Nikolai Gogol’s Classic Story, “The Nose,” Animated With the Astonishing Pinscreen Technique (1963) — openculture.com

A mild-looking barber slices into his morning loaf of bread to find a human nose embedded within. You might imagine this image opening the next David Lynch movie, but it actually sets up a more lighthearted, much older, and much more Russian story: Nikolai Gogol’s “The Nose.” (Find it in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books collections.) The story soon introduces us to the man to whom the nose belongs, a government official who wakes to find nothing but a smooth patch of flesh in the middle of his face. The quest to reclaim his nose takes him to the architecturally imposing, column-intensive hall in which he works, where he finds that the organ through which he once breathed has not only grown a body of its own, but already risen above him in the ranks of the civil service. To find out how this increasingly bizarre, dreamlike scenario resolves itself, you can either read Gogol’s story in the English translation free in Project Gutenberg’s copy of the Gogol Collection The Mantle and Other Stories, or you can watch Alexander Alexeieff and Claire Parker’s 1963 short above, which adapts “The Nose” by means of something called pinscreen animation.

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