Crimea/Palestine work in progress, April 2026

Short animation experiment using stills from the JDC of Jewish settlers in Crimea in the 1920s and line animation from the Jerusalem film archive. Please note, the underlying stills are upscaled using AI as a temporary solution, hence the slightly strange quality of the figures/faces.

Short treatment experiments with some of the JDC stills I have collected. Please note these derive from low-res thumbnails whose resolution is upscaled as a temporary solution, which may adversely affect aspects of some images.

Experiment using architectural plans of houses and settlements, with toponyms, in the Soviet Jewish colonies. Plans taken from Joseph Rosen's papers in the JDC archives.

I've started experimenting with headlines and excerpts from the Jewish press in the US and Mandate Palestine, to see if I can use them to give a flavour of the ideological polemics of the time and a contemporary outside prism onto the Soviet Jewish colonisation project. Such treatments would need to be more rhythmic (shorter and punchier). I also want to get facsimiles from the Soviet press, and to work with Palestinian newspapers I have.

Rough sequence using excerpts from Peretz Hirschbein's 1935 novel Red Fields, interweaving footage from Crimea and Palestine. N.B. given my currently limited access to a wide enough range of archival Soviet film footage from Crimea, I have in places used shots from Soviet features filmed in the Ukrainian or Russian steppes (Dovzhenko/Eisenstein) as placeholders, to get a feel for the treatment in principle. Late in the sequence, I've used some JDC archival footage (preceded by an intertitle) from the Jewish colonies in Crimea.

Rough sequence using a first excerpt from Viktor Shklovsky's writings about the film he made with Vladimir Mayakovsky, Abram Room and Lilya Brik about the Jewish colonies in Crimea. It likewise interweaves footage from Palestine and Crimea, and some of the shots are placeholders. Toward the end of the sequence, I have experimented with compositing techniques using footage from the Hirschbein sequence.

Experiment editing Zalman Korelnik's letter to his children in Palestine, mostly using footage from Palestine, some Soviet agronomical footage, and a handful of stills from the Soviet Jewish colonies.

Experimental and rough sequence beginning to work within a wider relational frame, using a Russian text about the Tatars' Great Migration to the Ottoman Empire in 1860, together with Zionist footage shot along the Bosphorus en route to Palestine; footage of the newly occupied West Bank; and Boris Chichibabin's poem Crimean Strolls. It is quite dense text-wise but I share it in the spirit of a very early experiment (as with all the sequences on this web page).

Experiment with animating the movement and projection of hand-painted lantern slides of Jewish settlers in Crimea from the JDC archives. I have found about 40 such slides so there is scope to make more and experiment further.