The Case of the Artist

The Case of the Artist (1962) is a short Soviet animated satire you can watch online on iFILM. Nineteen minutes long, directed by Grigory Kozlov, hand-drawn in the years when "formalism" was an official enemy.

A painter gets trapped inside his own abstract canvases. The world of shapes without objects turns into one nightmare after another, and the terrified artist eventually flees back to "realism." The whole thing is a caricature of abstract, constructivist and surrealist art, made at the height of the Thaw-era arguments about what painting should be. Watch it less for the gag than as a time capsule: it shows exactly what the culture was told to mock. Stream The Case of the Artist (1962) online on iFILM.