Rabbit's Moon Kenneth Anger USA, 1979

An inscrutable, nightmarish, surreal dreamscape set to Modest Mussorgsky's famous composition of the same name, "A Night on Bald Mountain" is one of only a handful of short films ever created using pinscreen animation, a method in which shadows cast by miniscule steel pins positioned against a sidelit screen are manipulated to produce images of unique texture and dimension unparalleled in the field of traditional animation. Co-directors Alexandre Alexeieff (1901–1982) and his partner Claire Parker (1906–1981) built their first pinscreen device in 1931 with the assistance of Alexandre's then-wife, fellow artist Alexandra Grinevsky (1899–1976). Alexeieff and Parker then spent nearly two years animating this 8-minute film, which preceded the better-known cel-animated short "Night on Bald Mountain" from Disney's Fantasia (1940) by seven years. "A Night on Bald Mountain" represented the public debut of Alexeieff and Parker's pinscreen method.