Thursday 17 October 2013

Soviet Filmstrips -Diaflims

Today I want to tell you about very old and interesting thing called Filmstrips.

The filmstrip was a common form of still image instructional multimedia, once commonly used for education or for entertainment, overtaken at the end of the eighties by VHS. In the early 1950s production companies started producing filmstrips for home entertainment. There were a number of films from Disney, and also from other manufacturers. You can read full Wikipedia article here.

In short, the "filmstrips" were illustrated stories that were projected on a canvas or wall. The sequence of images was printed on a perforated film strip and all frames were thematically linked to each other and are usually equipped with text.

In Soviet Union filmstrips were called Diafilms (Диафильм) and before introduction of VHS they were extremely popular among soviet people. Lots of Diafilms of different subjects and different genres were released: educational, fairy tales and even some sci-fi ones.


As for me, I haven't saw much Diafilms when I was a kid (I was born in 1984), and I remembered about them only two days ago, so now I am rediscovering Diaflims :) 

3 comments:

  1. That is a blast from the past. My school used to take field trips to the local library where our class would be treated to some of these. Well, not the Soviet ones anyway,

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  2. These are wonderful! Would love to see more of them translated. The art is lovely.

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    1. I WILL translate more. There was a break in translation because of some real life things.

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