The Art of Czech Animation

A History of Political Dissent and Allegory

Adam Whybray

• Editorial: Bloomsbury Academic
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350104648
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Categoría: Animación

The Art of Czech Animation is the first comprehensive English language account of Czech animation from the 1920s to the present, covering both 2D animation forms and CGI, with a focus upon the stop-motion films of Jirí Trnka, Hermína Týrlová, Jan Švankmajer and Jirí Barta. Stop-motion is a highly embodied form of animation and The Art of Czech Animation develops a new materialist approach to studying these films. Instead of imposing top-down Film Theory onto its case studies, the book's analysis is built up from close readings of the films themselves, with particular attention given to their non-human objects. In a time of environmental crisis, the unique way Czech animated films use allegory to de-centre the human world and give a voice to non-human aspects of the natural world points us towards a means by which culture can increase ecological awareness in viewers. Such a refutation of a human-centred view of the world was contrary to communist orthodoxy and it remains so under late-stage consumer-capitalism. As such, these films do not only offer beautiful examples of allegory, but stand as models of political dissent. The Art of Czech Animation is a unique endeavour of film philosophy to provide a materialist appraisal of a heretofore neglected strand of Central-Eastern European cinema.

1

‘It’s the simple things’: Animated allegories against Nazi and Soviet oppression

Overcoming the poverty of object analysis

In Vlasta Pospísilová’s 1984 short Lady Poverty (Paní Bída), poverty is anthropomorphized as a crone in a tattered dress and headscarf. As Lady Poverty moves through the Czech countryside, she plunders households of their objects, stealing them away in a bag of cloth from which they never re-emerge. The film works as a parable, illustrating the rewards of hard work and the dangers of sloth. Characters asleep during the day are stripped of their possessions, while a hard-working, resourceful family are able to fend off Poverty. When Poverty has finished divesting a person of their property, she throws them a length of rope fashioned into a noose with which they can hang themselves. Integrally, when the resourceful family are thrown the noose, the father ties it around a wardrobe in which Lady Poverty has chosen to hide, imprisoning her inside for enough time for the wardrobe to be transported out of the house.

The family’s repurposing of the noose illustrates an aspect of their collective character (their ingenuity), but how are we to interpret the object’s transformation symbolically? If the noose represents suicide in the face of financial and material ruin, could its refashioning represent the conversion of despair into hope? If so, what does it mean that the daughter of the family later uses this same rope as a washing line? Does this indicate domestic work keeps thoughts of suicide at bay? In these moments, the allegorical meaning of the film recedes from view and the symbolic rope is replaced on screen and within the imagination by the merely physical rope, usable for binding a wardrobe shut or for hanging clothes from but not for theorizing with.

How do we, as theorists and film viewers, overcome this potential poverty of on-screen object analysis? Renira Gambarato proposes a method for paring down the sheer conflux of objects confronting the theorist to those useful for analysis. Firstly, the theorist must apply quantitative analysis to all the objects in a film, determining how many times each given item appears on screen. Those objects appearing with the greatest frequency are determined to be the most cogent for textual analysis.¹ While in their paper ‘Objects of Desire’ Gambarato and co-author Simone Malaguti distinguish between micro and macro objects, determining only micro objects need be analysed² this can only ever be a provisional distinction since the importance given to macro objects dwarfs that of micro objects in the work of some film-makers (such as in the urban landscape films of Patrick Keiller). Moreover, despite the empirical basis for Gambarato’s methodology, there will always doubtless be commonsensical omissions from the theorist’s quantitative analysis – objects necessarily on screen in many mid- to long-shots of household interiors, such as door handles or plug sockets; or else things that are divisible parts of actors or props, such as fingernails, screws or nose hairs. Gambarato categorizes the objects to be analysed in a chosen film via a taxonomy composed of three criteria – relevance, expressiveness and functionality³ – which in turn include numerous sub-categories, under which objects are placed according to their given function within a scene. The noose of Lady Poverty, for example, does not have any ‘autobiographic signification’ or ‘advertising’ or ‘ideological’ function, nor relate to any particular artistic movement,⁴ but might be considered to have ‘scenographic’⁵ value through clarifying the character and temperament of Lady Poverty and the ‘semantic’ function⁶ of connoting suicide through metonymic association. However, if the theorist is especially interested in investigating just one of these functions (i.e. an object’s ideological function) and the other functions only insomuch as they help express that one function, Gambarato’s methodology fails to increase the ease or efficiency of the theorist’s work, since it can only be applied ex post facto when the task of analysis has already been performed.

An implicit aspect of Gambarato’s work not made explicitly part of her methodology is that, in any given paper, her analysis of objects is performed upon a series of films by the same director – a director, such as Wim Wenders or Denys Arcand, whose work has been previously determined by Gambarato to express an ideologically or aesthetically consistent approach to their use of objects on screen. Such an auteurist approach allows a director’s changing or evolving relationship to objects in their work to emerge.

In this chapter, the films of Jiří Trnka are analysed chronologically to demonstrate the shifting ways in which Trnka used objects on screen across his work to embody political and philosophical ideas in response to the rule of Nazism and, later, Soviet-style communism over Czechoslovakia.

Generally, Trnka communicates the political messages of his work(s) through the encoding of aspects of the film’s mise-en-scène, via cinematographic techniques that emphasize the material qualities of these aspects. In his earliest two-dimensional works, such as Grandfather Planted a Beet (Zasadil dědek řepu, 1945) or Springman and the SS (Pérák a SS, 1946), objects like a giant beet or a pair of springs are, at the level of production, not distinguished materially from the rest of the films’ mise-en-scène, since they are, like everything else on screen, mere drawings. As such, these objects are made to ‘stand out’ from their environments through either scale or novelty. The aforementioned beet is abnormally large; the springs allow a chimney sweep to jump great heights into the air. This may be regarded as a preparatory or juvenile stage in Trnka’s approach to objects, since these objects are not truly depicted in their everydayness – bestowed, as they are, with some quirk that sets them apart from the quotidian. Indeed, Hermína Týrlová’s films of the same period, such as Lullaby (Ukolébavka, 1948) or Ferda the Ant (Ferda Mravenec, 1943), are more consistent in their non-miraculous depiction of objects, but rarely wedded to the political concerns that subtly characterize Trnka’s work.

Trnka’s approach to objects reached maturity in his first feature-length film, The Czech Year (Špalíček, 1947), which illustrates the seasonal rituals and customs of Bohemia. If the springs of Springman and the SS are explicitly politically resistant objects, the spiced bread rolls and folk costumes of The Czech Year are more benignly traditional objects, carefully rendered in accurate local detail. This traditionalist mode emphasizes the craft and care taken in the creation of the objects themselves, with parallels drawn between the labour of Czech peasants within the film and the artisanal work of Trnka himself who carved the objects and puppets of his films. If there is a political impetus to this work, it is purely descriptive and celebratory. The objects are to be appreciated and assessed in their simple objecthood. This is also the approach of the majority of Týrlová’s films, even while they adopt a contemporary rather than a historical subject, as in The Little Train (Vláček kolejáček, 1959) or Two Balls of Wool (Dvě klubíčka, 1962). While Trnka develops this poetic-descriptive approach in a number of ways across his filmography, it always remains the foundation upon which later approaches are built – with the curious exception of Passion (Vášeň, 1962).

With The Emperor’s Nightingale (Císařův slavík, 1949) Trnka attempted to exceed the simple, descriptive approach of his early work through the use of irony. In order to make a critique of excessive artifice in art, Trnka produced a claustrophobically artificial film filled with an excess of decorative detail. Problematically, Trnka’s painstaking artisanal approach ensures the beauty of the baroque details of the film’s mise-en-scène, the aspect of the film most praised by reviewers. Trnka therefore abandoned this mode, returning to a more direct historical approach for The Prince Bayaya (Bajaja, 1950) and Old Czech Legends (Staré pověsti české, 1953).

Old Czech Legends advances The Czech Year in technique through shifting from a strictly historical approach to a more fully allegorical, mythic mode of film-making, albeit still rooted in the everydayness of objects. This is achieved primarily through associative editing,⁷ which draws metonymic connections between objects and their environments. Through using visual metonymy rather than figurative metaphor, Trnka ensures the objects of Old Czech Legends are never abstracted from the local environments in which they are rooted. Old Czech Legends’ cinematic rendering of rootedness develops in two antithetical directions across the films of the following decade. Down one path, rootedness descends into earthiness, as in the coarse carnivalesque humour of Archangel Gabriel and Miss Goose (Archandel Gabriel a paní Husa, 1964). Meanwhile, the other path ascends to a kind of civilized pastoralism in which an object’s rootedness is illustrative of its transcendence, as in Trnka’s ornate adaptation of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Sen noci svatojánské, 1959).

Finally, in the early to mid-1960s, when Týrlová was producing her most abstract and experimental work, like A Marble (Kulička, 1963) and The Blue Apron (Modrá zástěrka, 1965), Trnka achieved the most thorough-going realization of his allegorical film-making with The Cybernetic Grandma (Kybernetická Babicka, 1962) and The Hand, before his death in 1969. Rather than simply encode single cinematic objects with political meaning, these films allegorize an aspect of the KSČ’s ideological state apparatus – technology; censorship – in microcosm, communicating this critique through the work’s cinematic language rather than dialogue or voice-over narration. It is instructive to demonstrate how Passion of the same period (mis)uses abstract metaphor to illuminate how The Cybernetic Grandma and The Hand work more successfully within a metonymic mode, which builds its critiques from the ground-up. Within these two films political deconstruction occurs at the material level of everyday objects grounded in their everyday environments.

To insist such metonymic film-making is allegorical, it is essential to investigate the meaning of this contested term.

Introduction to allegory

Defined simply, allegory is a rhetorical or pictorial form in which surface content functions as an extended metaphor for hidden, symbolic meaning. This meaning tends to be of moral, spiritual or political import and will sometimes relate to a particular situation contemporaneous to the author/creator, but will generally also contain a more universal or generalizable message applicable to all times and places. The concept and function of allegory are debated because it can be hard to delineate precisely where a symbolic work becomes allegorical. Many authors, painters or directors seek to communicate a message to their audience, or make use of metaphors or allusions, yet not all such works are allegories. A requirement of allegory is that its symbolism is extended to the full length of a work and is internally consistent. For instance, in a novel, a rose might represent the love between two characters, but if the rose is merely a metaphor used once to illuminate the relationship between two characters who merely exist in and of themselves rather than standing in for some higher or more abstract concept, then the work is not functioning allegorically. Compounding this problem of blurred definitional boundaries is the fact that classical or early modern allegories could rely upon a common set of literary and mythic allusions known to the majority of readers or viewers, such as figures from the Bible or Greco-Roman myth. Modern writers or artists working within an allegorical mode have a far wider pool of references to draw from, yet they cannot assume common knowledge across their audience. As such, these modern allegories are likely to be open to a broader variety of readings or depend less upon prior knowledge or viewership. Such works may consequently end up being closer to moral fables or fairy tales (when simplified, relying less upon allusion) or, on the other hand, more abstract and broadly symbolic, employing a wide range of symbolism, rather than providing a coherent allegorical vision. Despite this, Theresa Kelley insists, ‘allegory survives after the Renaissance, against pressures that ought to have done it in’.⁸ This is because, in spite of its unfashionable status, the allegorical form has remained useful to artists working across the twentieth century and beyond.

The allegory is the ideal artistic form for artists living within a totalitarian state liable to find themselves under scrutiny from their government. This is because allegory hides its latent meaning beneath its surface. It says other than what it appears to say. The viewer of a cinematic allegory must act as an interpreter, inferring the meaning of the film and the intentions of its director through their awareness of parallels between what they see on screen and some other paradigm(s) external to the film, which, ideally, they have encountered prior to their viewing. For instance, the viewer of either of the film adaptations of George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1954 and 1999) would need to be already acquainted with the figures of Stalin and Trotsky to recognize their doubles in the pigs Napoleon and Snowball – or, more broadly, be aware forms of totalitarian power exist within the human world – to understand the film’s message. With such knowledge, the viewer can then adopt a schema taken from the world outside of the film (say, the Russian Revolution) and overlay it upon the diegetic world on screen. This is symptomatic of a key difference between the allegorical form and the morality story, fable or fairy tale, which offer self-contained stories, from which a meaning can be derived in its entirety, without reference to outside sources or specific historical, political or social knowledge. This accounts for the tendency to consider the very young as the appropriate audience for the latter and the treatment of allegory as a higher, literary form, associated less with folk culture than the literary canon of Dante and Shakespeare.

Inevitably, these are generalizations, since the definition of allegory has been historically unstable, its theorization shifting across the twentieth century. Indeed, Jeremy Tambling even ventures, ‘perhaps there is no definite thing called “allegory”, only forms of writing more or less “allegorical”’.⁹

However, a genre or mode of expression having blurred boundaries does not mean it should be barred from use in critical analysis. Despite its contested status, allegory remains the most appropriate term to use in relation to the films studied in this book because most of the films considered herein involve the interplay between a literal meaning and a hidden symbolic meaning which is systematic, internally consistent and politically engaged.

Allegory always contains the me...