{politics} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

The Hand, a film by Jiří Trnka

Regular readers may have noticed that Jiří Trnka’s name has been written here with all the Czech accents intact, something that hadn’t been possible until a few days ago thanks to a database coding fault. This had long been the case with accents like those used in Czech, Polish, Turkish, Japanese, and other languages, to my endless frustration. I’ll spare you the technical details but the solution, which I resolved at the weekend, turned out to be easier than I expected, as a result of which I’ve been going back through posts adding accents to names which until now had been incomplete.

Jiří Trnka (1912–1969) came to mind while I was restoring the accents for Jiří Barta; both men are Czech animators, with Barta having been mentioned here on many occasions. Trnka was one of the founders of the Czech animation industry whose puppet films aren’t always to my taste but I thought I might have mentioned The Hand (1965) before now. This was Trnka’s final film, and one of his most celebrated for its wordless presentation of a universal theme: the freedom of the artist in the face of authoritarian demands. Many of Trnka’s previous films had been stop-motion puppet adaptations of fairy tales which lends The Hand a subversive quality when the scenario seems at first to be pitched in a similar direction. The artist character is a typical Trnka puppet with a persistently smiling face who spends his time in a single room making flowerpots with a potter’s wheel. “The hand” in this context refers both to the manual nature of the potter’s craft as well as to the huge gloved appendage that forces its way into the room demanding that the pots be abandoned in favour of hand-shaped sculptures. The resulting battle of wills shows the strengths of animation in delivering a potent visual metaphor.

Trnka’s message at the time of the film’s release was especially pertinent for the Soviet satellite nations where the promise of post-war Communism had been corrupted by decades of repressive governments, a situation that Jan Švankmajer bitterly addressed in The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia. Trnka isn’t as savage as Švankmajer but his message is still an ironic one, and may have been fuelled by an equivalent bitterness. Trnka’s career was bookended by films showing the struggle of assertive individuals against authoritarian oppression, but in the first of these, The Springman and the SS (1946), the contest is between a Czech chimney-sweep and the Nazi occupiers. The Hand could only be taken by Czech viewers as being aimed at their own oppressive government, and as such may be seen as Trnka’s contribution to the Czech New Wave, especially those films (Daisies, The Cremator) that the same government regarded as politically subversive or otherwise harmful. The Hand, like The Cremator, was withdrawn from distribution a few years after its release. Jiří Barta is a very different director to Trnka but Barta’s The Vanished World of Gloves (1982) features a dystopian sequence showing a fascist world of marching hands which looks like a homage to Trnka’s film. Watch The Hand here.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jiří Barta: Labyrinth of Darkness
• Jiří Barta’s Pied Piper

Weekend links 777

The Seven Wonders of the World (1886). 1: Lighthouse on the Island of Pharos, Alexandria; 2: Statue of the Olympian Jupiter; 3: The Colossus at Rhodes; 4: The Temple of Diana at Ephesus; 5: The Mausoleum of Artemisia; 6: The Pyramids of Egypt; 7: The Walls and Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

• “The space of possible languages is vast, and full of exotic languages that are much weirder and stranger than any we have yet imagined.” Nikhil Mahant on the many possible forms of alien language.

• Among the new titles at Standard Ebooks, the home of free, high-quality, public-domain texts: Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (translated by Basil Creighton).

• At Alan Moore World: A new interview with Mr Moore about Long London, magic and the future of humanity.

• New music: The Reverent Sky by Steve Roach; and Contrary Motion by Scanner & Nurse With Wound.

• At Public Domain Review: Tangled Dürer: The Six Knots (ca. before 1521).

• At The Daily Heller: A Typographer’s Mother Goose by Louise Fili.

• At Colossal: Woodblock prints by Utagawa Hiroshige.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Jud Yalkut’s Day.

• The Strange World of…Steve Aylett.

• Seven And Seven Is (1966) by Love | Seven By Seven (1973) by Hawkwind | Seven, Seven, Seven (1995) by Money Mark

Hon by Yasmine Hamdan

If you’ve seen Jim Jarmusch’s vampire film, Only Lovers Left Alive, you may remember the scene near the end where the film stops for a moment in Tangier so that Yasmine Hamdan, a Lebanese singer, can perform one of her songs. I’ve got the soundtrack CD which includes Hal, the song she sings, but despite my predilection for Middle Eastern music I’ve been remiss in chasing down the albums that she’s released since. Hon is a new Yasmine Hamdan song, her first in a while if the YT comments are correct (her last album was in 2018), with an animated video credited to Khalil. The video is a wholly animated piece which is one reason why it’s featured here; as I’ve said in the past, I lost patience with the live-action video format years ago but still like those that use animation provided the technique is well-deployed.

The song itself is a political one, you might say inevitably so given the singer’s background and the state of current events. No prizes for guessing what the “tiny country with a gaping wound” refers to. Khalil’s animation uses its variety of collaged objects to spell out Arabic words. Is one of these a fleeting reference to the opening shots of Sergei Parajanov’s The Colour of Pomengrates? Maybe. The link to the song came via Animation Obsessive, a favourite Substack which teaches me something new with every post. The latest instalment concerns Robert Sahakyants, an Armenian animator described as a Soviet hippy, or the closest you could get to such a thing in the Soviet Union of the 1970s. That’s another lead to go chasing after.

Weekend links 753

Grow (1970) by Linda Brewer.Via.

• The week in work-related reviews: Raymond Tyler reviewed the Bumper Book of Magic at Religious Socialism, while James Palmer did the same at Foreign Policy. Meanwhile, Rob Latham at the Los Angeles Review of Books examined the legacy of the New Wave of science fiction with reviews of New Worlds 224, and The Last Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison’s long-delayed story collection.

• “Incline Press is a private fine press publisher in the UK, stubbornly printing with hand set, metal type on a collection of vintage machines, working with poets and artists to make limited edition books and ephemera.”

• New music: Horses In Your Blood, another dose of unhinged weirdness from Moon Wiring Club; The Source by Jon Palmer; and Ekkorääg by Tarotplane.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Spotlight on…Rikki Ducornet The Fan-Maker’s Inquisition: A Novel of the Marquis de Sade (1999).

• At Smithsonian Magazine: “Rare atlas of astronomy from the Dutch Golden Age goes on display in England“.

• Old music: Jon Savage’s Space, a space-themed compilation on Caroline True Records.

• At The Daily Heller: Berman’s Book Boom is a boon to graphic design’s legacy.

• At Public Domain Review: Christoph Jamnitzer’s Neuw Grotteßken Buch (1610).

• Mix of the week: A Dungeon Synth mix by Flickers From The Fen for The Wire.

• At Heavy Metal Magazine: The HP Lovecraft Art of John Holmes.

• At The Quietus: The Strange World of…Laurie Anderson.

• I Can Hear The Grass Grow (1967) by The Move | Grow Fins (1972) by Captain Beefheart | The Growing (2011) by The Haxan Cloak

Magic Lantern: A Film about Prague

There are many documentary films about the city of Prague but Magic Lantern is the only one written and presented by playwright Michael Frayn. Very good it is too, a personal view of the city’s political and cultural history which takes in the usual names and subjects: Rabbi Loew and his Golem, Emperor Rudolf II, Rudolf’s alchemists, artists and scholars, photographer Josef Sudek, the ubiquitous Franz Kafka, puppets, automata, and so on. While Frayn discusses the Communist and post-Communist periods there’s a brief clip of Jan Švankmajer’s The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia.

Frayn’s film was directed by Dennis Marks, and broadcast in 1993 as part of the BBC’s long-running Omnibus strand. (There’s a further Švankmajer connection in the person of executive producer Keith Griffiths whose Koninck company produced this film at a time when they were also helping Svankmajer make his features.) Magic Lantern wasn’t the only film that Marks and Frayn made together, and not their first metropolitan essay either. Imagine a City Called Berlin (1974) is a portrait of the former capital of Germany during its Cold War isolation; there’s also The Mask of Gold: A Film about Vienna (1977), and Jerusalem: A Personal History (1984), all of which may be seen at The Dennis Marks Archive. My complaints about YouTube are copious enough to paper the walls of the Hradčany, but the site is at its best when it provides this kind of haven for television history that would be impossible to find elsewhere.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Le Golem, 1967
• Gustav Meyink’s Prague
• Stone Glory, a film by Jirí Lehovec
• The Face of Prague
• Josef Sudek
• Liska’s Golem
• Das Haus zur letzten Latern
• Hugo Steiner-Prag’s Golem
• Karel Plicka’s views of Prague