Anti-Animation: Textures of Eastern European Animated Film

Ăœlo Pikkov

Textures of Eastern European Animated Film Dissertationes Academiae Artium Estoniae 25

Dissertationes Academiae Artium Estoniae 25

Ăœlo Pikkov

AntiAnimation: Textures of Eastern European Animated Film

Doctoral thesis Estonian Academy of Arts 2018

Ülo Pikkov Anti-Animation: Textures of Eastern European Animated Film Doctoral thesis Estonian Academy of Arts 2018

Supervisior: Prof. Raivo Kelomees (Estonian Academy of Arts) External reviewer: Prof. Robert Sowa (Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow), Michał Bobrowski PhD (Jagiellonian University) Opponent: Prof. Robert Sowa (Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow) Public defence: 18.06.2018 (Tallinn) English translation: Eva Näripea Copy editor: Eva Näripea, Richard Adang Design and layout: Margus Tamm Supporting instutions: Cultural Endowment of Estonia, Estonian Film Institute Printed by: AS Pakett Print run: 200 © Ülo Pikkov, 2018

ISBN 978-9949-594-61-0 (print) ISBN 978-9949-594-62-7 (pdf) ISSN 1736-2261

Table of contents

Introduction 1.1.

1.2.

1.3.

1.4.

1.5.

1.6.

1.7.

1.8.

9

About the dissertation Points of departure Sources and source criticism Geographical scope Thematic focus Theoretical framework and terminology Animation as a chronicle of its times The artistic part of the dissertation

Summary of the chapters

29

Dystopia and Involuntary Surrealism in Animated Film

41

2.1.

2.2.

2.3.

2.4.

2.5.

3.1.

3.2.

Dystopia and involuntary surrealism in animated film Surrealist sources of Eastern European animation film On links between caricatures and animated films On the topics and style of Soviet animated films Body Memory

Involuntary surrealism Automatism

3.3.

3.4.

3.5.

3.6.

3.7.

3.8.

Duplications, repetitions and cycles Compositing Metaphysics Oneirism Woman as an abstract object Conclusion

Surrealist Sources of Eastern European Animation Film

On Links between Caricatures and Animated Films in communist Eastern Europe

4.1.

4.2.

4.3.

4.4.

4.5.

4.6.

4.7.

4.8.

4.9.

5.1.

5.2.

5.3.

59

Introduction The advent of surrealism Surrealists and cinema The surrealist essence of animation film The consistency of surrealism The uncanny as the measure of surrealism in animation film Who are considered surrealists by animation film-makers?

The geography of surrealist animation Conclusion

83

The nature of caricature Caricatures start to move and turn into films Developments of animated film in the Eastern Bloc

5.4.

Aesopian language

5.5.

Communist caricatures and cartoons as visualised Aesopian dialectics

5.6.

Peculiarities of Eastern European humour

5.7.

Summary and contemporary situation

On Topics and Style in Soviet Animated Films

6.1.

6.2.

6.3.

6.4.

6.5.

6.6.

6.7.

6.8.

6.9.

6.10.

6.11.

105

The Post-revolutionary period The Stalin era Visual form and style The Khrushchev thaw Animation industry in the Baltic republics Brezhnev and stagnation The positive effects of the planned economy Animation, collective consciousness and identity: between past and present Gorbachev’s perestroika and the dissolution of the Soviet Union The image of woman in Soviet animated film Conclusion

Body Memory

7.1.

A Train to the Land of Fear: creating Body Memory

7.2.

Prof Richard Raskin’s interview (2014) with

Ülo Pikkov on Body Memory

7.3.

A shot-by-shot breakdown of Body Memory

7.4.

The shooting storyboard of Body Memory

7.5.

Body Memory participation in festivals

7.6.

Body Memory prizes and awards

137

Conclusions

201

Appendix

221

9.1.

Apple Trees and Barbed Wire Estonian Memories of Soviet Occupation

in Body Memory (Jakob Ladegaard)

9.2.

Into What Future?

(Ruth Barton)

9.3.

Perception of Sound in/as Body Memory (Iben Have)

9.4.

A Choreographic Analysis of Body Memory (Yutian Wong)

9.5.

Unravelling the Body Without Organs

in Body Memory (Nicole Richter)

9.6.

From concrete horror to symbolic significance

in Ăœlo Pikkov’s Body Memory (Edvin Kau)

9.7.

The Return of the Animated Dead in Body Memory (Vlad Dima)

Acknowledgements

262

Anti-Animation

Introduction

9

Introduction

1.1.

The purpose of my dissertation, Anti-Animation: Textures of Eastern European Animated Film, is to provide an outline of the core elements and characteristic features of Eastern European animated film between the end of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989. From the outset, my perspective is panoramic in its intention of mapping the broader nature of Eastern European animated film. I aim to describe and analyse its distinctive textures, i.e. characteristic structures, in terms of industrial processes, authorial intentions, formal explorations, and various flows of influence, exchange and interaction in the context of shifting socio-political circumstances.

In this study, I have relied on several methods of data collection. Most importantly, I have analysed autobiographies, artworks, texts and images, as well as conducting interviews with key agents in the field. In content analysis, I have prioritised authorial intention and the meanings of the particular work as conceived by its author(s), considering the works and their meanings in the spatio-temporal context that surrounded their emergence. This dissertation is a product of inductive interpretation, a qualitative research method.

The written part of my dissertation explores the development of – and various conceptions related to – Eastern European animated film in the framework of the region’s socio-political paradigm.

The title of the dissertation, Anti-Animation: Textures of Eastern European Animated Film, is intentionally provocative, formulated in the hope of stirring new discussions and debates on the topics it investigates.

By ‘anti-animation’ I mean all of the animated films produced under the conditions of a totalitarian regime that, contrary to those made in the ‘free world’, were shaped by the socialist command economy and political censorship. One could say that anti-animations were made despite all of the rules of logic.

10

Anti-Animation

The notion of anti-animation draws partly on Georg Griffin’s legendary essay ‘Cartoon, Anti-Cartoon’, published in 1980, in which Griffin describes animation as a ‘“naïve” fantasy’, contrasting it with antianimation as a ‘self-conscious examination of form and process’ (Griffin 1980: 197).

An animated film is not an isolated piece of audiovisual work, but part of cultural production on a wider scale, directly related to various political, economic and cultural aspects of a society. According to Yuri Lotman, A film is part of the ideological struggles, culture and art of its era. In these aspects it is related to numerous aspects of life lying outside the text of the film, thus giving rise to an entire series of meanings which are often more important to a historian or a contemporary than strictly aesthetic problems might be (Lotman 1976: 42).

Some of the following chapters have been published before as articles in various academic journals and collections. Here they appear in an updated form, accompanied by commentaries.

Body Memory (Keha mälu, Nukufilm, 2011), an animated film accompanied by authorial annotation and documentation, forms the practical part of this dissertation. Since its release, Body Memory has been screened at more than 170 international film festivals and has earned wide recognition and numerous awards. The breath of its distribution and the myriad of commentaries it has inspired makes Body Memory a good case study for examining how the trends described in the theoretical part of this dissertation relate to actual practices. In order to provide a more multifaceted account of Body Memory, a number of its analyses by international experts have been reproduced as part of the dissertation.

•

11

Introduction

1.2.

By its very nature, animated film combines several art forms: a fact that continues to pose challenges to any attempt to define its texture, characteristic structure or ‘essence’. Most persistent is the question of whether it belongs in the ‘category’ of film or in that of visual art. This, in turn, has immediate ramifications for terminology. For example, the emergence of surrealism in film is typically considered in relation to the rise of cinematic impressionism, and both are frequently understood as interlaced elements of the ‘French avant-garde of the 1920s’. In the context of visual art, however, impressionism has a completely different frame of reference (Aitken 2001: 85–87).

I examine animated film in firmly cinematic terms and hence rely on the terminology of film studies. After all, during the Soviet era, animated film undoubtedly belonged to the field of cinema: animations were produced by state-funded film studios according to the rules and regulations devised by ‘cinema committees’, governmental organisations that controlled the Soviet film industry. At the same time, the majority of animation artists were (and continue to be) trained in art schools, not film schools.

Hence, animated film is by nature, as well as in terms of the educational background of its practitioners, a symbiosis of different disciplines.

This is also why art history remains a relevant frame of reference for the discussions below.

(Re-)defining the texture and terminology of not only animated film but film in general continues to be a challenging task, perhaps now more than ever since the emergence and rapid development of digital technologies have brought about a number of fundamental shifts in this field. For example, Lev Manovich, one of today’s leading media theorists, has suggested that in the digital age cinema ‘is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a sub-genre of painting’ (Manovich 2016: 22, 42).

Thus, it appears that moving images, including animated film, are still in search of their position among the visual arts.

12

Anti-Animation

Looking at film theoretically, my dissertation relies heavily on the auteur theory, which emphasises the defining creative role and authority of a film’s director both in the production process and with the other crew members (Stam 2000: 83–110). ‘Auteur is the central creator of a film’s meaning’ (Valkola 2015: 347).

At the same time, I am also interested in the position of animated film in broader cultural and historical contexts. This introduces a dimension of classical cultural studies to the dissertation, which, by drawing on semiotics and other cultural theories, transcends the limits of strictly medium-specific observations. One of the recurring themes of the dissertation is the cultural-political history of Eastern Europe, and its relations with and reflections in animated films of the region. In the introduction to their recent edited volume, Obsession. Perversion.

Rebellion: Twisted Dreams of Central European Animation, Olga Bobrowska and Michał Bobrowski have insightfully proposed that the apparent simplicity and attractiveness of animation were exploited

by Eastern European animation artists (as well as by their Western colleagues) in order ‘to mock the social and political reality’ (Bobrowska & Bobrowski 2016: 9).

This dissertation focuses on the period between the end of World War II (1945) and the fall of the Berlin Wall, i.e. the end of the Cold War (1989), an era that has been described as ‘post-war’ or ‘Soviet’.

While concentrating on the socialist period, I have also analysed some authors and trends before and after this time frame, in order to provide comparisons and a more nuanced interpretation. It is also important to emphasise that the Soviet period has been typically divided into shorter eras, such as the repressive years of Stalinism, the Khrushchev ‘thaw’, stabilisation/stagnation under Brezhnev’s rule and beyond, and perestroika, each of them characterised by slightly different sets of limits and rules in terms of ideological surveillance and political constraints on creative freedom. Despite these fluctuations, the post-war Eastern European animated film can still be considered a relatively constant, statefunded and carefully controlled artistic ‘ecosystem’.

The attentive reader will notice that the emphasis of this dissertation is mainly on cultural, political and economic developments in the Soviet Union. This is in part due to the dominant role of the Soviet Union in the region, but it also reflects my own personal experience and background as someone who was born and spent his formative years on the periphery

13

Introduction

of the USSR. The importance of the wider socio-cultural environment on the work – and its results – of researchers of art has long been established.

For instance, Henk Borgdorff has aptly observed that Artworks and artistic actions acquire their meaning in interchange with relevant environments. Research in the arts will remain naive unless it acknowledges and confronts this embeddedness and situatedness in history, in culture (society, economy, everyday life) as well as in the discourse on art (Borgdorff 2010: 56).

•

1.3.

Careful consideration of sources is an essential aspect of any historical study. The period under examination in this dissertation is accessible to today’s researchers only through various ‘indirect’ sources, rather than first-hand experience: historical records, personal memoirs, oral accounts by its witnesses, as well as the animated films that form the main focus of this dissertation. How to interpret these sources? What sources in general are available for researching Eastern European animated films and how representative are they?

Due to the methodology of ‘research in the arts’ and ‘art practice as research’, I examine animation films as the primary sources and the rest of the information as the secondary sources of the dissertation.

Some suggest that it is impossible to make sense of the Soviet period by relying only on written (and published) sources, that these sources never reveal the ‘double meanings’ typical of the era and that the Soviet times can be fully comprehended only by people who experienced them and their realities first-hand (Annuk 2003: 19).

14

Anti-Animation

While I do not fully subscribe to this opinion, I still consider it valid to a certain extent. Hence, as well as due to the relative scarcity of written sources, I have prioritised interviews with and commentaries provided by animation artists active during the period of my study as vital sources of information. In addition, having been born in the Soviet Union and witnessed its realities first-hand, I am confident in my ability to evaluate my sources with the necessary receptiveness and rigour.

The animated films under examination here can also be regarded as indirect, secondary historical sources that might not be objective portrayals of reality, but still provide material for gleaning observations about the nature of the times and conditions in which they were produced.

To study the Soviet, i.e. the socialist, era today means analysing it from a contemporary, post-socialist perspective. Taking on this task, one has to consider which analytical categories and concepts, theories and approaches are the most appropriate and the most productive. Would a postcolonial frame of reference be a productive tool for investigating the Soviet period?

The answer is yes, according to David Chioni Moore. In his 2001 article ‘Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in Post-Soviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique’, Moore was one of the first to suggest that the concept of postcolonialism, with its characteristic theorisation of language, economics, politics, resistance and liberation, was indeed an effective instrument for describing the condition of the countries that used to form the Eastern bloc (Moore 2001: 115). He argues that the post-World War II Soviet expansion into the Baltic countries, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and Czechoslovakia, as well as the RussoSoviet domination over these territories until 1989/1991 fit the classic criteria of colonialism: a ‘lack of sovereign power, restrictions on travel, military occupation, lack of convertible specie, a domestic economy ruled by the dominating state, and forced education in the colonizer’s tongue’ (Moore 2001: 121). Encouraged by Moore’s observations, a number of contemporary researchers have conceptualised the hegemony of the Soviet Union in post-World War II Eastern Europe in colonial and postcolonial terms (e.g. Mazierska et al. 2014: 6).

15

Introduction

Films and their authors are inseparable from a particular spatio-temporal environment. The meaning and reception of different images change over time, which means that an analysis of any film has to be accompanied by an investigation of its broader socio-cultural context. According to Jarmo Valkola, ‘No film has ever been produced in an isolated world that consists only of the film crew and their equipment. [---] Film is shaped by contemporary individuals who are affected by the surrounding time and space’ (Valkola 2015: 456).

One might ask if such a broad approach, combining historical, philosophical, phenomenological, cognitive and aesthetic angles, is indeed necessary for studying, analysing and theorising about animated film. In my opinion, it is unavoidable since animation, as well as audiovisual culture in general, is shaped by various cultural, political and social impulses. Only the widest possible analytical spectrum makes it possible to achieve at least a certain degree of objectivity. In contrast to the research objects in hard sciences, cultural objects yield poorly to quantitative evaluation and a broad-based analysis is fundamental for rendering objective results.

My study contributes to the still rather small body of surveys and histories of animated film, in particular of Eastern European animation. This rather conspicuous lacuna has been recognised, for instance, by Sonja Bahun, who appropriately observes that, Surprisingly, given the amount of public funding and support they received in each of the countries under consideration, the Soviet and Central and Eastern European production of animated films regularly tends to be sidelined in the discussions of cinema and ideology in the region (Bahun 2014: 182).

•

16

Anti-Animation

1.4.

In this study, ‘Eastern Europe’ refers to those European countries that after World War II shifted to the Soviet sphere of influence. Hence, the region is defined politically rather than geographically. In academic literature, this set of countries is also designated as the Eastern bloc, Communist bloc, Soviet bloc, countries of the Warsaw Pact, satellite countries of the USSR, etc. Most frequently, they are now referred to as post-communist countries.

Piotr Piotrowski uses the term ‘East-Central Europe’ to describe the part of Europe located ‘between the Iron Curtain and the Soviet Union’, which, ‘due to the agreement signed between the Western powers and the Soviet Union at Yalta’, was under the more or less strict control of the Soviet Union until 1989 (Piotrowski 2009: 7). In her Cinema of the Other: The Industry and the Artistry of East Central European Film, Dina Iordanova describes the region as ‘the “other” Europe’, alongside the more common labels of ‘Eastern Bloc’ and ‘East Central Europe’ (Iordanova 2003: 5).

For the purposes of this dissertation, the following geopolitical entities are considered part of Eastern Europe: the Soviet Union, Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia.

The volume and quality of the animated film industry varied greatly in different Eastern European countries. Inevitably, the following discussions concentrate on the production and processes of the most significant and active animation industries of the region. It is also important to emphasise that, at times, these countries demonstrated vast variations in terms of creative freedom, especially in relation to political and ideological pressure exerted on animation artists (for example, in terms of to what degree adherence to the paradigm of socialist realism was compulsory).

Despite variations, however, Eastern European animation in general can be regarded as a product of largely similar creative processes. For instance, while a number of unofficial or underground art movements managed to gain some ground in spite of censorship, no comparable practice of unofficial animated film emerged in Eastern Europe because

17

Introduction

the entire film industry was centralised and controlled by the state.

Unlike in live-action film-making, amateur practices remained extremely marginal in animated form: (in part) due to the technological complexity of the form, animation was simply not the main focus of film amateurs, and the distribution of those amateur animations that were made was very limited. Eastern Europe lacked non-conformist or unofficial animated film; even the banned, censored and ‘shelved’ animations were funded and produced within the state-supported system.

While the cultural traditions of different Eastern European countries may be rather different, their largely similar political circumstances provide a sound basis for analysing them comparatively. The following observations pertain to Eastern European animated film in a more general sense: • state-regulated production: the production of films, as well as the industrial infrastructure, was funded and ideologically controlled by state authorities; • subject matter of the films: the narratives and characters had to follow a certain ideology and express a certain morality; films were often propagandistic and drew on folklore and fairy tales or depicted certain historical events; • audiovisual style of the films: socialist realism and vernacular art initially constituted the dominant stylistic regime, which was later diversified by numerous individual modes of auteur expression.

The aim of this dissertation is to highlight and analyse general developments, currents and trends across Eastern Europe. This kind of regional approach, which considers Eastern Europe as an integrated whole, instead of focussing on film histories of individual nation-states, is endorsed by Dina Iordanova, who in her Cinema of the Other Europe (2003) approaches Eastern Europe as a common cultural space, as well as by Ewa Mazierska (e.g. 2010: 14), the principal editor of Studies in Eastern European Cinema (Routledge), a journal that has provided a platform for a number of articles that are highly relevant to this study.

Drawing on this understanding, my dissertation follows the regional path regarding the developments of post-war Eastern European animated film as an integral system permeated by the politics of the era. After all, Eastern Europe constituted an integrated cultural space that functioned as a single market for the films produced across it by film-makers who

18

Anti-Animation

interacted in a professional regional network of film education, events, festivals, publications etc. In Iordanova’s words, The countries in the region have continuously shared common values and traditions in literature and fine and performing arts, as well as in wider tradition of the role of critical and diasporic intelligentsia within public discourse. For the long years of Communist rule, intellectuals from the region were interested in each other’s spiritual quests, reading each other’s novels, watching each other’s plays and films. Hence the symbiotic and synergetic phenomenon of East Central European intelligentsia and their struggle to establish the idea of Central Europe as a shared cultural sphere, albeit one under constant revision and marked by occasional divisions (Iordanova 2003: 12).

That said, it is equally important to keep in mind that the control of the Soviet Union over different Eastern European countries varied in intensity, ranging from military occupation (e.g. in the Baltic countries) to indirect political-economic patronage (e.g. in Yugoslavia). Other dissimilarities can also be observed; for instance, while Soviet authorities typically discouraged religious practice, the Catholic Church continued to play a prominent role in Polish society, forcing the secular authorities to ‘accept’ it.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, the concept of the ‘return to Europe’ quickly gained currency, and the understanding of Eastern Europe as a single, integral cultural space was rejected in favour of individual attempts to re-orient local culture(s) to Western European traditions. The ‘return to Europe’ was a comprehensive pursuit, ranging from culture to politics and economics. Liberated from decades of isolation from and opposition to Western Europe, Eastern Europeans were keen to embrace Western ideals and standards, and to leave behind their common past. However, while variety can be observed now (as before) amongst different Eastern European countries, they continue to share certain similarities in their cultural, political and economic patterns of development. And due to their shared socialist past, they will most likely remain linked to the concept of ‘Eastern Europe’, at least for the foreseeable future.

•

19

Introduction

1.5.

What are Eastern European films ‘about’? Is there a single theme or narrative thread common to Eastern European animated film? Do Eastern European animation artists have a similar story to tell?

In the broadest terms, it can be suggested that Eastern European films – as with cinema and culture in general – are ‘about’ looking for and preserving collective identities. As observed by Iordanova, ‘it is certain that the films dealing with issues of history, memory and morality make up the core of East Central European film’ (Iordanova 2003: 2).

However, due to its particular cultural and political context, Eastern European animated film is characterised by a number of peculiarities, such as a heavy reliance on Aesopian language and frequent surrealist references, as well as strong pessimist undercurrents and recurrent dystopian sensibilities. These idiosyncrasies can perhaps be explained by the pressure exerted on Eastern European animation artists by political censorship and a sense of instability that forced film-makers to rely in their works on a ‘safety net’ of intricate double meanings, keeping open multiple avenues of interpretation.

Shaped by the complex history and unique cultural situation of the region, the fascinating tradition of Eastern European animated film holds a significant position in the world heritage of animation. By analysing it, we will hopefully develop our understanding of the region’s history, as well as of the condition of its inhabitants.

•

20

Anti-Animation

1.6.

The developments of art history have influenced my analysis primarily in terms of ‘vertical’ art history, understood as a hierarchical approach to art history centred around Western metropolises, such as Paris, Berlin and later New York. In this understanding of art history, Western (European) art gives shape to the grand narrative and grammar of European art. In Eastern Europe, the standing and reputation of animation artists depended heavily on their prominence in the West, exemplified, for instance, by their success at Western film festivals. Moreover, Eastern European animation auteurs often drew inspiration from various discourses, styles and practices of Western art movements. Importantly, artists adopted these impulses individually, frequently in opposition to official cultural policies.

Hence, Western ideologies continued to influence the Eastern European cultural sphere despite its apparent isolation.

The understanding that Western European art is the universal template of ‘true’ art has been challenged from numerous perspectives. Indeed, nowadays it is more appropriate to talk about cultural networks and global culture formed by the symbiosis of different regions. The idea of integrated animation networks is also the starting point for this dissertation.

Due to its technology, animated film is a relatively recent art form, one that was born in the wake of cinema and has developed in parallel with it. At the same time, animated film relies on and conveys various ancient traditions and practices. While the 20th century provided favourable conditions for its proliferation, animated film has retained a firm connection with its mythic roots (Pikkov 2010: 12, 17, 19, 36).

The rapid development of digital technologies has turned animation into a widespread medium and a universal technique. It can be found across the entire spectrum of contemporary audiovisual culture. Indeed, as Lev Manovich has aptly observed, ‘[b]orn from animation, cinema pushed

21

Introduction

animation to its periphery, only in the end to become one particular case of animation’ (Manovich 2001: 302). Paul Wells further details this in the ‘post-digital’ era, …animation may be understood in three distinct ways – traditional animation (Cartoon, Drawn, CutOut, Collage, 3D Puppets, 3D Clay, Experimental techniques etc.), computer animation or ‘digimation’ (Computer applications and processes to ‘affect’ and ‘effect’ performances and environments in quasicartoonal form or visual effects), and as an interface with traditional ‘live action’ (simplistically defined here, as the photo-recording of ‘theatrical’ performance and real, material environments) (Wells 2012: 10).

Here, the terms ‘animation’ and ‘animated film’ are primarily understood in a traditional sense since the period under consideration largely preceded the ‘digital turn’, when the animated form, in various traditional or prevailing technical modes, was typically used for cinematic storytelling.

Animated film is one category or type of animation. On the most general level, there are two types of animated film: two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D). 2D animation includes such techniques as hand-drawn animation, cut-outs or silhouettes, sand animation, direct animation (animated films drawn directly on film) etc. 3D animation is comprised of such categories as model or puppet animation, 3D computer animation, pixilation, time-lapse etc. (Pikkov 2010: 18). However, the list of animation techniques is always incomplete, as the existing technologies can be combined in numerous ways and new technologies keep emerging.

In a sense, the work of each author is unique in terms of both style and technique. However, for the sake of simplicity, I have chosen to rely only on the traditional, prevailing terminology of animation techniques.

Animation essentially involves the presentation of still images in a manner that creates an illusion of motion in viewers’ minds (Pikkov 2010: 14). The Encyclopaedia Britannica defines animation as ‘the art of making inanimate objects appear to move’.1 According to the 1980 statutes of ASIFA (Association International du Film d’Animation), ‘[t]he art of

1

https://www.britannica.com/art/animation (accessed 26 March 2017).

22

Anti-Animation

animation is the creation of moving images through the manipulation of all varieties of techniques apart from live action methods’.2 Norman McLaren, the noted animation director and theoretician proposed that ‘[a] nimation is not the art of drawings that move but the art of movements that are drawn; what happens between each frame is much more important than what exists on each frame’ (cited in Furniss 1998: 5). Yuri Lotman has drawn particular attention to animation as a specific system: ‘[T]he animated cartoon is not a variety of the feature cinema but represents a quite independent form of art, with its own artistic language, opposed in many ways to the language of the feature cinema or the documentary.’

According to Lotman, ‘[t]he basic property of the language of animation is that it operates with a sign of a sign’ (Lotman 1981: 36–37).

As the definitions of animation offered by ASIFA and McLaren demonstrate, animated film is frequently understood in terms of movement and generating the illusion of it. However, Jan Švankmajer, one of the leading Eastern European animation artists, has taken a step further, suggesting that animation ‘isn’t about making inanimate objects move, it is about bringing them to life’ (Hames 2008: 140).

Under totalitarian conditions, Eastern European animated film turned out to be something much more significant than merely a practice for creating the illusion of movement: it became an inseparable part of local identity that conveyed significant shared meanings to broad audiences, which granted animation a unique status. While elsewhere in the world animated film tends to be regarded as belonging to the field of entertainment and popular culture, in Eastern Europe it dwells firmly in the sphere of high culture, together with literature, theatre, music and other cinematic forms.

In a way, animated film (and especially puppet animation), with its manipulation of characters that are entirely at the mercy of film-makers, is where the essence of totalitarian society comes to the fore most expressively. A number of Eastern European animation artists have accentuated these themes in their works, for instance Jiří Trnka’s The Hand (Ruka, 1965) and Rao Heidmets’s Theatre Papa Carlo (Papa Carlo teater, 1988).

2

http://www.asifa.net/who-we-are/statutes/ (accessed 26 March 2017).

23

Introduction

In addition, my reflections on Eastern European animated film will draw on critical theory, in particular the idea of the culture industry as theorised by the Frankfurt School (Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse and Jürgen Habermas). Of special importance in the context of my dissertation is their opinion that institutions, in particular the culture industries that produce cultural texts and control the mass-mediated flows of information, shape and manipulate large masses of individuals.

According to Horkheimer and Adorno, The enslavement to nature of people today cannot be separated from social progress. The increase in economic productivity which creates the conditions for a more just world also affords the technical apparatus and the social groups controlling it a disproportionate advantage over the rest of the population (Horkheimer, Adorno 2002: xvii).

The Eastern European animation industry, funded and centrally controlled by the state, was ideologically motivated and constituted a significant part of the political propaganda machine. As such it is an example par excellence of the culture industry as theorised by the Frankfurt School.

Compared to media and film theory, the amount of research and scholarly literature in animation studies is still rather modest. Among other studies, my dissertation relies most heavily on Giannalberto Bendazzi’s Animation: A World History (2016), Yuri Lotman’s Semiotics of Cinema (1976), Lev Manovich’s The Language of New Media (2001) and Paul Wells’ Understanding Animation (1998; see Wells 2005). In addition, I have conducted a series of interviews with animation artists, giving them a prominent voice in this dissertation.

•

24

Anti-Animation

1.7.

Animated films are often narrated by means of allegory. I earlier suggested that the first animation theorist was Plato, whose Allegory of the Cave captures perfectly the crux of animation (Pikkov 2010: 31). In his famous allegory presented in the Republic (Πολιτεία, c. 380 BCE), Plato likened the human condition to the situation of prisoners chained in a cave. The only reality the inhabitants of the cave know consists of shadows cast upon the walls in front of them. However, the real things (‘Forms’ or ‘Ideas’ according to Plato) that cast those shadows are actually outside of the cave. The ‘Ideas’, not the shadows cast by them, constitute the highest, most fundamental reality: one that is not accessible through sensation of the material world, but through intellectual reasoning.

Essentially, animated film is the inversion of the Allegory of the Cave.

People see and hear the world of ideas on the screen because every element of the film is an idea of something (a ‘bearer of meaning’ according to Béla Balázs,3 or ‘sign’ according to Lotman4). This is the world outside Plato’s cave. Moreover, in our minds the ideas presented in animation become related to certain experiences. Thus, different experiences of the world can result in different interpretations of a film; for example, adults and children arrive at contrasting readings of the same film since their experiences of the world are dissimilar (Pikkov 2010: 129).

3

The famous film theorist Béla Balázs argues in his Der sichtbare Mensch, oder, Die Kultur des Films (Leipzig, 1924) that ‘in film every sign is a bearer of meaning, everything becomes symbolic in film’ (cited in Lukkarila 1991: 163).

4

‘Every image on the screen is a sign, that is, it has meaning, it carries information’ (Lotman 1976: 31).

25

Introduction

Animated film functions as a chronicle of its time. While, in terms of technology, an animation is an audiovisual work that relies on generating an illusion of movement of inanimate objects, it is not merely a piece of aesthetic form; it forms a part of a larger cultural structure. Animated film is cultural text, a source of social knowledge and information.

Furthermore, animated film can be understood as a structured portrayal of its time.

It is equally important to emphasise that by scrutinising animated films we arrive at a better understanding of the social and human condition. After all, the primary aim of visual culture is to represent our existence; and by analysing animated film we also enhance our knowledge of ourselves.

Lotman has suggested that ‘[c]inematography is a teaching mechanism.

It not only provides information, it also teaches us how to extract it’ (Lotman 1976: 96). Hence, animated films teach us how to better understand ourselves: one only has to be interested and active enough.

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1.8.

The practice-based component of this dissertation, which complements and interacts with the written part, is the animated film Body Memory (Keha mälu, 2011). My own artistic experiences, resulting in this film, as well as the process of formulating my authorial position, have been crucial for describing and arriving at a better understanding of the works of other authors, as well as of the various processes and contexts related to them.

Today, art practice has become an increasingly legitimate research tool, and such concepts as ‘research in the arts’, ‘art practice as research’ or ‘research in and through the arts’ have gained more and more currency.

Henk Borgdorff, a leading theorist of artistic research, has suggested that

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Art practice qualifies as research when its purpose is to broaden our knowledge and understanding through an original investigation. It begins with questions that are pertinent to the research context and the art world, and employs methods that are appropriate to the study. The process and outcomes of the research are appropriately documented and disseminated to the research community and to the wider public. (Borgdorff 2006: 16) My film, accompanied by the necessary documentation (the description of its making, technical metadata, contextual information, analyses, illustrations, photos etc.), and the written part of the dissertation constitute an integral piece of artistic research that aims to make a significant original contribution to the earlier, mostly theoretical-historical, body of research on Eastern European animated film.

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Summary of the chapters

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Summary of the chapters

2.1.

The first chapter of the dissertation analyses the emergence and development of dystopian sensibilities and involuntary surrealism in animated film.

Compared to live-action narrative cinema, which creates dystopias mainly by means of staged fantasies, animated film works exactly the other way around: dystopia is typically based on realism. An animated film that breaks with its essential paradigm of fantasy and strives to represent reality or depict a documentary plot produces a dystopian view of the world.

Today, surrealism has become understood as something broader and more general, existing quite independently of the original birth of the surrealist artistic movement, and its initial central figures, in the 1920s.

Also, in addition to intentional surrealism the appearance of ‘involuntary surrealism’ has been detected (Hammond 1978; Richardson 2006).

Involuntary surrealism emerges when the author of a work of art did not have the intention of producing a surrealist work or practising surrealism but nevertheless the audience has acknowledged the work as surrealist.

Relatively free to experiment and to develop various auteur techniques, Eastern European animation artists produced a remarkable number of films that feature prominent elements of dystopia and involuntary realism. In contrast to Western Europe, surrealism continued to hold currency among Eastern European artists after World War II, becoming an expression of underground thought and the spirit of protest.

This chapter is based on an article of the same title that first appeared in Fantasmagoria. Un secolo (e oltre) di cinema d’animazione, an edited volume published by Marsilio Editori in 2017 (Pikkov 2017).

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2.2.

The second chapter of the dissertation charts the terrain of Eastern European surrealist animation and its authors.

Surrealism appeared on the global cultural map after World War I on the initiative and under the leadership of the French writer André Breton.

Initially advocated by poets and writers, surrealist ideas soon spread to the world of visual art. The heyday of surrealism as an art movement was the inter-war period, yet it has retained its importance to the present.

Surrealism is not a style in the narrow sense, but rather an authorial world-view and attitude, although even its creators and practitioners were unable to define it completely. Hence, it was up to the surrealists themselves to define who was a surrealist and who was not. Similarly, this chapter takes a cue from the self-image of particular animation artists when it proceeds to define and evaluate the nature of surrealist animated film according to the testimonies of film-makers. I interviewed a number of animation artists whose works have been regarded as surrealist, starting with Jan Švankmajer, one of the most distinguished contemporary Eastern European surrealists. I then interviewed the Quay brothers, Jerzy Kucia, Igor Kovalyov, Priit Pärn, Raoul Servais and a number of other significant figures. Every interview provided new information on surrealist animation artists, leading to additional interviews. I asked the film-makers what, in their opinions, was the nature of surrealism and how it emerged in their works, as well as who else they considered to be surrealist animation artists. Based on the interviews and my analyses, a ‘map’ of surrealism in animated film was formed. In socialist Eastern Europe, surrealist sympathies often communicated a certain statement: it was a form of protest expressing opposition to official cultural politics.

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The second chapter was initially published as an article in Baltic Screen Media Review (Pikkov 2013).

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2.3.

The third chapter examines the special relationship between animated film and caricature. A number of prominent animation artists have been active on both fronts, and in both media their works feature a plethora of coded messages.

Socialist Eastern European animated film enjoyed steady state funding but was strictly censored in terms of both content and form. Because of this, Eastern European animated films often relied on double-coded Aesopian language. The prominence of caricaturesque animated films in Eastern Europe was also facilitated by the proliferation of humour magazines, which provided an important platform for the still-image works of animation artists. In addition, the enormous popularity of anecdotes and ‘street jokes’ in totalitarian society prepared fertile ground for the appearance of numerous caricaturesque animated films.

This chapter is based on a paper presented at Animation between Arts, a conference organised by Ca’Foscari University of Venice in 2015.

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2.4.

The fourth chapter of the dissertation provides a survey of the most common topics of Soviet animation and outlines its major stylistic trajectories. Soviet animated film emerged and materialised in synch with the fluctuations of the region’s political climate and was directly shaped by it. A number of trends and currents of Soviet animation also pertain to other Eastern European countries. For, as Dina Iordanova has said, Between 1945 and 1989 ... the development of these countries was ... dictated by Soviet policies in the spheres of economics and culture. [---] Whatever happened in the Soviet Union, directly influenced the cultural climate in the countries of the Eastern Bloc, and often events in the USSR were replicated in the Eastern Bloc (such as the ‘Thaw’ that followed the demystification of the cult of Stalin’s personality in the late 1950s or the stagnation of the Brezhnev period) (Iordanova 2003: 20–21).

However, it is also true that the cultural elite of the satellite states often enjoyed a higher degree of artistic freedom than did their peers in the Soviet Union, for example in terms of the extent to which adhering to the tenets of socialist realism was compulsory. Also, the entire Soviet Union cannot be measured with the same yardstick, because animated films were produced in a number of different studios and in various Soviet Socialist Republics, where the local circumstances affected both the industrial practices and regulated the proverbial length of the leash. The smaller republics in particular, such as Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, stood out for animated works that were sometimes much more ideologically complicated than the films produced in Moscow, reflecting either

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Summary of the chapters

intentional political digression or the recklessness of their authors.

This chapter was initially published as an article in Volume 4 of Baltic Screen Media Review (Pikkov 2016).

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2.5.

This chapter provides my authorial position in relation to Body Memory and documents the inception and production processes of this film.

I see myself primarily as an animated film director and artist. As an author, I am fascinated by the interface between animated films and reallife events, by animated film as a collective reflection of society, and by the opportunity to examine society and different historical periods via animated film. I am interested in using the animated form to investigate, and come to terms with, memories, dreams, ordeals and traumas. For me, animated film provides a platform to re-create and document the past. The medium also serves as a tool for meditation and self-discovery.

Hence I find myself returning to such topics as deportations and terror, as seen in Body Memory, Empty Space (TĂźhi ruum, 2016) and Letting Go (in production). I have also been drawn to certain personal items and objects directly related to a particular story, and have used them as a connecting link between films and real people and events, as in Body Memory, TickTack (Tik-Tak, 2015) and ZEBRA (2015).

The most important criterion for evaluating an animated film is, in my opinion, the degree to which it affects its author personally. The director as the author of the film, and her/his authorial position, is inseparable from the film. Over the course of my directorial career of two decades, I have used almost all of the most common animation techniques. I am convinced that each animated narrative requires a specific technique, and that the technique and the form are determined by the story.

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I continue to be fascinated and challenged by various experimental techniques, most importantly direct animation (drawing directly on film).

I have applied this technique on several occasions, as exemplified by Dialogos (2008), The End (2015), Re-cycling Project (2014) and Zebra (2015).

Body Memory, the animated film presented here as part of my doctoral dissertation, was produced by Nukufilm in 2011. The film examines Stalinist repression and deportations: one of the most tragic periods of Estonian history. The associative narration, reconstruction of and struggle between various realities renders the film essentially abstract. During the pre-production process, I noted in my journal (17 January 2010): Snow, bare trees, the waste revealed as the snow melts: all of this needs to be natural, just as offered by nature. It would be conceptually misguided to use contemporary film techniques in order to create artificial snow, artificial trees: an artificial March that would hide its virtuality from audiences. Sometimes cinema, a great illusion by nature, requires the natural as a contrast to animated sequences that portray metaphysical body memory. The final episode of the film, with its natural quality, refers to the documentary origin of cinema. [---] The last episode, technologically standing in opposition to the rest of the film, serves to connect the non-rational memory of the body with history.

Indeed, one of the initial ideas of Body Memory was to bring together different worlds. This led to a combination of live-action footage and animated sequences that sought to express the inevitable interdependence and interplay of the past and the present, the mythic and the real world.

Another important point of departure was the bodily experience of these historical events. Despite not having an immediate relationship with Stalinist repression and deportations due to my age, evoking a sense of intimate, bodily experience was extremely important to me. In 2011, I wrote in the initial synopsis of the film, The body remembers more than we can expect and imagine. It remembers the sorrow and pain of our predecessors. Hence, each body holds all the stories

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Summary of the chapters

in the world. Our bodies keep alive the stories of our parents and grandparents, as well as of their ancestors.

But how far back is it possible to go in bodily memory?

Can memories and traumatic experiences be passed on to successive generations?

My aim in the film was to scrutinise the past by means of mediating an unconscious experience (body memory), not by means of interpreting history. In this context, body memory can also be seen as cultural memory, social memory or collective remembrance, which harks back to the topic of myth and mythology.

John Halas and Joy Batchelor, legendary British animation artists, have stated: ‘If it is the live action film’s job to present physical reality, animated film is concerned with metaphysical reality – not how things look, but what they mean’ (Wells 2005: 11).

The animated film presented here as part of my dissertation has given me an opportunity to consider the questions and themes examined in the written part of the dissertation, not only as an observer and researcher but also as an author and animation artist. My own artistic experience and the need to define my position as an author have helped me to better understand and describe the works of other authors, as well as the processes and contexts related to them. Not only the production of the film itself but also its subsequent distribution and the critical feedback it has received have provided invaluable insights into the creative processes of animation film-making.

Body Memory has been screened at more than 170 international animation film festivals and has received over 30 international awards.

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References Aitken, Ian 2001. European Film Theory and Cinema: A Critical Introduction. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Annuk, Eve 2003. Totalitarismi ja /või kolonialismi pained: miks ja kuidas uurida nõukogude aega? – Võim & kultuur. Eds. Arvo Krikmann, Sirje Olesk. Tartu: Eesti Kirjandusmuuseum, Eesti kultuuriloo ja folkloristika keskus, http://www.folklore. ee/~kriku/TRANSPORT/RAAMAT_EKM.pdf, pp. 13–39.

Bahun, Sanja 2014. The Human and the Possible: Animation in Central and Eastern Europe. – Cinema, State Socialism and Society in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, 1917–1989: ReVisions. Eds. Sanja Bahun, John Haynes. Abington, New York: Routledge, pp. 186–208.

Bendazzi, Giannalberto 2016. Animation: A World History. Vol. 1–3.

Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Bobrowska, Olga; Bobrowski, Michał (eds.) 2016. Obsession, Perversion, Rebellion: Twisted Dreams of Central European Animation.

Bielsko-Biała: Galeria Bielska BWA. Borgdorff, Henk 2006. The Debate on Research in the Arts. Sensuous Knowledge: Focus on Artistic Research and Development 2.

Norway: Bergen National Academy of the Arts.

Borgdorff, Henk 2010. The Production of Knowledge in Artistic Research. – The Routledge Companion to Research in the Arts.

Eds. Michael Biggs, Henrik Karlsson. London, New York: Routledge, pp. 44–63.

Furniss, Maureen 1998. Art in Motion: Animation Aesthetics. London: John Libbey.

Griffin, George [1980] 2009. Cartoon, Anti-Cartoon. – Animation: Art and Industry. Ed. Maureen Furniss. New Barnet: John Libbey, pp. 189–198.

Hames, Peter 2008. The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer: Dark Alchemy.

London: Wallflower Press.

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Hammond, Paul (ed.) 1978. The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema. London: British Film Institute.

Horkheimer, Max; Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Iordanova, Dina 2003. Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film. London, New York: Wallflower Press.

Lotman, Jurij 1976. Semiotics of Cinema. Translated by Mark E. Suino.

Michigan Slavic Contributions 5. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Lotman, Yuri 1981. On the Language of Animated Cartoons. – Film Theory and General Semiotics. Russian Poetics in Translation 8.

Eds. Lawrence O’Toole Michael, Ann Shukman. Oxford: Holdan Books, pp. 36–39.

Lukkarila, Matti 1991. Sininen valo: Béla Balázs ja hänen elokuvateoriansa. Oulu: Pohjoinen.

Manovich, Lev 2001. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Manovich, Lev 2016. What is Digital Cinema? – Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Eds. Shane Denson, Julia Leyda.

Falmer: REFRAME Books, http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/postcinema/contents/, pp. 20–50.

Mazierska, Ewa 2010. Eastern European Cinema: Old and New Approaches. – Studies in Eastern European Cinema, vol. 1 (1), pp. 5–16, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1386/seec.1.1.5/1.

Mazierska, Ewa; Kristensen, Lars; Näripea, Eva (eds.) 2014.

Introduction: Postcolonial Theory and the Postcommunist World. – Postcolonial Approaches to Eastern European Cinema: Portraying Neighbours On-Screen. London, New York: I.B.Tauris, pp. 1–39.

Moore, David Chioni 2001. Is the Post- in Postcolonial the Post- in PostSoviet? Toward a Global Postcolonial Critique. – PMLA, vol.

116 (1), pp. 111–128.

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Pikkov, Ülo 2010. Animasophy: Theoretical Writings on the Animated Film. Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts.

Pikkov, Ülo 2013. Surrealist Sources of Eastern European Animation Film. – Baltic Screen Media Review, vol. 1, pp. 28–43, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/bsmr-2015-0003.

Pikkov, Ülo 2016. On the Topics and Style of Soviet Animated Films. – Baltic Screen Media Review, vol. 4, pp. 16–37, DOI: https://doi. org/10.1515/bsmr-2017-0002.

Pikkov, Ülo 2017. Distopia e surrealismo involontario nel cinema d’animazione. – Fantasmagoria. Un secolo (e oltre) di cinema d’animazione. Ed. Davide Giurlando). Venezia: Marsilio, pp.

51–67.

Piotrowski, Piotr 2009. In the Shadow of Yalta: Art and the Avant-garde in Eastern Europe, 1945–1989. Translated by Anna Brzyski.

London: Reaktion Books.

Richardson, Michael 2006. Surrealism and Cinema. Oxford, New York: Berg.

Stam, Robert 2000. Film Theory: An Introduction. Malden, Oxford: Blackwell.

Valkola, Jarmo 2015. Filmi audiovisuaalne keel. Translated by Elle Vaht, Karol Ansip, Kristiina Davidjants. Tallinn: Varrak.

Wells, Paul 2005. Understanding Animation. London, New York: Routledge.

Wells, Paul 2012. Validating the Animated Film. Toy stories, Trade Tattoos and Taiwan Tigers: Or What’s Animation Ever Done for Us? – Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis, vol. 15 (1), 5–24, http://www.tmgonline.nl/index.php/tmg/article/view/1/50.

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Dystopia and Involuntary Surrealism in Animated Film

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Dystopia and Involuntary Surrealism in Animated Film

From very early on, two conventions, a dichotomy of styles, developed in cinema – the realism of the Lumière brothers and the fantastic renderings of Georges Méliès. Animation, with its non-realistic stories, characters and movements, has commonly been regarded as drawing on Méliès’s tradition, while realism has been reseved for the documentary realm.

Invention of fantasies and utopian universes has gradually become a standard for animated film that has become associated with irreality, rejection of the laws of physics, antigravity, strange characters, bizarre environs etc. Mainly due to the immense popularity of Disney and the animated utopias for which his studio advocated throughout the ‘century of cinema’, the fictional world of fantasy has become an integral part of the animated film. The development of utopian fantasy worlds has gradually become the essense of animation. Compared to live-action narrative cinema that creates utopias mainly by means of staged fantasies, animated film works exactly the other way around – its dystopia is based on realism. An animated film that breaks with its essential paradigm of fantasy and strives to represent reality or depict a documentary plot is at the same time producing a dystopian view of the world.

In 1912, Ladislav Starevitch (1882–1965), an animation artist of Polish descent, makes his The Cameraman’s Revenge (Miest kinomatograficheskovo operatora). Starevitch uses dead insects in the film, replacing their legs with wires so that they can be animated. The Bug Trainer (Vabzdžių dresuotojas, 2008), a biographical documentary on Starevitch, explains that the animated insects came across so life-like that even the film critics of the time thought that it is possible to train them to perfectly obey the director’s instructions and to make them perform in an orderly manner. It is exactly the elements of realism that make The Cameraman’s Revenge an untraditional animation and that introduce a sense of dystopia.

Animated film evokes dystopia primarily by giving a ‘life’ to real events, things and objects. The technique that makes most use of ready-made objects is puppet animation and Eastern Europe is the region particularly known for dystopian puppet animations. Jiří Trnka’s Hand (Ruka, 1965) is a characteristic example, as are Jan Švankmajer’s and Mati Kütt’s films that throw a new, metaphysical light on ordinary, ready-made objects.

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Similar decontextualisation of ready-mades and their presentation in a way that their connotational meanings derive from their own materiality is also typical to the practice of surrealists: ‘Surrealism supercharged objects, endowing them with energy, autonomy and life’ (Leslie 2004: 91).

Jan Švankmajer has noted that ‘[a]nimation isn’t about making inanimate objects move, it is about bringing them to life’ (Hames 2008: 140).

In his Manifesto of Surrealism, André Breton writes that ‘the marvellous is always beautiful, everything marvellous is beautiful, only the marvellous could be beautiful’ (Breton [1924] 2010).

Both dystopian universes and surrealism are based on experiencing something familiar in a new and uncanny way (for example, associating the world as we know it with catastrophies, wars, epidemics, apocalypses etc.). Any animated film that strives for the realist paradigm but that is conceived by the audience as even slightly deviating from it or being less than perfect in achieving it, will automatically evoke a tinge of dystopia and/or the uncanny (as if when something is familiar, yet also strange).

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3.1.

By now surrealism become regarded as something broader and more general that exists independently of its original age of birth and its initial central figures; also, in addition to intentional surrealism so-called ‘involuntary surrealism’ (Hammond 1978) has emerged.

fig. 1

Involuntary surrealism emerges when the author of a work of art has not had the intention of producing a surrealist work or practicing surrealism but when nevertheless the audience has acknowledged the work as surrealist. The audience assumes that the work is surrealist even though the author’s worldview and intentions were in no way related to surrealism. According to André Breton, in those cases the authors had ‘failed to hear the surrealist voice’ (Breton [1924] 2010).

Hence, even the founder and initiator of the surrealist movement recognized that being a surrealist did not require intention from the part of its practitioner, or even acceptance of surrealist tenets: Swift is surrealist in spitefulness.

De Sade is surrealist in sadism.

Chateaubriand is surrealist in exoticism.

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Constant is surrealist in politics.

Hugo is surrealist when he is not being stupid.

Desbordes-Valmour is surrealist in love.

Bertrand is surrealist in the past.

Rabbe is surrealist in death.

Poe is surrealist in adventure.

Baudelaire is surrealist in morality.

Rimbaud is surrealist in his way of life, and elsewhere.

Mallarmé is surrealist in his confidences.

Jarry is surrealist in absinthe.

Nouveau is surrealist in the kiss.

Saint-Pol-Roux is surrealist in symbolism.

Fargue is surrealist in atmosphere.

Vaché is surrealist within me.

Reverdy is surrealist at home.

Saint-John Perse is surrealist at a distance.

Roussel is surrealist in the anecdote.

Etc. (Breton [1924] 2010) While it is difficult to point out the particular mechanisms of involuntary surrealism, it appears that it is evoked by certain ‘surrealist’ images, formal elements and tropes. A characteristic example of early involuntary surrealism in animated film is Bob Clampett’s Porky in Wackyland (1938). The film’s visual design, in particular the landscapes and melting forms, is clearly influenced by Salvador Dalí. Of contemporary animation artists, Ivan Maksimov’s works, with their bizarre characters and endless metamorphoses, strike the cords of involuntary realism. In fact, Maksimov himself has admitted his sympathy towards surrealist art, although he does not consider himself a surrealist (Pikkov 2015a).

Several of Priit Tender’s animated films (such as Kitchen Dimensions [Köögi dimensioonid], 2008; House of Unconsciousness [Alateadvuse maja], 2015) clearly betray surrealist traces by mixing the world of nocturnal dreams with daytime realities, yet Tender does not consider himself a surrealist either (Pikkov 2015b).

It has to be emphasized that determining involuntary surrealism requires extreme caution and the element of surrealism has to be clearly discernible because certain ‘surrealist’ features (unreality, oneirism, mystery, antigravity, fantasy) are rooted in the technical processes of animation-making.

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‘In cinema, surrealists yearned for the impossible, the unexpected, dreams, surprises that would wash away the sense of inferiority nesting in their soul, and take them eagerly to the barricades, to adventures, mysteries and miracles’ (Valkola 2015: 80).

In a sense, every animated film is involuntarily surrealist. By its very nature, animation blurs the boundaries between the possible and the impossible: ‘Virtually all animated forms may be seen as “surreal” in the sense that many deliberately juxtapose unusual and unexpected aspects within normally plausible, authentic and fictionally consistent environments’ (Wells 2002: 37).

The notion of surrealism (the surrealist method) has changed considerably since its inception in the 1920s – what once seemed surrealist may now very well be a common, everyday practice. For instance, for the firstgeneration surrealists it was a surrealist act to walk out of the movie theatre in the middle of a screening and to go for a different screening (Breton 2000: 73; Rees 1999: 54). Considering contemporary, ‘distracted’ modes of media consumption characterized by constant shifting between different films and texts, thus consuming parallel streams of information and ‘editing’ them in one’s mind, it is quite safe to propose that what once was a unique surrealist experience has by now become a part of everyday life. Equally, a number of avant-garde (including surrealist) creative practices have become an essential part of the ordinary toolbox of digital technologies. In his The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich observes that ‘the avant-garde became materialized in a computer’, or, in other words, the digital revolution embedded avant-garde aesthetic strategies into ‘the commands and interface metaphors of computer software’ (Manovich 2002: 306). Thus several typically avant-garde techniques, such as combining images with texts or several different image layers, collage, processing photographic images with painting or graphic tools, deletion and blurring of objects, now form an integral part of almost any filmmaking software. Working digitally, most contemporary animation artists make frequent use of the initially avant-garde methods without recognizing them as such. To put it simply, the arrival of the digital age in filmmaking has in part coincided with a return to the paradigm of historical avant-garde and modernism.

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This ‘renaissance of avant-garde’, occurring in parallel to the introduction of digital technologies, is not limited to the field of visual art; it has also affected music. Anne LeBaron, a composer and music scholar, observes that [w]hile [automatism and collage] existed in isolated examples of music before and after surrealism’s peak, they blossomed into full-blown developments only with the advent of postmodernism. Technological tools used to record and process music … provided an environment for such surrealist techniques when placed at the disposal of composers. (LeBaron 2013: 33) Despite the short, yet intensive, life span of the surrealist movement initiated by Breton, its influence is still strong. A. L. Rees has described the scope of its impact, writing that [s]urrealism has a cult value in variety of subcultures, from modern myth-and-magic (based on surrealism’s appeal to the occult) to MTV. Surrealism is not only the most popular and widely known of all modern movements, but also one of the most influential on the fashion, advertising and cinema industries.

(Rees 1999: 44) Yet the effect of surrealism on society is even broader than this, extending to almost every walk of life. For example, surrealists were among the first to bring out into the open several favourite topics of contemporary tabloids, such as sexuality and desires, that had been socially outlawed at the time of surrealism’s birth. Today, however, public debates related to subconsciousness and sexuality have hardly anything to do with surrealism and have instead become a part of everyday life in the West.

Surrealism has always picked a fight with dominant politics, traditions and norms, yet in post-World War II Eastern Europe surrealism provided a considerable platform for social and political protest: ‘In post-war Eastern Europe – and especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia, cut off from the developments of Western visual arts – Surrealism remained a vital force, a semi-clandestine cultural opposition’ (Russo 2015: 251).

At the same time, there are certain differences between the so-called ‘original’ French surrealism and its later Eastern European manifestation.

One of those is the relationship with realism. While Parisian surrealists

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preferred to keep a distance from physical reality and instead emphasised the role of subconsioucs, their descendants in Prague saw reality as a necessary point of gravity. Vratislav Effenberger, one of the ideologues of the surrealist movement in Prague, insisted that ‘[i]magination does not mean turning away from reality but its antithesis: reaching through to the dynamic core of reality’ (Hames 2008: 34).

Although the first-generation surrealists were fascinated by cinema, their own achievements in the field of filmmaking remained modest (nevertheless, the movement still produced a number of cinematic works the effect of which on culture in general cannot be overestimated). In Dictionnaire abrégé du Surréalisme (1938), André Breton lists only six films: Man Ray’s Emak-Bakia (1926), Man Ray and Robert Desnos’s L’étoile de mer (1928), Marcel Duchamp’s Anémic cinema (1925), Georges Hugnet’s La Perle (1929), Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí’s Un chien Andalou (1929), and Luis Buñuel’s L’Age d’or (1930).

Breton’s own relationship with his fellow-surrealists was often extreme, oscillating between love and hate, and undoubtedly his classification of surrealist films was affected by this, as well as by the struggles of power within the movement. Yet, taking a dogmatic position, one has to admit that only those six films can be considered truly ‘surrealist’. While Breton indeed listed only films made by the members of the surrealist group, he also saw surrealist impulses in a variety of other works, thus acknowledging the legitimacy of ‘involuntary surrealism’.

Surrealism and the historical avant-garde are still significant for the contemporary discourses of animaton and film. First, as an art movement, surrealism has inspired many animation artists. Secondly, the ‘renaissance of avant-garde’ that emerged in relation to the development of digital technologies is to a large extent based on century-old ideas and concepts.

Third, the ‘involuntary surrealism’ of many animated films derives from the very essence and technology of animation.

In what follows I will present some specific examples of involuntary surrealism.

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3.2.

Automatic writing has always been a core surrealist method. According to André Breton, ‘pure psychic automatism’ forms the backbone of surrealism (Breton [1924] 2010).

Surrealists borrowed the concept of automatism from psychoanalytic therapy that allows patients to speak out loud whatever comes to their mind in order to open the patient’s flow of thought and access her/his unconsciousness. Adopting the same method to writing and drawing, surrealists hoped to release a stream of creativity. In Robert Stam’s words, The Surrealists, for their part, stressed what they saw as the deep affinities between moving images and the metaphor of processes of écriture automatique, in a movement defined by André Breton as “psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express … the actual functioning of thought.” (Stam 2000: 56) Animated filmmaking has always been a highly controlled process, usually involving a long planning period (screenplay, designs, sketches) and also entailing additional testing as the work progresses (linetest, camera tests, preview). The animation technique closest to the surrealist concept of automatic writing is perhaps direct animation where the creative process is spontaneous and the results are largely out of the immediate control of the author. Len Lye’s (1901–1980) works demonstrate well the spontaneity of this techique and the haphazardness of its outcomes. At the same time, Norman McLaren’s (1914–1987) version of direct animation can hardly be compared to automatic writing as he tended to stay in total control of the process. The end results of Man Ray’s (1890–1976) ‘rayographs’ (images produced in exposing to light objects that were placed directly on film) were again completely open to chance.

Hence one could argue that in animation the method of automatic writing (its spontaneity and unpredictability) is not related to technical choices but rather to the methods of a particular author.

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Modern digital technologies have automated many creative processes and ‘[t]hus human intentionality can be removed from the creative process, at least in part’ (Manovich 2002: 32).

In the digital age, automatic writing has become, at least partly, a common practice and an integral part of the creative process. In a way, this has realised one of the goals of surrealists – to remove human consciousness from the creative process.

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3.3.

Automatism, which has been briefly described above, is closely related to the question of duplications, repetitions and cycles. In animation, repetitions and cycles are widely used to increase the length of animated sequences, while duplication of different elements enriches and intensifies the result. Most movements in animation, mainly in hand-drawn animation, are created in cycles – the main reason for this is to economise on the cost of labour (it is easier, hence cheaper, to produce duplications, repetitions and cycles), yet it also introduces an element of ‘automatism’ to the animated film. Zbigniew Rybczyński’s (b. 1949) Tango (1983) exemplifies well the use of repetitions and cycles. It is a film that (re) presents the course of human life by means of rhythm and repetitions.

Repetitions and cycles turn its characters into mechanisms that operate according to a certain inevitable rule, thus reducing them to a clock-like automatic machine.

A similar motif of repetition also underlies Repete (1995), a hand-drawn animation by Michaela Pavlátová, that repeats and mixes ordinary, everyday situations, transforming them into surreal hallucinations.

Many of Švankmajer’s works are also based on cycles and repetitions that come across as inescapable vicious circles. The characters of The Flat (1968), Dimensions of Dialogue (1982) and Et Cetera (1966) are trapped in a series of destructive repetitions, while A Game with Stones (1965) presents stones in a similar situation.

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Surrealists frequently portrayed the human body as a mechanical object.

In a certain sense, the animated film also creates hybrids of human flesh and artificial mechanisms – the characters are brought to life by mechanical movement. Both the surrealists and animation treat (human) body as a mechanism.

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3.4.

Compositing – the combining, layering and dissolving of different elements (visual images, texts, special effects) is increasingly typical in contemporary digital image-making processes. While early classical montage theories (Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin) treated films (and editing of them) as train-like pictorial narratives where time was determined horizontally, contemporary animation and digital processes add a vertical axis – a single frame might incorporate extremely varied spatiotemporal dimensions.

For instance, Luncheon on the Grass (1988) by Priit Pärn includes a sequence with two distinctive, yet parallel temporal orders. In the scene, a child is pulling at a table cloth, and while it moves, the seasons change behind the window. Hence the image brings together at least two parallel temporal orders, introducing a multitemporal regime.

Surrealists were also fascinated by a similar kind of ‘compositing’, representing vastly different elements of time and space on a single picture. Salvador Dalí’s paintings are the first to come to mind here – technically speaking, most of them are multi-layered ‘composites’ combining elements with no direct spatiotemporal connection. Collage, a technique frequently used by surrealists, is also based on the idea of compositing.

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3.5.

Surrealist experience is typically uncanny and metaphysical. Metaphysics and rejection of logic can be seen as referring to surrealism, although they most certainly not guarantee it. Films that defy the structure or cause-effect logic of classical narrative are all too frequently and casually defined as surrealist works. But simple unconventionality is not surrealism! Surrealist sense of cinema manifests first and foremost in extra-cinematic categories, such as context and authorial stance that, in turn, are intertwined with the social and the political. At the same time, Robert Short aptly indicates that the widespread use of the adjective ‘surrealist’, not only in the context of cinema but also in relation to unexpected, bizarre experiences in general, testifies to a certain extent that the objectives of the surrealists have been accomplished – after all one of their goals was to merge the domains of art and everyday life (Short 2008: 184).

In a similar manner, the experimental animated films of the Hungarian György Kovásznai (1934–1983) intermix everyday life with artistic abstractions. In his films Kovásznai processed documentary live-action sequences and combined them with animation.

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3.6.

The first-generation surrealists were tremendously inspired by dreams and the subconsciousness, primarily via Sigmund Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams (Die Traumdeutung, 1899). By experimenting with dreams and the methods of psychiatry, the surrealists sought to escape the constraints of consciousness and unblock the world of subconsciousness and desires.

Importantly, according to Freud, whose psychoanalytic method of dream interpretation was of central importance to the surrealists, ‘ideas in dreams are expressed as images or pictures, rather than in words’ (Coon and Mitterer 2008: 193).

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By its very nature, the art of film bears a great resemblance to a dream – in cinema, dreams can be re-staged and presented; and the act of watching a dreamlike sequence of images in a darkened room and in a relaxed position is similar to what we experience at night, lying in our bed.

Valkola summarises, [e]ven though a dream-watcher is more active than a movie-watcher, the first is usually not aware that a dream is a dream; as a result of this (on the level of consciousness) both the dream-watcher and the moviewatcher feel themselves as rather passive observers taking part in a fictive, pseudo-anatomical world of images. (Valkola 2015: 89) Dreams and films share further similarities, such as unexpected camera angles, distorting lenses and fragmentary course of events.

Surrealists were attracted to cinema precisely due to its resemblance of dreams, its ability to reflect the unconscious urges and hidden desires.

The way reality echoes in our dreams and the impact of surrealist art on us is indeed similar – both make us feel uncanny. Yet in our dreams we are not merely spectators, but often active participants. Hence, if one is to draw parallels, the dream is closer to interactive cinema that can be partly influenced by its audience.

Robert Desnos wanted to be able to shoot an unpleasant character on the screen or to go and give a kiss to the screen (Williams 1978: 46). Isn’t this an idea – ahead of its time – that has now been realised in interactive media and computer games? In any case, it is yet another example of the ‘renaissance of avant-garde’ in the digital age.

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3.7.

Even though we know several successful female surrealist artists, such as MĂŠret Oppenheim, Germaine Dulac, Nelly Kaplan and a number of others, surrealism has still been dominated by male figures. When the topic of surrealists and women comes up, the latter are usually not artists but the charismatic companions of male surrealists, such as Gala and Peggy Guggenheim. A number of studies of surrealism (mainly by feminist scholars) have indeed sharply criticised surrealism for its essential chauvinism and masculinity. For the surrealists, a woman was primarily an abstract, fetishized object whose main purpose was to inspire men, leading them to occasional bursts of madness. Man Ray, for instance, was strongly drawn to the form of female torso, depicting it as an idealized, erotic and often headless figure (Brandon 1999: 384).

The surrealist l’amour fou, crazy love, an extreme longing for romance, has found countless outlets in animated films that often represent heterosexual intimacy in a remarkably oversimplified and emotionally excessive manner.

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3.8.

Over time, the traditional role of animated film has been shaped as one centred around representation of fantasies, fairy tales and utopian worlds.

All attempts to modify this paradigm only render results that come across as dystopian-surrealistic. Increasingly popular animated documentaries, realistic computer games and a number of virtual reality practices (3D maps, architectural renderings, instruction videos, user interfaces etc.) have already significantly broadened the traditional domain of animation with the effect that, as a technique, it is less and less seen as a mere aid for visualising fantasies. The more the focus of animation centres

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on documentary representations (of the immediate reality), the less traditional and closer to live-action narrative cinema it becomes. While continued development of digital technologies facilitates the production of increasingly perfect virtual reality, the precondition of dystopia in animation is still the production of direct reality. In live-action narrative cinema, dystopia is evoked by means of staged fantasy. In animation, attempts to represent the real world or to use real (ready-made) objects, foster a connection with surrealism, in addition to producing a sense of dystopia.

Nowadays, our understanding of surrealism is broader, compared to Breton and his fellow surrealists. By drawing on oneirism, metaphysics, automatism, decontextualisation of ordinary objects, disregard of the common rules of logic, compositing, repetitions and duplications, fetishisation of women and many other surrealistic elements works of art become involuntarily surrealist. Involuntary surrealism, while clearly discernible in animated film, is a problematic and ambiguous concept, which defies exact definitions. A lot has changed throughout the century that has passed from the advent of surrealism – we now have new technical means and possibilities at our disposal, the political framework of the art scene is different and so are the expectations of the audience.

The development of digital technologies has given rise to the renaissance of avant-garde that has transformed many surrealist ideas into necessary creative tools of animation artists.

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References Brandon, Ruth 1999. Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917–1945. New York: Grove Press.

Breton, André ([1924] 2010). First Manifesto of Surrealism – 1924.

Translated by A. S. Kline. http://poetsofmodernity.xyz/POMBR/ French/Manifesto.htm.

Breton, André (1978). ‘As in Wood’, in: The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema. Ed. Paul Hammond. London: British Film Institute, pp. 72–77.

Coon, Dennis; ‎Mitterer, John O. (2008). Psychology: A Journey. 3rd edition. Belmont: Thompson Wadsworth.

Hammond, Paul (ed.) (1978). The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema. London: British Film Institute.

Iordanova, Dina (2003). Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

LeBaron, Anne (2013). ‘Reflections of Surrealism in Postmodern Musics’, in: Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought. Studies in Contemprary Music and Culture, vol. 4. Eds. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner. New York and London: Routledge, pp. 27–74.

Leslie, Esther (2004). Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant-garde. London and New York: Verso.

Manovich, Lev (2002). The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass., and London: MIT Press.

Pikkov, Ülo (2015a). Interview with Ivan Maksimov, 7 March. Recording in author’s possession.

Pikkov, Ülo (2015b). Interview with Priit Tender, 29 September.

Recording in author’s possession.

Rees, A. L. (1999). A History of Experimental Film and Video. London: British Film Institute.

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Russo, Giovanni (2015). ‘Jan Švankmajer’, in: Animation: A World History. Volume II. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

Short, Robert (2008). The Age of Gold. Dali, Bunuel, Artaud: Surrealist Cinema. London: Solar Books.

Stam, Robert 2000. Film Theory: An Introduction. Malden: Blackwell.

Valkola, Jarmo (2015). Filmi audiovisuaalne keel. Tallinn: Varrak.

Wells, Paul (2002). Animation: Genre and Autorship. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

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Surrealist Sources of Eastern European Animation Film

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This article investigates the relationship between surrealism and animation film, attempting to establish the characteristic features of surrealist animation film and to determine an approach for identifying them. Drawing on the interviews conducted during the research, I will also strive to chart the terrain of contemporary surrealist animation film and its authors, most of whom work in Eastern Europe. My principal aim is to establish why surrealism enjoyed such relevance and vitality in the post-World War II Eastern Europe. I will conclude that the popularity of surrealist animation film in Eastern Europe can be seen as a continuation of a tradition (Prague was an important centre of surrealism during the interwar period), as well as an act of protest against the socialist realist paradigm of the Soviet period.

4.1.

Surrealism in animation film has been an under-researched field. While several monographs have been written on authors whose work is related to surrealism (Jan Švankmajer, Brothers Quay, Priit Pärn, Raoul Servais and many others), no broader studies on the matter exist. Most likely it is the result of the relative marginality of animation film as compared to mainstream cinema and its main agent, the feature length narrative film, which is the focus of the majority of work on surrealism in cinema (with an exception of Jan Švankmajer’s oeuvre, which has recently attracted remarkable interest among film scholars). In addition, the activities of surrealists and their circles are rather poorly documented, which sets additional limits to research.

My investigation adopts qualitative research methods, providing inductive reasoning and interpretation of the subject (surrealism in animation film) and drawing on semi-structured interviews. The content analysis of films concentrates on the meaning assigned to the work by its author, keeping also in sight the spatiotemporal context of production.

It must be established from the outset that there are many ways to understand and interpret the notion of “surrealist animation film”.

In everyday use, “surreal” often stands for something obscure and incomprehensible. In art history, however, it signifies a set of practices

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and theories of a certain 20th-century avant-garde movement. In studying surrealism in animation film I will subscribe to this art historical frame of reference. Raphaëlle Moine and Pierre Taminiaux observe in their 2006 study that attempts to establish surrealist film as a genre lead to simplification and institutionalization (Moine, Taminiaux 2006: 114).

In order to avoid excessive simplification and institutionalization of surrealist animation film, I will focus on surrealism in animation film, rather than surrealist animation film as a genre. I understand animation film as an audiovisual work recorded frame by frame, which aesthetically or at least formally conforms to the classical concept of cinema. Animation essentially involves the presentation of still images in a manner that creates an illusion of motion in viewers’ minds. (Pikkov 2010: 14) By Eastern Europe I mean the geopolitical region that after World War II was under Soviet rule or influence.

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4.2.

Surrealism is one of the most often described and reproduced phenomena of the 20th-century art. Who is not familiar with Dalí’s melting watches, Magritte’s men with top hats or the shots of an eye sectioned with a knife in Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou – these and many other “surreal” images have become the staple of modern popular culture. Barbara Creed (2007: 116) argues that “[t]he surrealist movement of the 1920s was shortlived, but it continued to exert a marked influence on artistic practice and popular culture.” Surrealism appeared on the global cultural map after World War I on the initiative and under the leadership of the French writer André Breton (1896–1966). While dadaism and futurism should be mentioned as forerunners of or at least influences on the movement, surrealists themselves had the habit of emphasizing its uniqueness and independence: “Surrealism began among poets whose aim was to create a revolution, both political and artistic, combining the visions of Freud, Marx, Sade and Lautréamont.” (Brandon 1999: 3)

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The heyday of surrealism as an art movement was the interwar period, yet it has retained its importance to this date. Surrealism is not a style in the narrow sense, but rather an author’s worldview and attitude, although even its creators were unable to define it exhaustively. Surrealists considered society and culture as oppressive of human freedom and true needs, attempting to liberate the concealed powers in people, particularly their spontaneous and subconscious faculties of expression. Doing this, they drew on the teachings of Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), the founding father of psychoanalysis. Surrealists aimed at blurring the boundaries between art and life, and replacing the old, oppressive society with one that would meet people’s true needs. Surrealists regarded spontaneity and expression of subconscious urges as an instrument to liberate people from the reins of reason-based society.

The first Surrealist Manifesto was published in November 1924, a moment now considered the “official” birth date of surrealism. In the Manifesto, Breton defines surrealism in following terms: “Pure psychic automatism by means of which one intends to express, either verbally, or in writing, or in any other manner, the actual functioning of thought.

Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, free of any aesthetic or moral concern.” (Breton [1924] 2010) Surrealism is based on a belief in a higher reality of certain neglected forms of association, the omnipotence of dreams, the idle play of thinking. The Manifesto is in fact more a call for a new understanding of art (life) than a definition of a new modernist art movement. The surrealists sought to transcend the boundaries of the traditional field of art and were interested in transforming the people and society at large.

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4.3.

According to Linda Williams (1981: 51), “[s]urrealist … filmmakers were … the first to take seriously the striking resemblance between the film’s imaginary signifier and that of the unconscious.” Surrealist filmmakers, as surrealists in general, do not divide the world into the inanimate and the alive, for them everything is animist, i.e. related to everything else and in possession of a soul. As Williams (ibid.) explains it, “[i]nstead of showing what a character thinks, the Surrealist tendency in film was to show how images themselves can “think””. As a mirror of modern times and lifestyle, cinema quickly caught the attention of surrealists, becoming an object of discussion and a field of experimentation. “Many of the early Surrealists (Luis Buñuel, André Breton, Jean Goudal, Ado Kyrou, Jean Ferry and others) fell in love with the fledgling cinema and its power to … follow the movements of the dream-world.” (Creed 2007: 118) Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel collaborated on two films (Un Chien Andalou, 1929; L’Age d’Or, 1930), which have become landmarks of both surrealism and cinema; film as a medium also fascinated Man Ray, Robert Desnos, Marchel Duchamp and many others, yet in contrast to painting cinema was never properly theorized by surrealists, they “did not have, properly speaking, a cinematographic doctrine”, as Georges Sadoul put it (ibid.). The first more comprehensive analysis of surrealist cinema, Le Surréalisme au cinema (1953, updated 1963), was written by the critic and surrealist filmmaker Ado Kyrou (1923–1985).

The tenets of contemporary animation film developed in parallel to the advent and evolution of surrealism, as the initial isolated experiments gradually accumulated into a separate film form and an industrial branch.

Animation film became one of the corner stones of popular culture and had maintained this position to this date. The interwar period has also been designated as the “Golden era” of animation film (Wells 2002: 2). During these years the first major studios were established (Disney, Fleischer, Walter Lantz) and several still popular characters launched their screen careers. The aesthetic framework and spectatorial expectations were also shaped during this golden age of animation, largely based on Disney’s popularly successful work. The period also saw the birth of

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Destino,1 perhaps the most legendary surrealist animation film, which, however, remained uncompleted until 2003. Salvador Dalí met Walt Disney in 1945 (King 2007: 87), in order to collaborate on a six-minute animation film (ibid.: 88). Yet in 1946 Disney, unconvinced of its potential audience appeal, halted the production on its tracks, although in the hope of returning to it at a later date (ibid.: 91). In 1999 the Disney corporation discovered that the copyright of Dalí’s designs for Destino (about 135 drawings and 32 paintings), worth at that point approximately 10 million USD, did not belong to Disney after all, since the film was never completed (ibid.: 92). Disney restarted Destino’s production, assigning Dominique Monfrey as its new director, and the film premiered in 2003. This way Disney managed to re-claim the copyright of Dalí’s original designs. Created as a computer animation, Destino includes and builds upon Dalí’s images, 15 seconds of which were part of an initial screen test by Dalí (ibid.).Yet even if Destino is based on the work of one of the most famous surrealists, the question remains whether it is an essentially surrealist film. For designating an animation film as surrealist is it enough to use Dalí’s images, or does it take something more?

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4.4.

Modernist art movements, including surrealism, are defined by a strive towards creating something completely new and unprecedented, an impulse of qualitative progress. Similarly, the first animation films quite noticeably attempted to surprise the audiences with something original and extraordinary. In addition to this gravitation towards novelty, animation film and surrealism share other common traits. Although 1924

1

Destino is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w38cerphic4.

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is acknowledged as the birth date of surrealism, certain surrealist ideas circulated in the art world even earlier, exerting certain influence on the development of animation film. For instance, describing the work of one of the earliest animation filmmakers, Winsor McCay (1869–1934), Judith O’Sullivan observes that his art nouveau comic strips, as well as his later films, reveal several surrealist features – anxiety, hostile atmosphere, objects coming together in irrational conjunctions, constantly threatening mechanical devices (Wells 2002: 31). From today’s point of view, several pioneers of animation film, such as Ladislas Starevich, Émile Cohl, James Stuart Blackton and many others, can be considered proponents of surrealism. The abstract animation films of Viking Eggeling, Hans Richter, Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fishinger from the interwar period also betray dadaist and surrealist impulses. Furthermore, “protosurrealist” authors such as Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Hieronymus Bosch, Marquis de Sade and Alfred Jarry have influenced and inspired several animation filmmakers. In order to determine which animation films are surrealist and which not, a determining set of characteristic features has to be established. What is it that makes an animation film surrealist?

Surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer (b. 1934) insists that “Surrealism is everything but art: ‘world views, philosophy, ideology. psychology, magic’. (Owen 2011: 4) Independently of any assumed influence of surrealism, the technical execution of animation films alone invests them with certain surrealist elements: irrationality, dreaminess, mystery, anti-gravity, fantasy. Collage, a technique highly characteristic to surrealist practice (Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Francis Picabia etc.), is commonly used in animation film in the form of cut-out (silhouette) animation (Jan Lenica, Walerian Borowczyk, Terry Gilliam, Yuriy Norshteyn etc.). Art historian Roger Cardinal observes that “the whole idea of the animated film is to suppress the categories of normal perception … [and to] annihilate the very conditions of rationality” (Wells 2002: 5). Hence every animation film is encoded with a certain surrealist undercurrent, irrationality. Animation film is essentially about creating an illusion (Pikkov 2010: 14). “The cartoon format has continually propagated this restatement of Surrealism as somehow being that of the ‘wacky’ and the ‘weird’ merely for its own sake.” (Norris 2007: 86) Thus animation film features a number of typically surrealist characteristics, yet it is not regarded as surrealist in general. At which point does animation film becomes more surreal than “normal” and hence “properly” surrealist?

How to measure the degree of surrealism in animation film?

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4.5.

Among other things, surrealism has been described as a certain form of realism: sur-realism. According to animation theorist Paul Welles, the illusion of realism induced in animated film is hyper-reality. The term “hyperrealism” was introduced by the French cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard to designate “a hyperreality, a simultaneity of all the functions, without a past, without a future, an operationality on every level” (Baudrillard 1994: 54). Semiotician Umbert Eco employs the notion of hyper-reality to describe Disneyland where absolutely everything is artificial, yet seems more real than reality itself. In Understanding Animation (1998) Wells attempts to map the essence of realism in animation film. In the study of realism, he proposes Disney’s films, which he calls hyper-real, as a central point of reference (Pikkov 2010: 99). Thus, following Welles, we should move along an axis which has realist films on one end, non-realist (abstract) films on the other end and hyper-real Disney’s films in the middle. On the diagram below (fig. 1) I have depicted the scale of realism suggested by Wells.

fig. 1

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When discussing realism in animation film, it should be borne in mind that animation is a symbiosis of fine art and cinema, which also defines the paradigm of realism in animation film – it is not about the copying of reality, but about portraying it as truthfully as possible; an attempt to represent the real world as closely to the original as possible.

Returning to surrealism as a form of realism, we can add a vertical axis to Wells’s diagram that defines the degree of surrealism in the paradigm of realism (fig. 2).

fig. 2

Surrealism can thus be realist (as in Magritte’s style), hyper-realist (Dalí’s style) or abstract (Miró’s style).

fig. 3

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As the Magritte–Dalí–Miró axis demonstrates (fig. 3), surrealism can manifest in all forms of realism. Surrealism is not the opposite of realism, it is a degree of dislocation in realism. Following again Wells’s train of thought, which draws on Disney’s style as an example of the most familiar degree of abstraction in animation film, we should use Dalí’s style (as the most famous example of surrealism) as a central point of reference in mapping surrealism.

The basic structure of film was formed and developed soon after the birth of cinema (with the exception of sound that was added later) and has eversince remained basically intact. More precisely, film, by combining a number of independent basic elements (art forms), consists of several different structures: we can talk about the structure of story, of image, of sound etc. On closer observation, it is a multi-patterned pattern. (Pikkov 2010: 60) Hence film consists of a number of independent “disciplines”, each of which can be individually assessed as to their degree of surrealism. In animation film we can consider surrealism’s effect on: • visuals (visual design of film); • sound (aural design of film); • movement (rhythms and pace of film); • storytelling (rationality and logics of film’s plot); • relations (connections between film’s characters).

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In Destino, only visuals are surreal, at least when judged against the context of “average” animation films. The sound, movements, storytelling and relations between characters follow rather traditional and commonplace patterns of animation film. When the various disciplines of Destino are considered in terms of their degree of surrealism, the average result is “moderately surreal” (and this only due to Dalí’s images in the visuals of the film). Surrealism is only an external style in Destino (fig. 4).

However, in any given animation film the disciplines are usually not of equal importance, and each animation film has a dominant – e.g. music in a musical film. Thus, the median value of surrealism in all disciplines of an animation film might not lead to a correct assessment, since the dominant of the film has to be considered as well. At the same time it is quite obvious that an excessively intricate analysis might loose track of the film as a whole. In Surrealism and Cinema, Michael Richardson (2006: 3) also emphasizes that precisely the film as a whole should provide the basis for defining surrealism.

Hence, an examination of surrealism in animation film should not proceed from individual disciplines; rather, a film should be considered as a whole in order to detect the degree to which it contains the various forms of surrealism. A study of surrealism in animation film should not be based on the physical properties of surrealism (dislocated realism), it should rather take into account the experience of the audience and the context of the filmmaker. The spectator’s perception of the film is of utmost importance, and perhaps the only actual criterion of judgment.

In other words, if we set aside the essential surrealism of animation film, a film can be thought of as “properly” surrealist only when it is perceived as a surrealist whole. It should be noted, however, that the perception of surrealism itself has changed over time. For example, what appeared scandalous in the surrealism of the 1920s, has by now become a normal part of the paradigm of contemporary art and lost its shock value. Returning to Destino, I suggest that for me as a spectator the visual images of the film come across as surrealist, yet the film does not succeed in creating a surrealist whole. The surrealism of Destino is limited to the surrealist visuals, and the sound, movement, storytelling and relations lack surrealist qualities. Destino does not manage to create the feeling of the uncanny that is essential to surrealism.

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4.6.

What, then, is it that makes an animation film surrealist? Art historian Hal Foster (cited in Creed 2007: 116) argues that “no given categories, aesthetic or Surrealist, could comprehend Surrealism conceptually”, yet “there is one term that comprehends Surrealism – the uncanny”. Sigmund Freud suggests in his 1919 essay Das Unheimliche that heimliche relates to home, house, family and everything familiar, as opposed to heimliche, which is a sense of uncanny foreignness, partly reminiscent of what has been experienced before (Freud 1919: 2).

In order to establish the criteria by which to assess the degree of surrealism in animation film, we should concentrate on the notion of “uncanny” and “creating uncanny” or, in other words, on the subconscious uneasiness caused by the dislocation of realism. In this context, realism should be considered as something traditional, previously experienced, which, when dislocated (presented in an unfamiliar manner), creates an unconscious sense of the uncanny. An unexpected metamorphosis in a film’s expected presentation of visuals, sound, movement, storytelling or relations engenders a sense of the uncanny and defines the degree of surrealism in the film.

The notion “uncanny valley” was introduced by Masahiro Mori, a Japanese roboticist (b. 1927). Mori suggested that the more realistic “living” artificial bodies (i.e. of robots, animated characters etc.) appear, the more emphatic they seem to real human beings (who consider them credible), up to the point where artificial creatures become too human-like and suddenly evoke eeriness instead of empathy. (Pikkov 2010: 80)

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fig. 5 Mori’s concept of the “uncanny valley” considers only characters and the spectatorial take on them, but as the uncanny is a defining feature of surrealist animation, the film has to be located in the uncanny valley as a whole – the entire experience of the film must be uncanny (fig. 5).

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4.7.

Surrealism is far from being understood in a single and straightforward way, “[s]urrealism is not one thing, and there are as many manifestations of it as there are surrealists.� (Richardson 2006: 171) Throughout history the surrealist community has determined on its own who is a surrealist (whose work can be regarded as surrealist) and who is not; during the earliest days it was mostly done by their spiritual leader Breton. In order to map the terrain of surrealist animation filmmakers, I applied a similar technique, asking animation filmmakers themselves to identify the surrealist community. I began by approaching them with a short questionnaire, asking to name surrealist authors. I then contacted those (surrealist) filmmakers that were mentioned and posed the same questions to them.

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First I interviewed Jan Švankmajer – “one of the most original and productive of all surrealist film makers” (Richardson 2006: 121), a versatile author who has become one of the leaders of the contemporary surrealist movement. (He is not only a prolific filmmaker but also serves since 1970 on the editorial board of the Analogan magazine and participates in the work of Gambra Gallery in Prague, which is dedicated to exhibiting surrealist art.) In its significance, Švankmajer’s contribution to promoting surrealism is similar to Breton’s once leading role.

Based on the interviews with ten directors – Jan Švankmajer, Brothers Quay, Priit Pärn, Jerzy Kucia, Igor Kovalyov, Raoul Servais, Piotr Dumala, Koji Yamamura, Atsushi Wada and Mati Kütt – the following diagram (fig. 6) of animation filmmakers was outlined; these are the authors that the community itself defines as surrealists.2 The work of these filmmakers reveals a desire to not imitate life, but rather to shed light on the metaphysical world. The personal internal universe and visualisations of the subconscious are of prime interest to them. In their films, numerous ready-made objects are animated, rendering the entire cinematic space “alive”. According to Švankmajer, “[s]urrealism is a journey into the depths of the soul, like alchemy and psychoanalysis. Unlike both of these, however, it is not an individual journey but a collective adventure.” (Hames 2008b: 112) Collectivity has always been an essential facet of the surrealist project, which does not necessarily manifest as artistic collaboration, but rather as companionship of shared sensibility. The core group of contemporary surrealist animation filmmakers know each other well and meet frequently at film festivals. While not constituting a formal group, they can certainly be regarded as a creative circle of friends. In addition to filmmaking, most of them are also active in fine art, exhibiting prints, paintings and sculptures. The respondents work in more or less equal measure in such animation techniques as puppet animation, hand-drawn animation and mixed media animation. None of them, however, use CGI, which suggests that surrealism in animation film is primarily associated with traditional techniques. “Surrealist movies do not use slow motion, they do not present the images produced by the cinematic apparatus as yet another illusion.” (Kuenzli 1996: 10) The works of these surrealist

2

The interviews were conducted between 2011 and 2013. The recordings are kept in the author’s archive.

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animation filmmakers also rarely rely special effects and noticeable digital postproduction, preferring the “natural” style that evokes the sense of uncanny with dislocations in something familiar and traditional.

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4.8.

Authors throughout the world were mentioned in the interviews, yet the filmmakers whose names came up most often belong to the Eastern European cultural terrain (the American-born Brothers Quay have also made films in Poland and in Czech Republic and are the representatives of the “Eastern European cinematic tradition”). The interviews established that the community of animation film directors is rather clear-cut, and a number of authors were mentioned repeatedly (Švankmajer on seven, Brothers Quay on six, Pärn, Kovalyov, Borowczyk and Servais on two occasions). The fact that the point of gravity of surrealist animation appears to be in Eastern Europe can be explained as a continuation of a pre-existing tradition, as a strong surrealist group was active in Czechoslovakia during the interwar period, on whose invitation, for example, André Breton visited Prague in 1935 (Bydžovská 2005: 6).

“After Paris and Brussels, Prague was one of the most important centres where surrealism was developed by several generations of artists” (ibid.: 1). “[P]aradoxically, surrealism greatly expanded in the Czech lands during the war, when it was banned. In the stifling atmosphere of the Protectorate, it represented, for the young generation, an alluring challenge to engage in free creative thought.” (ibid.: 9). Even after World War II, under the conditions of enforced socialist ideology, surrealism retained its sound footing in Eastern Europe. Jonathan L. Owen observes that “[s]urrealism, in its authentic form, has forever been in revolt against existing ideological and social systems” (Owen 2011: 218). There is a direct correlation between the popularity of surrealism and the degree of

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personal and creative freedom in post-war Europe. Michael Löwy, one of the most prominent contemporary theorists of surrealism, argues that “[s]urrealism is not only a stream of Modernism or a chapter in the history of the 20th century avant-garde, but it is also a kind of ‘anthropology of human freedom’” (Majmurek 2010: 165). The Surrealist movement has always demonstrated political ambition and in post-war Eastern Europe it also functioned as an act of protest and resistance.

“The Platform of Prague”, the Czechoslovakian surrealist manifesto, stated that “[s]urrealism must oppose itself to both Stalinist Communism and Western capitalism” (Owen 2011: 191). In socialist Eastern Europe surrealist thought was in the constant process of development and conceptualization, as demonstrated by the animation films produced in the region. “If no branch of any national cinema has ever succeeded in establishing an uncontaminated Surrealist tradition, Surrealism has nonetheless remained an enduring tendency of both Czech and Polish animation” (Owen 2010: 45). In Priit Pärn’s words, “in Soviet animation film, adopting a surrealist point of view was a form of protest, since the authorities preferred funny films with unambiguous messages.”3 By the second half of the 1980s, the political pressures had started to ease considerably in Estonia and, liberated from the clutches of censorship, the artists were able to enjoy more creative freedom. In 1986, on Pärn’s initiative, animation filmmakers Heiki Ernits (b. 1953), Rao Heidmets (b. 1956), Miljard Kilk (b. 1957), Mati Kütt (b. 1947), Hillar Mets (b.

1954), Priit Pärn (b. 1946), Tõnu Talivee (b. 1951), Riho Unt (b. 1956) and Hardi Volmer (b. 1957) formed the Tallinnfilm Surrealists group (see also Laaniste 2009: 141), with Kalju Kivi (b. 1951) and Vahur Kersna (b.

1962) joining them at a later date. As the group included the majority of Estonian animation filmmakers of the late 1980s, the Estonian animation film of the time was decisively surrealist in nature. Although the Tallinnfilm Surrealists lacked a written platform (manifesto, programme), they had, for example, a logo that was printed on shirts and other items for promoting the group. The Tallinnfilm Surrealists showed their art works primarily at group exhibitions, but its members also continued to make animation films, thus establishing a strong presence of surrealist ideas and images in Estonian animation.4

3

Author’s interview with Priit Pärn, 6 May 2012.

Recording in the author’s archive.

4

Author’s video interviews with Tallinnfilm Surrealists in the spring of 2013 in Tallinn. Recordings in the archive of the author.

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A good example of how surrealist-inspired art gave direct impulses to animation film is Mati Kütt’s piece Smoked Sprats (Sprotid), featuring a tin jar filled with female torsos (displayed at a group exhibition in Vaasa, Finland, 1989), and his animation film Smoked Sprat Baking in the Sun (Sprott võtmas päikest, Tallinnfilm, 1992). Both works are centred around the image of an imprisoned female golden fish. The 23-minute film is essentially an opera, or more precisely an underwater animation opera. By intertwining the opposite worlds and urges (above the water/ under the water, two-dimensional/three-dimensional, fear of castration/ reproduction drive etc.), Kütt tells the story of a golden fish who in the name of its freedom and happiness is ready to fulfill any three wishes.

Yet the freedom attained in this manner is more than questionable to both the wisher and the freedom-seeker. Smoked Sprat Baking in the Sun can also be interpreted as a series of monologues of the subconscious, stemming from the collision of desires and norms. The film’s soundtrack is composed of dramatic opera tunes with naïve libretto in German, investing the story with a sense of the grotesque and pathos. The uncanny – the primary condition of surrealism – is easily perceived in Smoked Sprat Baking in the Sun. The film’s visuals present a fish with legs living on dry land and a man inhabiting the underwater domain; the film’s sound features traditional opera, presented in an overdramatized manner; the movement and gravity are transformed into metaphysical underwater weightlessness; the story is the well-known fairy-tale of Golden Fish

by Alexander Pushkin, yet the elements of the tale are over-amplified; the characters of the film appear to be a fish and a fisherman, but their relationship is interlaced with an unexpected lustful sexual innuendo.

Each discipline of the film presents familiar elements in a dislocated atmosphere – Smoked Sprat Baking in the Sun employs surrealist forms and imagery. Hence, according to the system of assessment introduced above, the film is on average “very surrealist” (fig. 7).

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fig. 7

Other Estonian surrealist animation films of the period include Enchanted Island (Nõiutud saar, Unt, Volmer, 1985), Papa Carlo’s Theatre (Papa Carlo teater, Heidmets, 1988), Noblesse oblige (Pärna, Heidmets, 1989), Labyrinth (Labürint, Kütt, 1989), Hotel E (Hotell E, Pärn 1992) etc.

“Sixty years after the birth of surrealism in France the Estonian animation filmmakers declared themselves surrealists! Slightly weird, but art reflects its times and surrealist ideas made a perfectly befitting mirror to the crumbling Soviet Union.” (Pikkov 2011: 94) Surrealism, born in the Paris of the 1920s, found a new hotbed in postWorld War II Eastern Europe, where it became a contra-culture in opposition with the dominant cultural politics, inspiring many artistic minds. Surrealism constituted one of the keystones of Soviet underground avant-garde art (Laaniste 2009: 134). The surrealist animation film of the post-war period was a confrontational art form, seeking to challenge the boundaries of its field with absurd and irony. The common denominator of cultural politics in the former Soviet sphere was socialist realism, basically a form of realism. Similarly to surrealism it first manifested in literature and subsequently gave impulses to other art forms. Drawing primarily on Hegel’s thought, the Hungarian Marxist György Lukács developed his theory of art, or more precisely of literature, that served the needs of Stalinist Russia particularly well, as literature had traditionally been a leading art form in Russian culture (Kangilaski 2013: 20). In the early 1930s socialist realism became the dominant art paradigm in the Soviet Union and in 1934 Andrei Zhdanov, the chairman of the

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Supreme Soviet of the Communist Party, declared at the Soviet Writer’s Congress that socialist realism is characterized by truthful and historically concrete depictions of reality in its revolutionary development, by party-mindedness (which meant illustration and justification of the party politics), and by popular appeal (ibid.). At the same event, Karel Teige, one of the leaders of the Czechoslovakian avant-garde, proposed to combine the notions of surrealism and socialist realism (Hames 2008a: 22). Indeed, the ideology and propaganda of the socialist society, which combined realism with fantastic images of a bright future, shared in part the surrealist impulse to change reality, but it relied on the idealization, not the dislocation of the reality.

Cultural forms have frequently developed in the process of contradictory interaction, which also explains the popularity of surrealism in post-war Eastern Europe – limited personal freedom and the officially endorsed socialist realism called for the counterweight of surrealism (fig. 8). In Western Europe, where such (cultural) politics did not exist, surrealism was soon marginalized, and its former avant-garde thrust was safely transformed into neutered symbols of popular culture and consumer items.

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4.9.

The study of surrealism in animation film facilitates a broader understanding of impulses and interactions between filmmakers, it widens interpretational horizons of particular filmic texts and enhances awareness of authorial positions. Surrealism has always been intimately related to authorial worldviews and attitudes, which are typically socially sensitive and critical. Surrealism can also be regarded as an indicator of personal freedom, and an examination of its spread and forms of expression sheds light on patterns of social development.

Identifying animation filmmakers and their films as surrealist has little value on its own, yet such classification helps to better understand the conditions of the time and the political system under which these filmmakers lived and produced their works. Instead of assessing the individual disciplines of animation film, the films should be analysed as integral wholes, in order to determine to what extent they contain surrealist modes of expression. Surrealism in animation film should be judged on the basis of spectatorial experience and authorial contexts.

As established by interviews conducted for this study, the central group of contemporary surrealist animation filmmakers includes Jan Švankmajer, Brothers Quay, Priit Pärn, Igor Kovalyov, Walerian Borowczyk and Raoul Servais. While these authors do not constitute a formally established group, they can still be regarded as a creative circle of friends. We saw that most of surrealist animation filmmakers come from or have been active in Eastern Europe. The popularity and wide spread of surrealism in post-World War II Eastern Europe can be explained as a continuation of a tradition (Prague was already a strong centre of surrealism during the interwar period), yet it is partly also an act of protest against socialist realism of the Soviet period.

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References Baudrillard, Jean 1994. Simulacra and Simulation. University of Michigan Press.

Brandon, Ruth 1999. Surreal Lives: The Surrealists 1917–1945. New York: Grove Press.

Breton, André [1924] 2010. First Manifesto of Surrealism – 1924.

Trans. A. S. Kline. http://uploads.worldlibrary.net/uploads/ pdf/20121102214233manifestopdf_pdf.pdf.

Bydžovská, Lenka 2005. ‘Against the Current: The Story of the Surrealist Group of Czechoslovakia’. – Papers of Surrealism, 3, http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal3/acrobat_ files/lenka.pdf.

Creed, Barbara 2007. ‘The Untamed Eye and the Dark Side of Surrealism: Hitchcock, Lynch and Cronenberg’. – Graeme Harper, Rob Stone (eds.), The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film.

London: Wallflower Press, 115–133.

Freud, Sigmund 1919. ‘The Uncanny’. http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/ freud1.pdf.

Hames, Peter 2008a. ‘The Film Experiment’. – Peter Hames (ed.), Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer. London, New York: Wallflower Press, 8–39.

Hames, Peter 2008b. ‘Interview with Jan Švankmajer’. – Peter Hames (ed.), Dark Alchemy: The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer. London, New York: Wallflower Press, 104–139.

Kangilaski, Jaak 2013. ‘Kunstnike lootused’. – Jaak Kangilaski (ed.), Eesti kunsti ajalugu. 1940–1991. I osa. Tallinn: Eesti Kunstiakadeemia, Sihtasutus Kultuurileht, 16–22.

King, Elliott H. 2007. Dalí, Surrealism and Cinema. Harpenden: Kamera Books.

Kuenzli, Rudolf E. 1996. Introduction. – Rudolf E. Kuenzli (ed.), Dada and Surrealist Film. Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 1–12.

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Laaniste, Mari 2009. ‘Karikatuur ja/või kunst. Valdkondade vahekorrast Eestis Priit Pärna loomingu näitel / Cartoons and/or Art: On the Relationship of Two Fields in Estonia, Based on Priit Pärn’s Creative Career’. – Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi, 18, 1–2, 111–150.

Majmurek, Jakub 2010. ‘Utopia, Dystopia, Escape: Surrealism and Polish Science Fiction / Fantasy Cinema’. – Kamila Wielebska, Kuba Mikurda (eds.), A Story of Sin: Surrealism in Polish Cinema.

Krakow, Warsaw: Korporacja Ha!art, 160–185.

Moine, Raphaëlle; Taminiaux, Pierre 2006. ‘From Surrealist Cinema to Surrealism in Cinema: Does a Surrealist Genre Exist in Film?’ – Yale French Studies, 109, 98–114.

Norris, Van 2007. ‘‘Interior Logic’: The Appropriation and Incorporation of Popular Surrealism into Classical American Animation’.

– Graeme Harper, Rob Stone (eds.), The Unsilvered Screen: Surrealism on Film. London: Wallflower Press, 72–89.

Owen, Jonathan L. 2010. ‘Motion Without Escape: The Bleak Surrealism of Czech and Polish Animation’. – Kamila Wielebska, Kuba Mikurda (eds.), A Story of Sin: Surrealism in Polish Cinema.

Krakow, Warsaw: Korporacja Ha!art, 44–59.

Owen, Jonathan L. 2011. Avant-Garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Pikkov, Ülo 2011. ‘Sürrealismi tee eesti animatsioonifilmi’. – Teater.

Muusika. Kino, 3, 94.

Pikkov, Ülo 2010. Animasophy: Theoretical Writings on the Animated Film. Trans. Eva Näripea. Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts.

Richardson, Michael 2006. Surrealism and Cinema. Oxford: Berg.

Wells, Paul 2002. Animation and America. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.

Williams, Linda 1981. Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film. Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press.

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On Links between Caricatures and Animated Films in communist Eastern Europe

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On Links between Caricatures and Animated Films in communist Eastern Europe

Animated film has long been closely connected with caricatures; pioneers of animation, such as Emile Cohl, James Stuart Blackton, Winsor McCay, John Randolph Bray, Paul Terry, Max Fleischer, and many others, were first known as caricaturists, before turning to animation. In addition, several animated characters were born, and won initial popularity, on the humour pages of newspapers, travelling on to the world of cinema with their authors.

In his book, Animated Cartoons, How They Are Made (1920), E. G. Lutz observes that many pioneers of animation launched their career as ‘comic graphic artists’ (Lutz, 1920: 8‒10). A number of other authors have also emphasised the importance of caricatures for the development of animated film (e.g., Pikkov, 2010: 31; Solomon, 1987: 13; Wells, 1998: 188). Yet, despite admitting the significance of these impulses, no exhaustive studies on the links between caricatures and animated film have been written and this field remains largely unresearched. To some extent, Donald Crafton has examined these issues in his Before Mickey: The Animated Film, 1908‒1928 (1993) and Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film (1990), but his scope is limited to the pre-World War II period.

This article aims to map links between caricatures and animated film, as well as their development, during the post-World War II era, concentrating in particular on Eastern Europe (the terrain of which is considered here less as a geographical area and more as a political space dominated by the Soviet Union during the post-war decades that became known as the communist sphere or the Eastern Bloc).

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5.1.

In the context of this article, I understand caricature as a simplified graphic image that exaggerates certain distinctive features for the purposes of comic or grotesque effect. The essence of caricature lies in parody, drawing attention to human weaknesses or shortcomings of social and political life. The concept originates from the Italian word caricare, meaning ‘to charge’, ‘to load’, ‘to exaggerate’.

The history of caricature is comparable to art history, as simplified and grotesque graphic images can be traced back to the medieval period. Still, caricatures, in the modern sense of the word, took root in Germany of the Reformation Age, spreading, alongside satirical literature, to neighbouring countries in the first half of the 16th century. The wider spread of caricatures, especially political and personal caricatures, was facilitated by the development of graphic art and the invention of the printing press in the late Middle Ages, while earlier the satirical songs of minstrels had performed the same function (Wright, 1875: 347). When writing about the ‘caricaturesque’ in a wider sense, I mean the depiction of something in a very exaggerated or simplified manner, a grotesque generalisation.

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5.2.

The certain similarity between early animation and caricatures stems in part from technical factors, i.e. from the fact that drawing (reproducing) a character had to be easy and the figure itself sufficiently clear and highcontrast, in order to stand out even if the quality of a film or a printed

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page was low. Other similarities include highlighting satiric aspects and simplification in creating memorable characters. Indeed, the earliest drawn films (and namely those, since animated film in general also employs many other techniques) are characterised by a strong emphasis on the caricaturesque. For instance, Walt Disney taught his animators that ‘the first duty of the cartoon is not to picture or duplicate real action or things as they actually happen – but to give a caricature of life and action’ (Barrier, 1999: 142).

The first films of Disney Studios were extremely caricaturesque and mostly consisted of sequences of moving caricatures. Disney’s early concept prescribed the creation of moving caricatures. In due course, as the animated film developed and its technical arsenal expanded, the production of Disney Studios, as well as other major studios, became more epical and the initial cartoonishness gradually disappeared. In addition to the introduction of more advanced techniques, the films also changed in terms of their content. Romantic screen adaptations of fairy tales became the norm for feature-length animated films (Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937; Pinoccio, 1940; Bambi, 1942). Similarly, early live-action filmmaking was heavily influenced by circus and vaudeville and only later became an art form for telling stories.

From early on, the production of animated films in the United States developed as a collective, studio-based, rather than an individual enterprise. In America, the popularity of the first animated films and the rapidly growing network of cinemas facilitated demand for new animated films, which in turn created favourable conditions for setting up the animation industry.

In contrast to the United States, where major animation film studios flourished before World War II, European animation relied on individual authors featuring diverse personal styles. Among them, we can find filmmakers who were inspired mainly by caricatures (Emile Cohl, Lortac, Cavé), directors who told epic stories (Lotte Reiniger, Vladislav Starevich, Berthold Bartosch), as well as artists experimenting with animated images (Walter Ruttmann, Hans Richter, Viking Eggeling, Oskar Fischinger).

World War II halted the developments of European cinema in its tracks, many filmmakers emigrated and the continuity of film production was disrupted. In addition to filmmakers, a large number of European

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artists ended up in the United States, bringing with them the ‘spirit of modernism’. America’s strong film industry was enriched by the creative investigation and experimentation of various modernist art schools, exemplified by Disney’s collaboration with Dali or Oskar Fischinger’s American works.

‘US took the lead role in avant-garde film, as it did with painting when New York replaced Paris as the cultural capital of modernism.’ (Rees, 1999: 57) During World War II, the United States became the world’s leading film producing country and the pioneer of audiovisual technical inventions; Stephen Cavalier has written that ‘the history of animation is largely the history of American animation.

[---] Western Europe led the way in the early days of cinema, and has been a fertile area for experimental and avant-garde animation. Eastern European animation was funded by communist states, which meant that animators had more financial security than their Western counterparts, but also that they had less creative freedom’ (Cavalier, 2011: 13).

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5.3.

Compared to the rest of the world, the development of animated film in Eastern Europe took a different route.

‘Between 1945 and 1989 … the development of these countries was levelled to a significant extent and dictated by Soviet policies in the spheres of economics and culture. [---] Whatever happened in the Soviet Union directly influenced the cultural climate in the countries of the Eastern Bloc, and often events in the USSR were replicated in the Eastern

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Bloc (such as the ‘Thaw’ that followed the demystification of the cult of Stalin’s personality in the late 1950s or the stagnation of the Brezhnev period).’ (Iordanova, 2003: 20‒21) After the October Revolution of 1917, Soviet Russian animated film was extremely experimental. Dziga Vertov’s (1896‒1954) avant-garde enterprises, Kino-Glaz (Кино глаз or Cine-Eye) and Kino-Pravda (Kino Pravda or Cine Truth), employed several animators. The first Soviet animated film, Soviet Toys (Советские игрушки, 1924), was made under Vertov’s direction. This caricaturesque drawn animation depicted the class struggle, portraying the fight of workers and peasants with a wealthy capitalist. Cinema, including animated film, was seen in Soviet Russia mainly as a tool of propaganda. The most well-known Soviet animated film directors of the period are Vladimir Suteyev, sisters Valentina and Zinaida Broomberg, Ivan Ivanov-Vano, Olga Khodataeva and Nikolai Khodataev.

Soviet Russian animation filmmakers were relatively free to experiment, just as the entire post-revolutionary society was open to various innovations. New forms of expression and approaches were probed in cinema, literature and theatre, as well as in art. Yet these artistic liberties did not last for long.

‘Initially avant-garde and satirical, Soviet animation changed in the middle of the 1930s with the establishment of Socialist Realism ...

Control was tightened, and Stalin-era animation concentrated on mostly didactic animation for children.’ (Klots, 2013: 5) Both Soviet animation and caricatures have often been regarded as airbrushed. This is mainly because the tenets of Soviet visual culture were formed on the basis of the so-called satirical Rosta (Российское телеграфное агентство or Russian Telegraph Agency) windows – propaganda posters accompanied by texts in verse. Soviet animation is also characterised by a combination of folkloristic elements with new, proletarian imagery. Frequently, traditional folklore characters were represented in Soviet everyday setting, as in Valentina and Zinaida Broomberg’s Ivashko and Baba-Yaga (Ивашко и Баба-Яга, 1938) or in Gennady Sokolsky’s Ivashko from Pioneers’ Palace (Ивашка из Дворца пионеров, 1981).

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Almost without exception, the post-World War II Soviet animated films were didactic in nature and propagandistic in their message. Soviet animation was directly influenced by the officially established tenets of Socialist Realism, and the only way to avoid them was through employment of clearly caricaturesque imagery.

‘For the first 15 years following World War II, animation in Eastern Europe shared similar characteristics with 1930s Soviet animation: mainly created for children, oriented towards moral and civic teaching, and resistant to stylistic changes.’ (Bendazzi, 1994: 151) Khrushchev’s Thaw, which began after Stalin’s death in 1953, relaxed political pressure to some extent, and this also changed Eastern European animation, which became more varied in terms of subject matter and scope of technical devices. Khrushchev’s Thaw diversified the means of expression available to communist cultural life, while communist society in general remained very insular.

‘Soviet techniques shifted from Stalin-era Socialist Realist naturalistic cartoons that often employed rotoscoping, towards innovative methods (and rediscovery of the avant-garde aesthetics of the 1920s) causing a more cartoonish, abstract, and even surrealist appearance.’ (Klots, 2013: 5) Andrei Khrzhanovsky’s (b. 1939) Glass Harmonica (Стеклянная гармоника, 1968) is a characteristic example of how the diminished political constraints and aesthetic diversification influenced Soviet animation. Glass Harmonica’s distinctly surrealist content and form (Ülo Sooster (1924‒1970), a surrealist artist, participated in its production) features hybrids of humans and animals, as well as metaphorical, elongated perspectives. In its time of release the pictorial language of Glass Harmonica came across as extremely innovative and modern, and it would have been impossible to make such a film either before or after the liberating breeze of Khrushchev’s Thaw.

In an interview Andrei Khrzhanovsky confesses that despite Khrushchev’s Thaw Glass Harmonica was still a highly problematic film – it was well-known due to word of mouth, but it hardly got any distribution. In addition, its production process was complicated by delays and demands for re-editing. (Pikkov, 2015)

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Fyodor Khitruk (1917‒2012), a famous Soviet animation filmmaker who also launched his career during Khrushchev’s Thaw, has argued ‘animation to be a synthesis of caricature and poetry.’ (Horton and Rapf, 2012: 506) Glass Harmonica and Khitruk’s The Story of a Crime (История одного преступления, 1962) can be considered the first (and for a long time the only) post-World War II Soviet animated films that broke the strict codes of Socialist Realism. While Khrzhanovksy and Sooster’s surrealist film was made possible only by the temporary relaxation of constraints during Khrushchev’s administration, Khitruk’s caricaturesque style allowed him to evade the limits of Socialist Realism also in his later productions.

‘It is actually the permissive filter which has been enabling for the animation film-maker working in comedy, because it foregrounds the self-conscious nature of the joke, and the attitude informing the joke, rather than a traditional aesthetic effect or a clear act of orthodox authored art-making.’ (Horton and Rapf, 2012: 505) Animation historian Giannalberto Bendazzi notes that the Iron Curtain that divided Europe into the West and the East was much more visible in animated film than in live-action cinema or any other art form (Bendazzi, 1994: 151).

The Western European animation industry concentrated primarily on the production of feature-length films for children (that were frequently mediocre copies of Disney) and, as in the United States, animated shorts remained the privilege or obsession of only a few authors. In Western Europe, the spread of television in the 1950s created a certain demand for animated commercials, but even this did not lead to the establishment of a tradition and industrial infrastructure comparable to that of liveaction cinema. By contrast, the Eastern European animation industry was subsidised by the state, which resulted in proper production infrastructure and created a stable environment of production. Short forms dominated the field of animated film, but feature-length animations were also made.

Equally to live-action cinema, animated films were widely distributed on both large and small screens. Studios employed a large amount of people who were interested in a smooth production process and keeping any subversion in acceptable limits. On one hand, state funding ensured the stability of animated film production and established proper industrial conditions, but on the other hand it created the need to compromise with

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the authorities. For this purpose, the position of script editor was set up at studios whose responsibilities included both artistic guidance and control over political correctness, and who ‘thorough editorial corrections … also partially functioned as ideological cleansing methods’ (Klimova, 2013: 58‒59) The censorship of art and other creative activities has a long history in the Eastern Bloc that can be traced back to the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire. Although the revolution of 1917 obliterated the imperial apparatus of censorship, in 1922 Soviet authorities set up a new body for censorship and the protection of state secrets, Glavlit (Главное управление по охране государственных тайн в печати), which operated, together with its sub-institutions, until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Film critic Jaan Ruus, who also had a long career as a script editor, has described this role in Soviet Estonia as follows, ‘In bureaucratic jargon, the editor’s mission was to be the politruk (политрук, ‘political instructor’) and to ensure that the artist would work ‘for the cause’ and move in the right direction without aberrations. Yet, in Soviet Estonia’s cinematic system, the editor paradoxically took the opposing role, by becoming literally the director’s advocate’ (Trossek, 2008: 40).

Limits were constantly challenged in the communist art system, and in this struggle the script editor played a crucial part as the mediator between the author and the authorities. Thus, a film director’s creative freedom depended to a great extent precisely on the script editor under whose custody s/he worked. Filmmakers, operating under tutelage of censorship and script editors, developed a distinctive language of expression, ‘where allegory became a certain form of ‘straightforwardness’ and its decoding in the reception of the public became the dominant means of comprehension. Thus a situation emerged where an animated film, for example, was not just a film, but also something else – a cultural sign quite dangerous and meaningful for the existing power discourse.’

(Trossek, 2006: 102)

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5.4.

Artworks created in communist conditions were often full of subtexts, and the audience also actively engaged in both creating these subtexts and looking for what had been written ‘between the lines’.

Instead of communicating their ideas directly, authors preferred to use allegory and ambiguous references – so-called Aesopian language. Aesop (Aisōpos, c. 620–564 BCE) was an Ancient Greek slave and storyteller whose fables often relied on allegory. At the same time, his simple tales, usually featuring animals as characters, were highly critical of the authorities. Due to his works, criticising authorities (and their agents) through allegory has been termed ‘Aesopian language’.

Robert J. Goldstein, the famous political scientist, has defined Aesopian language as ‘critical commentary on the political regime in veiled form’ (Klimova, 2013: 25).

Aesopian language employs devices of communication that transmit information indirectly rather than directly. Double-coded artworks created under communist conditions are good examples of Aesopian language. It is symbolic that Aesop himself was a slave and thus his free expression was extremely limited.

‘One of the main differences between allegory and Aesopian language is the presence of a censoring organ, which affects the authors’ writing practices and the readers’ interpreting choices.’ (Klimova, 2013: 13) Lev Loseff, known for his studies on Aesopian language, also emphasises that Aesopian language requires three agents: an author, a reader and a censor. Decoding of Aesopian language is not only the job of reader, it also engages author and censor. According to Lev Loseff, the expression ‘Aesopian language’ was developed by the writer Mikhail SaltykovShchedrin in the 1860s, and has been used since then by critics and the intelligentsia. Originally a phenomenon of Russian literature, it has gradually spread to other media, such as visual art, music and film (Loseff, 1984: 3‒5).

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It is important to underscore that not all authors created political subtexts intentionally, but as art was widely censored by the state, one can assume that every author who was aware of censorship also carefully considered any possible political references in her/his works, and used Aesopian language at least unconsciously. ‘[B]y the early 1930, in addition to pervasive official censorship, Soviet artists had unconsciously adopted even more effective control mechanism – self-censorship. This means that the creative work of artistscaricaturists, just like of other publicly acknowledged authors, followed a principle that has been termed ‘the three U principle’ – угадать (‘to guess’), угодить (‘to please’), уцелеть (‘to survive’).’ (Vseviov, 2013: 51)

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5.5.

A number of humour magazines were published in post-war Eastern Europe – Szpilki in Poland, Eulenspiegel in GDR, Dikobraz in Czechoslovakia, Ludas Matyi in Hungary, Jež and Kerempuh in Yugoslavia, Krokodil in Russia, Pikker in Estonia, etc. Compared to Western Europe, the number of humour magazines was larger in Eastern Europe due to state funding, and many animation filmmakers also worked for them, earning extra income with publishing their caricatures. With authors, ideas also moved between these two fields. In comparison to the rest of the world, post-war Eastern European animation definitely had more intimate connections with caricature, and this was at least partially due to the popularity of humour magazines and their state funding.

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In 1956, the caricaturists of the Yugoslavian humour magazine Kerempuh established an animation studio under Zagreb Film studio (established in 1953). The caricaturesque style of animations produced at Zagreb Film became to serve as the benchmark and trailblazer for the entire Eastern Europe. Technically rather simple, yet caricaturesque, animated films became the main production article of the studio and the critics started to refer to their authors collectively as the Zagreb School. By now, this term denotes all Eastern European caricaturesque animated films. In 1962, Dušan Vukotić’s Erzatz, produced in Zagreb Film, became the first non-US animated film to win an Oscar. Examples of Eastern European caricaturesque animated films produced outside Zagreb Film, but still considered ideologically belonging to the Zagreb School, are …And Plays Tricks (1978) by Priit Pärn (b. 1946) and Bartakiada (1985) by Oldrich Haberle (b. 1951).

Among many other Eastern European animation filmmakers, Rein Raamat (b. 1931) was inspired by the caricaturesque style of the Zagreb School. Although Raamat did not draw caricatures himself, his The Water Bearer (Veekandja, 1972), the first Estonian post-war drawn animation, relies heavily on ‘Zagrebian’ absurd and humour. The Water Bearer was produced at Tallinnfilm’s Joonisfilm Studio, established by Raamat in 1971. The film became a yardstick for a number of subsequent Estonian animations, as well as directors-artists who joined the studio. Many of the latter had previous experience as caricaturists and continued this line of work in parallel to making films. In Soviet Estonia, the main platform for publishing caricatures was the Pikker magazine, in addition to the humour pages of several newspapers and magazines (Sirp ja Vasar, Edasi, Noorte Hääl, Noorus). Caricaturists also participated in various specialised competitions. Yet an ideologically incorrect concept could create serious problems for both its author and the publication that published the caricature. For instance, in 1979, Heiki Ernits (b. 1953), a young animation director who studied in Moscow at the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors, was expelled and received a ‘publication ban’ because his caricature published in Pikker was deemed unsuitable.

The composition of the caricature resembled a famous photo of Lenin’s family. (See Figure 1) Priit Pärn’s caricature Sitta kah! (literally Just Shit!, but roughly Whatever! or I Don’t Give a Shit!), published in the cultural weekly newspaper Sirp ja Vasar in 1987, depicted a man in a padded jacket (the garment could be read as a symbol of Soviet mentality) standing on a broken horse-led wagon and throwing a piece of manure in

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the shape of the geographical map of Estonia.. (See Figure 2) It caused a political scandal and the case was discussed by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Estonia, which resulted in the dismissal of the newspaper’s editor-in-chief.

fig. 1

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5.6.

Compared to the contemporary democratic world, in communist Eastern Europe caricatures and humour in general had a rather different content and meaning.

Soviet jokes were special ‘because of the extremely repressive and intrusive nature of the political and social system and in particular the absence of freedom of speech. The jokes were far more important to the people who told them than are the jokes told in democratic societies, where jokes are merely a laughing matter, sheer entertainment.’ (Davies, 2011: 217) So-called ‘official humour’ also existed in the Soviet system and it was often referred to as satire, but here I talk about unofficial or ‘folkloric’ humour.

‘The many hundreds, quite possibly thousands, of political jokes told by the citizens of the former Soviet Union and satrapies of its empire constitute one of the largest bodies of jokes ever invented. [---] In the Soviet Union, political jokes also routinely made fun of individual leaders, but more important, they were jokes about an entire social and political system.’ (Davies, 2011: 213-214) Communist caricatures were primarily characterised by infrequent use of words or speech bubbles – a word has a considerably more particular meaning than an image and the use of a wrong word is not as easily excusable as artistic play with forms and shapes! In case of a visual image without word, the author could rely on the ‘safety net’ of ambiguity and thus minimise the risk of political liability. It was the editors, not authors, who usually added a general caption or an explaining text that often accompanied caricatures. Eastern European caricaturists also used absurd, self-irony and certain surrealist subject matter, which made it difficult to assign a particular message to a picture. Caricaturists (as well

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as other artists) intentionally created works that could be interpreted in various ways. Naturally, communist print media was dominated by politically trustworthy caricaturists who produced ‘correct’ caricatures either on commission by the political elite or at least with their approval.

Boris Yefimov (1900‒2008), one of the most prolific Soviet caricaturists, has recalled in his memoir that in his practice there were occasions where commissions came directly from Stalin who not only prescribed a particular subject matter, but also interfered personally in the creative process, correcting himself both the captions and sometimes even the drawing. (Vseviov, 2013: 51) Typically, the editorial board of a particular publication determined the subject matter of caricatures, and it also gave general guidelines, sometimes going to extremes in terms of reversing the intended message.

For instance, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalists (the bourgeoisie) were generally depicted wearing a top hat or a bowler hat and smoking a cigar. Apart from the obviously distorted political joke, this image also carried the message that Soviet caricaturists live in such isolated conditions that they have no idea that no-one in the ‘free world’ wears the early 20th-century fashion any more. Official Soviet caricature gradually turned into a parody of its own visual clichés.

Another peculiarity of Eastern European humour is the immense popularity of political anecdotes, which spread by the word-of-mouth.

This genre was practically non-existent in the capitalist world, or at least far less popular. (Davies, 2011: 300) The vast popularity of political anecdotes eloquently illustrates the situation where jokes targeted at the authorities provided a certain counterweight to the lack of freedom of speech. Thus, conversations in the Eastern Bloc often started with the question, ‘Have you heard the latest joke?’ And this usually meant a political or in some way socially critical anecdote.

In the Soviet sphere of influence, a unified field of folkloristic humour, or rather a system of underground humour, was established that expressed a certain repressed collective identity. It was shaped in opposition to the totalitarian propaganda and highlighted the shortcomings and absurdities of the surrounding social reality. Taboo topics and threat of repressions only fuelled the popularity of underground humour.

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Christie Davies, a professor of sociology, observes that the great popularity of jokes targeted at the authorities had a direct connection with the collapse of the Soviet Union, or at least these anecdotes undermined people’s loyalty to the communist system (Davies, 2010: 10). The massive spread of anecdotes has also been regarded as a form of resistance (Obrdlik, 1942: 712; Pi-Sunyer, 1977: 182) or as a kind of consolation (Cochran, 1989: 272; Hong, 2010: 61).

Eastern European literature has left an extensive legacy of humour classics, but Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (Osudy dobrého vojaka Švejka za svétové valky, 1923) deserves a special attention. A number of scholars (Ajanovič-Ajan, 2004; Tőke, 2008) consider this novel, and particularly its protagonist Švejk, the epitome of Eastern European humour. Švejk’s character draws on several folklore heroes (such as the Czech Hloupy Honza (Dull Honza), Hungarian Ludas Matyi (Mattie the Goose-boy) or Estonian Kaval Ants (Crafty Hans)) whose cunning cleverness permits him to succeed in any situation. The ‘ingenuously idiotic’ behaviour of Švejk, who stands for the lower class in general, provides the key for understanding the protagonists of Eastern European caricatures and animated films. The typical Eastern European ‘hero’ is a rather passive character with an ironic outlook, and instead of initiating events he just gets mixed up in them against his will – ‘[u] nder occupation, during wars or revolutions, his only shelter and shield is a special kind of humor, full of pessimism, absurd and surrealism.’

(Ajanovič-Ajan, 2004) Paul Wells, a theorist of animation film, observes, ‘Eastern Europran humor like this may be viewed as black irony – the surreality is a philosophic and political statement as well as the vehicle for humor.’

(Wells, 1988: 161) In Animation and Realism, Midhat Ajanovič-Ajan argues that surrealist irony and ironic black humour are inscribed into the history of Eastern Europe. This preference for dark humour can be traced back to the days of the Habsburg Monarchy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which included many different small nations. The latter were practically cut off from the highest ranks of authorities, which led to anecdotes and ironic black humour targeted to them.

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Luigi Lombardi-Satriani has argued that folklore as a whole is a ‘culture of contestation’, which defined itself in opposition to the official culture of upper classes (Lombardi-Satriani, 1974, quoted in Krikmann, 2002: 840).

Similarly, post-war Eastern Europe was to a great extent under the dominance of the Soviet Union and the relationship of the common people with the central authorities was distant and one-sided. The anarchy of authorities was compensated by jokes on them. In the communist period, humour also became a certain social code – an anecdote was enough to determine one’s interlocutor’s political attitudes and codes of behaviour. Humour turned into a certain cryptic text, or, as Priit Pärn observes in the film Pärnography (Pärnograafia, 2005), ‘Laughter comforts the downcast.’ ‘[T]he post-Stalinist Soviet regime was perhaps one of the most productive hotbeds of anecdotes in the history of humour.’ (Krikmann, 2002: 840) Surrounded by a society charged with political jokes, artists unintentionally reflected folkloric humour in their works. In contrast to political anecdotes that had no chance of being ever published in print, animation filmmakers succeeded to express critical stances towards the dominant system and its agents by means of artistic abstraction and Aesopian language.

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5.7.

The sources of animated film lay to a large extent in caricatures and comic strips; many pioneers of animation were practicing caricaturists.

Animated film of the United States moved gradually away from this ancestry and epic feature-length animations obtained the dominant

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position. Meanwhile, in European animation the short format, which is also characteristic to caricaturesque humour, took root. Compared to feature films, shorts are cheaper and quicker to produce, hence providing more room for taking artistic as well as economic risks. Concentrating on short films, European animation developed into a diverse art form.

Following Disney’s achievements, American mainstream animation continues to flaunt its technical novelties (aiming to defeat its competitors with technical excellence) and to tell epic stories. Film production depends heavily on distribution system, which is why mainstream cinema focuses on making feature-length films.

The post-war division of Europe into the communist East and the capitalist West also had an impact on animated film of those regions.

In Eastern Europe, animated film was funded by the state, but also strictly censored, both in terms of content and form. Eastern European animations often relied on double-coded Aesopian language. Doubtlessly, the prominence of caricaturesque animations was also influenced by the great number of humour magazines, as well as the co-operation of many animation filmmakers with them. In addition, the enormous popularity of anecdotes and other ‘street jokes’ caused the abundance of caricaturesque animated films in totalitarian society.

Although the political system has changed, Eastern European animation continues to feature remarkably strong caricaturesque elements, even if the popularity of caricatures has waned and the humour magazines that published them have mostly been marginalised.

Certain Aesopian language has also retained some of its importance in Eastern European animation. Time and again, the Švejkian characters reappear, and their misfortunes, as well as the conflict between their human expectations and the random ways of the world still provide inspiration for numerous directors. In Cinema of the Other Europe, Dina Iordanova also emphasises that despite the change of regime Eastern and Central European animation continues the tradition of lyricism, surrealism, magical realism and avant-garde (Iordanova, 2003: 150).

At the same time, Eastern and Western European animated films have become less dissimilar as film production and funding follows the same principles across the European Union and films circulate in the same the channels of distribution and are screened at the same festivals. The European cultural sphere is increasingly integrated. In 1989, with the fall

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of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, the Eastern European communist regime ceased to exist. Since 1989, ‘[t]here was a massive emigration of animation professionals, many of whom are now employed by companies across Western Europe, Canada and the US.’ (Iordanova, 2003: 32) Over the last decades, many European and American art schools have introduced curricula for animation, which has turned out a considerable number of auteurist animation filmmakers. In addition to traditional channels, new opportunities have been opened up by modern digital solutions for film distribution, as well as for funding. In turn, digital channels have created greater demand for animated films, especially shorts, which include many caricaturesque animations.

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References Ajanovič-Ajan M (2004) Animation and Realism. Available at: http://www.ajan.se/index.php?option=com_ content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=36.

Barrier M (1999) Hollywood Cartoons: American Animation in Its Golden Age. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bendazzi, G (1994) Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation.

London: Libbey.

Cavalier, S (2011) The World History of Animation. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cochran R (1989) “What courage!”: Romanian “Our leader” jokes. The Journal of American Folklore 102(405): 259–274 Davies C (2010), Jokes as the truth about Soviet socialism. Folklore: Electronic Journal of Folklore 46. DOI: doi:10.7592/ FEJF2010.46.davies. Available at: http://www.folklore.ee/ folklore/vol46/davies.pdf.

Davies C (2011) Jokes and Targets. Bloomington: Indiana University

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Press.

Hong N(2010) Mow ‘em all down grandma: The “weapon” of humor in two Danish World War II occupation scrapbooks. Humor – International Journal of Humor Research 23(1): 27–64.

Horton A and Rapf JE, A Companion to Film Comedy. Malden and Oxford: John Wiley & Sons.

Iordanova D (2003) Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film. London and New York: Wallflower Press.

Klimova O (2013) Soviet youth films under Brezhnev: Watching between the lines. PhD Thesis, University of Pittsburgh, USA. Available at: http://d-scholarship.pitt.edu/19634/1/Klimova_ETD_2013. pdf.

Klots A (2013) Depicting the trickster: Soviet snimation and Russian folktales. In: 17th Annal Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies Northwest conference: From symbolism to security politics, literature and imagery in Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Seattle, USA, 27 April 2013. Available at: http:// ellisoncenter.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Klots. pdf.

Krikmann A (2002) Sissejuhatavat humorist ja rahvanaljast: ained, mõisted, teooriad. Keel ja Kirjandus 12: 833–847.

Lombardi-Satriani L (1974) Folklore as culture of contestation. Journal of the Folklore Institute 2: 99–121.

Loseff L (1984) On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature. München: Verlag Otto Sagner in Kommission.

Lutz EG (1920) Animated Cartoons, How They Are Made. New York: C Scribner’s Sons. Available at: https://archive.org/details/ cu31924075701304.

Obrdlik A (1942) “Gallows humor” – A sociological phenomenon.

American Journal of Sociology 47(5): 709–716.

Pikkov Ü (2010). Animasophy: Theoretical Writings on the Animated

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Film. Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts.

Pikkov Ü (2015) Interview with Andrei Khrzhanovsky, 17 April.

Recording in author’s possession.

Pi-Sunyer O (1977) Political humor in a dictatorial state: The case of Spain. Ethnohistory 24(2): 179–190.

Rees AL (1999) A History of Experimental Film and Video. London: British Film Institute.

Solomon C (1987) The Art of Animation: An Anthology. The American Film Institute.

Tőke L (2008) Idiots on the ball: Švejkism as a survival strategy in the East European imaginary. In: Näripea E and Trossek A (eds) Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc. Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts, pp. 157–175.

Trossek A (2006). Rein Raamatu ja Priit Pärna joonisfilmid nõukogude võimudiskursuses. Ambivalents kui allasurutu dominantne kultuurikood totalitarismis. Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi 15(4): 102–125.

Trossek A (2008). When did it get political? Soviet film bureaucracy and Estonian hand-drawn animation. In: Näripea E and Trossek A (eds) Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc.

Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts, pp.31–45.

Volmer H (2005) Pärnograafia. A documentary. Tallinn: Acuba Film.

Vseviov D, Belobrovtseva I and Danilevskij A (2013) Vaenlase kuju: Eesti kuvand Nõukogude karikatuuris. Tallinn: Valgus.

Wells P (1988) Understanding Animation. London: Routledge.

Wright T (1875) A History of Caricature and Grotesque. Chatto and Windus . Available at: https://ia601408.us.archive.org/34/items/ historyofcaricat00wrig/historyofcaricat00wrig.pdf.

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On Topics and Style in Soviet Animated Films

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Soviet animated film took its shape alongside and was directly influenced by the specific political developments of the region. While the focus of this article remains on animated film in Russia after the October Revolution of 1917 and in Soviet Union as it gradually broadened its geographical span, the same trajectories and tendencies can also be observed in other Eastern European (i.e. Eastern Bloc) countries. For, as Dina Iordanova has suggested, Between 1945 and 1989 ... the development of these countries was ... dictated by Soviet policies in the spheres of economics and culture. [---] Whatever happened in the Soviet Union, directly influenced the cultural climate in the countries of the Eastern Bloc, and often events in the USSR were replicated in the Eastern Bloc (such as the ‘Thaw’ that followed the demystification of the cult of Stalin’s personality in the late 1950s or the stagnation of the Brezhnev period).

(Iordanova 2003: 20–21) At the same time it is also true that the cultural elite of the satellite states often enjoyed a higher degree of artistic freedom, compared to their peers in Soviet Union. This becomes especially evident in the choice of subject matter and topics, as well as in the extent to which the animation artists abided (or rejected) the tenets of socialist realism. In addition, the entire Soviet Union cannot be measured with the same yardstick, as animated films were produced in a number of different studios and in various socialist republics where local circumstances affected both particular industrial practices and regulated the proverbial length of the leash. The smaller republics in particular, such as the Baltic countries, stood out for works that were sometimes much more ideologically complicated than the films produced in Moscow, reflecting either intentional political digressions or recklessness of their authors.

Speaking about censorship in the Soviet Union, it is important to avoid the simplified confrontation of the artist and the state – the filmmaking community included both loyal servants of the Party and rebels against the regime.

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So far, studies of Eastern European, and especially Soviet, animated film have focused mainly on history and animation techniques (Bendazzi 2015; Pontieri 2012; MacFadyen 2005; Асенин 1986); on renowned authors (Hames 2008; Капков 2007; Kitson 2005); and to much lesser extent on critiques of ideology and totalitarianism (Moritz 1997) or feminist discourses (Fadina 2016; Пироженко 2004a, 2004b; Kononenko 2011). In addition, several prominent Soviet animation artists have published autobiographical texts explaining their methods and practices (Ходатаев 1936; Брумберг 1979; Иванов-Вано 1950, 1962; Норштейн 1988; Хржановский 1983).

This article attempts to map the development of Soviet animated film, highlighting some of its characteristic features, especially in terms of topics and visual style. As the Soviet art scene was strongly shaped by political climate, the political shifts provide a basis for this analysis. The discussion is structured into sections based on historical periodization and the developments in the field of animation are considered in parallel to trasformations in the socio-political sphere. Obviously the scope of the article is rather ambitious, not least in its temporal and geographical dimension, which is the reason the following pages are only able to scratch the surface of this broad and multifaceted set of issues, and fully acknowledging the pressing need for further, in-depth studies.

Nevertheless, I hope that the survey below will not only contribute to a fuller understanding of how the topics and style of Soviet animated film was constructed and developed, but will also improve our understanding of the past and people of this era.

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6.1.

Lucanus Cervus, arguably the earliest surviving Russian animated short, was made by Ladislas Starevich in 1910. Born in Moscow to a family of Polish origin, Starevich produced several animated films in tsarist Russia until his emigration to France after the 1917 October Revolution where he continued making of animated films.

After the October Revolution, Russian cultural and art scene was immensely innovative and extremely susceptible to new ideas. Russian animated film of the time was first and foremost inspired by modernist thought, propaganda posters and caricatures. The filmmakers whose practice, as well as both political and artistic visions, shaped the early years of Soviet film were Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Alexander Dovzhenko and Dziga Vertov. The latter was also the author of the earliest surviving Soviet animated film, Soviet Toys (Советские игрушки, 1924). Laura Pontieri has aptly pointed that ‘most of the early Soviet animated films came out of political manifestos and satirical vignettes; they were primarily caricatures and propaganda works addressed to an adult audience’ (Pontieri 2012: 6). Ivan Ivanov-Vano, one of the great figures of early Soviet animation, also confirms that satire, political posters and pamphlets were of utmost importance for the budding Soviet animation (Vano 1950: 18).

The post-revolutionary period was also characterised by the implementation of state control and domination over the film production.

The state censorship has a long history in the Soviet Union and can be traced back to the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire, but in 1922 the Soviet authorities set up Glavlit (Главное управление по охране государственных тайн в печати), a new body for censorship and protection of state secrets, which operated, together with its subinstitutions, until the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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6.2.

After Lenin’s death in 1924, Joseph Stalin rose to the leadership of the Soviet Union and his dictatorship lasted until his death in 1953.

In 1927, Senka the African (Сенька-африканец), the first Soviet animated film for children, was made in collaboration of Yuri Merkulov, Danil Cherkes and Ivan Ivanov-Vano. The film is based on a story by Korney Chukovsky, one of the most popular Soviet children’s poets.

A vivid depiction of a child’s fantasy world, Senka the African became an immediate success and was instantly followed by two other screen adaptations of Chukovsky’s poems – Big Cockroach (Тараканище) and Moidodir (Мойдодыр, both 1927).

1929 saw the release of Mikhail Tsekhanovsky’s Mail (Почта), an animated adaptation of Samuil Marshak’s Soviet poem, which tells the story of a letter addressed to the writer Boris Zhitkov. The letter follows the writer around the world and finally reaches him when he returns to Leningrad. Mail sports a highly modern visual and musical form shaped by the post-revolutionary avant-garde mode of expression. Originally made as a silent short, Mail became one of the first Soviet sound animations when a soundtrack was added to it in 1930.

In the end of the 1920s the Soviet animation filmmakers began to invent characters that would continue to appear in a number films, thus producing the first animated ‘series’, featuring among many others such legendary characters as Tip-Top, Bratishkin and Buzilka.

The Soviet animated films of the 1920s were mostly entertaining but always with a ‘political or social message’ (Pontieri 2012: 18). In Soviet Russia, animated film functioned primarily as an ideological tool for shaping the mentality and behaviour of the masses. For instance, Samoyed Boy (Самоедский мальчик, 1928) illustrates well how this ideological education through animation worked. In the film, a Samoyed boy comes to Leningrad for school and as a result of his studies realises how backward the mindset and worldview of his native Nenets people is. The film openly ridicules the beliefs of this group of indigenous people. Birgit Beumers aptly observes that ‘[t]he boy is a model Soviet citizen: He gives

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up his family to become part of a larger Soviet family’ (Beumers 2007: 156). Samoyed Boy provides the first animated appearance of the ‘Soviet person’, a comrade who has rejected his background and past. The film is perhaps especially significant because in the late 1920s the creation of a ‘New Soviet Citizen’ typically involved images of children. In fact, ‘[t]he Soviet state placed children’s affairs at the heart of its political legitimacy, emphasizing that children were treated with greater care than they were anywhere else in the world’ (Kelly 2007: 1).

The first Soviet puppet film, Aleksandr Ptushko’s The New Gulliver (Новый Гулливер), was released in 1935. It is a combination of a fulllength feature film and puppet animation. The New Gulliver is a re-telling of Jonathan Swift’s famous Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The Soviet version features Petya, a young pioneer boy, a Soviet “Gulliver” who has landed in Lilliput Island that suffers under capitalist inequality and exploitation.

Importantly, the fairy tale films that later became extremely popular, even the ‘trademark’ of Soviet animation industry, did not emerge until the mid-1930s when Fairytale about Tsar Durandai (Сказка о царе Дурандае, 1934), the first Soviet animated film based on a classical fairytale, was made by Valentina Brumberg, Zinaida Brumberg and Ivan Ivanov-Vano. In the early Soviet period, fairy tales and folklore were generally considered as atavistic remnants of feudalism. For instance, Maxim Gorki vehemently called for the purification of literary language and ‘expunging [of] all regionalism, earthiness, and folkisms from Soviet prose’ (Fadina 2016: 65).

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6.3.

Both the content and the form of animation were strongly affected by the change of course that took place in Soviet culture after Andrei Zhdanov, the Secretary of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, prescribed socialist realism as the official canon of the Soviet art at the 1934 Soviet Writers’ Congress. The decision left no room for modernist

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experiments with form and designated children as the primary target audience of animation. The latter is also evident in the name given to the state animated film studio established in June 1936 – Soyuzdetfilm (‘det’ refers to дети – ‘children’). Even if the particle ‘det’ was dropped when the studio became Soyuzmultfilm in August 1937, the target audience remained the same and until the early 1960s Soviet animation focused exclusively on children (Bendazzi 2015: 175).

The centralisation of Soviet animation industry under Soyuzmultfilm put an abrupt end to the previous era of experimentation and stylistic investigation. An important figure to consider in this turn of events is Walt Disney who also aimed most of his films at children. Starting from the mid-1930s, several Soviet animation filmmakers and high officials made no secret of their admiration of Disney who by then had established himself as one of the major animation producers of the world, and strove to emulate both the style and the quality of his works on their home turf.1 In 1933, the delegates of the first All-Union conference of Soviet comedy demanded: ‘Give us a Soviet Mickey the Mouse!’ (Pontieri 2012: 38) The First International Film Festival in Moscow screened some Disney’s animated films in 1935, receiving warm audience approval. From then on, American productions had a great impact on the themes and style of Soviet animated films (Pontieri 2012: 38).

According to Giannalberto Bendazzi, Stalin also took great pleasure with Disney’s films sent to the Moscow International Film Festival, enjoying them in the privacy of his own cinema in Kremlin. After watching them, Stalin had even announced that this is what Soviet animation should look like (Bendazzi 2015: 175). The film critic Anatoly Volkov suggests that while Stalin’s approval was not the only force behind the wide appreciation and emulation of Disney’s style in Soviet animation, the cinema directors were well aware of the Leader’s sympathy, especially for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) and Bambi (1942) (cited in Pontieri 2012: 47).

1

It is important to note that Disney has of course been admired and copied all over the world, not only in the Soviet Union, because the Disney Studio has been so productive and successful for so many decades.

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Sergei Eisenstein, one of the most prominent Soviet filmmakers of the time, is also known to be an enthusiastic supporter of Disney. Having met Disney in person in Hollywood in 1930, Eisenstein became one of his most significant advocates in Soviet Union. While Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart observe in their How to Read Donald Duck (Dorfman and Mattelart 1992) that after World War II Disney became the tool and emblem of American imperialism, Eisenstein considered his early work to be profoundly communist. In Eisenstein’s words, ‘Disney’s films are a revolt against partitioning and legislating, against spiritual stagnation and greyness. But the revolt is lyrical. The revolt is a daydream’ (quoted in Roberts 2007: 48).

Although certain strive for realism in narrative structure that characterises Disney’s productions strikes some of the central cores of the socialist realist paradigm the attempts of the Soviet animation industry to emulate Disney’s style and quality were largely unsuccessful for several reasons.

For example cel animation (celluloid sheets system) which became the industry norm in 1930s (Bendazzi 2015: 40; Furniss 2007: 19-20) was invented, developed and patented in America and Soviet analog was technically much poorer. Ivanov-Vano describes the difference: ‘The American cel sheets used at the end of the 1930s were of a good transparent quality that could allow juxtaposition of a few layers, while the Soviet cels had a slight grey or yellow tinge that would cause a considerable darkening of the drawing when more than three layers were used at the same time’ (Pontieri 2012: 39-40).

A limited number of layers in cel animation set the boundaries of the complexity of Soviet animation. Also the practice and development of animation industry came to a standstill during World War II in Soviet Union, while in America animation production thrived on.

However, some distinctly Disney-esque features, such as round shapes and plastic movement, became part of the toolbox of Soviet animators.

In addition to form, Soviet animation also imitated Disney’s fairy tale narratives and cheerful stories, and following Disney’s example began to draw on Russian national folklore and classical literature (Alexander Pushkin, Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Krylov): ‘Animators turned to national cultures, adapting classical texts, producing fairy tales, and utilizing the figurative and plastic suggestions of popular traditions’ (Bendazzi 2015: 175).

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With the emergence of the Disney style, fairy tales regained popularity (as well as a positive image) and became an increasingly important narrative source for Soviet animation. But in general, the aims of the pre-World War II Soviet animation can be summarised in Laura Pontieri’s words – ‘mythification of the past, exaltation of the present, and apotheosis of the brilliant future’ (Pontieri 2012: 42).

In contrast to the 1920s and the better part of the 1930s, when the authorities strove to forgot the past almost completely (with an odd exception, few and far between, such as the above-mentioned Fairytale about Tsar Durandai), the 1940s saw a significant return of a certain part of it, namely in the form of Russian traditional tales and national fairy tales, which resulted in animated films like Little Tower (Теремок, directed by Pyotr Nosov and Olga Khodatayeva, 1945), Fairy Tale about a Soldier (Сказка о солдате, directed by Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg, 1948) and Geese-Swans (Гуси-лебеди, directed by Ivan Ivanov-Vano and Aleksandra Snezhko-Blotskaya, 1949) (Fadina 2016: 78).

In addition to animated versions of fairy tales, byliny songs and children’s stories, Soviet animation industry also produced didactic films with ‘stock’ characters from fairy tales, such as the cunning fox, the big bad wolf, the strong yet simple bear etc. Examples of this kind of films include The Fox and the Wolf (Лиса и волк, directed by Sarra Mokil, 1937), Cockerel – Golden Comb (Петушок – Золотой гребешок, directed by Pyotr Nosov and Dmitri Anpilov, 1955) and Kolobok (Колобок, directed by Roman Davydov, 1956).

During World War II Soviet film industry saw a severe decline as ‘[c] inema in general was not on the priority list for the state, and evacuated studios were not producing many films’ (Fadina 2016: 74).

After the end of the war, the animation industry recovered and continued to find inspiration in the world of fairy tales and folklore, spicing the traditional narratives with ideological or didactic messages. For instance, Ivanov-Vano’s Stranger’s Voice (Чужой голос, 1949) was produced as a part of the campaign against jazz music (and Western lifestyle in general).

In the film, a Soviet bird returns home from its trip abroad and performs a concert. When it starts to sing a jazzy tune that it learned overseas, the Soviet birds give it a whistle and expel the jazz singer from the forest.

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Folklore and fairy tales provided narrative material not only in Soviet Union but across the entire Eastern Bloc, including in post-war Czechoslovakia where Jiří Trnka produced a series of animated films based on folkloric sources, such as The Czech Years (Špalíček, 1947), The Emperor’s Nightingale (Císařův slavík, 1949) and Prince Bayaya (Bajaja, 1950). Adaptation of fairy tales and folklore provided filmmakers a safety net, while anything too personal could have easily caused problems in the tense political atmosphere of the post-war era. Indeed, as Antonín J. Liehm has noted, ‘[i]t was much harder for the watchdogs to penetrate the land of fairy tales, folk stories and poetic visions’ (quoted in Hames 2008: 24).

Trnka’s contribution to the development of Eastern European animated film cannot be overestimated, as his mastery in puppet animation raised the profile of this technique considerably, making it visible as a solid alternative to cel animation and the Disney style.

In addition to his native Czechoslovakia Trnka also managed to establish a school of puppet animation in the German Democratic Republic (Bendazzi 2015: 236). Established in 1955, DEFA Studio für Trickfilme was the largest animation studio in the GDR, producing about 2,000 works between 1955 and 1989. Despite this astonishing volume the DEFA productions were typically conservative and primarily aimed at children.

According to Ulrich Wegenast, the diligent observation of the conventions of socialist realism meant that in DEFA’s films ‘[p]uppets and cartoon characters could not be too aloof. They had to be as natural as possible so they were not associated with the negative rating “Formenhascherei” (meaning, straining after formal effects)’ (quoted in Bendazzi 2015: 236).

As already suggested, the post-war Soviet animation followed in the steps of the Disney universe. For instance, Leonid Amalrik and Vladimir Polkovnikov’s The Little Grey Neck (Серая Шейка, 1948), with its plastic movements and round shapes, emulates the Disney canon with great precision. By comparison, Ivanov-Vano’s The Humpbacked Horse (Конёк-Горбунок, 1947, remake 1975), while clearly influenced by Disney, attempts to combine the features of this style with folkloric forms and pieces of vernacular art (woodcuts, pottery, handicraft). In terms of content, the film draws again on folklore tradition – it is based on Pyotr Yershov’s poem of the same title that, in turn, makes use of various classical fairy tales. It is interesting to note that just as numerous Soviet animated films had to struggle with censorship Yershov’s 1834 poem had

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also been censored upon its publishing, and even banned for over two decades due to the mortal sin of making the Tsar appear foolish. IvanovVano continued to mix folkloric and historical elements in his subsequent films, such as The Lefthander (Левша, 1964), How One Man Fed Two Generals (Как один мужик двух генералов прокормил, 1965) and Go There, Don’t Know Where (Поди туда, не знаю куда, 1966).

Mikhail Tsekhanovsky and Vera Tsekhanovskaya’s The Wild Swans (Дикие лебеди, 1962) is interesting for its synthesis of the classical, ‘spatial’ Disney style animation and flat backgrounds that imitate historic book illustrations. While certain sense of disharmony arises from this mixing of styles, the result comes across as modern and innovative for its time. The Wild Swans, with its combination of three-dimensional world of film and two-dimensional prints, demonstrates fascinating stylistic investigations.

Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg’s Big Troubles (Большие неприятности, 1961), although in several respects a conventional post-war Soviet animation, rejects the Disney style decisively. While the design of the film attempts to imitate children’s drawings and evoke a ‘child-like’ style, it was not aimed at children – it was the first postwar Soviet animated film to be targeted primarily to adult audiences.

Big Troubles thus marks the waning of Disney’s influence on Soviet animation, which on the stylistic-aesthetic level had been unwavering until the Thaw of the 1960s (Fadina 2016: 77).

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6.4.

After Stalin’s death in 1953 Nikita Khrushchev took office as the head of the Soviet Union. His tenure brought about the so-called ‘Khruschev’s Thaw’ that ‘from a cultural point ... was characterized by a certain degree of liberation in all spheres of Soviet life and culture’ (Fadina 2016: 83).

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For the animated film industry, one of the most significant consequences of this shift in power was the emerging ‘policy of decentralization and balanced ethnic representation’, which led to the establishment of new animation studios in Estonia (Tallinn), Ukraine (Kiev), Armenia (Yerevan) and Georgia (Tbilisi) (Bendazzi 2015: 140). Despite setting up new production centres, Soyuzmultfilm in Moscow retained its importance as the largest and most important animation studio in Soviet Union.

The rapid proliferation of television after World War II went hand in hand with an increasing demand for animation production, which in turn gave rise to a certain shift towards a simplified, ‘limited’ style of animation.

Limited animation or ‘modernist style’ (Amidi 2006: 18) is characterised by reduced movement of characters, as well as by an emphasis on uncomplicated forms and colour schemes; it prioritises design, colour, line and composition. United Productions of America (UPA, established in 1944) was the first studio to apply limited animation extensively, but the filmmakers of the Zagreb school, such as Dušan Vukotič, Vatroslav Mimica, Vlado Kristl and many others, are also known for preferring this style.

In contrast with the UPA and the Zagreb school that utilised limited animation in order to introduce a sense of modernity and the flair of the times to their works, Soviet Union was mainly drawn to the functionality of this technology. Round shapes and plastic movement of the previously dominating Disney approach were replaced by more simple and cartoonish designs that in a certain sense signalled a return to the roots of Soviet animation – to the post-revolutionary cartoons and propaganda posters. Limited animation was considerably easier to create than the Disney style and it significantly reduced the need for resources in the animation industry, leading to increased production volumes. In addition, the rejection of Disney’s naturalistic style has in part been ascribed to the escalation of the Cold War (Fadina 2016: 82).

Standing closer to caricature and poster art than to the Disney approach, limited animation often highlighted contemporary living environment and social relations. In addition to fairy tale universes and nature, Soviet animation began to represent contemporary cityscapes and typical characters of the period, as in Fyodor Khitruk’s The Story of a Crime (История одного преступления, 1962) that is clearly set in modern-day Moscow. Limited animation also attracted adult audiences who had been

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virtually excluded as a target group for quite a while. As the rise of limited animation in Eastern Europe coincided with the Thaw, several films of the period (and beyond) stand out for their cautious critiques of the Soviet society and especially its bureaucratic apparatus. For instance, Valentina and Zinaida Brumberg’s Big Troubles (Большие неприятности, 1961) tackles social issues such as alcoholism, scorn of work and the Soviet youth counterculture movement known as stilyagi (стиляги); Khrituk’s The Man in the Frame (Человек в рамке, 1966) subtly denounces bureaucracy and implicitly also the Soviet nomenklatura; Khrzhanovsky’s Glass Harmonica (Стеклянная гармоника, 1968) introduces an entirely new theme of philosophical existentialism to the Soviet animated film, questioning Soviet social ethics by means of both content and form.

The object of Khrzhanovsky’s critique is no longer the narrow-minded bureaucrat but the society that represses the artist and her freedom of thought – here, the parallel with Soviet society is especially explicit.

The content and form of Glass Harmonica are strikingly unique and this created a whole set of problems, including to its author – the film fell victim of censorship and was ‘shelved’, while the author was unexpectedly enlisted and spent the following two years serving in the Soviet army (Pikkov 2015).

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6.5.

While all three Baltic countries had taken their first steps in animation during the interwar era of independent statehood, the post-war (re-) emergence of animation industry had almost no ties with earlier decades since World War II had severed all continuities. The first Soviet Estonian animated film was Elbert Tuganov’s Little Peter’s Dream (Peetrikese unenägu, 1958), based on Palle alene i Verden, a 1942 story by Danish writer Jens Sigsgaard. In 1957, Tuganov became the founder of the

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puppet animation department at Tallinn Film Studio (later Tallinnfilm).

Subsequently, the department became the Nukufilm studio. In 1971, Rein Raamat, who had assisted Tuganov in the production of Little Peter’s Dream, set up Tallinnfilm’s hand-drawn animation department that over the course of time became the Eesti Joonisfilm studio. Nukufilm and Eesti Joonisfilm were Soviet Estonia’s leading animation studios, both of which continue to define the field of Estonian animation to this date.

Joonisfilm and Nukufilm were under the control of Goskino (Государственный комитет по кинематографии СССР; Госкино) who approved their production plans, as well as signed off the completed films. Silvia Kiik, a long-time employee of Tallinnfilm, has described the peculiarities of the studios’ struggles with Moscow on several occasions.

According to her, ‘[c]ensorship (Goskino) officials could sometimes be incredibly paranoid: back in 1975, the sight of a mechanic using a wrench that had been randomly coloured red in Avo Paistik’s film Trifle (Pisiasi) caused a scandal at the film’s approval screening’ (Kiik 2006 I: 104–105).

And, ‘[i]n 1978, a red vacuum cleaner in Paistik’s film Vacuum Cleaner (Tolmuimeja) resulted in shelving the film for nine years’ (Kiik 2006 II: 92). Mari Laaniste adds that in the case of Priit Pärn’s Time Out (Aeg maha, 1984), Goskino officials demanded that ‘two of the characters who were originally stereotypically dressed Russian construction workers had to be redrawn as circus clowns’ (Laaniste 2008: 54). Ironically, in doing so, the censor herself gave a judgment on the Soviet work ethic.

Estonian animated films, especially those made under Raamat in Joonisfilm, stood out for being, to a large extent, ‘artistic’ products targeted at adult audiences (see, e.g., Trossek 2008: 34).

The first Soviet Latvian animated films, puppet animations Ki-ke-ri-gū!

(1965) and Pygmalions (1967), were made by Arnolds Burovs.

In Bendazzi’s words, Pygmalions explored themes such as creation, the artist’s relations to his work and difference between abstract beauty and life. Pygmalions provoked an ambiguous reaction – it was criticized in Latvia for not following the conventions of Socialist Realism, but Moscow officials showed it to non-Soviet guests to prove the USSR had modernism too.

(Bendazzi 2015: 315)

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Puppet animation, as well as cut-out animation, became Latvia’s ‘trademark’ – Burov, who also worked in a puppet theatre, alone used this technique in fourty films. The films typically drew on folkloric sources.

Soviet Lithuania produced its first animated film in 1966 – The Wolf and the Tailor (Vilkas ir siuvėjas) by Zenonas Tarakevičius. Tarakevičius was later employed by Soyuzmultfilm, which demonstrates that in addition to ideas also people moved between different studios. However, Lithuanian animated film never quite took off and in comparison to live-action narrative and documentary films the production of animated films remained marginal. Despite this, the Lithuanian studio managed to complete some politically intriguing works, for example, Initiative (Iniciatyva), a 1970 film by Antanas Janauskas, that has been seen as a comment on the 1968 Soviet invasion to Prague (Bendazzi 2015: 317) In contrast to Estonia and Latvia where puppet animation dominated the animated film production, Lithuania nearly lacks its own tradition of puppet animation. Lithuanian animation tended to come in drawn form and the majority of Lithuanian animators had their backround in caricature, architecture or design.

Within the context of Soviet Union, the Baltic republics enjoyed a special status – they were collectively known as the ‘Soviet West’ – and, despite censorship, this offered to the Baltic animation artists a slightly greater degree of creative autonomy. As Andreas Trossek has observed, Goskino also acknowledged this privileged state of affairs, the so-called ‘Special Baltic Order2’ (Trossek 2008: 35).

It appears that the Soviet cinema nomenklatura accepted the concept of the Baltic republics as the ‘Soviet West’. Indeed, many animated films produced there, especially by Eesti Joonisfilm, flaunt relatively bold experiments in line with contemporary Western art movements and music.

Furthermore, the thematic horizon was also broader compared to the animation production of the rest of the Soviet Union. In Richard Mole’s words, ‘[w]riters, artists, film-makers and scholars in all three republics

2

More correctly, the Baltic Landesstaat. This is a reference to the historical arrangements in the territories of today’s Estonia and Latvia where Baltic German nobility retained its political power and protestantism (German cultural domination) was accepted.

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were given greater freedom to assert national values and express national sentiment, although they were still restricted by the outer limits of Soviet nationality policy’ (Mole 2012: 63–64).

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6.6.

When Khrushchev was removed from office, Leonid Brezhnev, a much more conservative-minded leader, took over. During his long term in office, which has become known as the Stagnation, the screw of censorship was tightened again but, apart from the fact that nobody was shot any more for not painting or writing as the supreme leader wanted, this censorship was concerned with the text more than with the aesthetics. This fact allowed artists, animation artists included, considerably more freedom than they had had for the last two decades. (Bendazzi 2015: 77) After Brezhnev’s ascent to power in 1964, the Soviet animation industry continued to produce films for children, as well as to keep a safe distance from politically uncomfortable and/or contemporary subject matters.

The field was dominated by poetical-lyrical fairy tales. A number of long-running animated series emerged, skyrocketing in popularity on the television screens across the entire Eastern Bloc. Characters like Cheburashka, Gena the Crocodile, Winnie the Pooh, Karlsson-on-the Roof, and, of course, the Rabbit and the Wolf, became the greatest animated stars of the small screen. Just You Wait! (Ну, погоди!, 1969–1993), an animated series by Vyacheslav Kotyonochkin, was particularly well-received, not least due to featuring well-known pop songs that secured the continued popularity of the series and made it Soyuzmultfilm’s longest-running animation.

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In Czechoslovakia, the Mole (Krtek), Pat & Mat, Maxipes Fík earned comparable fame in local animated series, while in GDR, the legendary Little Sandman (Unser Sandmännchen) begun his screen adventures.

As most of these characters were introduced to their audiences, and earned their enduring affection, on the small screen, it is also important to highlight the increasing role of television for the era’s audiovisual culture in general and for the animation in particular. Starting from the late 1970s, the development of television brought about a significant change in the patterns of media (including animation) consumption – in addition to cinemas, the audiences were now able to watch animated films in the privacy of their home. As in the West, television became the prevailing, and incredibly influential, media outlet – by the mid-1980s more than 90 per cent of the households in the Eastern Bloc owned a television set (Stites 1992: 189). Animated films became a staple of everyday television programme, which increased their popularity as well as production volumes. In Russia, for instance, ‘a prime showcase for animations was a children’s program called Spokoinoi nochi, malyshi (Good Night, Little Ones), which immediately preceded the evening news’ (Kononenko 2011: 175) – a fact testifying of the high prestige and importance of the animated medium in the televisual context. As to the production volumes, children had the privilege to enjoy as many as 30–40 hours of new animation annually (Bendazzi 2016: 194).

An interesting example between different ideological approach between Disney (western) and Soviet animation is adaption of Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894). While Disney’s produced and Wolfgang Reitherman directed 1967 feature-length The Jungle Book, is a rather jolly enterprise that featured merry inhabitants of the jungle singing and dancing to jazzy tunes, than Soyuzmultfilm’s 1973 version directed by Roman Davydov Adventures of Mowgli (Маугли), mainly concentrated on the class struggle.

In addition to this quantitative upsurge, Eastern European animation also underwent artistic growth from the 1960s on (Bendazzi 2015: 236). Apart from Disney, Soviet animation filmmakers received significant impulses from various contemporary Western art movements, such as pop art, in particular via George Dunning’s 1968 animated film Yellow Submarine, in the wake of which, according to Trossek, a number of Soviet poppsychedelic animations emerged – Puzzle Box (Шкатулка с секретом,

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1976) by Valeri Ugarov, Contact (Контакт, 1978) by Vladimir Tarasov and, definitely most famously, The Mystery of the Third Planet (Тайна третьей планеты, 1981) by Roman Kachanov (Trossek 2011: 118).

The poetical lyricism of Eastern European animated films of the stagnation period took on strangely pessimistic undertones, suggested by a certain sense of desolation and lack of happy endings. In fact, a number of commentators (Wells 1998; Bendazzi 2015; Ajanovič-Ajan 2004) have argued that pessimism is one of the defining features of Eastern European animation: In the area we call middle Europe, the term itself has much more cultural than geographical meaning, between 1950 and 1980, worked a significant number of animated film studios. Many successful films, regardless of their origins, be it Prague, Budapest or Zagreb, relied precisely on the tradition of humor whose main character was a plain man whose main feature was pessimism (Ajanovič-Ajan 2004).

This approach is perhaps especially evident in the caricaturesque animated films of the Zagreb school that often feature pessimistic protagonist(s), various deadlocks and oppressive environments (labyrinths, dead ends). Pessimism also dominated in the authorial stance, as testified by downcast choice of topics (and music) and lack of happy endings. Bendazzi has characterised the entire Polish animated cinema of the 1960s as ‘poetry of pessimism’ (Bendazzi 2015: 242), while Priit Pärn confessed in an interview, ‘I’m a practicing pessimist’ (Kirt 1984).

This overtly pessimistic attitude can be read as a certain reaction to the official optimism of the Soviet society that lived in the constant hope of shortly arriving bright communist future: ‘This pessimism reflects a unique historical-political situation. In the mid-1960s, the artist and intellectuals reacted to the bureaucratic state, and emphasized a hopeless individual and social reality’ (Bendazzi 2015: 242).

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6.7.

The planned economy of the communist era, alongside the state-funded film industry, liberated filmmakers from the problems of raising funds to their productions, allowing them to concentrate on the actual creative act, no matter how complicated or expensive its formal expression. As already indicated, censorship of the stagnation period tended to target the text (meaning the screenplay of an animated film) and the audiovisual form was largely under the control of the studio and the author. According to Bendazzi, ‘[w]hen political customs relaxed and stylistic research was allowed, the state-funding system revealed unexpected good qualities. In different ways from nation to nation, the State became a patron of auteur animation’ (Bendazzi 2015: 236).

Hence, starting from Brezhnev’s era, Eastern European animated film paradoxically became a safe haven for auteur techniques, as the state funding provided the means for trying out and experimenting with a wide range of different ideas and techniques. Even though censorship and ideological control over film industry remained certainly significant, the financial freedom facilitated invention and use of innovative auteur techniques. The multitude of the latter undoubtedly became another prominent feature of Eastern European animation. As the system established by the state in a way promoted formal diversity, no single animation technique or style became absolutely dominant.

Soviet system of film education also supported auteur animation and technical heterogeneity, since the central All-Union State Institute of Cinematography (Всесоюзный государственный институт кинематографии, VGIK) was a truly vibrant hotbed of talents from all over the Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc. VGIK’s animation curriculum was designed to train unique directors well-versed in both narrative and (audio)visual form: ‘The teaching practice soon drifted toward auteur cinema, because the graduates were supposed to acquire also the tools of the animator’s and designer’s profession’ (Bendazzi 2015: 306).

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Eastern European animation artists worked in traditional (hand-drawn, puppet and cut-out animation) as well as in various lesser-known techniques (sand and clay animation, direct or drawn on film animation etc.). It was also not uncommon to mix and combine several different techniques.

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6.8.

Film is ‘a social document’ (Haynes 2003: 181). In a sense, Eastern European animated film can be regarded as a self-portrait of society, a reflection of collective consciousness. The more intense pressure ideology puts on culture, the more relevant animated film becomes as a document of an age. Soviet censorship was set up in order to guarantee the ‘correct’ content of cultural production and its brutal nature frequently manifests most vividly in the form of authorial comments and references. Animated films can be considered a reflection of an era, not unlike fairy tales that used to convey a sense of what was important and regarded as necessary to pass to future generations in ancient times. Animated films yield to both historico-political and socio-cultural analysis. Indeed, over the recent decades, animated films have increasingly taken on a social role earlier reserved for fairy tales – as agents of cultural memory, national consciousness and identity. Fadina suggests that animated adaptation in particular function ‘as a recycling of (a) national memory and (b) national identity and (c) gender identity’ (Fadina 2016: 125).

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Animated films give us a chance to investigate and describe the society in a wider sense. In his Semiotics of Cinema, Yuri Lotman suggests that [a] film is part of the ideological struggles, culture and art of its era ... related to numerous aspects of life lying outside the text of the film, thus giving rise to an entire series of meanings which are often more important to a historian or a contemporary than strictly aesthetic problems might be (Lotman 1976: 42).

When animated films are analysed as social documents, it becomes relevant to consider what is excluded, as much as what is included. From this point of view, it is significant to note that Soviet animation almost never touched religious topics unlike Soviet live-action narrative cinema, as exemplified by the works of Andrei Tarkovsky, most importantly his Andrei Rublev (Андрей Рублёв, 1966). Even if priests are depicted in some animated films, they function as antiquated symbols of the reactionary past, alongside czars and queens. It can be argued that religious topics and symbols – traditionally central and extremely visible in Slavic societies – were indeed a complete taboo in Soviet animated film. Due to this, Yuri Norstein and Ivan Ivanov-Vano’s The Battle at Kerzhenets (Сеча при Керженце, 1971), a film that in its design relies heavily on elements of Russian icon art, is all the more noteworthy.

In 1979, Yuri Norstein completes his Tale of Tales (Сказка сказок), a film that has been regarded as the best animated film of all time by film critics (Pikkov 2010: 191). Based on memories, it portrays some of the topics most significant for the 20th-century Eastern European collective subconsiocus – World War II, childhood and coming of age, home and homesickness, anonymous urbanisation etc. Tale of Tales offers a unique insight into the inner world of the author and the society surrounding him.

It is a highly symbolic and multi-layered piece, linking past with present and dreams with reality. In a sense, Tale of Tales could stand for the entire Eastern European animation tradition. Typically to many Eastern European animated films, it struggled with censorship and escaped the fate of being ‘shelved’ only due to a lucky coincidence (Bendazzi 2015: 283).

While the above-mentioned examples highlight the importance of memory and past traditions, a trend of opposite temporal direction – towards the present – can also be traced. Namely, starting from the late 1960s, the previous explorations of folkloric and vernacular topics

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were gradually replaced by investigations of the authorial self through reflections of contemporary society. Several Eastern European animated films of the period offer unique insights into the totalitarian society and its accepted models of behaviour. For instance, Jiří Trnka, who began his career with fairy tale films, became in the 1960s increasingly fascinated with the world surrounding him, then and there. One of his boldest films of the period is The Hand (Ruka, 1965), a stop motion puppet animation portraying the relationship between the artist and the patronising authority, the latter terrorising the former – a struggle too well known to many artists of the time. Indeed, The Hand turned out to be too anti-state – it remained Trnka’s final film and ‘threw him into official disfavor’ (Moritz 1997: 38–39). Paul Wells has characterised it as ‘a vision of inhibited process and misrepresentative outcomes; a triumph of resistance’ (Wells 1998: 88).

The sometimes rather dangerous interest of animation artists in portraying their immediate realities became increasingly more prominent between the late 1970s and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The characteristic examples of this tendency include, for example, Priit Pärn’s Exercises in Preparation for Independent Life (Harjutusi iseseisvaks eluks, 1980) and The Triangle (Kolmnurk, 1982). Among other things, Pärn’s films illustrate a significant general trait of Soviet animation that is particularly noticeable in films dealing with contemporary realities – namely, the diminishing reliance on verbal language. As David MacFadyen observes, Soviet cartoons frequently ‘have tiny screenplays, often no text whatsoever. They are visually, more than verbally, active’ (MacFadyen 2005: 16). The waning of the verbal is doubtlessly related to the specific conditions of the totalitarian society. Since a word usually has a significantly more concrete meaning than a visual image, the author, by excluding the former, could rely on the safety net of ambiguity and thus minimise the rist of being censored.

As the animated films became increasingly reflective of the surrounding realities and environment, they also became sources of citation, mostly in terms of music, jokes and one-liners. While still oriented towards young audiences, animations, even those featuring characters initially targeted at children, also began to gain wide popularity among adults. For instance, Gena the Crocodile and Cheburashka quickly rose to the status of popular cult figures far beyond the animated medium, and their fame still seems to be unfading. For instance, the figure of Gena the Crocodile has been reproduced on a postage stamp (Fadina 2016: 69) and Cheburashka’s

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picture graced the official uniforms of the Olympic Team of the Russian Federation in 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010. Cheburashka also became the official logo and mascot of Soyuzmultfilm.

Doubtlessly, Just You Wait! owes at least part of its enduring popularity to the fact that it offered comical entertainment as well as significant insights into the society and social relations. Anna Gareeva has aptly argued that ‘Nu, pogodi! reflects and comments on contemporary Soviet society. It allows one a unique insight into the way of life of the Soviet people, from their streets, dress, to popular culture. The most popular cartoon series, it left audiences with a feeling nationalism, community, the ‘Soviet spirit’ (Gareeva 2013: 1).

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6.9.

Perestroika and glasnost initiated by Mikhail Gorbachev from 1985 onwards led to thematic diversification in animated film and lifted the taboo from representing Soviet society and its flaws for what they were, at least to a certain extent. Self reflection and social critique became the dominant keywords and many productions of the period took social topics under scrutiny. In Trossek’s words, ‘the cultural sphere was suddenly given a green light for moderate social criticism, which, in the Soviet Union, had previously been confined to “dissident discourse”’ (Trossek 2011: 120).

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One of the most famous ‘animated reflections’ of the period was undoubtedly Priit Pärn’s The Luncheon on Grass (Eine murul, 1987), a film that explores the questions of artistic freedom, bureaucracy and struggles of everyday life in Soviet conditions. Another pertinent example is The Door (Дверь, 1986) by Nina Shorina that similarly ponders over mundane troubles of the little men and women. Robert Sahakyantsi’s Wind (Ветер, 1988) and Button (Кнопка, 1989) offer extremely bold critiques of the regime. The final film of this upsurge of reflexive animations was Riho Unt’s House of Culture (Kultuurimaja, 1988) about the desire towards Western ideals in the Soviet society and the utterly illusional nature of them. House of Culture also introduces a completely new period of animation production in Eastern Europe – one based on the rules of market economy. Moreover, it is of symbolic significance that in 1989 Unt’s film was awarded the grand prix at the First All-Union Animated Film Festival that took place in Kiev, Ukraine.

1989 was the year of cataclysmic changes all over Eastern Europe and the fall of the Berlin Wall on 9 November 1989 marked the beginning of the dissolution of the Soviet ‘empire’. This date also indicates the end of Soviet political and cultural domination over its Eastern European ‘satellites’. However, the economic crisis and instability of the 1990s had devastating effects on the animation industries of the former Eastern Bloc countries – several seasoned animation artists were forced to end their careers or to emigrate to the ‘West’; numerous studios were dismantled because the governments stopped supporting them and the rest of the industry became a site for Western out-sourcing instead of making their own films; the film market was hit by a great depression (Fadina 2016: 93). Only the advent of digital technologies in the second half of the 1990s and early 2000s paved the way for recovery and significant (global) growth of the animation industry.

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6.10.

The majority of Soviet animated films represent a world dominated by men, with female characters typically passive and far fewer in number.

Despite the official rhetoric of gender equality the female figure in Eastern European animation is almost always subservient to men and utterly stereotypical, that is, defined by male values, irrespective of the sex of the director and writer of a particular film (Fadina 2016: 261–264).

A good example is Dziga Vertov’s 1924 Soviet Toys, the earliest surviving Soviet animated film, where the only female character is a bimbo dancing to the tune of her man. Or take Dušan Vukotić’s 1962 Ersatz, one of the most famous films of the Zagreb school, where the role of the woman is limited to providing company to the man. Natalie Kononenko has rightly noted that Soviet animation ‘not only criticized capitalism, but also depicted women as sexless and self-sacrificing, and urged cooperation, neighborliness, and nonviolence’ (Kononenko 2011: 272). Furthermore, she adds, that ‘[a]lthough the Communist Party had originally promised to liberate women and to make them the strong and equal partners of men, by the time that most Soviet cartoons were created, independent women were no longer desired’ (ibid.). In the same vein, Nadezda Fadina argues that ‘in Russian academic thought feminism has been almost non-existent throughout the Soviet period’ (Fadina 2016: 136).

As observed by Giannalberto Bendazzi in his Animation: A World History (2015: 307), it was only in the wake of perestroika in the latter half of the 1980s, with Natalia Dabizha, Ekaterina Obraztsova and Natalia Orlova entering the stage of Soviet animation, when feminist approach started to gain some traction. Notably, Lydia Surikova’s How Ivan the Fine Young Man Was Rescuing the Tsar’s Daughter (Как Иван-молодец царску дочку спасал, 1989) introduces an atypical female character to the Soviet animation – one that indeed actively initates the events. In Fadina’s opinion, this was one of ‘the truly feminist animated films’ (Fadina 2016:

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On Topics and Style in Soviet Animated Films

165). However, a comparison of Surikova’s film with Pärn’s 1982 The Triangle suggests that unconventional female characters can also be found in pre-perestroika animations. Furthermore, The Triangle once again demonstrates that the Baltic states enjoyed more artistic freedom compeared to the rest of Soviet Union.

Similarly to female characters on the screen, the female animation artists were also a minority: ‘State socialism maintained elaborate policies designed to secure gender equality. This, however, did not significantly change the situation of women in film-making, who were traditionally marginalised and had fewer changes to become directors’ (Iordanova 2003: 119).

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6.11.

For decades, the development of Soviet animation was defined by the tendency to emulate Disney’s ‘round’ style, choice of topics and techniques, as well as by the habit to target the production to young audiences (Bendazzi 1994: 177). Yet equally strong was the desire to emphasise that Soviet culture stood in stark opposition to the Western standards and way of life. In addition to putting animation in the service of the construction and production of Soviet identity, Soviet authorities also used animated film as an ideological instrument (for example, the anti-jazz campaign in Ivanov-Vano’s Stranger’s Voice or the class struggle in Davydov’s Adventures of Mowgli). Cultural landscape, including animated film, was one of the battlegrounds of the Cold War. Although Khrushchev’s Thaw witnessed numerous releases of animated films for adult audiences, Soviet animation in general remained a children’s genre, a didactic form drawing heavily on folkloric sources.

Paradoxically, however, the early Soviet discourse had rejected fairy tales as a legitimate thematic pool, condemning them as vestiges of feudalism.

It was not until the mid-1930s that fairy tales were ideologically rehabilitated and became the major providers of content for the Soviet animated film industry.

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Initially centralised in Moscow, Soviet animation industry began to spread its branches to other republics upon the onset of the Thaw, which also coincided with the gradual increase in the variety of different auteur techniques. Despite ideological control, Eastern European animated film became an oasis for such innovative methods that blossomed due to strong state support to filmmaking. This created favourable conditions for the emergence of a formally diverse field of animation where no technique or style achieved an absolutely dominant position.

The domination of Soviet Union over the Eastern European countries after World War II had mixed effects. On the one hand, the state supported industry was able to produce high-level artistic animations without the pressing need to focus on their commercial success. On the other hand, the state also controlled and censored almost every step of filmmaking, severely curtailing the creative freedom of the animation artists.

Animation has a rich tradition of debating, commenting and reflecting on the political and socio-cultural situation of the society. Since animated film is also a vechicle for cultural memory, collective consciousness and identity, Soviet animations provide unique insights into the totalitarian society and its modes of behavior, some of which this article was hopefully able to highlight.

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Link to the film:

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https:// vimeo.com/ 62741577

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7.1.

As I started to work on the animation film Body Memory, I was immediately struck by the idea that I had to find the plot (and feeling of the film) inside myself, that I had to become an ancient shaman who relayed the emotions and fears of my ancestors. This idea led to the choice of title for the film – ‘Body Memory’ – which is also a key to understanding the film.

I wrote the following in my diary during pre-production and looking for shooting locations (14.02.2010): As I drive along the roads of Estonia, I see a lot of wild apple trees. But these trees really speak of the farms that were once here, the gardens in which they grew. The farms are now abandoned and the houses dilapidated, but the apple trees are still there. It’s strange to think that someone built themselves a house, planted apple trees around it and surely thought it would all last forever and be passed down to their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s children...

Often it’s the apple trees that last the longest. A house can perish in fifty years. It can disappear so fast that it’s hard to imagine there was once a building there. Only the apple trees betray signs of the life that was once there.

The deportations and social processes that followed, including collectivization and urbanization, left thousands of Estonian farms empty.

Most of them have completely perished. The apple trees could be the paths to each home, if only someone knew how to read them. Soon, these apple trees, these signs of life, will also perish and then it will be hard to find one’s roots.

The apple tree became a symbol I wanted to use in the film right from the beginning. An apple tree has cultural and religious significance. There is

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an episode in the film where a pencil is tied to an apple tree and it moves in the wind, back and forth, forming the letter S. S like the serpent... And this, again, hints at the idea of body memory: the bodies of apple trees carry their own memories! Isn’t an apple tree trying to draw the letter S trying to tell us an ancient story about people being driven out of the Garden of Eden? If apple trees can use their body memories to tell us stories of their predecessors, then certainly people can do the same.

In research, the concept of body memory refers to the body collecting and storing experiences (memories) just as the brain does. The concept is often used in the context of our subconscious or subconscious memory.

Body memory is also directly tied to our cultural memory.

A

Our culture is based on stories.

Stories are the foundation of everything. Our own lives are also stories: biographical stories. And a story must be told, reproduced, handed forward.... During my pre-production period, I made repeated trips to the Estonian Literary Museum and the Museum of Occupations to look at the materials on deportations, mainly people’s memories and photos. The visual design also used the drawings made by those who were deported to Siberia (A: unknown author; B: Hilda Orn; C: Helvi Koppel-Kohandi).

B

C

The animation film Body Memory deals with people’s subconscious memories.

We remember more than we can imagine and our bodies remember the pain and worry of our predecessors.

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Almost seventy years have passed since the 1949 deportations in Estonia but the after-effects are still very present in society. After World War II, the Soviet Union occupied the Republic of Estonia and 30,000 inhabitants were deported to Siberia, mostly the more educated and successful people. Neither children nor the elderly were spared: the youngest known deportee was three-day-old Anne Ojaäär of Hiiumaa Island and the oldest was 95-year-old Maria Räägel of Abja Parish.

In March 1949, 20,723 civilians were deported from Estonia and 20,600 of them made it to their intended destination. More than 92,000 people from the Baltic states were forced to leave their homes.

There are fewer and fewer people left who remember those events or who experienced them first-hand. And, yet, memories of the events live on in our subconscious...

The animation film Body Memory recreates this historic tragedy on an abstract level without making an overtly political judgement about the events.

The film is about the pain and mental ties that hold together people who are violently forced to leave their homes.

The film follows one group shut into a railway cattle car: their feelings and relationships to those who share their fate. The film follows two sub-plots: ‘People in the Train’ and the ‘Garden of Eden’. The people are shown through abstract, yarn puppets who are shackled to their past by the yarn coming from their bodies.

Archival photos

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Deportees were taken to Siberia in cattle cars with 24-25 people per twoaxle car. Their trip to Siberia lasted a total of 11 days and nights.

Design sketches

As the train moves, yarn unrolls from their bodies and runs out of the car through the cracks in the walls. As the yarn unrolls, it makes the people’s bodies spin. Spinning, they become smaller and smaller until they disappear altogether.

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In a crisis situation, people show their true natures and differences: some people try to be organised, some act individually, and some remain passive observers. There are struggles that cause the mass of people inside the train to become a large, spinning ball of yarn. The ball of yarn disappears as it goes out between the wall boards.

The second sub-plot is the ‘Garden of Eden’, where we see a pencil tied to an apple tree drawing the letter S. The apple tree has retained its memory of the serpent as the embodiment of evil, which caused people to be driven out of Paradise.

Maybe the apple tree is trying to warn us with its drawing of the serpent but we don’t understand.

The camera pans out and the viewer sees an apple orchard in March. A train pulling cattle cars passes through the orchard. As the train moves away, it turns into a serpent.

Body Memory is constructed as a linear story with two memories edited in parallel until they blend together. Just as each drop of water reflects a whole world, each human being reflects all of humanity.

First test

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Poster by Anne Pikkov

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Year Duration Sound Genre Target Group Director Screenwriter Director of Photography Animator Art Designer Lighting Producer Production studio

Animation technique

puppet film (classical stop-motion, puppet animation) 2011 10 min. 30 sec.

Dolby stereo Auteur film children and adults Ülo Pikkov Ülo Pikkov Raivo Möllits Märt Kivi Ülo Pikkov Raivo Möllits Arvo Nuut Nukufilm OÜ

Animation Film Body Memory – Technical Information and Crew

Body Memory

Technical execution The film uses several techniques of classic animation (e.g. puppet animation and 3D computer animation). The set is theatrical and simple: most of the film takes place in a closed cattle car.

The dolls are simply constructed, becoming symbols of people in the film, rather than detailed characters.

Deportees were taken to Siberia in cattle cars with 25 people in each car. Thus, we made 25 puppets for the film. The puppets are all women because men and women were separated during deportation and the car that we chose for the film was a female car.

The puppets used in animation often have exchangeable heads or faces for different expressions. I wanted the puppets in this film to be complete characters and for their emotions and expressions to be created with their whole bodies. I wanted to treat the puppets as having individual, distinct characteristics. The film was shot chronologically.

During preparations, I wrote the following in my diary (21.01.2010): Every puppet should tell its own story through its movements. But there are a lot of them and they are all very similar: thus, each personality can only be shown through movement, through animating the puppets. (...)

The puppets are characters who are together by chance, people who were forced from their homes, stuffed into cattle cars and taken away from everything that was near and dear to them.

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Dancer (KĂźlli Roosna) creates movement schemes

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7.2.

I am fascinated by this statement, which I assume you wrote: What can an old apple tree tell us? What mysteries are hidden in his roots, gnarled over time? Does he remember the serpent and the lost Paradise? Our body remembers more than we can expect and imagine.

It remembers the sorrow and pain of our predecessors. It keeps alive the stories of our parents and grandparents as well as their ancestors. But how far back is it possible to go in your bodily memory.

This explains what the apple tree is doing in the opening sequence of the film and why the train should morph into a serpentine beast at the end. Do you see the story you tell in Body Memory as in some way having Biblical roots? And were these framing pieces – involving the easel and tree at the start and mainly the easel and serpentine creature at the end – part of your concept for the film from the start?

The apple trees, or, more precisely, the apple orchard in the film comes from somewhere near my father’s birthplace. That’s in Rapla County in Estonia. Those old apple trees have captivated me since I was a child, with their twisted, scarred trunks. I wanted to make a film about those trees when I was in film school and found myself strolling around the orchard time and again, wondering what those trees would say if they could talk. That’s how I got the sudden inspiration to give an apple tree a pencil and let it tell its story.

The apple tree started to talk - it started drawing an S-shaped line that looked very much like a snake.

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I understood that I was being told The oldest story know to humanity – the story of the serpent that convinced man to eat the forbidden fruit from the apple tree, which, in turn, caused man to be thrown out of Paradise. This made me understand that we all carry a lot of stories with us. Our ancestors’ stories live on inside us, we just have to look deep enough.

Is your story based on a specific historical event involving “the sorrow and pain […] of our parents and grandparents, as well as their ancestors”?

Descriptions on websites refer for example to “the hidden horror of deportation” and “the Second World War.” Is there a specific deportation you had in mind?

The mass deportations in the Baltic countries took place in 1949. People were arrested in their homes, families were torn apart and deported to Siberia. My father was a schoolboy at the time. When he went to school the next day, half of the seats were empty. His best friend’s family was also taken to Siberia. The children were shocked by what had happened and ran to the apple orchard you see in the film. It’s located quite near the railroad so the children saw the trains transporting deportees. I remember my father’s words well. He said that when he stood in the apple orchard on that brisk March morning, he understood that the light between the ground and the sky would never be the same. This recollection, heard described in my childhood, has burned so deeply into my memory that I feel as though I was there, myself.

The name of the film, “Body Memory”, is a key to unveiling its story. Just like the apple trees remember the story of the serpent that caused humans to be thrown from Paradise, I also recreate the story of that deportation 64 years ago.

The prisoners in the freight car are portrayed, not as helping one another but at times as being terribly cruel to one another. Could you please comment on this aspect of the film?

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I’ve long been troubled by Joseph Brodsky’s question of why people didn’t rebel against the Soviet terror.

If people had publicly stood up against the terror, its scale would have become evident and it wouldn’t have been so fatal. But there were no rebellions.

In the film, I try to reconstruct complete terror and people grasping to cope with it. I show how fear can turn off the ability to reason and make one cruel towards those who share one’s fate.

I had always viewed the unraveling of the figures in the train as a metaphor for the death of the people who were being deported.

But I see on a blog that someone has written of your film: “Puppets made of string represent unraveling persistent memories and our attempt to forget them.” What do you yourself see the unraveling of the figures as representing?

For me, the unraveling string represents fate and the predetermined bonds tied to a person that cannot be broken. But the serpent at the end of the film represents evil.

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7.3.

Shot 1 (22 sc.)

The camera tilts and rises upward, showing first the legs of a tripod, then a box of oil paints and finally a blank canvas on what we now can see is a painter’s easel.

Shot 1 (cont.)

Shot 1 (cont.)

Shot 2 (5 sec) The title of the film is superimposed over the canvas.

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Shot 3 (8 sec.)

The camera tracks upward, following a thick branch of a tree.

Shot 4 (19 sec.)

Changing direction, the camera now tracks downward along another thick branch.

Shot 5 (14 sec.)

The camera now focuses on a thinner branch, to which a drawing pencil has been tied. Moved back and forth by the wind, the branch appears to be drawing lines on the canvas.

Shot 5 (cont.)

Shot 6 (3 sec.)

A transition to the approaching animation: lines now seem to be drawing themselves.

Shot 7 (36 sec.)

Approx. 15-20 women are standing in a freight car in the dark, and periodically shiver synchronously.

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Shot 7 (cont.)

Serpentine threads arise from two of them, exploring the space.

Shot 7 (cont.)

The figures are suddenly illuminated by a blinding light.

Shot 8 (3 sec.)

Zoom in on the slats through which the light is now pouring, ending with a screen that is entirely white.

Shot 8 (cont.)

Shots 9, 10, 11 (10 sec.)

Single lines seem to twist and wiggle over the white background.

Shot 12 (2 sec.)

Inside a freight car, single threads sway and finally become taut‌

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Shot 13 (9 sec.) ‌each attached to the head of one of the women in the freight car.

Shot 14 (4 sec.)

The women try to disentangle the twisted threads that are attached to them.

Shot 15 (11.5 sec.)

One woman frees herself from the thread and proudly struts forward but is roughly pushed back by the women around her, one of whom is pregnant.

Shot 16 (4 sec.)

The women laugh at having inflicted this punishment, except for the pregnant one contemplates the egg she bears at her stomach.

Shot 17 (6 sec.)

One of the laughing women is suddenly yanked by her thread to the back of the freight car, where she unravels as the thread is pulled through the slats.

Shot 18 (3 sec.)

One woman is violently yanked backward by her thread, her head blocking the lights as it fills the screen which goes black.

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Shot 19 (10 sec.)

Seen from above, the women are locked into a pattern which changes several times as their threads are pulled through the slats of the freight car.

Shot 20 (5 sec.)

Threads pulled downward through slats.

Shot 21 (8 sec.)

A woman, violently yanked by her thread, is pulled against the slatted wall freight car wall and tries unsuccessfully to free herself.

Shot 22 (7 sec.)

A woman is pulled up from the floor of the freight car, and suspended by threads in which she now appears to be seated.

Shot 23 (5 sec.)

She laughs as she rocks back and forth hammock style. But her threads are suddenly yanked and she loses her balance.

Shot 24 (3.5 sec.)

She is now dragged helplessly along the floor of the freight car and out of frame.

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Shot 24 (cont.)

Shot 25 (3 sec.)

Each time she tries to sit up she is pulled back down to the floor.

Shot 26 (4 sec.)

In the process, knocks over another woman.

Shot 27 (4 sec.)

Thread is being unwound from the head of a seated figure.

Shot 28 (2 sec.)

Now seen from above, the unwinding of the head continues.

Shot 29 (6 sec.)

We now see from the quickly rotating POV of the head made to spin by the unwinding thread.

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Shot 30 (4 sec.)

The woman grabs the thread in an effort to prevent further unwinding but to no avail. She is pulled out of frame.

Shot 31 (5 sec.)

Another spinning POV shot, with the figures and slats speeding by little more than a blur.

Shot 32 (2 sec.)

Again the woman holds the thread in an effort to stop the unravelling of her head.

Shot 33 (5 sec.)

Shot 34 (5 sec.)

A woman is dragged along the floor toward a slatted wall of the freight car.

Shot 35 (6 sec.)

She manages to tie a knot in the thread, thereby preventing it from pulling her into the slats.

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Shot 36 (2 sec.)

Close-up of the knot blocking the movement of the thread through the slat.

Shot 37 (3.5 sec.)

The woman’s smiling face, seen through the slat from the outside.

Shot 38 (1.5 sec.)

The slats give and her relief turns out to be short-lived.

Shot 39 (4 sec.)

Her head seen as in Shot 37, only this time spinning and decreasing in size as it unravels. She disappears from view and the camera focuses on the pregnant woman.

Shot 40 (50 sec.)

The pregnant woman manages to break the threatening thread by biting it.

Shot 40 (cont.)

While she caresses the egg, a serpentine thread arises from her head and begins to sway.

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Shot 40 (cont.)

The thread spins her around but she resists, removing some of the thread from around her head and winding it protectively around the egg.

Shot 40 (cont.)

The thread continues to spin her around and unwind her, leaving her helpless.

Shot 40 (cont.)

Her head is completely unwound and the now headless woman drops the egg which rolls away.

Shot 40 (cont.)

Spun around helplessly, she continues to unravel until there is nothing left of her. The other women are amused.

Shot 41 (2 sec.)

Someone kicks the egg which rolls toward our right.

Shot 42 (6 sec.)

Like a soccer ball, it is rolled across the floor and finally flies upward toward the wall.

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Shot 43 (4 sec.)

It spatters against the slatted wall, some of it disappearing through the cracks, the rest dropping to the floor.

Shot 44 (8.5 sec.)

General unravelling.

Shot 45 (12 sec.)

More unravelling and resistance.

Another headless woman strides across the floor of the freight car and stands at a slatted wall.

Shot 46 (5 sec.)

What is left of a headless woman is pulled through the slats.

Shot 47 (10 sec.)

A headless woman crawls along the threads.

Shot 48 (1 sec.)

Another head begins to unravel.

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Shot 49 (2 sec.)

Again the headless woman crawling along the threads.

Shot 50 (sec.)

Again the unravelling head.

Shot 51 (3 sec.)

Two women next to each other are alternately made to spin as they unravel, almost as though they were dancing together, until they are knocked down by a third woman.

Shot 52 (1 sec.)

More unravelling.

Shot 53 (2 sec.)

Knots that had been tied in threads are pulled apart.

Shot 54 (3 sec.)

Unravelling women are pulled together into a clump.

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Shot 55 (2.5 sec.)

The arm of a headless woman unravels.

Shot 56 (4 sec.)

The clump of partially unravelled women now crawls like a crab or spider along the floor of the freight car.

Shot 57 (3 sec.)

Zoom in on a screaming woman, the screen going black as we enter her mouth.

Shot 58 (10 sec.)

Zoom out from a bloody orifice.

Shot 58 (cont.)

General melee.

Shot 59 (14 sec.)

All but one woman have now become a round clump on the floor.

The remaining upright woman pushes the clump away with her foot when it rolls toward her.

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Shot 59 (cont.)

The clump rolls over her and flattens her (cartoon style) on the floor and the flattened woman is pulled through a slat and out of the freight car.

Shot 59 (cont.)

All that is left of the women is now a round clump on the floor of the freight car.

Shot 60 (1 sec.)

Two legs emerge from the bottom of the clump and assume a standing position.

Shot 61 (6.5 sec.)

Arms emerge on either side and for a while, the clump appears to be a single person.

Shot 62 (18 sec.)

The clump is thrown from side to side and eventually tries to lift itself and walk forward on two legs.

Shot 62 (cont.)

Again it is thrown from side to side and begins to unravel, leaving only a few individual threads which are pulled through the slats‌

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Shot 62 (cont.) ‌leaving only an empty freight car.

Shot 62 (cont.)

The image of the empty freight car becomes overexposed, eventually fading to white and leaving only a white screen.

Shot 63 (2 min. 9 sec.)

The image of the drawing pencil attached to a thin branch, as in Shot 5, is gradually faded in.

Shot 63 (cont.)

As the camera tracks backward, it shows the canvas on an easel with a box of oil paints, as in the opening sequence. The easel stands beside railroad tracks.

Shot 63 (cont.)

As the camera continues to track back and is raised to a higher position, a freight train from a bygone era rolls past on the tracks.

Shot 63 (cont.)

A long row of freight cars is visible as the train continues along the tracks.

173

Shot 63 (cont.)

The train morphs into a worm-like or slug-like beast, crawling where the tracks had just been and slithers out of sight.

Shot 63 (cont.)

When the beast is no longer in the frame, the image fades to white.

7.4.

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180

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185

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186

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7.5.

2011

MESSAGE TO MAN International Documentary, Short and Animated Film Festival Message to Man (St. Petersburg, Russia), 2011

TOFIFEST - Toruń Short Film Festival (Poland), 2011 SUPERTOON - International Animation Festival (Zagreb, Croatia), 2011

SHNIT International Short Film Festival (Bern, Switzerland), 2011 Animasyros - International Animation Film Festival & Forum (Syros Island, Greece), 2011

Animator International Animated Film Festival (Poznan, Poland), 2011 CINDI - Cinema Digital Seoul Film Festival (South-Korea), 2011

Osloanima International Independent Animation Film Day (Oslo, Norway), 2011

CICDAF - China International Cartoon and Digital Art Festival (Changzhou, Beijing, China), 2011

Ourense International Independent Film Festival (Spain), 2011

Busho International Short Film Festival (Budapest, Hungary), 2011 BALKANIMA - European Animated Film Festival (Belgrade, Serbia), 2011 KROK - International Animated Film Festival (Ukraine), 2011 Sedicicorto International Film Festival (Forli, Italy), 2011

Court Metrange (Rennes, France), 2011 Granada Young Filmmakers Festival (Spain), 2011 Lille International Short Film Festival (France), 2011 Travelling Junior Film Festival (Rennes, France), 2011 Corto Potere Short Film Festival (Bergamo, Italy), 2011 Uppsala International Short Film Festival (Sweden), 2011

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Tiburon International Film Festival (California, USA), 2011 Brest European Short Film Festival (France), 2011 UNLIMITED - Short Film Festival (Cologne, Germany), 2011 CINANIMA - International Animated Film Festival (Espinho, Portugal), 2011 ALCINE The European Short Film Festival (Madrid, Spain), 2011 Fredrikstad Animation Festival (Norway), 2011

Amiens International Film Festival (France), 2011

Petaluma International Film Festival (USA), 2011 EXPOTOONS - International Animation Festival (Buenos Aires, Argentina), 2011 Laputa International Animation Festival (Japan), 2011

Festival Scope (Paris, France), 2012 ANIMA - Brussels International Animation Film Festival (Belgium), 2012 GO SHORT - International Short Film Festival Nijmegen (Nijmegen, Netherlands), 2012 Hong Kong International Film Festival (China), 2012 Tampere Film Festival (Finland), 2012

Istanbul Animation Festival (Turkey), 2011

Oldenburg Short Film Days zwergWERK (Germany), 2011

2012

Lille Animated Film Festival (France), 2012 Crossing Europe Film Festival Linz (Austria), 2012 ANIRMAU - Animation Film Festival (Lalin, Spain), 2012 Filmfest Dresden International Short Film Festival (Germany), 2012 MEDIAWAVE - “ANOTHER CONNECTION� (Hungary), 2012

Montreal Animated Film Summit (Canada), 2011

CPH: DOX - Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival (Denmark), 2012

Animpact Animation Festival (Seoul, South Korea), 2011

BSFF - Brussels Short Film Festival (Belgium), 2012

ANILOGUE - International Animation Film Festival (Budapest, Hungary), 2011

NexT - International Film Festival (Bucharest, Romania), 2012 Kyiv International Short Film Festival (Ukraine), 2012

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PAZZ - Performing Arts Festival (Oldenburg, Germany), 2012

Izmir International Short Film Festival (Turkey), 2012

Melbourne International Animation Festival (Australia), 2012

Figari Film Fest - International Shortfilm Festival (Roma, Italy), 2012

ANIMAFEST ZAGREB - World Festival of Animated Film (Croatia), 2012

ANIMANIMA - International Festival of Animation (Čačak, Serbia), 2012

Seattle International Film Festival (USA), 2012

Guanajuato International Film Festival (San Miguel de Allende, Mexico), 2012

CFC Worldwide Short Film Festival (Toronto, Canada), 2012

FILMETS - Badalona Film Festival (Barcelona, Spain), 2012

VIS - Vienna Independent Shorts (Austria), 2012 Art Film Fest (Trenčianske Teplice, Trenčín; Slovakia), 2012 Jerusalem International Film Festival (Israel), 2012

Tabor International Short Film Festival (Croatia), 2012 Patras International Film & Culture Festival (Greece), 2012

T-Mobile New Horizons International Film Festival (Wroclaw, Poland), 2012,

Sardinia Film Festival (Sassari, Italy), 2012

INCUBATE - Multidisciplinary Festival (Tilburg, Netherlands), 2012, ANIFEST - International Festival of Animated Films (Teplice, Czech Republic), 2012 BFI London Film Festival (Great Britain), 2012

LIAF - London International Animation Festival (Great Britain), 2012 Hiroshima International Animation Festival (Japan), 2012 FEST ANČA - International Animation Festival (Bratislava, Slovakia), 2012

Varna World Festival of Animated Film (Bulgaria), 2012 REGARD - Saguenay International Short Film Festival (Canada), 2012 WIZ-ART - Lviv International Short Film Festival (Ukraine), 2012

FICBUEU - International Shortfilm Festival of Bueu (Spain), 2012

Wiesbaden International Weekend of Animation (Germany), 2012, Animpact Animation Festival (Seoul, South Korea), 2012

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CINEAST - Central and Eastern European Film Festival (Luxembourg), 2012

Brasil Stop Motion International Film Festival (Brazil), 2012 Telluride Film Festival (USA), 2012

Helsinki Short Film Festival (Finland), 2012, Programme: Best Short Films Around the World Chicago International Film Festival (USA), 2012 ROZAFA Anifest - Festival of Animated Films for Children and Youngsters (Shkodra, Albania), 2012

ShorTS – International Film Festival (Trieste, Italy), 2012 Malta Short Film Festival (St. Julians, Malta), 2012

ANIBAR - International Animation Festival (Kosovo), 2012

Cambridge Film Festival (Great Britain), 2012 EUShorts Festival (Budapest, Hungary), 2012 Big Cartoon Festival (Moscow, Russia), 2012, Programm: The Winners ANIMACAM - International Online Animation Festival (Galicia, Spain), 2012 KLIK! - Amsterdam Animation Festival (Netherlands), 2012 Antarctic Short, Documentary and Animation Film Festival (Queen Maud Land, Antarctica), 2012

Foyle Film Festival (Derry, Great Britain), 2012 Big Sur International Short Film Screening Series (USA), 2012

NORDISK PANORAMA - Five Cities Film Festival (Århus, Denmark; Oulu, Finland; Reykjavík, Iceland; Bergen, Norway; Malmö, Sweden), 2012

StopTrik International Film Festival (Slovenia, Poland), 2012

Rooftop Films (New York, USA) , 2012

KALIBER35 Munich International Short Film Festival (Germany), 2012 Cork Film Festival (Ireland), 2012 L’ALTERNATIVA - Independent Film Festival of Barcelona (Spain), 2012 St. Louis International Film Festival (USA), 2012 CONCORTO Film Festival (Pontenure, Italy), 2012 Short Shorts Film Festival (Mexico), 2012 ANIFILM - Třeboň International Festival of Animated Films (Czech Respublic, 2012 Ars Electronica Animation Festival (Linz, Austria), 2012

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Etiuda and Anima (Krakow, Poola), 2013, Programme: 10 Best Discoveries of Artistic Director for 20 Years of IFF Etiuda&Anima

2013

WORLDFILM - Tartu Festival of Visual Culture (Estonia), 2013 Tehran International Animation Festival (Tehran, Iran), 2013

Akbank Short Film Festival (Turkey), 2013 LIAF - London International Animation Festival (Great Britain), 2013, Retrospective

Kaunas Film Festival (Lithuania), 2013 Denver Film Festival (Colorado, USA), 2013 FILE - Electronic Language International Festival (Brazil), 2013 Future Film Festival (Bologna, Italy), 2013 Northwest Animation Festival (Portland, Eugene, USA), 2013 ANIMIX - International Animation, Comics, Caricature Festival (Tel Aviv, Israel), 2013

Trickfilm - Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film (Germany), 2013, Section: Animated Spaces Florida Film Festival (USA), 2013

ReAnimania - Yerevan International Animation Film Festival (Jerevan, Armenia), 2013, Retrospective

EstDocs - Estonian Documentary Film Festival (Toronto, Canada), 2013

NexT - International Film Festival (Bucharest, Romania), 2013, Programme: Imaginaria

Mecal International Short Film Festival (Barcelona, Spain), 2013, Programme: Short Animated Films from Eastern Europe Vizii - International Visual Culture Festival (Kyiv, Ukraine), 2013 PÖFF: Animated Dreams Animation Film Festival (Tallinn, Estonia), 2013, Programme: Best of Animated Dreams 2000-2012 Priit Pärn Animated Film Festival (Tapa, Estonia), 2013, Retrospective: Ülo PIkkov Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival (Bristol, Great Britain), 2013, Programme: Estonian Dreams Strange Beauty Film Festival (Durham, USA), 2013 Minimalen Short Film Festival (Trondheim, Norway) , 2013

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2014

2016

Helsinki Short Film Festival (Finland), 2014

Holland Animation Film Festival (Netherlands) Programme Winner`s Choice 2016

Annecy International Animation Film Festival (France), 2014, Special Programme: Estonia - The Animated Dreams of Nukufilm FANTASPOA - International Fantastic Film Festival of Porto Alegre (Brazil), 2014 26th Minimalen Short Film Festival (Norway) 2014 International Fantastic Film Festival - Fantaspoa (Brasil) 2014 “eLU Vivre i`Estonie a`Nantes” (France) 2014

2015 Crouch End Festival special event “Skepto@London” (London, UK) 2015 8th KLIK! Amsterdam Animation Festival (Netherlands) Program „Rock, Paper, Scissors“ 2015 31th Interfilm International Short Film Festival (Germany) Special Programme „Focus Baltic States“ 2015

6th StopTrik International Film Festival (Slovenia-Poland) Estonian programme

2017 Manipulate Visual Theatre Festival (UK) 2017 Festival „Atlatszo Hang“ (Hunrary) 2017 Human Rights Film Festival, program “Not Welcome” (Switzerland) 2017 7th Lithuanian Film Festival, section “After Dark” (Lithuania) 2017 Bristol Festival of Pupperty (UK) 2017 Anilogue, Estonian Programme (Hungary) 2017 DOK Leipzig, Post-Angst Programme (Germany) 2017

•

Animage Festival (Brazil) Retrospective Special Edition

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7.6.

1. Prize, Annual Award of AV Division of Estonian Cultural Endowment (Estonia), 2011, Best Animation of the Year 2. Award, Anim’est International Animation Film Festival (Bucharest, Romania), 2011, Grand Prix Anim’est Trophy 3. Award, Se-Ma-For Film Festival (Lodz, Poland; Lugano, Switzerland), 2011, Best Animation - Little Peter 4. Award, ANIMAGE - International Animation Festival of Pernambucol (Recife, Brazil), 2011, Best Photography Prize - Animage trophy 5. Award, Riga International Film Festival (Latvia), 2011, Baltic Competition - Jury Special Mention 6. Award, TINDIRINDIS - International Animation Film Festival (Vilnius, Lithuania), 2011, Special Mention 7. Award, Etiuda and Anima (Krakow, Poola), 2011, Anima Competition - Honourable Mention 8. Award, TOFUZI - International Festival of Animated Films (Batumi, Georgia), 2011, Diploma for Original Technique 9. Award, FIKE - Evora International Short Film Festival (Portugal), 2011, Organization Award

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10. Award, Ottawa International Animation Festival (Canada), 2011, Honourable mention: “For its vivid visual metaphor” 11. Award, Golden Kuker International Animation Film Festival (Sofia, Bulgaria), 2011, Best Experimental animated film award 12. Award, ALMERIA EN CORTO - International Short Film Festival (Almeria, Spain), 2011, Gil Parrondo Award for Best Artistic Director 13. Award, Tous Courts International Short Film Festival (Aix-en-Provence, France), 2011, Special Mention 14. Award, PÖFF: Animated Dreams - Animation Film Festival (Tallinn, Estonia), 2011, Best Story 15. Award, DOK LEIPZIG - International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Film (Germany), 2011, Honorary Mention 16. Award, ANIMATEKA - International Animated Film Festival (Ljubljana, Slovenia), 2011, Special Mention 17. Award, Clermont-Ferrand International Short Film Festival and Market (France), 2012, Best Animation Film Award 18. Award, MONSTRA - Lisbon Animated Film Festival (Portugal), 2012, Best International Film 19. Award, Roanne Animation Short Film Festival (France), 2012, Experimental Film Competition - Jury Grand Prix 20. Nomination, Holland Animation Film Festival (Utrecht, Netherlands), 2012, MovieSquad HAFF Award Nomination 21. Award, Gulf Film Festival (Dubai, United Arab Emirates), 2012, Best Director 22. Award, Krakow Film Festival (Poland), 2012, International Short Film Competition - Silver Dragon for the Director of the Best Animated Film

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23. Award, SKEPTO International Film Festival (Cagliari, Italy), 2012, Avant-garde and Experimental Special Award 24. Award, Trickfilm - Stuttgart Festival of Animated Film (Germany), 2012, Meckatzer Lena- Weiss - Award 25. Prize, San Giò Verona Video Festival (Italy), 2012, Special Jury Prize 26. Prize, RICA - Wissembourg International Film Festival (France), 2012, Best Screenplay Award 27. Award, Leeds International Film Festival (Great Britain), 2012, Special Mention 28. Award, Riga Freedom Film Festival (Riga, Latvia), 2012, Short Film Competition Award 29. Award, International Short Film Festival of Torrelavega (Spain), 2012, The Best Animated Short 30. Award, MUMIA Underground Animation Festival (Belo Horizonte, Brazil), 2012, International Competition - Best Film 31. Award, Encontrarte Amares - Festival of Visual Arts and Animation Cinema (Portugal) , 2013, International Competition of Experimental Animation Film - Best Film 32. Prize, Four Days of Naples Cinema: Together for Work (Italy) , 2013, Animation Contest - First Prize 33. Award, AsterFest International Film Festival (Strumica, Macedonia), 2013, Best Animated Film 34. Award, BANG Awards – International Film Animation Competition (Portugal), 2014, Honourable Mention

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Conclusions

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Conclusions

Having become part of contemporary everyday life, animated film has significantly affected the way people see the world. Children nowadays spend a considerable amount of time watching animated films that, one might speculate, have substantial effects on their thought processes, patterns of behaviour and use of language. As a medium, animated film is a crucial tool for both commercial enterprises and totalitarian governments. The latter is exemplified by how various fields of culture, including that of animated film, served as battlefields of the Cold War, fought between the socialist East and the capitalist West.

A key concept of this dissertation is ‘anti-animation’, a notion introduced in the title of the dissertation that, in my opinion, defines the characteristic structure, the ‘essence’, of Eastern European animated film. The concept refers to the understanding that, compared to the ‘free world’, the animated film industry of totalitarian societies was based on radically different premises. Even though the origins and early formation of animated film in Eastern and Western Europe shared certain similarities and common ground, post-World War II animated film in Eastern Europe was shaped by the planned economy, centralised industrial structure, political censorship and a number of other factors that stood in stark contrast to the principles of free market economics. Hence, in my view, Eastern European animated film of the Soviet period can be defined as anti-animation, i.e. animated films produced under political pressure and in contradiction to capitalist industrial logic. I hope that this polemical concept, shedding new light on Eastern European film in general, provokes further discussions and debates.

The aim of the dissertation is to delineate the characteristic features and structures of Eastern European animated film as a ‘culture industry’, in Adorno and Horkheimer’s sense (2002), assuming that Eastern European animated film forms an integral part of the global heritage of animation.

Equally, my aim is to bring Eastern European animated film into the limelight of the international community of (animated) film scholars, critics and animation artists.

The main purpose of the dissertation is to map the characteristic features, structures, processes and developments of Eastern European animated film. The individual chapters focus on various key questions, moments and aspects of this inquiry. The introduction summarised the principal findings of the chapters and also provided new insights, as well as some possible lines of further investigation.

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The threats of both nostalgia and revisionism loom large in any study of Soviet heritage. I have made considerable efforts to avoid political evaluations, primarily focussing on describing and analysing the production of animated films and the various forces that influenced it.

After World War II, the newly established political spheres of influence polarised the European art world and Eastern European art fell into isolation. It has often been described as ‘different’, compared to Western European art, just as the entire region has been regarded as the ‘other’ Europe (Iordanova 2003: 5). While the political situation in the east was indeed different from that in Western Europe, in art historical terms this terminology suggests a hierarchical model that defines Western Europe as the ‘source’ of all significant artistic developments and ideas, which were subsequently copied or imitated in Eastern Europe and the rest of the world. In contrast to the widespread myth of Western art being the ‘correct’ or universal one, the actual developments of the art sphere have primarily occurred through global cultural networks. At the same time, it is difficult to deny the global influence and wide-ranging domination of Western art ideologies, supported by cultural, political and economic expansion of the West.

Indeed, many Eastern European artists drew inspiration from Western (European) art history and the artistic trends that emerged there, yet postWorld War II Eastern European animated film was equally characterised by the rise of several independent schools and authorial styles that must be regarded as unique, rather than simply ‘different’. In this period, Eastern Europe became an unprecedented incubator for animated film precisely due to its isolation, but also because the cultural sector in general was strong. Despite political pressure and largely due to the establishment of the network of state-owned and financed studios that functioned as ‘centres of excellence’, several master-works of global animation history emerged in post-war Eastern Europe.

Among them was Yuri Norshtein’s Tale of Tales (Сказка сказок, 1979), considered by many film critics to be the greatest animated film of all time (Bendazzi 2016: 304; Pikkov 2010: 122; Beumers 2007: 9; Wells 1998: 93). The film portrays a number of topics that were very significant for the 20th-century Eastern European collective subconscious, such as World War II, childhood and coming of age, home and homesickness, dreams and reality. A film about the resurgence of painful memories, the Tale of Tales offers unique insight into the inner world of the author and

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the society surrounding him. In Brian Ashbee’s words, ‘[i]n this film, space becomes a metaphor for memory’ (Ashbee 2003: 37). Due to the poeticism of his audiovisual style and his propensity for contemplative, meditative narratives, Giannalberto Bendazzi has likened Norshtein’s position in Soviet cinema to that of Andrei Tarkovsky (Bendazzi 2016: 304). A highly symbolic and multi-layered work, The Tale of Tales is representative of the entire Eastern European animation tradition.

The radical difference between animation and anti-animation becomes especially clear when comparing Norshtein’s oeuvre to Disney’s works.

While documentary film represents reality, animated film reflects the possibility of a reality. Hence it is extremely important to consider animated films and their authors in the spatio-temporal environment of their existence. Since the meaning and perception of various images change over time, it is important to analyse not only films but also their broader socio-political contexts. The film historian Jarmo Valkola has aptly observed that ‘[n]o film has ever been produced in an isolated world that consists only of the film crew and their equipment. [---] Film is shaped by contemporary individuals who are affected by the surrounding time and space’ (Valkola 2015: 456).

Yet this interaction between art and its context is never a one-way street. Hence, one can at least speculate that just as the environment influences films and their authors, the works of film-makers also affect the environment, being capable of inducing change. This is probably one of the most significant reasons for the strict control exerted by Eastern European totalitarian state apparatuses over film production: the survival instinct of totalitarianism called for absolute control over anything and everything that could shape the way people though of and saw the world.

According to Yuri Lotman, ‘[e]verything which we notice during the presentation of a film, everything that excites and affects us, has meaning’ (Lotman 1976: 41). Furthermore, he states that ‘[c]inematography is a teaching mechanism. It not only provides information, it also teaches us how to extract it’ (Lotman 1976: 96).

Contrary to documentary and live-action narrative cinema, the content of an animated film is created uniquely for that particular film and the element of chance is minimal. Thus, animated films can be interpreted by means of artistic, technical and political argumentation.

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The difference between artists on each side of the Iron Curtain was not a matter of different people; it was a matter of what was possible for them.

And the opportunities for free expression (artistic expression) were far fewer in Eastern Europe.

The tradition of animated film that emerged in Eastern Europe after the end of World War II was completely unique in terms of enjoying access to ample, state-assigned resources of production, while being subjugated to constant political surveillance. At times, ‘parallel universes’ appeared to exist in studios – directors were relatively unconstrained in their artistic pursuits, while the script editors assigned to them had to take care that only the politically ‘correct’ results of their work would reach audiences.

The animated film of a totalitarian society reflects the pressures of totalitarianism. In Boris Groys’ words, While for classic modernism the realization of its project meant essentially the creation of a work of art that was autonomous from any existing social or natural context, this autonomy remained completely illusory for Soviet culture (Groys 1997: 80).

In order to overcome these constraints, Eastern European animation artists often relied on metaphors, employing Aesopian language that provided the means to criticise authorities indirectly, via metaphorical elements.

Lev Loseff, a renowned scholar of Aesopian language, emphasises that the use (i.e. decoding) of Aesopian language requires the efforts of not only a reader, but also those of an author and a censor (Loseff 1984: 3–5).

Decoding, searching for and producing all kinds of interpretations and connections played a crucial role in Soviet animated film, as well as in Soviet culture in general.

Aesopian language can also be defined as ‘double-think’, by which Aili Aarelaid means flirting with Soviet seriousness, the substitution of texts with subtexts, manipulating Soviet rhetoric, etc. (Aarelaid 2000: 755).

The politics, including cultural politics, of Eastern European countries was dictated and influenced by the Soviet Union, but its control was not equal in all corners of the Soviet sphere, becoming looser with increasing distance from Moscow. Still, as Dina Iordanova suggests, Whatever happened in the Soviet Union, directly influenced the cultural climate in the countries of the Eastern Bloc, and often events in the USSR were

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replicated in the Eastern Bloc (such as the ‘Thaw’ that followed the demystification of the cult of Stalin’s personality in the late 1950s and the stagnation of the Brezhnev period) (Iordanova 2003: 21).

Eastern European animation was to a large extent a children’s genre (targeted at the youngest audiences), a didactic form drawing heavily on fairy tales and other folkloric sources. Paradoxically, fairy tales were not considered to form a legitimate thematic pool in the early days of Soviet Union, when they were regarded as vestiges of feudalism.

Russian animated film of the immediate post-revolutionary era was highly experimental and exploratory. In the mid-1930s, however, folkloric subject matter and fairy tales were ideologically rehabilitated and became the major providers of content for the Soviet animated film industry, not in small part due to the influence of the immensely popular productions of the Disney Studio. In short, the experimental spirit of the early-Soviet animation discourse was soon replaced by folkloric themes and conservative (predominantly socialist-realist) form. Adaptations of classical works of literature and fairy tales became the norm.

Uninhibited by the need to strive for commercial success in the Western sense, Eastern European animation artists could afford to disregard audience expectations and were thus more inclined to practise formal experimentation than were their Western colleagues. Or, as Groys has put it, ‘from the point of view of Soviet culture, the modernist artist merely served the market, unlike the Soviet artist, who participated in the collective project of reconstructing the world’ (Groys 1997: 80).

In addition, surrealism and surrealist art practices played a significant role in Eastern European animated film culture. In this context, surrealism constituted a form of protest against social and artistic norms in general, and against those of socialist realism in particular. Surrealism was most visible in Polish and Czechoslovakian1 animated film, but powerful surrealist impulses can also be observed in animated works of other Eastern European countries. In addition to surrealism, the absurd was another important element in Eastern European nonconformist art.

Surrealism indeed found fertile soil in the conditions of unsolicited

1

Prague was a major centre of surrealism even before World War II, and André Breton visited its productive surrealist group in 1935.

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socialist ideology, since ‘[s]urrealism, in its authentic form, has forever been in revolt against existing ideological and social systems’, as Jonathan L. Owen has suggested (Owen 2011: 218).

In the aftermath of Khrushchev’s ‘Thaw’, the surrealist impulses moved from visual arts to animated film. Glass Harmonica (Стеклянная гармоника, 1968) by Andrei Khrzhanovsky can be considered the first post-war Eastern European surrealist animated film, produced in close collaboration with Ülo Sooster, an Estonian underground artist living and practising surrealism in Moscow. In varying degrees of intensity, the surrealist elements have remained part of Eastern European animated film. At the same time, it must be emphasised that Eastern European surrealism differs in several respects from the tenets of the French-born movement, as it is generally understood. In particular, Eastern European surrealism functioned as an act of protest and resistance to official cultural policies. Jan Švankmajer’s description of the difference between the original French surrealism and its Czech counterpart can be seen as applying more generally to Eastern European surrealism: …after the war, it was forced into illegality and hemmed in by Stalinist and post-Stalinist realities of the 1950s to the 1980s. It could not react to this absurd reality and therefore all creation during this period was evidently less ‘poetic’ and ‘lyrical’ and was more ‘sarcastic’, full of black and objective humor, mystification (Hames 2008: 110).

Today, surrealism is typically considered a broader category that is not necessarily limited to a particular historical period and certain central figures, and that exists both in an ‘intentional’ form and as ‘involuntary’ surrealism (Hammond 1978; Richardson 2006).

Involuntary surrealism emerges when the author of a work of art did not have the intention of producing a surrealist work or of practising surrealism but nevertheless the audience has acknowledged the work as surrealist. The audience assumes that the work is surrealist even though the author’s world-view and intentions were in no way related to surrealism. According to André Breton, in those cases the authors had ‘failed to hear the surrealist voice’ (Breton [1924] 2010).

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In Eastern Europe it also sometimes happened that the overexploitation of the tenets of socialist realism and other discourses of socialist aesthetics resulted in a situation where a work of art intended as socialist-realist was perceived as surrealist. Indeed, socialist realism and surrealism share some common ground, both attempting to modify realism and reach beyond the limits of the traditional sphere of art. According to Peter Hames, Of all the ‘isms’ the various manifestations of realism have been the most discussed and theorized. What is clear is that the terms realism, naturalism, critical realism, Socialist Realism, Neo-realism and even surrealism have been applied to situations in which that particular artistic movement has been regarded as more ‘real’ or ‘authentic’ than others (Hames 2009: 55).

By combining reality with a utopian future, the socialist ideology and propaganda resembled surrealism in its approach. However, while surrealism aimed to dislocate reality by evoking a sense of uncanny foreignness, socialist realism strove to idealise it. Cultural phenomena often exist in an interplay of opposites, which also explains the popularity of surrealism in post-war Eastern Europe: the severely curtailed personal freedom and the official discourse of socialist realism called for a surrealist counterbalance. In Western Europe, where such (cultural) politics were absent, the life cycle of surrealism turned out to be considerably shorter.

Ready-made objects, such as consumer items, toys, tools, weapons etc.,2 acquired a completely distinctive position in Eastern European animated film. Ready-mades are particular objects (symbols) that embody ideological myths, according to their historical period, function, political significance etc. Švankmajer has described his attitude towards readymades in films as follows: I prefer the kind of objects which, in my opinion, have some kind of inner life. In addition to the hermetic sciences, I believe in the ‘conservation’ of certain contents in objects which people touch under conditions of extreme sensitiveness. The ‘emotionally’ charged objects are then under certain conditions

2

Paul Welles (1998: 90) calls them ‘fabrications’.

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capable of revealing these contents and touching them provides associations and analogues for our own flashes of the unconscious (Hames 2008: 118).

The entire space seen in an animated film is typically created for that particular work, but the use of ready-mades adds another dimension to it, offering the audience an opportunity to interpret the film in relation to their own prior experiences with the used ready-made object. Live-action narrative and documentary films contain a whole array of details that are known to viewers from their everyday lives: a certain environment, the costumes of characters or a particular prop. In animated film, which is an essentially sign-based form3, all objects are represented indirectly, by means of abstraction (e.g. as a drawing, a model or a miniature). In this context, the ready-mades provide the audience with a chance to make a very special, intimate and direct connection between the film and reality.

The use of ready-mades in animated film can be compared to dreams, as both present uncanny overlaps between personal experiences and poetic generalisations. According to Joseph Campbell, Dream is the personalized myth, myth the depersonalized dream; both myth and dream are symbolic in the same general way of the dynamics of the psyche (Campbell 2008: 14).

The animated works of Jan Švankmajer, the brothers Quay and Mati Kütt are particularly noteworthy in terms of the dislocating re-use of readymades.

The animation theorist Alan Cholodenko has noted that …while live action has a privileged relation with not only the adult human but the subject ... cartoon animation has a privileged relation with not only the child but the nonhuman and the object. And this is to suggest that animation cannot be theorised without theorising the life of objects (the nonhuman can be included in this category) and vice versa (Cholodenko 1991: 31–32).

3

‘Every image on the screen is a sign, that is, it has meaning, it carries information’ (Lotman 1976: 31).

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The ready-mades used in animated film disrupt the sense of cinematic illusion, yet they emphasise and mythologise the sign-based nature of the form.

Once again, it is important to emphasise that under totalitarian regimes both Eastern European animation artists and audiences (as well as stateappointed script editors who mediated the communication between the two sides) were eager to interpret even the subtlest allusions. A case in point is Vacuum Cleaner (Tolmuimeja) by Avo Paistik, an animated film produced by Tallinnfilm in 1978, featuring a red vacuum cleaner as its protagonist. Since the colour red is a traditional symbol of communism, the censorship authorities found that the red vacuum cleaner was inappropriate and the film was ‘shelved’: banned from any public screening for nine years (Kiik 2006 II: 92).

A sense of pessimism was widespread due to social pressures and struggles with censors. Indeed, several authors (Wells 1998; Bendazzi 2016; AjanoviÄ?-Ajan 2004) have designated pessimism as a key characteristic of Eastern European animated film. In parallel with surrealism, pessimism can be regarded as a response to the officially endorsed atmosphere of optimism. As Bendazzi observes, This pessimism reflects a unique historical-political situation. In the mid-1960s, the artist and intellectuals reacted to the bureaucratic state, and emphasized a hopeless individual and social reality (Bendazzi 2016: 242).

Another significant trait of Eastern European animation in general was its inclination to emphasise visual form and to downplay the role of dialogue (spoken text).

Sventlana Boym has pointed out that monsters created for Soviet children were always miniature, never enormous (Boym 2001: 39): an observation generally confirmed by Eastern European animation heritage. In comparison with Japanese or American animations inhabited by gigantic monsters, the monsters depicted in Eastern European animated films are indeed smaller. It is difficult to say whether this was a subconscious preference of animation artists or due to some editorial/censorship instructions, but certainly any appearance of gargantuan villains would have instantly been read as a reference to the totalitarian ideological

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apparatus. This seemed precisely to be the case with Paistik’s Vacuum Cleaner: the film was most likely banned because of the eponymous (red!) appliance that ballooned to colossal dimensions.

At times, Eastern European animated film served as a gateway for its audiences to experience Western art and lifestyle. For instance, Andreas Trossek has called attention to the influence of Pop Art and, in particular, George Dunning’s Yellow Submarine (1968) on Soviet animated film, by suggesting that ‘pop-psychedelic’ animated films, such as Valeri Ugarov’s Box with a Secret (Шкатулка с секретом, 1976), Vladimir Tarasov’s Contact (Контакт, 1978) and, most famously, Roman Kachanov’s The Mystery of the Third Planet (Тайна третьей планеты, 1981) emerged in close dialogue with Dunning’s Yellow Submarine (Trossek 2011: 118).

Indeed, animated film was the ‘channel’ that introduced several manifestations of Western pop culture to Soviet audiences. As proposed by Anna Fishzon: Before most Soviet children and adults had even heard of hippies they learned to recognize them by watching and listening to Bremenskie muzykanty (Бременские музыканты 1969) … the Bremen musicians of Soiuzmultfilm communicate both sartorially and musically that they are a rock and roll band – one that manages to evoke both home and abroad by moving seamlessly among musical styles: from psychedelic rock to nostalgic doo-wop, so-called gypsy art songs and 1960s estrada to Beatles-style melodies and funk. In their generic eclecticism the Brementsy truly resemble the first generation of Muscovite hippies, who adapted flower children’s costume, musical taste, and gentle politics of peace and personal freedom to hardboiled Soviet conditions (Fishzon 2015: 591).

Another, even more immediate, manifestation of Western pop culture in Soviet animated film occurs in Avo Paistik’s Sunday (1977), with its soundtrack in large part derived from Pink Floyd’s immensely popular album The Dark Side of the Moon (1973). While Paistik’s film was presented to the censorship authorities as an ideological critique of capitalism, its sound design (as well as part of its imagery, reminiscent of Yellow Submarine) betrayed profound admiration of the West.

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Double-coding and Aesopian language played a central role in Eastern European animated film, often reversing or ridiculing ideological messages and producing anti-propaganda by overemphasising propagandistic stances. For example, Soviet animated films and caricatures typically depicted capitalist ‘bosses’ wearing top hats or bowler hats and smoking cigars. Apart from the obviously distorted political joke, this image also carried the message that Soviet caricaturists lived in such isolated conditions that they had no idea that no-one in the ‘free world’ sported the early 20th-century fashion any longer.

By now, the majority of formerly socialist Eastern European countries (except for Albania) have joined the European Union and a number of other pan-European institutions. Film production and more general matters of audiovisual media (including copyright issues) adhere to similar mechanisms of operation and the same directives across the European Union. All member states (and film producers) have access to various shared funding instruments (e.g. MEDIA and Eurimage) and distribution platforms. Hence it can be argued that the contemporary structures of film production and distribution are similar across Europe and differences arise primarily from local cultural traditions. Indeed, the contemporary production processes are very much alike in both Eastern and Western European animated film. However, Eastern Europe stands out for studios and animation artists whose styles and authorial stances were formed during the socialist period. The difference between Eastern and Western animation culture lies not in ideological endeavours, but rather in authorial methods and viewpoints.

In his article ‘Where Are We When We Think in Eastern Europe?’, Ovidiu Tichindeleanu asks, ‘What is Eastern Europe now?’, answering, ‘“Nothing”. The longer answer would be that today Eastern Europe is so many things that it is more hope than presence, and more past than future’ (Tichindeleanu 2010: 87).

In this dissertation, I have looked for an answer to the question: has a new, post-socialist, Eastern European animation emerged since the collapse of the Soviet system? Or will the socialist tradition of animation assimilate with Western European film heritage? And if this assimilation occurs, how long will it take (or how long did it take)?

In my opinion, it will be increasingly difficult to discern Eastern European animated film as a cultural phenomenon with a set of distinctive

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characteristics. In the future, we will only be able to talk about the animation tradition of countries located in Eastern Europe that share a certain historical and social heritage. The ‘textures of Eastern European animated film’ belong to the past. However, as repeatedly emphasised in this dissertation, animated films reflect broader cultural-political dimensions and those films produced in countries that were once in the Soviet sphere of influence continue to reflect the totalitarian past through their heritage. The socialist past is an inherent part of Eastern European history. Yet contemporary Latvian animated film, for example, is certainly closer to its German counterpart than to Albanian animated films, even though Latvia and Albania share a socialist past. The quality of the animated film of a nation-state is also closely related to state support of the industry, as well as to international networks.

In contemporary society, animated film continues to serve as a vehicle of cultural memory, national mentality and identity. Animated film provides useful insights into broader social processes. Take, for instance, the issue of women, their role and social engagement in Soviet society.

The majority of Soviet animated films represent a world dominated by men, with far fewer, and typically passive, female characters. Similarly to female characters on the screen, female animation artists were also a minority. While, rhetorically, the socialist state advocated gender equality, in reality women were engaged in social processes to a much lesser extent than men were. This situation is also reflected in animated film, both in terms of production and representation. Unlike the misleading official stances and propaganda, animated film provides a much more adequate reflection of the actual circumstances. Thus, animated film can be considered a legitimate source for a successful reconstruction of the past.

Equally, the study of the Soviet period provides new opportunities for a better understanding of the contemporary, post-socialist, situation: the current social processes depend to a large extent on previous ones, which are reflected in animated film. In the 1980s, for instance, Eastern European animated film increasingly challenged and questioned the Soviet system, thus anticipating the emergence of perestroika.

At the same time, in addition to the contextual framework, animated film itself has also changed, becoming increasingly integrated with (narrative) film in general. In principle, all contemporary blockbusters are partially animated, relying to a great extent on animation techniques and animated special effects.

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Moreover, animation has become an inherent part of the contemporary information and media industry, and it is more and more difficult to separate animated film from the moving image media in general. Lev Manovich has highlighted this tendency by saying that ‘cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. It is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a sub-genre of painting’ (Manovich 2016: 22).

Fundamental shifts in animation, especially due to rapid developments in the digital realm, have been accompanied by the re-emergence of discussions about the definition of animation as being at the ‘crossroads’ of visual arts and cinema. First and foremost, animated film relies on the aesthetics of the former and the technology of the latter: ‘Arguably, all animation works as a version of fine art in motion, and recalls the generic principles which have evolved from art practice’ (Wells 2007: 66).

Throughout its existence, animated film has been a medium of experimentation and modernity. According to Wells, Virtually all forms of animation … have been predicated on experimentation in one form or another and certainly have been in the continual embrace of technological progress. One should add that the socalled conditions of the ‘post-modern’ – reflexivity, parody, inter-textuality, pluralism, bricolage, and so on – have always been present in animated cinema, and are the intrinsic aspects of its long-established selfenunciating vocabulary, and the heart of its perpetual modernity, artistically and socio-politically (Wells 2007: 31).

Thus, it seems that moving images, including animation, are still in search of their place among the visual arts.

The questions and topics raised in this dissertation are in constant dialogue with new stances and approaches, and this discussion will certainly continue in the foreseeable future. The digitisation of Eastern European film heritage is still under way and hopefully this process will recover at least a few forgotten animation artists and their films. A number of political choices on and decisions about the film production of the past are also yet to be discovered and conceptualised. The unique cultural milieu and complex history of Eastern Europe has shaped an unparalleled

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tradition of animated film, the study of which will offer us a better understanding of the region’s past and its people.

Body Memory, the animated film presented as part of my dissertation, has offered me an opportunity to consider the themes and issues explored in the written portion of the dissertation through practical engagement, not only as a researcher and observer but also as an author and animation artist. My own artistic experience and the need to define my position as an author has helped me to better understand and describe the works of other authors, as well as the processes and contexts related to them.

The production of the film, as well as its subsequent distribution and the critical feedback it has received, have provided me invaluable insights into all aspects of animation film-making. I have written this dissertation and analysed animated films as a colleague and a fellow artist, rather than as a bystander.

When making Body Memory and deciding which techniques to use, I paid close attention to earlier animated films, analysing a large pool of puppet animations and their visual designs in order to avoid unintentional references to or excessive similarities with pre-existing works. Yet despite my best efforts to create a unique animated film, the reactions to the film have frequently looked for references to and parallels with the works of other Eastern European animation artists, such as Jan Švankmajer and Jiří Barta. In spite of my intention to produce an original animated film, the process has apparently involved a number of unconscious choices, based on my Eastern European background and previous experiences.

Thomas Fuchs’ has written that Body memory does not take one back to the past, but conveys an implicit effectiveness of the past in the present. This approach converges with the results of recent memory research on the central significance of implicit memory which is just as much at the basis of our customary behavior as of our unconscious avoidance of actions (Fuchs 2012: 73; emphasis in the original).

By means of artistic devices, Body Memory investigates the subconscious memory. Relying on spontaneous images conjured up in the human subconscious, it attempts to recreate the atmosphere of deportations in order to unburden both personal and social memory from past sorrows.

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At the same time, every representation of the past also constructs and reproduces it anew, producing new history. According to Wulf Kansteiner, In the process it is crucial to keep in mind that all media of memory, especially electronic media, neither simply reflect nor determine collective memory but are inextricably involved in its construction and evolution (Kansteiner 2002: 195).

Here, it is important to emphasise that my conscious interest in animation was sparked by Eastern European animated film. In my opinion, it was indeed Eastern European animated film that inspired my commitment to the field of animation. These moments of recognition can seldom be pegged down, yet I remember clearly the astonishment evoked by Jiří Barta’s The Pied Piper (Krysař, 1985), which I saw as a boy when visiting Czechoslovakia in the summer of 1987. This experience produced an irresistible urge to delve into the magical world of animation, an urge that persists.

Regardless of historical and political circumstances, the creative ambitions of the artist generally remain constant; the main difference lies in the extent to which s/he is able to realise them. Several film-makers, including Kucia, Pärn and Kovalyov, have stated in interviews that some aspects of their trade have, quite curiously, survived the change in political and economic regimes: for instance, while creative freedom used to be curtailed by the censors during the socialist era, under capitalist conditions it is money that enforces similar, sometimes highly restrictive, limits, because producers often prefer projects that have the potential for commercial success and high audience appeal. The production of animated films is an expensive and resource-intensive endeavour, and as such it is always, to some extent, under the control of those who provide the necessary finances. In this sense, animated film and, for instance, painting are incomparable in terms of creative freedom: the larger the necessary investment in the creative process, the larger the tendency of the investor to control it, regardless of political regime.

I would like to conclude with a thought from Yuri Lotman: …art does not simply transmit information, it provides the audience with the means for perceiving this information, thus creating its own auditorium.

Complexity in the structure of the person on the screen

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intellectually and emotionally complicates the person in the audience (and vice versa: primitive work creates a primitive audience) (Lotman 1976: 93).

In the context of global animation, Eastern European animated film is structurally and intellectually more complex than the average animation.

My only hope is that it has also created a more intelligent than average audience.

•

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Horkheimer, Max; Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Ajanovič-Ajan, Midhat 2004. Animation and Realism. http://www.ajan.se/ index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=30&Itemid=36.

Ashbee, Brian 2003. Animation, Art and Digitality: From Termite Terrace to Motion Painting. – Architectures of Illusion: From Motion Pictures to Navigable Interactive Environments. Eds. Maureen Thomas, François Penz. Bristol: Intellect Books, pp. 1–50.

Bendazzi, Giannalberto 2016. Animation: A World History. Vol. 2. Boca Raton: CRC Press.

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Boym, Svetlana 2001. The Future of Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books Breton, André [1924] 2010. First Manifesto of Surrealism – 1924.

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Campell, Joseph 2008. The Hero With a Thousand Faces. 3rd edition.

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56 (2–3), pp. 571–598.

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Phaenomenologica 199. Eds. Dieter Lohmar, Jagna Brudzińska.

Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, New York: Springer, pp. 69–82.

Groys, Boris 1997. A Style and a Half: Socialist Realism between Modernism and Postmodernism. – Socialist Realism Without Shores. Eds. Thomas Lahusen, Evgeny Dobrenko. Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 76–90.

Hames, Peter 2008. The Cinema of Jan Švankmajer: Dark Alchemy.

London: Wallflower Press.

Hames, Peter 2009. Czech and Slovak Cinema: Theme and Tradition.

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Hammond, Paul (ed.) 1978. The Shadow and Its Shadow: Surrealist Writings on Cinema. London: British Film Institute.

Iordanova, Dina 2003. Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and Artistry of East Central European Film. London, New York: Wallflower Press.

Kansteiner, Wulf 2002. Finding Meaning in Memory: A Methodological Critique of Collective Memory. – History and Theory, vol. 41 (2), pp. 179–197.

Collective Memory. – History and Theory, vol. 41 (2), pp. 179–197.

Kiik, Silvia 2006. Avo Paistiku võitlused võimude, tsensuuri ja Goskinoga, II. – Teater. Muusika. Kino, no. 5, pp. 97–107.

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Loseff, Lev 1984. On the Beneficence of Censorship: Aesopian Language in Modern Russian Literature. München: Verlag Otto Sagner in Kommission.

Lotman, Jurij 1976. Semiotics of Cinema. Michigan Slavic Contributions 5. Translated by Mark E. Suino. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Manovich, Lev 2016. What is Digital Cinema? – Post-Cinema: Theorizing 21st-Century Film. Eds. Shane Denson, Julia Leyda.

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Owen, Jonathan L. 2011. Avant-garde to New Wave: Czechoslovak Cinema, Surrealism and the Sixties. New York, Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Pikkov, Ülo 2010. Animasophy: Theoretical Writings on the Animated Film. Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Arts.

Richardson, Michael 2006. Surrealism and Cinema. Oxford, New York: Berg.

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97–123.

Valkola, Jarmo 2015. Filmi audiovisuaalne keel. Translated by Elle Vaht, Karol Ansip, Kristiina Davidjants. Tallinn: Varrak.

Wells, Paul 1998. Understanding Animation. London, New York: Routledge Wells, Paul 2007. Animation: Genre and Authorship. London: Wallflower Press.

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Appendix

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9.1.

Jakob Ladegaard Aarhus University

Abstract Body Memory treats collective memories of World War II and the Soviet occupation of Estonia. The article argues that the film’s attempt to negotiate national and international perspectives on this issue echoes the difficulties of integrating Eastern European historical experiences in a contemporary European memory culture dominated by Holocaust studies.

Keywords Post-communism, Memory Culture, Estonia, Nationalism, Transnationalism, Holocaust

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In the summer of 1940, the Soviet Union occupied the Republic of Estonia. The Red Army ceded the territory to German forces in 1941, but when it re-entered Estonia in 1944 it marked the beginning of an occupation that only ended with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the recognition of Estonian independence in 1991. The Soviet annexation was followed by arrests, deportations and executions of “class enemies” and their families.

Two instances of Soviet repression stand out in Estonian history.

The first is the deportation on June 14, 1941 of more than 10,000 people, at least 7,000 of whom were women, children and elderly people. Most of the men were sent to prison camps, while most women and children ended up in Siberia. Less than half returned. On March 25, 1949, a similar event occurred, only this time the number of people deported was more than 20,000 – again mostly women and children (“Soviet deportations”). In a small country whose population had decreased from around 1.1 million to 830,000 between 1939 and 1945 (Feldman 2007, 412), more than 2% of the remaining population disappeared in the last deportation alone.

During the following decades of Soviet rule, these and similar events were banished from public discourse in the Eastern Bloc. After its collapse, the newly independent Eastern European nations began a process of redefining their national identity and re-writing their history.

In this process, the memories of deportations and other crimes resurfaced (Mälksoo 2009, 658). Accordingly, it became a paramount objective for Estonia to seek recognition of its past suffering among its new allies in the West (Tamm 2008, 505). But whereas Estonia and the other Baltic nations gained access to the EU and NATO in 2004, it has proved more difficult to integrate their historical experiences of World War II and Soviet rule in the common historical consciousness of Europe (Mälksoo 2009, 660).

Part of the explanation might be that Western Europe was co-responsible for what happened because it sanctioned the partition of Europe at Yalta. It has been far easier for the official West (not to mention Russia) to celebrate 1945 as the victory of freedom and civilization than to remember that it cemented Soviet control over Eastern Europe.

Another part of the explanation might be that the Holocaust dominates Western cultural memories of World War II. While some argue that the Holocaust therefore serves as a foundation for a “common European cultural memory” (Levy & Sznaider 2002, 102), Duncan Bell points out that such claims privilege Western perspectives and overlook the conflicting memories of World War II in the new Europe (Bell 2006, 1718). Estonia is a case in point: the murder of about 1,000 of the country’s Jews (the remaining 2,000 escaped to Russia) has not commanded the

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same attention in public debates as the prolonged Soviet repression.

This fact is criticized by the historian Anton Weiss-Wendt, who sees the Estonian insistence on international recognition of the Soviet crimes as an “unproductive comparative victimization contest” (Weiss-Wendt 2008, 484).

However, instead of understanding the complex field of collective memories in contemporary Europe in terms of exclusion and competition, it seems more promising to follow Michael Rothberg’s view that collective memory should be thought of “as multidirectional: as subject to ongoing negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (Rothberg 2009, 3). In our context, this implies appreciating both differences and similarities between Eastern and Western European experiences of World War II and its aftermath. We more often find productive attempts to negotiate such complex relations in artistic creations than in official political discourses. The way that Ülo Pikkov’s Body Memory tries to balance a national Estonian memory of World War II with an international Holocaust iconography is a case in point.

Marionettes and Barbed Wire The first scene in Pikkov’s film establishes a literal tie between a painter’s easel mounted on a tripod and a nearby apple tree: the tree ‘paints’ on the canvas with a pencil tied to a branch. This image has strong Romantic resonances, since Romantic painters privileged landscape motives and often relied on plein-air sketches as testimony of nature’s inspiration.

Historically, Romantic paintings were instrumental in constructing national identities in the 19th century, articulating imaginary ties between landscape, national territory and citizens. This was also the case in Estonia, where the painter Johannes Köler was a leading figure in the country’s national awakening movement.

Pikkov’s first scene further suggests that the filmmaker is heir to Romanticism. An intimate relation to the apple tree is thus established in the camera’s gentle upward movement in the first takes: the camera seems to rise out of the ground in the same way as the tree grows out of the earth. Similarly, an analogy is established between camera and easel: the legs of the tripod in Shot 1 could easily carry a camera, and when the

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camera zooms in on the lines on the canvas (Shots 5 and 6) they literally become animated, as if the camera’s attention brought them to life in the following animation sequence. Thereby the film suggests that like the Romantics, the filmmaker can express the inner ‘life’ of the landscape – and by extension, perhaps, of the nation.

In contrast to Köler’s idyllic summer sceneries, the lonely easel, overcast sky and snow-spattered ground in Pikkov’s scene convey a melancholy sensation of loss. The root of this sensation is exposed in the animation sequence: the Soviet deportations. Through the creative powers of the artist, the lines of the tree’s ‘painting’ are transformed into puppets made of string in a freight car. They are female, like most of the victims of the deportations in 1941 and 1949. As they leave the homeland, the dolls gradually disintegrate as the threads they are made of are pulled through the slats of the freight car. The puppets are thus turned into marionettes controlled by some outside force. Like the hero in Jirí Trnka’s Czech animation classic, ‘The Hand’ (1965), who tries in vain to prevent a giant hand from invading his room, the women are unable to defend their private sphere and persons. In line with Trnka, Pikkov thus criticizes authoritarian violence. But in the final images of the freight train turning into a worm-like creature which erases the railroad tracks, Pikkov further suggests that not only the victims, but also their stories, have disappeared from the landscape of national history.

The reference to Trnka shows that Pikkov addresses this Estonian issue in a filmic language with wider, transnational resonances.

The film thereby combines the transnational tendency in recent Estonian films (Mazierska) with the political critique of the late 1980s (Näripea 2010, 68-70). This is even more explicit in the film’s use of an iconography that most Western viewers would relate to the Holocaust: the crowded freight cars (although the Estonian deportees were also transported in trains) and the resemblance between the puppet’s taut strings and barbed wire. Images such as Shots 24, 34, 44, 47 and 49 thus all bring to mind the iconic photographs of concentration camp prisoners behind barbed wire fences.

There is a dissonance between the national Romantic imagery of the opening scene and the visual hints referring to Holocaust representations in the animation sequence. The former points to Estonian history; while the latter invoke an event that impacted Europe on a massive scale. Rothberg’s multidirectional memory invites us to think of this contradiction in terms of borrowing (rather than appropriation or contest): Pikkov borrows the visual vocabulary of Holocaust representations to claim that the Soviet deportations are not only an

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Estonian concern, but should be recognized as part of a shared European legacy. This does not mean that the two events are ‘the same’ in some absolute perspective. Rather, it is a call for justice that makes use of a (perhaps the only) language that can be widely heard in an international community dominated by Western accounts of history.

However, the transnational direction of this approach does not absolve the film of its uncritical reliance on a Romantic national mythology. For although post-communist nationalist discourses are extremely complex and express varying political agendas (Bremmer 2009, 141-143), the embrace of a 19th century model of art, nature and nation mythologizes history. In this respect, Pikkov’s film lacks the self-critical reflection that we find in Alain Resnais’ Holocaust documentary Nuit et Brouillard (1955). This film also begins with images of rural landscapes, but only to reveal that they are filmed from inside concentration camps, thus reflecting on the link between national mythology and extermination in Nazi ideology. This opening also problematizes the role of the camera itself – its ability to “lie” with its images of pastoral idyll – an ability that was fully used by the Nazi propaganda films that Resnais cites after the opening sequence. Pikkov’s celebration of the creative artist falls short of such media-critical self-examination. But it is perhaps not despite but because of such ambivalences that Body Memory succeeds in articulating the complex changes of collective memories in the New Europe.

•

References Bell, D. (2006), ‘Introduction: Memory, Trauma and World Politics’, in D. Bell (ed.), Memory, Trauma and World Politics – Reflections on the Relationship Between Past and Present, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, pp. 1-29.

Bremmer, I. (2006), ‘The Post-Soviet Nations after Independence’, in L.W. Barrington (ed.), After Independence – Making and Protecting the Nation in Postcolonial and Postcommunist States, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, pp. 141-161.

Feldman, G. (2000), ‘Shifting the Perspective on Identity Discourses in Estonia’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 31:4, pp. 406-428.

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Levy, D. & Sznaider N. (2002), ‘Memory Unbound – The Holocaust and the Formation of Cosmopolitan Memory’, European Journal of Social Theory, vol. 5 no. 1, 87-106.

Mazierska, E. (2010), ‘Post-communist Estonian Cinema as Transnational Cinema’, Kinokultura, 10 [online]. Available at http://www. kinokultura.com/specials/10/mazierska.shtml [Accessed 25 June 2013] Mälksoo, M. (2009), ‘The Memory politics of becoming European: The East European Subalterns and the Collective Memory of Europe’, European Journal of International Relations, 15:4, pp.653-680.

Näripea, E. (2010), ‘From Nation-Scape to Nation-State: Reconfiguring Filmic Space in Post-Soviet Estonian Cinema’, in R. Šukaitytė (ed.), Baltic Cinema After the 90s: Shifting Hi(stories) and (Id) entities, Vilnius: Vilnius Academy of Arts Press, pp. 65-74.

Resnais, A. (1955), Night and Fog, Paris: Argo.

Rothberg, M. (2009), Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

‘Soviet deportations from Estonia in 1940s’, Estonia.eu [online].

Available at <http://estonia.eu/about-estonia/history/sovietdeportations-from-estonia-in-1940s.html> [Accessed 25 June 2013].

Tamm, M. (2008), ‘History as Cultural Memory: Mnemohistory and the Construction of the Estonian Nation’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 39:4, pp. 499-516.

Trnka, Jirí (2000), ‘The Hand’, in The Puppet Films of Jirí Trnka, Chatsworth: Image Entertainment.

Weiss-Wendt, A. (2008), ‘Why the Holocaust Does Not Matter to Estonians’, Journal of Baltic Studies, 39:4, pp. 475-497.

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Contributor details Jakob Ladegaard’s areas of interest include the relations between modern literature, cinema, aesthetic theory and politics. His current research project concerns relations between Eastern Europe and the West in recent literature and cinema. Recent publications include ‘On the Frontier of Politics - Ideology and the Western in Jerzy Skolimowski’s Essential Killing and Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man’, Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 4:2, 2013.

E-mail: litjl@hum.au.dk First published in Short Film Studies Volume 4, Number 2 (October 2014 ISSN 2042-7824 (Print); ISSN 2042-7832 (Online)

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9.2.

Ruth Barton Trinity College Dublin

Abstract This analysis of Body, Memory will discuss the significance of the railway track. I argue that, just as Pikkov’s string figures embody memory, so his train lines function as cinematic lieux de mémoires, evoking at once the technological hopes of modernity and their part in humanity’s destruction.

Keywords Pierre Nora; lieux de mémoires; train track; history; Holocaust; modernity Within the burgeoning field of memory studies, the writings of French historian, Pierre Nora, occupy a central role in enabling creative interpretations of what he has termed lieux de mémoire, or sites of memory. Although Nora’s work is massive, encompassing seven edited volumes published between 1984 and 1992, he concisely explained his central theme in an introductory essay that was translated and reproduced in Representations (Nora 1989). In what follows, I will be drawing on this key piece of writing to tease out the possibilities of locating within Body Memory a series of such sites of memory.

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Nora’s writings reflect a widespread contestation of history – ‘the reconstruction, always problematic and incomplete of what is no longer’ (8) - as master or grand narrative. In its place, comes its antithesis, memory. Memory, he suggests, is the foundation of societies, always evolving; it is plural, collective and individual, taking root ‘in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images and objects.’ (8-9). Lieux de mémoire, in turn, may be created by state authorities (statues and other memorials) or occur spontaneously, when the public appropriates a place or an event in their desire to memorialise.

His examples look forward to the wider project of reconstructing a sense of French national identity. Yet, the concept is a useful one and can easily be adapted to other contexts. Lieux de mémoire need not be consensual and indeed such sites may conjure up quite radically opposing associations and memories. Nor need they be pressed into the service of nation building. At the same time, few people would dispute the intense need to memorialise shared by so many societies and ethnic groups. As these groupings become displaced, both from their physical origins and from official histories, so their need to create sites of memory, whether symbolic or concrete, becomes ever more urgent. And as the greatest atrocity of the last century passes from living memory, the question of how to memorialise the Holocaust gains in immediacy.

One feels that the director of Body Memory, Ülo Pikkov, was aware, if not of Nora’s specific writings, then certainly of the intellectual movement to which they speak. Nora himself considers the body as a repository of memory; true memory, he writes, ‘has taken refuge in gestures and habits, in skills passed down by unspoken traditions, in the body’s inherent self-knowledge, in unstudied reflexes and ingrained memories.’ (13). The text accompanying Pikkov’s film similarly identifies the body as guardian of memory, and not only of individual memory but historical, collective memory: ‘Our body remembers more than we can expect and imagine. It remembers the sorrow and pain of our predecessors. It keeps alive the stories of our parents and grandparents as well as their ancestors.’ Just as Nora saw memory residing in peasant cultures, and in primitive or archaic societies (7-8), so Pikkov’s mise-enscène evokes the landscapes of peasant middle Europe. In the same vein, his wool figures are suggestive of pastness, of an era of craft skills and domestic labour, a world that will, literally, unravel, as its representatives are uprooted and deported in the slatted cattle truck. Even the animation technique, stop motion, is, in the era of computer-generated imagery, a throwback.

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So far, one might say, so obvious. Yet, the film, I would argue, offers us another lieu de mémoire, one that evokes a nexus of memories, both historical and cinematic. This is the train track that dissolves into a slug in Body Memory’s concluding frames (Shot 63). Were one to view Pikkov’s film without its accompanying text, it could easily be interpreted as a Holocaust narrative, and one may guess that this was the filmmaker’s intention. Where Nora positions history and memory in dialectical opposition, the visual imagery of the cattle truck and the train track suggest, by contrast, a dialogue between the two modes. Both images are crucial to the iconography of Holocaust representations; in Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), the film cuts from footage of Nazis loading prisoners onto these trucks to the grassed-over tracks leading to the camp. The voice-over muses on what the camera/spectator is seeking: “Traces of the bodies that fell out when the cars were opened?

Of survivors driven by rifle butts through the doors…’ Did Pikkov have Resnais’ film in mind as he composed his? One cannot know this, yet it and other such canonical representations seep through Body Memory, endowing the film with its own historical resonances. By referencing Holocaust imagery, Pikkov invites the viewer to make connections between that atrocity and the less-familiar history of Soviet deportations from Estonia in the 1940s, which the text informs us are the subject of this animation.

Lieux de mémoire, Nora writes, are mixed, hybrid, mutant, bound intimately with life and death, with time and eternity; enveloped in a Möbius strip of the collective and the individual, the sacred and the profane, the immutable and the mobile.

For if we accept that the most fundamental purpose of the lieu de mémoire is to stop time, to block the work of forgetting, to establish a state of things, to immortalize death, to materialize the immaterial – just as if gold were the only memory of money – all of this in order to capture a maximum of meaning in the fewest of signs, it is also clear the lieux de mémoire only exist because of their capacity for metamorphosis, an endless recycling of their meaning and an unpredictable proliferation of their ramifications. (19).

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As a site of memory, then, the train track bears multiple meanings.

Evoking not only the Holocaust, it is one of the oldest of cinematic images. In early cinema it is the harbinger of hope and modernity, a celebration of that same spirit of invention that gave birth to the moving image. With its straight lines, and regularly placed rails, it bespoke the triumph of rational design over the chaos of the archaic. In the classic Western, the laying of the train track heralds the advent of civilisation, the movement of white America from East to West, and the taming of the wilderness. The trains that ran on these tracks promised glamour and adventure, the regulation of time, the conquering of space.

The association of the train track with the Holocaust is thus a multiple betrayal. It becomes, as so much of the Holocaust did, a recasting of human inventiveness. The track no longer leads into to a better future, but to an unimaginable horror. The gleaming modernist surfaces of the engine and carriages are replaced by the fetid wooden trucks intended for the transport of livestock. People travel in fear of their destination.

The final sequence of Body Memory (Shot 63) opens on a train track in the snow. The sequence, one guesses, is set in the present day.

However, when the train moves into shot, it turns out to be an old coalfired engine, and as it advances, it appears to be pulling wooden trucks.

Finally and inexplicably it transforms into a giant slug, erasing the track as its metamorphosis is completed.

This process of morphing suggests a reversal of temporality, the obliteration of modernity and its replacement by a kind of monstrous, primeval apparition. Memory itself, as embodied in the track, is threatened with erasure; hence, the tension in Body, Memory. As much as it functions as a call to memory and to memorialising, so it acknowledges that our connectedness with the past is fragile and violable. ‘We speak so much of memory,’ Nora writes, ‘because there is so little of it left.’ (7).

As the thread figures unravel, and the train track and engine are subsumed into the bulging slug, what then remains of memory? The clue to that dilemma lies in the painter’s easel that opens the film (Shot 1) and the scribbling pencil/twig (Shot 63), with which it closes. Once memory has become erased, Pikkov proposes, then all that survives is representation. The juxtaposition of the easel with its fine lines and the grotesque, devouring slug further prompts the viewer to question what form such representations may take. Must the artist’s representation inevitably aestheticize?

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The answer, I believe, lies in the concept of lieux de mémoire.

Of course, history cannot be retrieved, and all reproductions are necessarily partial and personal. Yet, such sites open up the possibility, as Nora writes, of a ‘proliferation of meaning’ available to the spectator.

Pikkov has intervened in this process by publishing accompanying text that locates Body Memory within a specific history, yet by invoking the iconography of the Holocaust, and cinema’s romance with the train track, he invites the spectator to animate his imagery with their own memories.

These memories are of necessity mediated and secondary; yet if historical events are to memorialised, and one must argue in defence of that project, then this may be the most creative way of engaging the present with the past.

•

References Nora, P. (1989), ‘Between memory and history: Les lieux de mémoire’, Representations 26, Spring: pp. 7-25.

Resnais, Alain (1955), Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), Paris: Argos Films.

Contributor details Ruth Barton is Head of the Department of Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin. She is the author of numerous books and articles on Irish cinema.

E-mail: Ruth Barton BARTONR@tcd.ie First published in Short Film Studies Volume 4, Number 2 (October 2014)ISSN 2042-7824 (Print); ISSN 2042-7832 (Online)

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9.3.

Iben Have Aarhus University

Abstract This article begins with a phenomenological description of the perception of the soundtrack in Body Memory: what is heard and what do the sounds express. Inspired by cognitive semantics, it then continues to present this perception as linked to the listenerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s body memory.

Keywords sound design, sound effects, music, perception, cognitive semantics, body memory.

Music and Sound in Body Memory The soundtrack of Body Memory is divided into two main categories: music and sound effects. There are no words, and, although some of the sound effects resemble real sounds (such as trains, sighs, footsteps and ropes swinging and swishing through the air), they are manipulated and form part of a thoroughly prepared sound design, very similar to a musical composition, for which sound designer Tiina Andreas won Best Sound Award at the International Stop Motion Animation Film Festival in 2012.

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The music and sound effects are kept relatively separate throughout the film. The sound effects are used in the freight car and the transitioning drawing scenes, and the musical theme, composed

by Mirjam Tally, appears in the opening and final sequences. The only exception to this is the central scene (Shot 40), in which the pregnant string figure attempts to protect her egg. In this scene – central in both a thematic and a durational sense – we hear the music and sound effects simultaneously.

The musical theme is played in tempo rubato – a musical term for playing with expressive and rhythmic freedom by slightly increasing and then decreasing the tempo. The accordion (played by Jaak Lutsoja) and the cello (played by Tõnu Jõesaar) have a trembling, whirling, restless expression, while the female voice (soprano Kersti Ala-Murr) has a calmer, more spherical expression, oscillating slowly between two octaves on an airy aaahh. Taken as a whole, the music adds a yearning, melancholic mood to the dull, barren winter landscape in the visuals. In the transition sequences, in which we witness the drawing on canvas, the music blends with the wooden sound of claves and the sound effects of creaking branches and the scratching pen.

In the finale sequence, the singing voice dominates. It remains on an aaahh, but the tones are not limited to the octave, creating a lighter and freer expression than in the opening scene. In the central egg sequence, the music recalls the opening theme and provides an element of human intimacy and empathy to this extended and emotionally difficult scene.

When we leave the realistic visuals and enter the freight car, there is a momentary silence before we hear the shivering and mumbling sounds of the string women. From here, a diegetic sound design unfolds with sounds relating to the women (such as sighs, bumps, swishing ropes, steps and rustling) and to the surroundings (such as rumbling, squeaking wood, metallic hinges, train sounds and wind). If we close our eyes and listen to the sound design, we can recognize isolated sounds, such as steps, evil laughter or a distant train, but we cannot follow a narrative.

Instead, the sounds of rattling, melee, commotion and increasing energy from high-frequency sounds give rise to a growing discomfort and tension. This is particularly true following the egg scene (Shot 40), at which point the soundtrack slowly becomes richer and more compact with a crescendo culminating in Shot 60, in which the string clump rises on its trembling legs. This auditive energy is maintained until we return to the image of the drawing pencil (Shot 63).

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Sound Perception as Body Memory When we listen to Body Memory with our eyes closed, we may feel that we do not only use our ears and brain to understand what is happening in the film, but our whole body. In Ülo Pikkov’s short synopsis of Body Memory, he claims, “our body remembers more than we can expect and imagine. It remembers the sorrow and pain of our predecessors. It keeps alive the stories of our parents and grandparents as well as their ancestors” (vimeo.com). With these sentences in mind, we can locate the memory of terrible events in the branches of an old apple tree being transferred to a canvas (Shot 3-6). Or we can view each woman’s string as a symbol of her body memory and her own and her ancestors life experience. We then witness how these life stories are unraveled during the horror inside and outside the wagon. And, even though the final strings gather together as one body of collective memory (Shot 59-61), they are ultimately all erased. And finally the serpent succeeds in erasing the (rail) tracks through the wintery orchard landscape.

But my aim here is not to provide a general interpretation of the film. Instead, having already described how we may perceive the soundtrack in Body Memory, I would like to describe how we perceive this soundtrack as body memory. In other research, I have developed a theory of sound and music perception as bodily knowledge (Have 2008), inspired by philosopher Mark Johnson’s book The Body in the Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason. As his title indicates, a central argument in Johnson’s book is that meaning is based on repeated patterns in bodily experience of the physical world. These experiences constitute embodied cognitive structures, which he calls image schemata, and which we as humans repeatedly use to understand new sensory input from our surroundings. In cognitive theory, schemata are a result of a human’s interaction with the physical world; they structure and organize experience, help us to understand sensory input (that would otherwise appear chaotic) and guide our expectations for future situations and experiences.

Johnson’s cognitive semantics is inspired by the French Phenomenologist movement. In particular, it is influenced by MerleauPonty, who introduced the notion of schéma corporel (body schema) in his book Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty, 1962).

Both Merleau-Ponty’s schéma corporel and Johnson’s image schemata

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accentuate the significant role of the body in human experience of the world.

Although Johnson does not discuss sound perception in his book, we can appeal to the concept of image schemata to understand how we use embodied knowledge from the physical world to create meaning for realistic as well as abstract sound structures; for example when perceiving a film (Have 2008). A more thorough theoretical explanation is beyond the scope of this short article, but some examples from Body Memory may help to illustrate my point.

Fortunately, the majority of us have not physically experienced deportation in a freight car. However, by using certain kinds of visual narrative, animation and sound, Ülo Pikkov (et al.) exposes his audience to a sensory input that activates our body memory towards a certain (emotional) recognition at a pre-conceptual level. For example, the sound of ropes swinging and swishing through the air instinctively arouses our attension, since our image schema (constructed from empirical knowledge of this sound) warns us to be alert. Similarly, the heavy metallic swish in Shots 7-8 or the auditive culmination around the climax in Shot 60 become almost haptic experiences, potentially leading to the feeling of a sword in the chest or an intense bodily tension. These reactions are preconceptual (or we could say pre-consciouss), but they are nevertheless conceptualized though image schemata.

The human-like sonorous sighs we hear during Body Memory provide a vunerability which contrasts strikingly with the rest of the sound design. These sighs peep out through the horribly noisy enviroment and affect us in the same way as large, pleading, teary eyes (cf. Puss in Boots from Shrek 2), causing us to empathize with the women immeditately.

Most of us will recognize and conceptualize this whimpering treble sound in a falling curve as being sad and sorrowful, simply because we use an image schema formed by previous physical experiences with our own or others’ sorrow.

When we listen to the musical theme of Body Memory, we also experience it as meaningful through the cognitive structures of image schemata. For example, when we experience the musical expression as trembling and unstable in the opening theme, we make metaphorical projections from physical experiences to the experience of the abstract musical structures; in this case, produced by accordion and cello.

The music then becomes meaningful in the visual context and, in this sequence, creates a feeling of restlessness, anxiety and melancholy that impacts on our expectations for the rest of the film.

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References Adamson, A., Asbury, K., Vernon C. (2004), Shrek 2, Glendale: DreamWorks Animation.

Have, I. (2008), Lyt til tv. UnderlĂŚgningsmusik i danske tv-dokumentarer, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press.

Johnson, M. (1987), The Body in the Mind. The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination and Reason, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962), Phenomenology of Perception, London: Routledge.

Contributor details My main research interest is music and sound as aesthetic and communicative devices in public and personal media. I address questions as to how reality, knowledge and emotions are realized, mediated and experienced through sound and music in audio-visual media. My recent research interest is in use of digital audiobooks.

E-mail: musih@hum.au.dk First published in Short Film Studies Volume 4, Number 2 (October 2014) ISSN 2042-7824 (Print); ISSN 2042-7832 (Online)

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9.4.

Yutian Wong San Francisco State University

Abstract Using choreography as a conceptual framework involving movement vocabulary and syntax and examining the spatial relationships between bodies, this analysis focuses on the ways in which the movements of the animated characters in this film effectively evoke a sense of dread and confinement.

Keywords dance, choreography, dancefilm, screendance, corporeality In telling the story of forced deportation through the spatial relationships of abstracted movement, Body Memory is reminiscent of contemporary dancefilm or screendance. Propelled by moving bodies—nude female dolls made out of string performing choreographed movement—the film is informed by the kinetic sensibility of Estonian choreographer Külli Roosna. The possibility of exploring intimacy, fear, and defiance within the formality of choreographic structure marks the influence of contemporary theatrical dance practice in Pikkov’s film.

From a choreographic perspective, the film utilizes one of the most basic formal structures. In making use of large ensemble choreography, soloists emerge to represent and explore the relationship between the group (or

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community) and the individual. The movement vocabulary performed by the doll-like string bodies draws on pedestrian movement with a focus on articulate torsos, while the use of theme and variation, repetition, and extrapolation organizes the syntax of the choreography to transform tasklike elements of pedestrian movement into patterned abstract movement.

Attention to dynamic variation and attack gives rise to rhythmic timing and breath-like phrasing. The set in which the doll-like figures move is used in such a way that the spatial distribution of bodies on stage creates a narrative arc in which the menacing implications of order give way to the resulting chaos.

Oftentimes in dance films, the choreography is only meaningful within a diegetic world, but Body Memory is unique in that one can imagine an effective translation of the choreography from the film to the stage. This is possible because the movement itself can be effectively reimagined in different settings such that the choreography can exist apart from the film. For this reason I will be referring to the movement sequence in the film in choreographic terms as the dance or the choreography. The animated figures function more like dancers in an ensemble performance in which individual dancers might take on solo roles to depict elements of individualized experiences, but the group as a whole represent the idea of community rather than specific characters.

The dance begins with an ensemble of female figures standing in stillness at the back of the cattle car. The only source of light coming through the slatted walls adds to a stage-like effect (Shot 7). A single figure in the second row dips her head and looks down at the ground prompting the entire ensemble to begin a vibratory shiver in unison before coming to stillness. A second figure in the center of the second row begins to shiver again and the rest of the group joins in again before they all stop in unison. The deliberateness of the opening scene sets the tone for the rest of the dance.

An individualâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s uncertainty is read in the body of the soloists while the collective experience is seen in the massed bodies of the ensemble. From a corporeal perspective a vibratory shiver is the result of holding extreme tension within the body. To actually achieve the shiver one must contract the muscles to a point of stillness before one can actually achieve the intensity of shivering, as opposed to simply shaking. The moment of stillness before the stillness becomes fraught with the anticipation that something uncontrollable (shivering) will emerge. The ensemble is massed at the back of the set but they are not pressed close to each other. At this point each body still maintains its own sense of personal space within the confines of the cattle car. Although

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the bodies are equally distributed and not yet touching one another, their position in the back of the cattle car does create a sense of foreboding and confinement.

A single string emerges from the head of the central figure and reaches towards the ceiling in a curvilinear path before a second string emerges from the head of another figure. A bright light flashes and the bodies press back into the far wall. When the scene returns to the cattle car, the bodies shift and are no longer standing at the back of the cattle car. They are evenly distributed throughout the entire space (Shot 12).

Each body has a string emerging from its head attached to the ceiling or the wall of the of the cattle car (Shot 13). Sometimes the string appears to function as an extension of the body and other times, the string represents something external that controls the body. Either way the interaction between the body and its respective string reinforces a feeling of tension as the figures are pulled in different directions before reassembling into parallel lines (Shot 14).

The orderliness of the figures arranged in parallel lines foreshadows the systemic violence that follows. Two figures are pulled upstage by a string by an unseen force and slammed against the back wall. One of the figures manages to push her self into a standing position and walks away from the wall towards the group (Shot 15) before she is punished and pulled back into the wall. There is a sense of weight in the confidence of her strut towards the ensemble and a sense of resistance as she opens up in the chest while facing the group before coming unraveled and disappearing into the wall. The contrast between the execution of a slow and deliberate strut that comes to a moment of stillness, and the quick flailing movement that turn into an uncontrolled spiral lifting the body off of the ground codes the significance of the weighted material body. In Shots 21-39, the figures fight to remain physically and emotionally grounded as they resist being pulled by the strings. The figures crawl along the floor and some begin to come psychologically undone as they engage in repetitive movements such as rocking back and forth or knocking their heads against each other. A moment of hope emerges as one of the women seated on the floor ties a small knot in her string in a gesture of defiance. Hope resonates in the ensuing stillness, but the figure is soon unraveled and swallowed up like the woman in Shot 15.

The evocation of the weighted body in contrast to the fast spiraling motion of coming unraveled is used most poignantly in the representation of a pregnant women and her attempt to protect herself and an unborn child. Standing in a deep pliĂŠ (knee bend) she breaks her string

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in an attempt to disconnect herself from the cattle car only to find herself reconnected (Shot 40). Instead of fighting against the string like the bodies in previous scenes, the pregnant figure slows down. She moves with the string as the rest of the group watches. As the string pulls, she turns with the string and comes unraveled a little bit at a time until she string becomes slack and gives her more time to protect the egg. Only when her head disappears does the rest of the body stumble around until it too is set into a spinning motion that unravels the remainder of her body.

The pregnant womanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s solo is followed by mayhem in which the remaining figures repeat variations on all the movements performed in the previous sections. Some are pulling on their strings as heads or limbs come undone. Others crawl on all fours, lie on their backs, or cling to the walls. There is a heightened sense of pain, fear, and desperation as the figures bang their heads against the walls, the floor or each other. They no longer move in unison as each individual figure executes their own variation. Crawling over and under each other, the figures become less human and more animal-like. The variations become layered and build in complexity until a group of bodies coalesce into a spiderlike creature (Shot 56). Composed of dead or dying bodies, the creature haunts the remaining figures. Eventually, the creature subsumes the remaining bodies and becomes one giant ball of dead bodies that rolls over and flattens the one remaining live body in the cattle car. The drama ends when the sheer weight of the giant ball resists getting pulled out of the car until the remnants of string figures finally disappear through the slats and the choreography comes to an end.

Interestingly, the relationship of the bodies to the cattle car remains ambiguous and allows for multiple readings. At the beginning of choreographed sequences of the film (Shot 7), it is clear that the figures are confined to the space and one expects that the bodies will eventually try to escape, but they do not. Instead, the figures resist being unraveled and pulled out of the space by an unseen force. The figures try to remain firmly grounded inside the cattle car as if the space itself represents the literal space from which the subjects do not want to be forcefully moved from. Or the space itself operates as a symbolic space where memory can take place. In this case, memories like choreography are ephemeral and the doll-like bodies struggle to materialize the bodily sensations of dread, confinement, and loss as an alternative archive.

â&#x20AC;˘

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References Branigan, Erin (2011), Dancefilm: Choreography and the Moving Image.

New York: Oxford University Press.

Dodds, Sherril (2001), Dance on Screen: Genres and Media from Hollywood to Experimental Art. Hampshire: Palgrave.

Preston, Hilary (2006), â&#x20AC;&#x153;Choreographing the Frame: A Critical Investigation Into How Dance for the Camera Extends the Conceptual and Artistic Boundaries of Dance, â&#x20AC;? Research in Dance Education. 7:1, pp. 75-87.

Rosenberg, Douglas (2012), Screendance: Inscribing the Ephemeral Image. New York: Oxford University Press.

Contributor Details Yutian Wong is an Assistant Professor in the School of Music and Dance at San Francisco State University where she teaches courses in critical dance studies. She is the author of Choreographing: Asian America (Wesleyan University Press, 2010) and the editor of Asian American Dance in the 21st Century (forthcoming).

E-mail: ytw@sfsu.edu First published in Short Film Studies Volume 4, Number 2 (October 2014) ISSN 2042-7824 (Print); ISSN 2042-7832 (Online)

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9.5.

Nicole Richter Wright State University

Abstract The primary source of terror in Body Memory emerges from the lack of materiality underneath the unraveling body. Using Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the “body-without-organs” this essay discusses the biopolitical implications of representing the body as an assemblage of string.

Keywords Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Body without organs, BwO, Pikkov, Animation “Body memory” as a phrase shifts traditional Western conceptions of memory that construct memory as a subjective process organized in the mind. Memories are usually thought to be stored in consciousness, spatially located in the brain. Proposing the idea that memory can be stored in the body, Ülo Pikkov’s film raises ontological questions about the nature of being and the body itself. What is the body? Where does it stop and where do other bodies begin?

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The subjects of Pikkov’s narrative film, tightly wound assemblages of yarn, shaped in human form, are faceless and anonymous, yet the spectator forms an emotional connection. The film asks spectators to care for, and about, the plight of these faceless beings, and more significantly to care only about these beings as bodies. The primary source of terror in Body Memory emerges from the lack of materiality underneath the unraveling body. By using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s concept of the “body without organs” (BwO) the biopolitical implications of representing the body as an assemblage of string can be better understood.

Deleuze and Guattari often use the word ‘string’ or ‘fiber’ to describe how multiplicities function, such as when they write “each multiplicity is already composed of heterogeneous terms in symbiosis, and that a multiplicity is continually transforming itself into a string of other multiplicities, according to its thresholds and doors” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 275). The animated images of string in the film play with the concept of multiplicity and the body. Deleuze and Guattari state directly that the BwO is not a literal body, and not even necessarily a human body. It is “connection of desires, conjunction of flows, continuum of intensities” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 179). The BwO is an ideal to be moved towards in order to overcome the body-as-image construct of self that has been organized by the ‘socius’, the field of social production.

Working toward the horizon of the BwO is a movement to “dis-organize the body, to de-stratify it, to free it from stratification, unification, identification and identity so as to enable experimentation with multiplicities and intensities” (Holland 2013: 96-97).

In Anti-Oedipus, the BwO is offered forth in positive terms, as a tactical response to the social production of identity because it “resists stratifications of the socius; neither hierarchies of selfhood nor fictions of individuality glom onto this quiescent organism that precedes the cultural formation of the subject” (Castronovo 2001: 137). In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari more fully develop the BwO and they discuss three different types of BwO’s: empty, full and cancerous. In Body Memory we are witnessing something akin to the empty body without organs, because the complete dismantling of the social population leaves only an empty space. Nothing from the socius is left to resist the dominant forces pulling the strings.

Body Memory shows how forces of power can hijack the concept of BwO and use it to biopolitically control a population. Here we see the BwO in its destructive possibilities. These bodies have been too emptied of meaning and signification. There is no reference point or substance

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to achieve the BwO on. The goal should not be to eliminate subjectivity completely because “you have to keep small rations of subjectivity in sufficient quantity to enable you to respond to the dominant reality” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 178). These animated beings have no source of power available to them to survive this violent encounter and to resist the unknown source of terror controlling them from outside. They are stripped bare and sucked into a black hole of white light [Shot 20]. The film bears witness to the swift and intense destruction of the organized body, freed too fully from its identity. The subjects are freed with “too violent an action…then instead of drawing the plane” they are “killed, plunged into a black hole” and “dragged toward catastrophe” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 178).

Body Memory uses images that spectators immediately connect to horrific atrocities in the 20th century such as the Holocaust, and the film is inspired by the Soviet deportations from Estonia in the 1940s. While the film may be inspired by a particular historical event the style of animation and minimalism of set design presents the themes and horrors of the film as universal and timeless. The choice to represent this struggle through yarn reinforces this universality. The outside force controlling the string is never seen or described, the spectator’s only access to understanding is within the claustrophobic space of the room, witnessing the destruction of bodies on screen. These are images of war and the machine of war; this is how the machine feeds on life and destroys life to survive. Here, we see the dangers of constructing a body without organs, the “dangers of violence” because the BwO “risks that a creative, metamorphic war machine will turn into a veritable machine of war, a negative force bent solely on destruction” (Bogue 2007: 50-51).

The most anxiety producing moment of the film, the struggle by a mother to protect her egg [Shot 40], is an image that facilitates an understanding of the BwO. Deleuze and Guattari describe the BwO as an egg—the egg is the BwO (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 182). The BwO is “the full egg before the extension of the organism and the organization of the organs, before the formation of the strata” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 153). Inside the egg, no form is yet developed, no organs exist— there is only possibility and becoming. As the mother unravels, and the egg becomes loose, the existence of the BwO is put into jeopardy. Upon its splatter against the wall, all hope for resistance to outside control is lost [Shot 43].

As more and more beings slip through the cracks into the unknown, a new political idea arises: an image of the full BwO, Shot 49. The full BwO is “without identity or representation because it is difference in itself or difference as the creation of something continually

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new” (Dale 2001:71). The beings merge together to create one large mass of yarn. Here, a new response to the source of danger is developed and the creatures are thinking strategically about how to survive. Shot 61 is an image of the full BwO. It is an assemblage of multiple beings strung together in various directions to produce a new whole that emerges as one being, “How to sew up, cool down, and tie together all the BwO’s. If this is possible to do, it is only by conjugating the intensities produced by each BwO, by producing a continuum of all intensive continuities (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 175). Instead of fighting for survival as individuals, the beings form a collective that has the potential to produce a different outcome. For a moment it seems possible that this new multitude will resist destruction, but inevitably, it is unraveled.

•

References Bogue, R. (2007), Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics, Hampshire, England: Ashgate Publishing.

Castronovo, R. (2001), Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States, Durham, North Carolina, Duke University Press.

Dale, C. (2001), ‘Falling from the power to die’, in G. Genosko (ed.), Deleuze and Guattari: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, London, Routledge, pp. 69-80.

Deleuze, G. & F. Guattari (1987), A Thousand Plateaus, London: Continuum.

Holland, E. (2013), Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘A Thousand Plateus’: A Reader’s Guide, London: Bloomsbury Academic.

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Contributor details Nicole Richter is Associate Professor in, and Coordinator of, the Motion Pictures Program at Wright State University. She has published articles in The Journal of Bisexuality, Feminism at the Movies, Queer Love in Film and Television, and Short Film Studies.

E-mail: Nicole.richter@wright.edu First published in Short Film Studies Volume 4, Number 2 (October 2014) ISSN 2042-7824 (Print); ISSN 2042-7832 (Online)

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9.6.

Edvin Kau Aarhus University

Abstract Body Memory confronts the viewer with a tale of deported peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experience of hopelessness and terror. In this article, I engage with the film and analyse elements of its concrete cinematic practice, in order to investigate how it achieves symbolic significance and universality.

Keywords animation, abstraction, concrete horror, symbolic significance, deportation, holocaust

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At first glance, it is not easy to grasp the full range of Body Memory. On the basis of the fate of the female figures in the waggon, we can hardly avoid connotations with the Holocaust of World War II, and with ethnic cleansing in general. But how can we arrive at a deeper understanding, beyond this immediate impression? A first step might be to seek concrete information about the film, and the most obvious place is the presentation on Vimeo.com. Firstly, there is the concept of “body memory” itself; the idea that our bodies retain memories, not only of our own experiences, but also those of our parents and ancestors. Perhaps the tree we encounter at the beginning of Body Memory can also remember and tell of the fate of previous generations, and of the sorrows and terrors they suffered?

Secondly, we note that the film is inspired by the Soviet deportations of very large numbers of people from Estonia in the 1940s and early 1950s (cf. Estonia.eu). How does Body Memory construct its narrative on the basis of this horror?

The tree’s tale: Unravelling life The initial sequence (Shots 1-5) suggests that the tree is presenting that portion of the film’s narrative that takes place in the waggon; that is, the memory which it is the art of the film to formulate. We will return later to the film’s final scene and the reunion with the tree. Shot 6 shows drawn lines that acquire their own life on the canvas, which is introduced in Shot 5 as the surface upon which the tree draws. We see the result as the events in the waggon. Perhaps Pikkov’s film is the actual visualisation of our own body memory, too?

The frightened women send their strings probing out into the room (Shot 7); first two or three of them, and then all of them do (Shot 12). The blinding light from outside is both alluring and frightening. The strings are gripped and tightened by an invisible power from outside the waggon (Shot 12). Strips of light are seen moving between the slats on both sides, showing that the train has begun to move (Shots 13-14).

Everyone fights against the frightening tethering, but when one of the women thinks she has broken free and can stroll through the wagon (with the snap of high-heeled shoes on the soundtrack), other women beat her back against the slat wall. Concern for the fate of others gives way to concern for one’s own survival, as one after another they are

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pulled violently up against the waggon’s walls with the prospect of being unravelled and disappearing out between the slats. The unravelling of one of them is shown in full, and viewed from an external camera position, the collision of a person with the wall ends up blocking the camera’s and the viewer’s vision, so that the screen goes completely black. It is thus made clear: they are being controlled from outside by an invisible power, and the unravelling represents death.

At the same time, the sound of an echoing crack marks the change from the first sequence with examples of individual destinies, to the next phase: A shot from a bird’s-eye view (Shot 19) shows that all of the characters have a loose end of their strings that “points” towards the right of the frame. The next shot shows how the strings disappear out between the slats (Shot 20). While the meticulously constructed soundtrack intensifies the visualisation of a chaotic hell, Pikkov twice uses a spinning camera effect that smears the images to unrecognisability.

The second time, there is an attempt to reproduce the unravelling as a point-of-view shot from the position of the dying person. The film literally presents the embodiment of the women’s panic on the screen.

One of the film’s longest shots, with a duration of no less than 40 seconds (Shot 40), shows a pregnant woman fighting for her life and for her child. Like the others, she becomes a victim of both the invisible force and the other prisoners’ desperation. When she drops the egg – the baby – the others kick it like a ball and end up smashing it against the slat wall.

The collective desperation triggers responses in which each prisoner’s self-preservation instinct results in aggression. Compassion is sacrificed in their efforts to save themselves. It is every woman for herself.

Death, individual and collective The very well-ordered chaos of Body Memory owes much of its impact to an overall principle: In the midst of its portrayal of the horrors of deportation, the film maintains an alternation between general presentations of the entire group’s situation and a focus on individuals.

This apparently simple yet complex narrative is brought together towards the end of the film in a final demonstration of the common fate of the figures. The remaining women are tangled together in a single large clump, while the camera literally moves in to a super close-up of

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a screaming mouth. Once again, Body Memory visualises two sides of the same coin: common destiny and individual terror, after which the clump literally disintegrates, and all of the figures disappear, following a terminal unravelling. Once again we are confronted with a white screen and the canvas of the old tree.

Body Memory as animated symbolism On the basis of the selected examples, we may be on our way to answering the question of how a short animated film that is based on a specific deportation outrage can evoke memories, which, it could be claimed, raise important moral questions about human existence and crimes against humanity – perspectives that extend far beyond isolated individual events.

From its concrete basis, Body Memory aims for generally applicable symbolic value. We could think of the level of abstraction of the animated film in the same way that cinematographer Allen Daviau has described black and white film: “I think, for people who had done black and white to go into colour, it was not only a technical adaption, but it was a philosophical one. (…) Black and white is a much more immediately abstract medium. It’s removed from reality by its very nature (…)” (Glassman et al. 1992). In the same way that black and white films can more easily be perceived as stylised and deliberately abstract constructions, the constructed and not individually identifiable “string women” of this animation film are already abstract. Pikkov’s stop-motion animation offers an opening to a symbolic level, which helps to endow the events in the wagon with universal value. Body Memory is a memento and a protest with universal application: against all oppression, abuse of power, deportation, extermination camps and mass murder.

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The journey to Body Memory When the Indian-born British sculptor Anish Kapoor describes how we relate to works of art, he speaks of both memories and journeys – remarks which can also be applied to Body Memory: “Precisely, I mean it’s about those memories that are in there (points to his elbow) – or in there (his knee), or in your stomach, as much as the ones that are in your head.” In relation to whether the encounter can be seen as a journey, he says: “You know, a kind of pilgrimage. The idea of a journey to an object, the journey to a place, a site. At least, that’s the kind of sculpture I’m interested in.” (Yentop 2009) One could describe in similar terms the relationship of the audience, not only with sculpture, but with art in general – and thus also with cinematic art. With Body Memory, too, it is necessary to engage with it, work with it and find your place within it.

Thus, my contention is that both that which characterises the animation as a medium – in this stop-motion version, the characters’ material construction and thus their inherently generalised nature – and the interacting viewer’s encounter with the work lift it from a matter of individual cases to the level of a general artistic appeal and a question of moral reflection; in other words, the kind of journey to the memory of Body Memory to which Kapoor refers. In this case, the film directs our attention to the overwhelming horror and despairing hopelessness that becomes the reality of the captured and deported prisoners.

The camera moves away once again from the pencil, the twig and tree, while the train, transformed into a worm-like creature, disappears. The monster that housed the horrific tale and the allencompassing terror goes away. Will it reappear in other times and other places?

As in the world of folk tales, the dragons and other monsters of evil appear and may disappear with their victims. The women and the train are gone, but the memory remains. The tree with its pencil still stands in the same place – and we have seen it. We remember it and its story.

(Translation: Billy O’Shea)

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References Glassman, Arnold, Todd McCarthy & Stuart Samuels (1992): Visions of Light. American Film Institute (AFI), NHK (Japan Broadcasting Corporation). Image Entertainment (DVD, part 9, 31:10-31:57). http://estonia.eu/about-estonia/history/soviet-deportations-from-estoniain-1940s.html Accessed 24 October 2013.

Yentob, Alan (2009), Arts series presented by Alan Yentop, BBC production, Winter 2009. Talk with/portrait of Anish Kapoor, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLKw5amlASY (Part 3, 3:01-3:52).

Accessed 24 October 2013.

Contributor details Edvin Vestergaard Kau is associate professor of media studies at the Department of Aesthetics and Communication, Aarhus University. He has written books and numerous articles on film theory, history, and analysis; visual style in cinema; multimedia; literature. He has also contributed to a number of collections, including Nordisk Filmforskning 1975-95 (ed. Peder Grøngaard, 1995), Multimedieteori (ed. Henrik Juel, 1997), Virtual Interaction (ed. Lars Qvortrup, 2000), Nøgne billeder. De danske dogmefilm (ed. Ove Christensen, 2004), and 100 Years of Nordisk Film (red. Lisbeth Richter Larsen og Dan Nissen, 2006), Fjernsyn for viderekomne (eds.: Nielsen, Halsskov & Højer, 2011). Books include Filmen i Danmark (Danish film industry from the advent of sound to the 80’s, with Niels Jørgen Dinnesen, 1983), and Dreyer’s Filmkunst (1989, English edition, The Cinema of Dreyer).

E-mail: imvek@hum.au.dk First published in Short Film Studies Volume 4, Number 2 (October 2014) ISSN 2042-7824 (Print); ISSN 2042-7832 (Online)

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9.7.

Vlad Dima University of Wisconsin-Madison

Abstract This essay explores the depiction of memory, death, trauma, and bodies in order to argue that the physical and historical limits are erased. Memory and trauma are imprinted in the physical body but they transgress the normal limitations, death included, as we witness the return of the animated/living dead.

Keywords memory, trauma, body, history, Holocaust, death, fantasy. Ă&#x153;lo Pikkovâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Body Memory is a stop-motion animation film about the traumatic experience of deportation and about the terrors that are linked inexorably to that event: memory and death. As representations of trauma, memory and death are imprinted in the physical body but in this film they transgress the normal limitations, and we witness the return of the animated/living dead. These animated dead are made of twine, and as the film progresses, they begin to unravel whilst inside the restricting space of a freight car. This unraveling is similar to that of time, or of history; it is akin to a thread of life to be spun and occasionally cut by the ancient

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Fates. Time, history, life and death, memory and trauma all come together in this haunting representation of the (broken) body. Consequently, this essay explores the film’s depiction of these elements, and their relationship to the animated body in order to argue that physical and historical limits are stretched to incredible lengths.

The animated body has an elastic physical quality that suggests an unlimited reconstructive ability. Slavoj Zizek observes that in cartoons, Tom the cat always returns to his regular form no matter the physical trauma he endures—he represents the fantasy of the indestructible body (Zizek 2008: 149-150). The twine, animated, stop-motion bodies in Body Memory are somewhat analogous to that idea of indestructibility.

Their “inhuman” quality is exactly what makes them an ideal choice to represent the deportation/camp experience that Robert Antelme referred to as the “unimaginable” (Antelme 1992: 3) in his landmark testimony, The Human Race. It is a choice that removes the spectators from directly facing the horror of the Real—no actual human detainees. Instead, we witness twine characters whose bodies are eventually reduced to nothing.

The film actually begins with a symbolization of nothingness, as Shots 1-2 focus on an empty canvas atop an easel. The camera slowly creeps up, and ends up on the white canvas, which becomes a narrative tabula rasa.

Shots 3-5 initially move away from the easel, up and down the empty branches of a tree, and it is finally revealed that one, thinner, quivering branch has an attached pencil that is marking up the canvas. It is all lines, black and chaotic, accentuated by Shot 6, in which they appear to be drawing themselves: this is a narrative arising from nothingness.

Fittingly, the drawing stops and makes room for stop-animation in Shot 7, inside the freight car, and the slats on the sides replace the lines.

Space shrinks drastically. Soon, the twine prisoners begin to unravel, and they would eventually be pulled out through the cracks of the train car to the outside, into nothingness. Does their disappearance suggest forgetting (images escaping our memory), trauma, or is it simply death? I am inclined to think the latter, because we witness individual deaths, as well as a larger, more encompassing idea of death. The macabre, fretful dance of the twine characters leads to their joining up in one large, common body, which we see in Shots 60-62. The twine characters incur an initial death whose limits they transgress as they metamorphose into a bigger entity that will also die. This new entity is a massive body, so big that its knees buckle up right before it disintegrates and disappears, too: this is the death of the communal. The monster must be what the film means by body memory—tragic history and memory converge to create a common body so powerful and monstrous that it crumbles under its own weight.

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However, it may not be a complete common history and memory because all of the twine bodies are female. The freight cars headed for camps were not necessarily segregated, but the woman in this instance carries an ambivalent significance. Like the worm at the end of the film, to which we will return shortly, this particular representation of the woman represents life and death simultaneously. The women prisoners are headed for death, but they also carry life. In the middle of the crowd, one woman carries an egg. As the twine of her body continues to unravel, she loses her head and the egg drops. Then it is sucked away, too, and it breaks against the wall. Even new life is subjected to the memory of the Holocaust, to the great trauma that transcends historical limitations.

In other words, this particular trauma remains relevant throughout time.

In the film, we see remnants of it in the overall narrative as well as into smaller details. The word “trauma” comes from Greek and it means, “wound,” so we can extrapolate to use “trauma” for gashes and breaks, which abound in the film: breaks in the twine bodies, breaks in the egg shell, breaks in the wall, and even breaks in the fabric of the medium, in the cuts of stop-animation (the medium itself is an in-between medium that is born out of breaks).

So, to reiterate, the broken bodies in the freight train are remnants of the Holocaust that transcend physical and historical limits.

They are the equivalent of the living dead—symbolic creatures of fantasy meant to keep the memory of the Holocaust alive. Zizek calls the return of the dead the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture (Zizek 1992: 22). The dead return because they have an unpaid symbolic debt that transcends their real death; in the case of the traumatic event of the Holocaust, the “victims will continue to chase us as ‘living dead’ until we give them a decent burial, until we integrate the trauma of their death into our historical memory” (Zizek 1992: 23). So, Zizek’s fundamental fantasy of the current mass culture can be linked to the literal and metaphorical ashes of the Holocaust trauma. The Holocaust is a physical and symbolic site that we avoid, the place of the Real, and to protect ourselves from having to deal with its horrors, we have created this fundamental fantasy that acts like a protective shield. In the film, and as suggested above, the animated twine characters further underline this protective shield.

However, beneath this (fake) screen, the Real persists, inextricably linked to our fears and memory. The trauma of the camp deaths will not go away, and memory stretches across time in a display of elasticity similar to that of the indestructible animated body.

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The memory of the camps returns obstinately to one image, central to the testimonies of most influential Holocaust writers. Primo Levi, Robert Antelme, Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Lévinas, and Maurice Blanchot all refer to der Muselmann. Levi describes these prisoners as “the weak, the inept, those doomed to selection” (Levi 1996: 88). This is a person who has given up any hope, and who passively awaits death. He has also been referred to as “a staggering corpse” or “walking corpse(s)” (Améry 1980: 9). In his personal testimony, Antelme accepts that everyone reaches the same physical and emotional state: “Soon I’ll be feeling the way he does,” and “I’ll be like him” (Antelme 1992: 62, 179). The twine characters are also all alike, and they certainly echo the image of der Muselmann. The image of der Muselmann exemplifies the narrow gap between the human and the inhuman in concentration camps—a thin line perfectly exemplified by the life-like twine bodies in Pikkov’s film. Agamben also describes der Muselmann as the one who has seen the Gorgon, “that horrid female head covered with serpents whose gaze produced death” (Agamben 2005: 53). The invoked image of the Medusa is reminiscent of the serpentine threads arising from the heads of the twine bodies in Shot 7, which also continue in Shots 12-14. And there is another connection to be made with the Gorgon/ Medusa: the blinding factor. The end of Shot 7 sheds blinding light onto the twine characters, and then in the reverse shot, Shot 8, a POV shot, this powerful light also blinds the audience until the screen goes completely white. A similar effect is created at the end of Shot 62 that is overexposed and leads again to a white screen, and eventually to the canvas from the beginning of the film, back to nothingness. However, no matter how much erasing is done, history and memory remain intact. Further proof of that lies in the closing shot.

Shot 63 tracks backward from a branch and the unfinished canvas, and moves up in a crane to follow the train passing by on the left. Shot 63 mirrors perfectly, in reverse, the beginning of the film: the movement of the camera initially suggests intimacy and descending into the past, almost like a cinematic flashback. At the end of the film, conversely, the backtracking alludes to distance and removal. Given the positioning of the canvas and the train (they each occupy half of the frame), the former then gathers as much attention as the latter, and it is worth noting an ingenious play on words. The episodes in the freight car are flanked by shots of this drawing board on which a branch draws with a pencil. The cinematic return to the drawing board in Shot 63 is thus a close approximation of the expression “back to the drawing board,” which insinuates, again, that we, as a civilization, have yet to deal with

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the Holocaust and its memory properly. Since the film traces our common memory and history by returning to a past that is still very much present in our contemporary consciousness, then the key to bringing to light the message of the film is at the very end. Like its characters made out of twine, the film will unravel from a ‘loose’ end. The loose (open) end focuses on a worm moving away from the camera. The transformation of the train into the worm-like creature perfectly explains the entire film. As a symbol, the worm resides in between extremes, birth/renewal and death (Werness 2004: 439), just like the women on the train. When Shot 63 finally fades to white, it recreates another white canvas, another narrative tabula rasa, another “birth” bound to face the impossible weight of memory and history. The physical proofs of deportation are eradicated as the cinematic cycle closes, but another narrative cycle will soon come back to life, and the historical body and its relentless memory will continue to terrorize our consciousness.

•

References: Agamben, Giorgio (2005). Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books.

Améry, Jean. At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980.

Antelme, Robert (1992). The Human Race. Evanston: Marlboro Press.

Levi, Primo (1996). Survival in Auschwitz. New York: Touchstone.

Werness, Hope B. (2004). The Continuum encyclopedia of animal symbolism in art. London: Continuum International Publishing Group.

Zizek, Slavoj (1992). Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge: MIT press.

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Contributor details Vlad Dima is Assistant Professor of French Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published widely on issues of sound in French and francophone cinemas and is currently working on his first book, Sound Moves.

E-mail: dima@wisc.edu First published in Short Film Studies Volume 4, Number 2 (October 2014) ISSN 2042-7824 (Print); ISSN 2042-7832 (Online)

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I would like to express my warmest thanks to Professor Richard Raskin for continuous encouragement of my studies and for the comprehensive approach of “Body Memory” in the Short Film Studies magazine, which has become part of this study.

I am grateful to all of the academics who have contributed to my PhD work, especially Jakob Ladegaard, Ruth Barton, Iben Have, Yutian Wong, Nicole Richter, Edvin Kau and Vlad Dima.

I would also like to thank Professor Giannalberto Bendazzi, who has spent a lot of time helping and guiding me through the twists and turns of animation history.

First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor, Professor Raivo Kelomees, for his guidance, great support and kind advice throughout my PhD research studies.

I also would like to thank my adviser and co-supervisor, Eva Näripea, for her constant support and translation, which were essential for the accomplishment of the work presented in this thesis.

My appreciation and gratitude goes to the friendly staff of the Doctoral School at the Estonian Academy of Arts, and especially to Professor Liina Unt for her kind support.

Acknowledgements

263 Tallinn, January 2018

This work was financially supported by the Estonian Academy of Arts, the Cultural Endowment of Estonia and the Estonian Film Institute.

Last but not the least, I would like to thank my family for their unconditional support, encouragement and love.

I would like to give special thanks to my first teacher in the field of animation, Professor Priit Pärn.

I would also like to thank all of the animation film-makers whose works have been investigated in this study and who have sparked in me an irresistible urge to delve into the magical world of animation.

I would like to acknowledge Richard Adang for reviewing the English in this manuscript.

A special warm thank you goes out to the production studio Nukufilm and Eesti Joonisfilm for the long years of cooperation and support for my artistic work.

My thanks to the pre-examiners of my thesis, Professor Robert Sowa and Professor MichaĹ&#x201A; Bobrowski, for their accurate and insightful remarks.

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