Soyuzmultfilm Puppet animation collective 1972
Man needs to understood he is creator and master of the world and that on him lies the responsibility for all unhappiness on Earth
and that he receives glory for all goodness in life. (from a letter by M. Gorkiy to Romain Rolland)
The master from Clamecy
After Romain Rolland's “Colas Bruignon”. Scenario Aleksei Simukov
directed by Vadim Kurchevsky
art director Teodor Tezhik
cameramen Yan Topper, Teodor Bunimovich, Ilia Minkovetsky
animators Joseph Douksha, Natalia Dabizha, Maya Buzinova
music Michael Meyerovich
sound Vladimir Kutuzov cutter Nadezhda Treshcheva
script editor Raisa Frichinskaya
text is read by Alexei Konsovsky
puppets and decor Pavel Lessin, Roman Gurov, Svetlana Znamenskaya, Pavel Gussev, V. Ladygin, Vladimir Alisov,
Marina Chesnokova, Vladimir Abbakumov, Oleg Massainov, Liliana Lutinskaya, Galina Gettinger
executive producer Nathan Bitman
I don't know, my friends,
why it give me such satisfaction
to drink a bumper of old remembrance from the bottom of my heart.
I have no idle fancies in my head No,...
I only tell what I have seen, done, and said
My name is Colas, nicknamed Breugnon,
An old sparrow of burgundy blood, wide in soul and trousers.
My wife - my treasure - is the benefactor of our home.
She often annoys me.
but I'm not fool enough to take offense because of her words.
She blames me for being a gourmand and liking banquets too much.
I indeed love all that's good: a good table, a good wine...
I praise my good fate and that which one finds in dreams.
I'm always hungry;
my mouth fairly waters before the feast spread for me by the earth and the sun.
How good is to live in these parts!
The land is good, that I'm born in and on which I make a living.
I am a carpenter belonging to the brotherhood of St. Anne.
Everything here I made with my own hands.
What can be better than the delight of an accurate hand,
and clever big fingers,
which can turn out the most fragile works of art.
Oh, my granddaughter! You little, cunning fox!
As soon as she sees me she comes running to greet me.
She knows I always have basket full of tales. She loves them as much as I do.
How good it is to stand with a tool in my hand and saw plane, shave, curve.
To rouse Beauty sleeping in the wood, her lover must penetrate to the heart of it.
How many shapes lie hidden there!
I look at them and youth resurrects itself.
It was a good life when I was twenty, women's breasts were fuller and more beautiful then,
and men had the heart in the right place and all the rest, too.
Nowadays people aren't made of such wood.
My weasel, where are you now? How many years I haven't seen you!
What is left of your cheerful face, of the tricky grimaces of my weasel?
Now there's no need to be afraid you'll nibble out my heart with your sharp teeth,
but how they could laugh and bite in the days of the past!
Once, it was about thirty five years after our last encounter, I nevertheless saw her again.
She was driving a donkey and shouting across the whole street.
I said: I'd know you among all women from the world with my eyes closed.
Bruignon, - she said - you're still the same reaper. I looked at her and I gasped and couldn't say a word.
And suddenly she said: You know what, it was you I was in love with then.
in love...
but I thought she was taking me on.
Oh, foolish youth!
How good it is to think I was such a fool sometimes. How it is reviving my heart!
Kiss me, - she asked.
When I touched her old cheeks
My eyes were stingy from how much I wanted to cry.
But the weasel said to me: "thorny"...
Then I heard voice of my old hag.
it cut through the air and yelled I was a do-nothing and a boozer,
and that I urgently had to go on with the order from the Duke:.
His highness' men were coming for it
Yes, yes, yes...what they tell is true: once you have a wife, forget about a quiet life.
Let them sing their song, I'll be singing mine.
To your heath, beauty!
What's that? What's that?
Our friend the vicar is arguing again with his parishioners.
Bruignon, can you hear? - he cried.
These do-nothing always are asking something from God,
everyday they hanker me and God with their fancies.
Here they want warmth for fields, there they want clouds to be showed aside
wheat must be reaped,
now there are these caterpillars and bugs...
I enjoyed the argument and then we raised glasses.
The vicar, of course, to Lord God, but I to common sense.
But these parishioners wouldn't give up demanding for their priest.
Vangabonds! - the vicar yelled - I'm serving God not you devil's children.
Yes, - I said -
there's no worse trade...
than driving God's truths into their thick-skinned heads.
It was a sin to sit at home in such mornings
so I went to forest together with my granddaughter and my apprentice.
I needed a piece of wood, flexible and dense.
I'm ready to caress tirelessly these sides! For me wood is dearer than woman.
Everybody has his own passion.
Occupied with my own business I hadn't paid attention to the riders approaching us.
Those were men from our duke de Nevier.
They ran at us like we were some criminals saying that we were on their master's property.
We knew this was his land.
But until recently when his late father was alive
we walked these paths freely.
I tried to explain to this iron blockhead, that since
three hundred years our grandfathers and great-grandfathers pastured cattle here,
made hay, gathered brushwood... but he didn't want to listen to anything.
Coming to my senses again I decided to go to the castle of his highness to seek justice.
Many of my works had gathered there during a quarter of a century...
They were miserable and uncomfortable here, my children. the woodwork was damaged and cracked.
Yes, our young duke can't be compared with the old one.
And I understood I had come in vain.
Don't you know - he said - everything in Clamecy belongs to me!
Land and forest and even you with your wooden figures I buy from you.
What could I answer? Everyone around me was laughing.
Brazen it out, he did and began to shoot at my dear little ones from a harquebus.
I cry for every of these wooden figures, brought to life by my own fingers.
Man is nothing, holy is what he has created.
Thrice the murderer murdered a creation.
But then happened that what the duke and his drunk do-nothings couldn't have foreseen.
One of them tumbled down to my feet. What's up with him? - the duke asked.
Your highness, there is a shooter more precise than you, - I said to him.
Who's that? - The plague, the plague, your highness.
Going mad from fear for plague and death people lost their last bits of common sense.
They burned down houses with sick as well as healthy.
Others hid in their holes, shutting all windows because of fear to see each other.
I felt my song was sung.
Burning up with fever,
my side were stinging and my intestines turned inside out.
Oh, God, why are you punishing an innocent man
who has done nothing to wrong you?
Why do you need my soul?
Then I understood he didn't hear me, and I was just wasting my time.
I don't know for how long I was wallowing in that barn,
but when I stood up and went for a breath of fresh air
I couldn't recognize Clamecy.
Then I shouted to people:
It can't go on like this! Come out, we should come together!
Or are your pants perhaps taken away, keeping you hiding in your rooms.
We all came together again.
Well, what the say is true:
Evil comes on a swift horse, but is slow of foot to leave us.
Just when I thought we left everything behind, new misfortune befell us.
Our little granddaughter fell sick.
All feverish, she kept calling for help and bumping around as an injured bird.
I can't tell what a night we had.
Isn't that strange how you get so attached to such a little creature,
everything is alright with her around, even the worst,
but without her there's nothing.
I completely forgot I had left the old hag alone in the room.
The clock on the wall had ticked with it's silent ticking
her last minutes during which her whole life flashed before her eyes.
Only praying to save her granddaughter kept her on this earth.
Who created this miracle I down know
but just as granddaughter's fever began to recede,
her breathing run as light as a brooklet and our birdie began to come back to life,
my old hag, dropped her head on the pillow, sighing: Now I can go.
the light in her eyes faded, her features grew sharp and hollow,
and her breathing stopped suddenly.
That's it. My wife's life had faded away
You see,
it's possible not to love your old hag,
to be angry at each other day and night for twenty five years,
but when the boned-one comes for her,
you feel how something get stuck in your throat,
like a piece of yourself has fallen away
though it's not beautiful, though it has ashamed you at times,
you love it.
Sun has retreated. It's freezing.
This cunning frost has gotten indoors even here.
Time is the best healer. How long can you mourn over something that can't be returned?
The only fault I have to find with this good life of ours, my friends,
is that it is too short.
I should like to have more...
Me, old sparrow, knew how to use it, and I never would forget friends.
Let's clink glasses!
God is my witness,
we haven't come to an agreement with our nice duke on who's land this is.
He won't let us set foot on his fields!
If there were no one in France like us, who love it's wine-yards and fields,
what grub would the king have?
In the evening we gathered at the "Three Cups" tavern.
one always agree sitting here at a table. And this is what we though out.
It's not enough to our duke teach a lesson, we need to have fun for ourselves, too.
We directed ourselves to the fields
carrying hidden weapons - axes covered with clothes and hats.
And we cried: Hail to our nice duke!
And these blockheads guarding the field, didn't realize anything of course.
With shouts - Where's our lord the duke? - they stopped our procession.
with laughter we answered - our nice duke is with us.
Then the duke himself showed up.
I said once more - our duke is with us.
He noticed the baldachin at once and ordered to take off the cover.
Is it alike? I think it is.
the nose may be too long, but let it be a duke with such a nose.
As an educaded man the duke de Nevier realized there was no place for two dukes.
So we began to celebrate our victory.
We ate, drunk and rejoiced the whole day without sparing our soles and mouths.
This was the method we chose to show that the Clamecy people
could be true subjects of the Duke and King, and yet insist on having our own way
The more poor I am, the more riches I have.
My little ones are with me, my friends.
My granddaughter - my blue-eyed titmouse. And my apprentice.
Isn't this true riches?
Children leave home, but old folk stays with their grandchildren.
That's better - we always have something to talk about.
Nice little rascals who are nothing yet, but will definitely become something.
I live for sake of them.
These are my seeds I'm throwing into future.
This is my workshop.
It was burned down during the plague.
It's meant like this - one man creates, the other destroys.
Nevertheless, life is good when you feel the firmness of a reliable hand,
when work is with you.
But the best of what I have made are the souls I have scupltured.
They will be happier,
because they'll stand on my shoulders and see farther/further.
The End Subs by dust angel. September 2016 adjusted by Eus using an original book translation