, no mean parser of narrative complexity, it is both ‘immediately apprehensible, and needs to be seen again and again, because it remains puzzling, both as to its form and as to its meaning’ (Byatt, 2005). However, I shall argue we can experience a straight story being told here, one in which sound and music play crucial roles in revealing the work as structured around a key underlying narrative strand.

Tale of Tales was created by Norstein while employed at the Soviet Union’s state-sponsored animation studio Soyuzmultfilm. Completed in 1979, it delighted Norstein’s colleagues, confounded the censors of Goskino (who immediately banned it, wholly ineffectually), gained awards at several international festivals, and was voted the ‘Best Animated Film of All Time’ at the Los Angeles Olympiad of Animation in 1984. While Tale of Tales is a quite atypical product of the Soviet animation system, it is also a film that absolutely required that system for its creation. Embodied in Soyuzmultfilm, the system provided institutional validation of the significance of animation as a medium, and offered a degree of career stability, scope for technical experimentation and exploration (though unaccompanied by access to resources), and a sympathetic creative context. None of these features were likely to have been intended when the system was put in place, but circumstances conspired to allow them to develop (Katz, 2016; Kitson, 2005).

The success of animation as a propaganda tool in the early years following the Russian Revolution through the work of Rosta (the Russian Telegraph Agency) and their employment of ‘dynamic graphics’ with roots in the avant-garde, together with animation’s importance to the Soviet war effort from 1941 onwards, provided the medium of animation and its practitioners with huge political capital within the Soviet Union (Katz, 2016) and, post-WWII, across that swathe of Eastern Europe that then became its satellites (there were significant and successful state-sponsored animation studios in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia, see Iordanova, 2003). Despite – or more likely, because of – the political effectiveness of the medium, animation production became hedged around with strict guidelines and subject to tight censorship in the Soviet Union and across Eastern Europe; animation could either be in the direct service of the party (promoting new policies or valorizing new heroes without the messiness and inconvenience of having to film the real live humans to whom myths were to be attached), or it could serve as a neutral distractor, as a form of socially-sanctioned displacement activity, always conforming, of course, to the principles of Socialist Realism.

From the 1930s onwards, a tradition had developed within the Soviet Union (spreading post-war amongst its satellites) of a focus on national folktales (narodnoy skazki) as the primary and most effective subject for animation, occasionally interrupted on ideological grounds but generally persisting as the aesthetic default condition for animation. While these animated folktales could appear anodyne and many undoubtedly were, as Katz (2016: 96) notes:

Classic animated films by Jewish directors such as Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg’s The Lost Letter (1945), Lev Atamanov’s The Scarlet Flower (1952), and Dmitri Babichenko’s Brothers Liu (1953) shaped rural settings around a Soviet geopolitical context and populated these settings with ethnic characters who engaged with their environments in often nonconventional and even confrontational ways.

Hence, even in the immediate post-war era (a particularly difficult time in the history of the Soviet Union for intellectuals and artists), a degree of disorderliness or insubordination (or even dissidence) was endemic, and sometimes encouraged in the activities of the artists and workers at Soyuzmultfilm. Katz (2016: 30) observes that there was almost always scope there for the evasion of censorship, in part as a consequence of the powerful sense that employees at Soyuzmultfilm constituted ‘a secret society’ within the world of Soviet state-sponsored art, and in part by virtue of the employment of ‘nonofficial’ artists through networks of contract and casual work – and, of course, by clever strategizing. The artists tended to have low opinions of the efficacy of the censorial radar at Goskino (the USSR State Committee for Cinematography); as Andrei Khrzhanovsky noted (cited in Katz, 2016) ‘the censors “had a superbly honed sixth sense, but they did not have the first five”.’ Moreover, the medium itself afforded rich opportunities for subversion; animation’s sharp edges and ambiguous centre resisted or evaded the censor’s grasp, sometimes resulting in what Moritz (1997) terms ‘masterpieces of film art’. Moritz discusses four different instances of animated subversion across the geopolitical region: the (1958) Polish film Dom (Home) by Walerian Borowczjk and Jan Lenica; Jiri Trnka’s (1965) Czech film Ruka (The Hand); Norstein’s (1979) Russian Tale of Tales; and the Estonian Eine Murul (Déjeuner sur l'herbe) of 1986 by Priit Pärn, each film adopting strategies involving different levels and types of ambiguity to evade the censor. ¹

All four animations present ‘complex non-linear stories’ – as Moritz (1997: 46) puts it, these films ‘posit an “interactive” system, in which the purposefully convoluted narrative structure must be unravelled by the viewer’. At the same time, ‘the intricate artistry of all four filmmakers does appeal as strongly to the emotions as to the reason of the viewer, which enhances our sympathy for the characters and makes the films transcend the narrower political issues that they originally protested.’ That potential for ambiguity, slippage, and emotional and narrative engagement in the experience of the animated film is stressed by Landesman and Bendor (2011) in their account of the ways in which Ari Folman’s (2008) war memoir Waltz with Bashir straddles the worlds of documentary and animation, gaining its power from the ability of the animated medium to present different levels of fact and ‘facticality’ that deflect claims to ‘absolute truth’ by representing instead the reconstructed truths of memory. In effect, animation, whether created as oblique critique of societal repression or as an act of reparation and self-realization embodies ambiguity that inheres in its ability to represent the outer reaches of the imaginable as though they were the real – and thereby to transform an audience’s sense of how that ‘real’ may be re-imagined, and, perhaps, re-engineered.

The relationships between the imaginable and the real that Tale of Tales foregrounds are notably obscure, even within the canon of Eastern European Soviet-period animation; the heterogeneous mixture of styles, the hermetic references to Norstein’s own childhood memories, the apparent centrality of the Great Patriotic War to the uncertain narrative, all conspired to offend virtually every censorial synapse available within Goskino and led to the film’s ban. As Kitson (2005: 108) reports, on viewing the film, Yermash, the head of Goskino, declared ‘At Soyuzmultfilm they’ve produced something that does not correspond at all to the principles of Socialist Realism’ and cancelled the film’s acceptance. The censors ‘simply did not have a clue what the film was about. It did not look seditious, but who could be sure without any solid plot to make the right points?’ Their confusion and consequent cold feet may become more comprehensible in the light of a brief sketch of the film and its elements.

Tale of Tales: A description and a problematization

We hear someone quietly singing what, even if we don't know it, we imagine to be a lullaby. ² We see a beautifully depicted apple in the rain (later revealed to be on the forest floor) and a baby at a mother’s breast, before a change of shot reveals a cartoonish little wolf seeming to observe the infant and mother. The title appears, and we see an old house in what appears to be a run-down, perhaps pre-war, semi-rural partly-forested Moscow neighbourhood; but suddenly, via a golden glow at the end of a passageway projected out from the house accompanied by the urgent sound of a string tremolando, we find ourselves in a very different, delicately depicted and fantastical world, where a little girl skips while a placid bull keeps the rope moving, a poet fails to write and is cajoled by a cat, a harassed mother calls the reluctant girl to attend to a squalling infant and a fisherman father arrives with a huge fish which fascinates the cat away from his literary criticism.

Then, via a fade to black, we are back to the original visual style with the old house, a tablecloth blowing away in the wind and a train noisily passing; the old house appears to be being abandoned, furniture being burned and cars pulling away, leaving the little wolf rocking by himself on the treadle of an obsolete sewing-machine. A brief shot of the old house in its heyday in winter, with its oven being stoked, yields to a scene of couples dancing to a pre-war tango; a summer party is in progress but suddenly the music jerks – the needle jumps – and a male partner disappears – again, and again, and again . . . until we see only female partners, still in dance pose, as a squadron of ghostly warriors sweeps away through them to be replaced by spiralling telegrams flying towards us, the sound of urgent knocking on doors and some telegram text being revealed, before the scene gradually stills to leave a lone woman walking beneath a street light into darkness. The discarded party tablecloth rises in a gust of wind, a train passes, a leaf blows delicately and lands on water with a large fish appearing below, before we are taken back to the old house in winter with the oven glowing – and then to a more modern-day family in the snow.

Mother and father sit on a bench, father determinedly drinking while mother silently clenches herself in tight disapproval, their child eats an apple while gazing intently at crows in a tree and daydreaming about offering the crows bites of his apple; he is wrenched back to reality when father finishes his drink and smashes the bottle, standing up and donning a Napoleonic hat in the process, while mother snatches the child away from his reverie. The apple is lost in the snow, but the child abruptly realizes that father is now a Napoleonic general and dons his own matching hat to march off in line behind a snowdrift, leaving the lonely bench, past which walks – slowly and possibly painfully – a lone old lady who fades from view.

Then back to the wolf and the old house, the wolf making a fire outdoors, preparing and roasting potatoes all the while humming the tango melody; the pre-war party scene returns as do a few of the male dancers (though many women are left partnerless) while the continuing flow of telegram texts becomes even more unequivocal in bringing bad news until we are left staring at an empty glass as the rain drips from the leaves. Then we are back with the wolf, chin in paws, staring at the fire – but suddenly we are aware, as is he, that there is a golden glow in the old house. The wolf walks towards it and disappears – and we are again in the delicately depicted fantastical world, where the family prepares to eat, a traveller wanders past, and is invited to share in the meal before disappearing over the hills and far away.

The wolf appears beneath the table at which sits the poet, our fantastical world unexpectedly now in colour; but then we cut to a repeat of the very early scene in which the baby suckles and the little wolf observes, before switching to a sepia version of the fantastical world where the mother and children prepare for bed while the father sets off in his boat to lay his nets. Back to colour for the poet’s table, on which the purring cat pinches out the candle and settles down to sleep, while the wolf, from under the table reaches tentatively for the poet’s manuscript, now glowing like the passageway in the old house; the wolf manages to purloin the manuscript, running off with it rolled up under his arm. He runs out of the fantasy world onto a highway, where cars screech, headlights transect the scene, but the wolf manages to escape unscathed into a forest – where from nowhere there is the sound of a baby crying. The wolf looks around before realizing that the source of the crying is under his arm; the manuscript is now a distinctly cartoonish and disgruntled baby. The wolf looks to rid himself of this unwanted encumbrance before realizing that he’s stuck with it, shrugging, sighing and picking up the infant again, running and running through the forest to end up at a cradle in which he deposits the infant with an immense sigh of relief before rocking it to the lullaby we heard at the film’s outset. The infant is initially soothed, and there is playful interaction between infant and wolf before the crying resumes and the wolf starts rocking the cradle manically . . . We track through the forest and reach again the apple from the film’s outset, before we find ourselves in another snow scene; as before, a child eats an apple and observes the crows as well as himself in the tree feeding the crows, but this time both are observed by the little wolf from the scene’s edge, and this time there are huge apples in the snow on one of which the child leans to observe himself with the crows while the wolf stands in front of another to observe both the real and the dream child.

Images from earlier in the film recur in, it seems, no particular order: warriors depart; apples lie on the forest ground and fall from the trees in the snow; the warriors depart again; before we return to the fantasy world meeting again the bull, the little girl, the mother and the poet, ending with the bull solemnly skipping by himself. We then return to the old house in winter with its glowing oven, then switch to the old house in the rain; we pan to a railway bridge from underneath which steam emerges from a passing train before being left with only a street light shining near the bridge as evening falls. End titles . . .

The film has visited several different worlds, delineated in part by the style of animation employed; it has presented fragmentary episodes that are interpretable as micro-narratives; it has slipped in time within its different worlds, and has juxtaposed one world with another, one episode with another, with little apparent sense of purpose. We sense that there is some connection between them – after all, the little wolf seems to inhabit them all in one way or another – but an overarching narrative, if any, appears elusive, and perhaps even illusory. What we seem to be presented with is ‘what is’ rather than ‘what happened’, a multi-layered meditation that crosses narrative genres (Slowik, 2014). We are left with a series of questions: Who is the little wolf, what is he doing, and why? What is the significance of the old house? What, where, when and why is the delicately-drawn fantastical world? Who is the family in the snow? While the departing warriors and telegrams are evident allusions to the Great Patriotic War, how do they – and the tango dance that they interrupt – relate to the other strands of the film? Does the film present a narrative or is it just a congeries of fairy-tales and folk-tales? Is the film actually subversive? And so on . . .

Of course, the account given above is somewhat deliberately obfuscatory in focusing almost entirely only on the film’s visual dimension. Despite mentioning a couple of instances where sound or music occurs, I have largely neglected description of the sonic and musical dimensions and have completely ignored the relationships between the film’s visual, sonic and musical structures. Before proceeding to show how these relationships can be interpreted as being at the core of the work and as motivating our experience of it as a coherent narrative world, it is necessary to visit the origins of the film in the initial work of its creators and in the early life – and memories – of its director. The film’s ontogenesis reveals much about the meanings and the possible storylines that it encompasses, and provides a grounding for understanding the ways in which its many strands are interwoven to afford narrative interpretation.

Genesis and production

The creation of Tale of Tales arises in an intermingling of Norstein’s memories of a happily communal childhood in Moscow’s northern suburb Mar’ina Roshcha, of daydreams of a Russian Golden Age of poetry and the arts in the early 19th century (exemplified in the works and life of Pushkin), and of the immediate and contingent circumstances of its initial conception. MacFadyen (2007) notes that Norstein’s collaborator Lyudmila Petrushevskaia stated that when she and Norstein began to work together on a treatment that was to become a starting point for Tale of Tales, she was heavily pregnant and ‘I was full of milk and could only think about children’; Norstein offered to take the baby for walks in its pram. Memories and dreams of infancy – and the reality of taking care of a new and very live infant – were thus in the forefront of Norstein’s consciousness; hence it is not surprising that the little grey wolf should have emerged as an important (though not initially central) figure, as the lullaby The little grey wolf will come (‘Придет серенький волчо́к’) is perhaps the one lullaby known to every Russian child. ³ The text is fairly hair-raising if taken literally, though the texts of lullabies can often externalize sentiments that would not be socially sanctioned if publicly expressed but that can be articulated to give vent to maternal emotions in the intimate interaction between mother and – pre-verbal – infant (Masuyama, 1989; Trehub and Prince, 2010).

By his own account, Norstein was full of ‘a mix of micro-histories, molecular episodes, metaphors, which had been living inside me, infusing each other’ (Kitson, 2005: 51) when he began his collaboration with Petrushevskaia, and that mix both informed, and began to take form through, their interactions. An early version taking the form of a shooting script – a list of actions to be seen on screen – was reviewed by the artistic council of Soyuzmultfilm, who, in an initiative that appears quite startlingly creative, decided that what was needed rather than a plot outline was ‘a sequence of emotions – those feelings that the authors want to evoke on screen’. The result was an impressionistic script narrated largely by a poet-figure that explicitly spoke of memory, of the feeling of being a child, of renewal, at that stage entitled Tale of Tales after a short poem by the Turkish communist writer Nazim Hikmet. The script included many of the figures later to appear in the film, but these were mostly given motivations for their actions which were generally different from, and far more definite than, those that ended up on film (see Kitson, 2005: 61–98) for a detailed account of the production process).

Norstein and his wife Francesca Yarbusova began working, ostensibly to produce a shooting script and design sketches for a film now to be entitled The Little Grey Wolf Will Come, but almost immediately the process deviated from the linear, developing themes and ideas in new ways that would lead to these themes becoming focal in the eventual film. The world of Pushkin (or rather, Pushkin as conceived in the Russian imagination – as representing a golden age where poets are the acknowledged legislators of the world) began to be more explicitly invoked (and referred to by Norstein as the ‘Eternity sequence’ – Kitson, 2005); the little grey wolf took form and became the film’s protagonist; the reminiscences of Mar’ina Roshcha were given concrete shape in a series of documentary photographs taken just prior to its demolition that gave rise to the old house in the film; the pre-war dancers – the inhabitants of Mar’ina Roshcha – and their party were sketched out; and episodes simply appeared (notably, the first winter scene) as a consequence of creative processes that appeared as mysterious to Norstein as to anyone else – at least, at the time. The production of the film began in earnest, with hugely painstaking technical ingenuity being expended; for instance, the Eternity sequence scenes, referring to the Golden Age of Pushkin, were shot on high-contrast black and white stock before being transferred to colour film, giving them the appearance of having been line-drawn rather than being based on animated puppetry.

The end result is visually sumptuous, using all Norstein’s (and Yarbusova’s) skill to delineate and animate their ideas. As Kitson (2005) notes, the two had worked for many years with cut-outs rather than redrawn animation, employing drawings on cel for both cut-outs and backgrounds, using multiple layers and textures to add depth and a near-three-dimensional quality to the visual scene and action. Different episodes – the wolf in and around the old house; the Golden Age ‘Eternity’ world; the dysfunctional family, apples and crows; the dancers, the phantom warriors and the telegrams – each have their own visual style, though that of the Eternity episodes remains distinct to the end.

The different episodes and styles are linked by the wolf. In the original script he appeared only at the end, with the infant in the cradle. In the finished version he appears some 20 seconds into the film, observing the infant at the breast. He is consistently associated with the old house as both a sort of genius loci and as a squatter, and his appearance watching an old babuschka stoking the glowing oven bookends both the tango scene with the dancers, warriors and telegrams, and the snow scene with the dysfunctional family, as well as presaging his journey into the Eternity world. He is the only character who appears – or can be inferred as appearing – in all the stylistically differentiated worlds. These worlds are not just differentiated by visual style; they are also differentiated aurally. As we shall see, sound and music are carefully and parsimoniously used throughout the film to complement, and in some cases augment, its visual dimension in hinting at, and indeed in articulating, narrative structure.

Sound and music

There are only four identifiable sound-producing agents in the film; the little wolf, a small flock of pigeons startled by the wolf’s sneeze, the infant (in both manifestations, as ‘realistic’ infant at the outset of the film and as cartoon manuscript–infant), and the cat, who spits on his paws, douses the candle flame with a hiss, and then sleeps, purring, prior to the wolf’s theft of the manuscript. The pigeons simply fly noisily away once only. The baby, in its early and realistic incarnation, makes suckling sounds; in its late and cartoonish manifestation, it cries and gurgles. The wolf is the most consistent and complex sound-producer. He is musical: singing, humming and whistling. He is audibly present: as he moves through the leaves they rustle under his feet; as he rocks on the sewing-machine’s treadle, it squeaks; as he moves the dish holding the potatoes, it scrapes on the floor; as he breaks twigs for the fire, they snap, as do the shoots of the potatoes that he breaks off prior to roasting; as he rolls up the manuscript, it rustles. He is unequivocally vocal, though non-verbal: sighing, grunting, sniffing, sneezing, soothing, and inarticulately interjecting when burnt by the too-hot potato. Although he never speaks, the fact that he is audibly present positions him as the film’s protagonist as soon as he appears, rustling through the leaves, to peer at himself in the shiny hubcaps of the cars, an attribution confirmed when he sniffs and sneezes in response to the car exhaust smoke. He has evident agency within the filmic world by virtue of his audibility and vocality; it is notable that the only other agent with whom he interacts audibly and vocally is the infant (in the final cradle scene, intended as the final scene in the film in the early script).

The wolf is ‘voiced’ by Alexander Kalyagin, now eminent as Artistic Director of the Moscow ‘Et Cetera’ Theatre, head of the Union of Theatre Workers of the Russian Federation and a member of President Putin’s United Russia party. Kalyagin sings the lullaby very gently, the lack of subglottal pressure and the relaxed larynx rendering the melody very approximately, much in the way that the lullaby would be sung in the real world: softly and tenderly, without much regard to ‘correct’ tuning, as the lullaby is not being performed for an audience but is being directed towards a closely-held infant in an act of something like phatic communion.

Even though at times the wolf appears to be humming or singing to himself, we can infer his connectedness to the different worlds that he traverses. Andrew Killick (2006) explores the fact of solitary music-making as what he terms ‘holicipation’, suggesting that it is quite distinct from types of music-making that are oriented either towards musical performance for others, or towards participation in making music with others; he proposes that ‘holicipation’ is best conceived of as a form of ‘getting to know the music from the inside’. But this does not seem to fit the case of the little wolf humming the tango or the lullaby; here, he seems to reminisce and to invoke the virtual presence of others through making music by himself. Indeed, one can propose that solitary music-making is of many different types and that, more often than not, the type of un-selfconscious humming engaged in by the wolf is a form of invocation of the social world that is essential in the construction – indeed, the constitution – of the self.

All Kalyagin’s vocal sounds are recorded on a close microphone by sound engineer Boris Filchikov (who appears to have worked for Soyuzmultfilm from 1950 to the mid-1990s), giving them a powerful sense of intimacy. We are not just observing the wolf; we are close enough to him to hear the involuntary vocal sounds that all of us make, sounds that are not intended for others to hear but that accompany our everyday actions. The fact that we can hear them signifies familiarity and proximity, pulling us into the wolf’s world and aligning our perspectives and attitudes with his. There are other agents present who are signified by their sounding presence. We never see them – they are acoustmêtres, to use Chion’s (1994) term – though we see the consequences of their actions: planks being hammered across windows, cars disappearing, headlights sweeping across the visual scene. We hear them clearly: the sound of a hammer on nails, the sounds of car engines revving and dying away in the distance, the sounds of cars swooshing past and of brakes screeching. They are of the modern world, are concerned to erase the past and to embrace the rewards of contemporary consumerism. They are quite impersonal, even more impersonal than those of the officialdom whose existence we infer by connecting the urgent knocks on the door with the telegrams bringing news to the waiting women (though the causal agency binding sound and image to yield inference here is rather more indirect than is the case with the consumerist acoustmêtres). Also impersonal – indeed, almost indifferent – are the few sounds of audible agents in the natural world that are deployed: the sounds of the passing train and its whistle, the noises of wind rustling the leaves, and of a fire erupting and crackling.

The soundtrack is put together with notable parsimony; a very few sounds are used, and they are happily recycled, usually with their associated images. And the soundtrack is economical in other ways. More often than not, when there is music there are no other sounds on the soundtrack and vice versa – except when the wolf is singing, humming or whistling; then, the wolf's ‘reality’ in the filmic scene is reinforced by his dual presence as voice and as audible actor. Indeed, the wolf’s humming marks him as having access to the film’s different worlds; for example, he was not evident in the scene where couples dance to the tango, yet he hums the tune and dances, evidently reminiscing. The music track is also extremely parsimonious. Three pre-existing recordings are used: JS Bach’s E flat minor Prelude and Fugue No. 8, BWV 853, from The Well-Tempered Clavier (almost undoubtedly in a recording by Sviatoslav Richter, probably the one recorded for Melodiya in 1969 from a magisterial and resonant live performance at the Moscow Conservatory); the second movement from WA Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, K41 (probably the recording made for Phillips in 1975 by Ingrid Haebler on fortepiano with the Capella Academica, Wien, conducted by Eduard Melkus); and the pre-World War II tango Weary Sun (originally To ostatnia niedziela/This last Sunday) by the Polish popular composer Jerzy Petersburski, a Russian version of which he produced around 1941 to popular acclaim in the Soviet Union (Grunert, 2010).

A very few cues were specially composed for the film by Mikhail Meyerovich, who had worked with Norstein on his previous award-winning animations. The cues that Meyerovich composed are simple and are employed directly and non-diegetically to highlight narrative significance; some are re-used where image sequences recur. A few function almost as stings (fairly brief cues that reliably indicate the occurrence or recurrence of a dramatic event), such as the string tremolando followed by a roughly-played pizzicato version of the first two phrases of the lullaby that foreshadows and accompanies the appearance of the glowing portal into the golden world – or, in its last occurrence, the transformation of the poet’s manuscript into something like that glowing portal. Similarly, a string tremolando increasing then decreasing in intensity presages the fire that burns the old chairs and leads into the car doors slamming and the cars being driven off.

More complex cues occur at more complex junctures in the film. Following the departure of the warriors from the tango-dance, telegrams from the front appear in ever-greater numbers with their numbing texts ever clearer, suddenly fading to the lone female figure passing under the lamp, the train rushing past, the leaf falling to the water and the fish appearing under it. This complex sequence is underscored by a more urgent string tremolando that drives an ominously rising sequence culminating in a descending crash of brass that is itself interrupted by a low chord and tremolando, leading into the tango theme played on a distant trumpet, fading away into the sound of the train – itself followed by an ascending tremolando, joined by a peaceful clarinet melody that descends calmly into the instrument’s lowest register as the leaf lands and a fish inquisitively yet placidly appears.

In a similar vein, the transformation of the manuscript into a crying baby, the wolf’s initial impulse to reject, his resigned acceptance of his responsibility and his hastening to the cradle are underscored by a rising string sequence over a conventional harmonic schema, followed by a stylized version of the lullaby’s first two phrases on high violin while the wolf decides; the string sequence then picks up and is joined by a clarinet obbligato, rising to a climax consisting of an implied cadential resolution as the wolf reaches the cradle and deposits the baby. In both these instances, music and image work together in a highly conventionalized manner, the music non-diegetically shaping audience expectations and eliciting appropriate modes of affective engagement with the sequence of images presented (Cohen, 2013; Kassabian, 2001).

The pre-existing works are used to underscore scenes that appear to be more-or-less self-contained. The tango, Weary Sun (Utomliennoye solntse), is both diegetic and non-diegetic; it sets the scene for the pre-war party at which the couples dance as well as being the music to which they are dancing, but its repeated mechanical interruption is used imaginatively to signify the social and personal fractures caused as the men, one by one, are snatched away from their partners. The simple, brittle sound of the slow movement of Mozart’s piano concerto No. 4, K.41 ⁴ played on fortepiano accompanies the snow scene featuring the dysfunctional modern-day family. The first visit to the serenely radiant Eternity scene is enveloped by Richter’s Bach Prelude, and the second, extended, visit by both the Prelude and Fugue, the latter ending as the fisherman disappears into the evening mist and the cat purrs itself to sleep on the poet’s table.

The last hearing of the Bach Prelude overlays the final snow scene, where the wolf observes both the child eating an apple and the dream-child in the tree feeding the crows. And the tango, played this time on bandoneon alone, plays out the film as the unseen train rushes beneath the lamp-lit railway bridge. It is notable that when the pre-existing music is employed there are no other sounds on the soundtrack (with the exception of the mechanical interruptions that fragment the first appearance of the tango); the music, particularly that by Bach and by Mozart, appears to liminalize the associated images by abstracting them from the real, preserving them from contamination by the natural but unordered sound that accompanies action in the film’s other, ‘real’ worlds and rendering them outside the everyday. The structure of the soundtrack is thus fairly simple; few layers tend to be present at any one time, though there are frequent instances where the sound or music associated with a particular scene will bleed over for a second or so into the next scene, providing a degree of continuity in the face of visual edits that might otherwise appear over-abrupt.

An over-arching narrative

We thus have a rich network of interacting dimensions – sound, music, visuals – that are brought together to create episodic fragments of stories, elements of which may recur. We have a protagonist, the little grey wolf, whose story moves through these episodic fragments and who acts on elements of these episodes in ways that eventually appear to change them. In an attempt to delineate an over-arching narrative, it is helpful to consider all the elements together in a condensed summary of the film.

We start with the infant at the breast and the observing wolf, accompanied by the lullaby. We cut to the old house in memory, and a music transition leads us into the first Eternity sequence which is framed by the Bach Prelude. We move back to the wolf and to the old house in the present day in the process of being abandoned, with naturalistic sounds. The scene with the dancers, phantom warriors and the telegrams takes place, accompanied by the tango with a music transition that takes us eventually back to the wolf at the old house in memory. We cut to the first snow scene with the dysfunctional couple, child(ren), apples and crows, which takes place over the Mozart concerto. We return to the wolf at the old house in the present day with naturalistic sounds, followed by an episode with the dancers and returning partners accompanied by the tango. We again return to the wolf at the old house in the present day with naturalistic sounds, and then in memory, with a music transition; the wolf enters the golden glowing passageway, leading us into the second Eternity sequence, which is set to the Bach Prelude and Fugue. The wolf acts in the Eternity world to steal the manuscript and escape back to the present-day world of car headlights and screeching brakes with the aid of a music transition and naturalistic sound; the manuscript reveals itself as a crying infant, abandoned and then accepted by a resigned wolf, motivated by another music transition and naturalistic sound. Then we have the second snow scene; the wolf observes the child and the dream-child, the apples and crows, to the Bach Prelude, which continues to play over a recurrence of the departing warriors, the final Eternity sequence, and the old house in memory and in the present day, cross-fading to the sound of an approaching and receding train with a departing whistle, before the tango accompanies the end-credits.

What has happened? As Mikhail Yampolsky puts it (quoted by Wells, 1998: 94), ‘What confronts us is not simply a film about memory, but a film built like memory itself, which imitates in its spatial composition the structural texture of our consciousness.’ We are certainly in the world of Norstein’s memories – but also in a world of artifice that delineates childhood and adult dreams and hopes. There is hence, perhaps, more coherence here than Yampolsky allows. The wolf moves between past and present, in Norstein’s memories and in the reality of his childhood home in Mar’inya Roschcha, with the lullaby as both his accompaniment and his raison d’être. He can remember the shared life of the old house, the dancers, the tragedy of the war, the nostalgia ⁵ of the tango music that signifies the joy and pain of that shared life. But he can also move further than that, into the Golden Age of the Eternity sequences, a world reflecting collective Russian imaginings intertwining the worlds of Pushkin with the worlds that Pushkin himself remade from an earlier stratum of Russian myth, embodied in the ‘learned cat’, the poet, the fisherman and the fish (MacFadyen, 2007), and sonically depicted in the form of Richter’s serene performance of the Bach Prelude and Fugue. He can also return from the Golden Age, bringing back some of that world’s properties to the present day, in the form of the manuscript–infant.

The wolf has agency; he is constituted by his actions in the film. In part this agency is visually depicted, but it is also – as we have seen – bestowed by the audibility of his actions and by their sonic qualities. We hear the wolf from close up; we experience his actions and vicissitudes both visually and aurally and empathize with him, being transported (Green et al., 2004) into the story-world, at least as side-participants (Gerrig, 1993). At the outset he is a passive observer; his actions then become overt – gathering potatoes, then breaking off their roots and baking and eating them (and burning his paws in the process). But always self-oriented; he is an ‘outsider’, a loner, and his actions do not impact on the world that he observes. And the same goes for his sounds; they are not oriented towards meaningful communication. Apart from the environmental sounds that synchronize with his actions (sound of treadle, of tubers being broken off potatoes) they are involuntary (sneezing, the voiced panting as he juggles the hot potato) or voluntary (humming the lullaby), but always phatic rather than goal-directed. But then he acts . . . with his transition between worlds eased (or spurred) by the string tremolando, he enters the Eternity world and steals the manuscript from the poet, returning to the ‘real’ world to discover that he now possesses a manuscript-infant: not ‘knowledge’ whose mere possession will deterministically change the world, but a moral responsibility whose ‘possession’ may alter the world but which will require continuous and nurturing action and interaction. Indeed, that moral responsibility is perhaps the proto-social responsibility, that of caring for an infant (albeit, apparently of a different species . . . which the infant recognizes in crying on the occurrence of the lullaby’s words ‘the little grey wolf will come’ – even if the wolf does not).

What is probably the key episode in the film comes with the second snow scene, as the wolf observes the child (perhaps a somewhat older version of the manuscript–infant?) as well as the dream-child. In the first version of the snow scene, the child inhabited his own world until snatched out of it by his mother; mother and father co-existed on the bench, each in their own world. The first snow scene is underscored by the Mozart Piano Concerto No 4, a juvenile exercise in arrangement; the piece is not bad music, but it is a brittle, four-square and predictable representative of the galant style, self-contained and circumscribed. In the second version the child, the wolf and the crows seem to co-exist in mutual knowledge of each other; the second snow scene with wolf and child, the subsequent reminiscences of the departing warriors, and the return to Mar’ina Roshcha, are all framed and bound together by the first 20 bars of the Bach Prelude – open-ended, all-encompassing, transcendent, in Richter’s performance able to reveal to the listener ‘the spiritual qualities inherent in the music itself’ (Gould speaking of Richter, quoted in Sanden, 2009). By this point the Bach Prelude has become so inextricably linked with the world of the Golden Age Eternity sequences that its appearance in the final snow scene transforms the significance of that scene. It is not now just a reminiscence of the earlier scene with the dysfunctional family; it is a transfiguration of that scene by the infusion of elements of the Golden Age world, imported by the agency of the wolf, imparting a sense of aspiration and hope to the shots of the child eating the apple, the dream-child feeding the crows, and the watching wolf. The film’s over-arching narrative suggests that our imperative is to identify the best that is human and to act upon it. Only then do we have the right to believe that the future can sustain the imagined perfection of the past, but we must be prepared to bear responsibility for an uncertain future; one must do the best that one can.

Norstein’s use of Richter’s Bach to effect these narrative ends can be interpreted as yet another instance of what Barham (2008: 260) has dubbed ‘the cinematic employment of Bach’s music as uninflected emblem of spiritual transcendence’. In Norstein’s case, this was perhaps influenced by Tarkovsky’s recurring use of Bach’s organ chorale ‘Ich ruf zu dir’, BWV 639 in Solaris to symbolize his ‘ethical intentions for the film’s narrative, grounded in a nostalgia for the earth and for the “ordinariness” of home’ (p. 266). Indeed, Pontara’s (2014: 8) words about Tarkovsky’s use of Bach in Solaris seem almost as apt for Norstein’s final use of BWV 853 in Tale of Tales:

we may read the [Bach] . . . as a musically expressed ethical statement issuing directly from the (implied) director: namely that a person’s most important obligation, always and under any circumstances, is to preserve the truth within him – or her – self, to hold on to that which makes him or her a human being.

Conclusion

This is a work of its time (the mid and late 1970s), and must be construed in that context. Its utopianism – its proposal of, effectively, an alternative reality and its endorsement of the power of ideas – was highly subversive, particularly in its evident rejection of the officially-sanctioned materialism and consumerism increasingly evident in much of Soviet life from the 60s onwards. Nevertheless, its subversiveness was not explicit; as Moritz (1997: 41) notes, ‘rather than a specific protest against government policies, the message of Tale of Tales urges artists to accept the burden of keeping better times alive through art’.

The film uses multiple styles of animation, more or less episodically at first, though elements of each style invade the others, and this process is motivated in part by its ‘blocked’ use of music and sound in conjunction with particular scenes and particular styles of scenes. Music affords a means of carrying over resonances from one style – one ‘world’ – to another. Those resonances lie, not in the music per se, but in the interaction of music and image-stream; music affords such resonances because of its ‘floating intentionality’, the fact that it can be interpreted as being about something but the specificity of its aboutness is under-determined (Cross, 1999). Here, music is in conjunction with an image-stream that embodies similar characteristics: a considerable degree of ambiguity about just what significance is possessed by the sequence of events that is depicted. So the ‘tale’ we experience as being told can be intensely private and can differ for each audience member while still relating directly to the events being portrayed.

This is also a deeply personal work. For Norstein, its origins are in his childhood memories, and its elements are bound up with his childhood: but also with his working life. As (MacFadyen, 2007) notes, while the film reflects iconic aspects of Russian literature and culture, ‘people who grew up with Norstein have more straightforward explanations for the genesis of the plot, seeing erstwhile friends and relatives they “recognize” on screen from the postwar Moscow suburb of Mar’ina Roshcha.’ But whether or not there are ‘real’ people in Tale of Tales, there is also something that transcends and remakes reality. As Kleiman (quoted in Gadassik, 2008: 89) declares, ‘for Norstein, like for a child or a “savage”, all living beings and objects possess a soul, and such a “primal animism” is perfectly compatible with the “monotheism” of a Demiurge, who creates a habitable world on film.’ Norstein has asserted that ‘the “anima” in animation means putting “soul” into something’ (Moritz, 1997), and in Tale of Tales he has imbued his creations with a form of vitality that endures long after the film has ended.