Created by: Ricky Wilson
Last modified: 2004-02-16
Location: http://clover.slavic.pitt.edu/~tales/film/morozko.html
DVD Chapters: 9, 10, 11
Just like in the story, the wicked step-mother has forced her husband to leave his daughter in the forest so her beauty no longer outshines that of the step-mother’s ugly daughter, Marfushka. Ivan, on the other hand, knows Nastya is to be dumped in the woods and as such is currently questing to rescue her and, surprise surprise, marry her.
“Upside-Down and Backwards Trick”: This is a highly technical term for the effect we see both when the tree-people are jumping into Baba Yaga’s hut and also when Father Frost is “frosting” the trees. It involves actually running the camera upside down, and then taking the footage after processing and flipping it, well, backwards and upside-down. This causes the alignment of the images to be reversed (so the footage is now right-side-up) and the sequence of events to also be reversed. So, what this means is pretty simple: the filmmakers want to show Father Frost putting snow on trees. That is a hard thing to replicate. So what they do is simply find a nice, snow-covered tree, set up the camera as described, start filming, and then have somebody sit under the tree and kick it, causing the snow to fall off. When the footage is reversed, however, it appears that the snow is actually falling up the tree. Neat, isn’t it?
Mise-en-Scene: Pronounced “meeze-on-sen.” This term, quite simply means, the set-up of any “stuff” in a film frame. It can be anything from positions of buildings or trees to the junk and detritus on a messy desk, and is an incredibly common term in film studies texts. It’s usually used in the context of “The brilliance of the mise-en-scene in Texas Chainsaw Massacre has only been realized in recent years,” or some-such thing. The best example in Morozko is Baba Yaga’s hut. The owl, the cool little bas relief on the oven door, the lack of windows, the unfinished and partially rotted lumber, these are all examples of mise-en-scene. It’s a good thing to know.