Baba Yaga in Space

The assignment: Create a video that envisions one of the movements from the orchestrated version of Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” piano suite written in 1874. The video should be built using clips found on the Internet Archive.

I chose to work with the movement called “The Hut on Fowl’s Legs”. That title probably requires some explanation. Mussorgsky had a friend named Viktor Hartmann who was an architect and artist. Hartmann died suddenly in 1873. The next year there was an exhibition of his paintings. To honor his friend, Mussorgsky wrote Pictures at an Exhibition where each movement is based on one of Hartmann’s paintings. One of those paintings was titled The Hut on Fowl’s Legs.

The hut is the home of Baba Yaga, a character from Slavic folklore. Sometimes Baba Yaga is depicted as a friendly character, but most often she is seen as a malevolent old woman that flies around in a mortar wielding a pestle, eats children, and lives in the woods in a house built on chicken legs.

The music starts out moving quickly with powerful sounds from horns and kettle drums and cymbals. Then there is a slow and quiet mid-section that is a bit of a respite but also has a tense and ominous sound. The final section takes off again with more horns and drums. It builds and builds toward the end of the movement. In the full piece, this movement slides right into the next movement, the Great Gate of Kiev, but we don’t need to go that far. We end the video here.

After listening to the music, I started wandering around the Internet Archive looking for clips that would fit. I wanted scenes with lots of action. I thought maybe some sort of racing videos might work so I looked at drag racing and motorcycle racing videos. Oddly enough, when you take away the sound from racing videos, you find out that the movement of the vehicles is really rather rhythmic and the sense of speed that you get from watching a race in person kind of goes away, especially with motorcycle road racing. Next I turned to rocket launches. There were some NASA videos of various rockets blasting off. They had lots of flames but not the kind of constant action I was looking for.

Finally I found what I wanted. Plenty of action and even some dialog that I could blend with the music. I’ll let you see what I found in the video itself. Hint – the clips come from several British action series that were filmed in the 1960s using marionettes. You know the ones I’m talking about.