Podcast “Little Hands Behind the Screen”: Succumb to the charms of the pin screen!
Have you heard of the Épinette? Behind this name lies not a musical instrument from the harpsichord family, but one of the very few pin screens used in animated films.
In a podcast supported by the Lavoir numérique de Gentilly and edited by Paul Thébault, journalist Lise Laroye explores this technique invented in the 1930s in Paris by Russian-born engraver Alexandre Alexeieff and his engineer partner Claire Parker. Dreaming of making engravings move, they imagined a grid of thousands of pins sliding in white tubes, whose reliefs modulate shadows under sidelight.
Only two of the screens created by the couple still exist, one of which, the NEC, is now in Canada, and the other – the Épinette – was purchased in 2012 by the Centre national du cinéma. Its managers explain how it was first necessary to restore this delicate machine made of 270,000 needles before being able to train eight young animation filmmakers in this technique, including Pierre-Luc Granjon, who won an award at the last Annecy festival.
Justine Vuylsteker, who made a beautiful short film from it, L'Étreinte, demonstrates here her fascination for this screen, as marvelous as it is capricious, which we press with our hands and all sorts of tools. With its velvety blacks, its extraordinary range of grays and its vaporous contours, the technique reminds her of aquatint. She also compares it to skin, ultra-sensitive, a precious quality, she emphasizes, in the age of disembodied creations generated by artificial intelligence...
Florentine Grelier, who teaches animation at the Institut Sainte-Geneviève in Paris, recounts how she was able to get a pin screen there, which she assembled as a kit with her students, using a modernized version of the machine created by Alexandre Noyer. This suggests a promising future for this almost century-old technique.
La Croıx
