The MFA kicks off a sampling of the work of Alexander Ptushko, Soviet animator and director, with his 1946 fairy tale, The Stone Flower. Of the legendary title object, it’s said during the film that "those who see it lose interest in the world around them." The film likewise abandons all realism, ethnographic or psychological, as the stonecutter hero goes in search of this grail. He finds it in a crystalline cave that, in the geography of fantastic set design, lies closer to Ford Beebe (the Flash Gordon serials) than to Michael Powell (The Thief of Bagdad).

Shot on the same captured German color stock that Eisenstein used in Ivan the Terrible, Part Two, Ptushko’s film is a study in dense blues, infernal reds, watery greens, and fluctuating skin tones. Some of the phallic special effects are as disturbing as they are charming (the heroine stumbling through a forest of pliable tree trunks; a field of plants that rise on their stalks and bloom on camera). But the highlight of the film is a naturalistic wedding-party sequence in which the whirls of color in the dancers’ costumes obliterate all else in the frame. The Ptushko series will continue with The New Gulliver (October 10 and 12), Sadko (October 24 and 26), and Viy (October 31). In Russian with English subtitles. (83 minutes).