10 minute read
POP ART in animation
Andreas Trossek, art historian and critic, who works as editor-in-charge of Estonian art quarterly Kunst.ee, writes about psychedelic animation from Estonia.
By Andreas Trossek Photos by Estonian Film Institute & Film Archive of the National Archives of Estonia
When the Second World War ended, Estonians found themselves on the 'wrong side' of the Iron Curtain, and no longer part of the free world. Surprisingly though, we can talk about a number of psychedelic Pop Art influenced animated films made in 1970s Tallinn.
Back then, Tallinnfilm was the main republic cinema production studio of the Estonian SSR, both funded and ideologically controlled by the Goskino, the USSR State Committee for Cinematography. Throughout the 1970s, a generation of Estonian neo-avant-garde artists who were influenced, among other things, by Pop Art (and also by The Beatles' famous Yellow Submarine animated feature from 1968) were actively engaged in the process of making hand-drawn animated films. Although artists such as Aili Vint (b. 1941), Leonhard Lapin (1947–2022), Sirje Runge (b. 1950), Ando Keskküla (1950–2008), Rein Tammik (b. 1947), Priit Pärn (b. 1946) and also the background artist Kaarel Kurismaa (b. 1939) need no introduction in Estonia today, their first youth culture oriented experimentations in the field of animation have often been overlooked. However, it is clear that quite a few animations from the 1970s rightly belong to the art historical framework of Soviet Estonian Pop Art, or 'Soviet Pop' as this localized version of Pop Art is often referred to.
POP… POP? POP!
In the 1990s, when local art historians were finally able to make attempts to write an honest and de-Sovietized art history, a certain positive quality of 'Pop-likeness' emerged in their texts about postwar Estonian art. It enabled to present some Soviet-era artworks as atypical and put them in opposition to the dominant paradigm of Social Realism. In retrospect, the key-members of the artist groups ANK '64 (Tõnis Vint (1942–2019), Aili Vint (b. 1941), Jüri Arrak (1936–2022), Malle Leis (1940–2017) et al), Visarid (Kaljo Põllu (1934–2010), Rein Tammik et al) and SOUP '69 (Ando Keskküla, Andres Tolts (1949–2014), Leonhard Lapin et al) could be considered to be importers and modifiers of many focal trends of the 20th century art, such as Pop Art, Op Art and Conceptualism, which at that time, in the 1960s and 1970s when they were young art academy graduates, represented ideologically disapproved 'Western tendencies' within the cultural apparatuses of the Soviet Union.
Quite many of those young artists were also connected with Tallinnfilm's cartoon animation unit, which was established in 1971 under the leadership of Rein Raamat (b. 1931), a professional portrait painter himself. It can even be suggested that hand-drawn animation became sort of a problem-free 'test site' for those artistic ideas that couldn't be fulfilled in the public/official art arena of the Estonian SSR. Animation as a relatively peripheral field of cultural production functioned as a new and empty niche, which stood both between and outside the official hierarchies of 'high art' (i.e. Soviet Realism). Pop-flavoured and at times psychedelic imagery didn't cause too many problems with cinema authorities, which, on the other hand, would have been inevitable in the case of a public art exhibition.
Pop flavoured and at times psychedelic imagery didn't cause too many problems with cinema authorities.
As a result, instead of official exhibition spaces, a significant number of individual aesthetic programs loaded with Pop imagery and colourful psychedelic vibes were in fact successfully carried out in the public space, although in a rather peculiar media – in animation films that were officially targeted at children. These new and weird films were screened in local cinemas and later occasionally shown on television, embedding themselves into the minds of many children… and also art-loving young adults.
HOW TO MIX ART WITH ANIMATION
In 1972 Rein Raamat, a former feature film production designer at Tallinnfilm studio (and who, by the way, had also been engaged in the process of making the first Estonian puppet-film in 1958, Elbert Tuganov's (1920–2007) Little Peter's Dream), directed his first handdrawn animation. It was called The Water Carrier (1972). However, making humorous cartoons mostly for children was not exactly what Raamat wanted to do in the long run. He had a painter's diploma himself, and already the third release of the studio, entitled Flight (1973), featured trendy background art with Op and Pop references by the young painter Aili Vint (a member of ANK ´64).
The soundtrack of the film was created by Rein Rannap (b. 1953), a founder of the legendary Estonian rock group Ruja, and in hindsight Flight could indeed be interpreted also as a music video or an abstract promotional clip. It was as close as you could get to 'yellow-submarine-sque' aesthetics in the Soviet Union at that time. The film proved to be successful, receiving an international festival award from Zagreb, and Raamat continued the pattern of hiring young ambitious artists in order to achieve a contemporary and up to-date visual effect.
Raamat's next film, Colourbird (1974), was, in contrast, somewhat a failure in the eyes of the film authorities in Tallinn because the artist-architect Leonhard Lapin (a member of SOUP '69) and his then-wife Sirje Lapin (now Runge) were more concerned with the rare possibility of exhibiting the aesthetics of Pop Art, rather than actually illustrating the storyline of the film. However, due to Raamat's cunning diplomacy, the film was approved in Moscow without problems – Estonian animation had simply acquired a good reputation. The rocking soundtrack was once again delivered by Rein Rannap.
To this day, it remains as a powerful testament of the fact that the hippie generation artists made no compromises – the result is rather schizophrenic to its core, falling between the categories of an experimental 'underground' art film and an educational short oriented for toddlers (teaching them primary colours). Colourbird was undoubtedly one of the most powerful manifestations of Pop Art aesthetics within the public space of the Estonian SSR in the early 1970s.
Raamat turned to less visually experimental solutions with the cartoons The Gothamites (1974) and A Romper (1976), which are noteworthy for their morally ambivalent types drawn up by Priit Pärn, already a celebrated caricaturist who later became highly regarded internationally in the world of animation. The background colours were by Kaarel Kurismaa, a pioneer of Estonian kinetic and sound art.
The new 'Pop Art paradigm' was continued in the directorial works of Ando Keskküla (also a member of SOUP '69), at the time a well-known young 'metaphysical realist' in official artistic circles whose paintings truly brought Hyperrealism or Photorealism to the Estonian SSR. A Pop Art influenced design by Rein Tammik (a member of Visarid) was openly expressed in Keskküla's The Story of the Bunny (1975), whereas Rabbit (1976) was visually a much more mechanically 'colder' mixture of Pop Art, Hyperrealism, and photography.
The music in the first film was composed by Rein Rannap once again, while the soundtrack for the second film was by Lepo Sumera (1950–2000), whose symphonic approach in the end of the films sounds rather psychedelic. In The Story of the Bunny, animated and documentary footage were fused together, so in the end the imagery 'jumps' from a cartoonish style into a photographic register. In Rabbit rotoscoping (the process of creating animated sequences by tracing over live-action footage frame by frame) was used. Thus it could be summarised that as a director, Keskküla was interested in the same effect that attracted him in (Photorealist) painting: a system in which the imaginary and real were put into a conflicting situation.
After Keskküla left animation for painting, Tammik gave another Pop Art/Hyperrealist look to Avo Paistik's Vacuum Cleaner (1978). The outcome was the second Estonian hand-drawn animation that outraged Goskino, and it was forbidden to show it outside the Estonian SSR. The story is about a red (sic!) vacuum cleaner, which starts swallowing up or destroying everything around it, growing bigger by the minute. Rotoscopic aesthetics in combination with the (possible) political allegory proved to be too scary for a screening permit in other parts of the USSR. A year earlier, the directorial debut of Pärn, Is the Earth Round? (1977), was also limited to republic screens because it was deemed too pessimistic at Goskino.
Pärn as a caricaturist was influenced by Pop Art indirectly, yet thoroughly, and that is most visible in his artistic design for Paistik's Sunday (1977). As if in tandem with Pärn, Kurismaa was once again included as a colourist. In theory this film was a critical sci-fi collage on the topic of the future of consumer society, but in practice the outcome was much more ambivalent and 'yellow-submarine-sque'. According to the archive documents, the target group of this animation was eventually limited, excluding young children (sic!).
The soundtrack of the film heavily borrowed from Pink Floyd's popular LP The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). This music got into the film, one could say, as a result of a 'work accident': the film's sound operator had recommended sampling Pink Floyd's music after the director refused to use the work by the contracted composer, but the film still had to be finished according to the deadline.
However, the most famous Estonian composer today, who actively worked in animation in the 1960s and 1970s, is undoubtedly Arvo Pärt (b. 1935). Mostly he composed soundtracks for puppet films, and a neat little Space Age puppet film Atomic and the Goons (1970) by Elbert Tuganov, serves as a good example of his early experimental style. But that's already another story, something completely different…
IN CONCLUSION
Within the official cinema circles of the Soviet Union, animation was mainly targeted towards toddlers, young children, and teenagers. Here, on the other hand, the artists had clearly used children-oriented cartoons as a means of artistic expression, and experimented with the possibilities of the film medium in general (while also alluding to works by sympathetic artists on the screen, adding another layer of inside-jokes), and this created a discrepancy.
Although undoubtedly the mechanisms of the Soviet film bureaucracy were more prominent in this context than the rules of Estonian art life, when we look back into the process of making these animations, one thing is clear: by gradually shifting our focus from film history to art history, the true value of Estonian Pop animation of the 1970s becomes apparent – these selected films appear as fragmented manifestations of post-Second World War youth culture that also filtered into the 'wrong side' of the Iron Curtain. EF
