Night
Ночь
Noch (ru)
18 visitors
Ночь
Noch (ru)
| ❤ | |
| Year | 1984 |
| Director(s) | Petkevich Vladimir |
| Studio(s) | School of Advanced Studies for Screenwriters and Directors Sverdlovsk Film Studio |
| Language(s) | Russian |
| Genre(s) | Domestic life Horror Literature (Rus./East Slavic) Religion Serious Surrealism/dream-logic |
| Animation Type(s) | Paint |
| Length | 00:09:52 |
| Wordiness | 5.25 |
| Animator.ru profile | Ru, En |
Subtitles:
⭳ Noch.1984.en.1.25fps.1783835998.srt
Date: July 12 2026 05:59:58
Language: English
Quality: needs_work
Upload notes: 182 characters long (view)
Creator(s): Niffiwan, Lemicnor₂
⭳ Noch.1984.ru.1.25fps.1783798754.srt
Date: July 11 2026 19:39:14
Language: Russian
Quality: needs_work
Upload notes:
Creator(s): Lemicnor, Niffiwan
⭳ Noch.1984.en.1.25fps.1783835998.srt
Date: July 12 2026 05:59:58
Language: English
Quality: needs_work
Upload notes: 182 characters long (view)
Creator(s): Niffiwan, Lemicnor₂
⭳ Noch.1984.ru.1.25fps.1783798754.srt
Date: July 11 2026 19:39:14
Language: Russian
Quality: needs_work
Upload notes:
Creator(s): Lemicnor, Niffiwan
Description:
A surreal film about a child's first brush with the idea of death. Based on Andrey Platonov's story "The Iron Old Woman".
A little boy doesn't want to sleep, and then his mother tells him that an Iron Old Woman roams the fields, taking those who don't sleep. The Iron Old Woman frightens people so much that their hearts fail them; she lives in dark ravines and collects bones and rags. The boy becomes curious to learn more about this old woman, and when his mother goes to bed, he climbs out the window.
The original story can be read here in Russian (written in 1941/1943, in slightly different versions). The film also weaves in themes and text from Andrey Platonov's story A Flower Upon the Earth (1945). It combines the contrasting themes of darkness and light of the two stories - for an analysis, see this 2004 paper (in Russian) by L.S. Medvedeva and A.A. Aksionova of Kemerovo State University.
This was Vladimir Petkevich's diploma film for the 2-year Advanced Courses for Screenwriters and Directors. His supervisor was Yuriy Norshteyn, and the art director was fellow student Aleksandr Petrov, using his famous paint-on-glass animation technique for the first time. Petrov said in a 2001 interview that this was the film in which he found his true artistic voice and stopped "feeling like an appendage": "I felt that this is mine, that I belong here, that this is probably why I was born". Petrov would adapt another Platonov story for his first solo film, the 1989 Oscar-nominated "The Cow".
"Night" was re-released by the Sverdlovsk studio in 1986 with modified music (less melodic, more ominous), and in this version it was sent to various film festivals. The first version above is the original, and the second is the 1986 version, which has a sharper image but perhaps a less satisfying soundtrack (though it's a matter of taste).
The transcription and the subtitles could still be improved, because some of the words of the Iron Old Woman are very hard to make out.
Awards (supposedly, but some information below may be incorrect):
1986 - USSR, Tbilissi - Grand Priх
1986 - USSR, Ryazan - Prize and Diploma
1986 - USA, Chicago - Chicago International Film Festival - Silver Plaque Award
DISCUSSION
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A lovely art-house film that it seems to me is far less talked about than it should be, considering how influential it was, despite being little-seen by the wider public. The film in which Oscar-winner Aleksandr Petrov first found his artistic voice and used the technique that made him famous. The spark for Petrov's fascination with the writer Andrey Platonov, which led to his Oscar-nominated The Cow (1989). One of the first clear examples of Yuriy Norshteyn's growing influence as a pedagogue (there was also Prorokova's 1982 A Priest Had a Dog, but "Night" is far more Norshteyn-esque).
Tracking down the information for it took far longer than I thought it would. Petkevich himself seems to have never talked about it, nor the reasons for the two different release versions (the fact that there are two versions of the film doesn't even seem to have been noticed anywhere until now). Animator.ru has almost no data about the film, and lists the wrong studio. The information about the awards it won is almost certainly at least partly wrong.
I first read the two Platonov stories that it is based on just recently, and I would highly recommend them. They are very moving. I would even say that the film, good as it is, pales in comparison. I have not had time yet to see if there are any good English translations - if I find any, I'll add them to the description.
Petkevich himself (and his wife Yelena) would continue mining the images from "Night" for his subsequent films for more than a decade, until he abruptly became disillusioned with art-house filmmaking and denounced his previous films around the year 2000 or so. If I had the chance to ask him some questions, I would perhaps ask: "Do you still like the works of Platonov? Do you consider Platonov to be art-house? Or is that sort of thing okay in literature, but not in film? What would you do differently today?".
EDIT: To be honest, I'm not even quite sure that this IS paint-on-glass. Sometimes I think I see brush strokes, but I also see some graininess in some parts, so I wonder if it could be powder animation. In his later films, Petkevich seems to have used both of these techniques (or at least his wife Yelena used powder animation in Forest Tales... I'm no longer certain about The Tree of the Motherland).