Educational film

At infanata.org, the generous popularizer of Russian book publishing, more and more old Russian film strips have been recently published. The Hungarian version of this fascinating genre was the most important visual source in our TV-less and movieless childhood, and we think back with nostalgia on it. My brother Gyuri has hunted with great effort for the surviving copies and for a working film strip projector in order to transmit this experience to his children in Copenhagen. I am now happy to see its Russian versions, on which our contemporaries grew up in the Soviet Union. These pictures also confirm my impression that twentieth-century Russian tale illustrations have indeed come forth from the cloak of the great Art Nouveau illustrator and stage designer Ivan Bilibin.

I am particularly delighted to see that the folk tales are performed by animal figures vested in the various national costumes of the Soviet Union and of the friendly countries.

One of the most surprising discovery among them is the story The two envious bear cubs whose first picture announces of having been composed of Hungarian folk tale motifs. It is even more surprising that not only the author Vazhdaev took the elements from the tale The two bear cubs, the fox and the cheese, but also the illustrator Repkin the motifs of the vests from Hungarian national costume.

Even the fox received a cute bride-vest of Kalotaszeg. It stands very fine on her hourglass waist. True, on this picture, around the end of the story she has already rounded out as a consequence of the great amounts of cheese shared to herself. In fact, in the course of the distribution she is visibly getting fatter and fatter from picture to picture.

I do not know whether this film strip induced our Russian contemporaries to link the name of Hungarians with envy for a life, but if it did, they did not make a big mistake. And in addition they could learn of it well in advance how Hungarian politicians and Hungarian electors look like towards the end of the election term. Even though all these concepts did not even exist at that time.

I wish we learned of it as well.