Global Animation Theory

Global Animation
Theory
Global Animation
Theory
International Perspectives
at Animafest Zagreb
Edited by
Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gilić ,
Holger Lang, Daniel Šuljić and
Hrvoje Turković
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Copyright © Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gilić, Holger Lang, Daniel Šuljić, Hrvoje Turković,
and Contributors, 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bruckner, Franziska, editor. | Gilic, Nikica, editor. | Lang, Holger, 1964– editor. |
Suljic, Daniel, 1941– editor. | Turkovic, Hrvoje, editor. | Animafest Scanner.
Title: Global animation theory : international perspectives at Animafest Zagreb / edited by
Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gilic, Holger Lang, Daniel Suljic, and Hrvoje Turkovic.
Description: New York : Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Publishing Inc, 2018. |
“This anthology is based on a selection of the most relevant and interesting presentations
from the first three editions of the Symposium for Contemporary Animation Studies,
Animafest Scanner.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018040037 | ISBN 9781501337130 (hardback : alk. paper) |
ISBN 9781501337154 (epdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Animated films—Congresses. | Animation (Cinematography—Congresses.
Classification: LCC NC1765 .G62 2018 | DDC 791.43/34—dc23 LC record available at
https://lccn.loc.gov/2018040037
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3713-0

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CONTENTS
Foreword ix
Giannalberto Bendazzi
Introduction xi
Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gilić , Holger Lang,
Daniel Šuljić and Hrvoje Turković
Section 1 Historical and Theoretical Approaches

from International Animation Studies
1 Animation since 1980: A Personal Journey 3
Marcin Giżycki
2 Animation in the Gallery and the Gestalt: György

Kovásznai and William Kentridge 11
Paul Wells
3 On Analogical Thinking: Jan Švankmajer’s Jabberwocky

and Alice 29
Mareike Sera
4 The Successful Chorus of ‘The Second Wave’:

An Examination of Feminism’s ‘Manifesto’ of
Digital Art 51
Chunning Guo (Maggie)
5 Seeking Truth in Facts: Historicizing Chinese

Animation 61
Olga Bobrowska
vi CONTENTS
6 Austria Unlimited – Chances, Spirits and Limitations

of a Small Production Environment 83
Holger Lang
7 Beyond Self-images: The Context and Development of

Animated Documentaries, the Cornerstones of Modern
Animation in Sweden 99
Midhat Ajanović -Ajan
Section 2 Case Studies from Around the World

8 Short Circuits: On the Impact of the Flipbook in the
Work of Robert Breer 117
Edwin Carels
9 ‘. . . The Film Is Not About That’: Notes on (Re)Reading

Tale of Tales 143
Mikhail Gurevich
10 The Importance of Ranko Munitić’s Work on the Zagreb

School of Animation 163
Andrijana Ružić
11 Animation Experienced through Music: Tomislav Simović

and the Zagreb School of Animation 177
Irena Paulus
12 The Puppet as Not-Puppet: The Notion of Puppet

as ‘Human in Theatrical Performance’ in the Works of
Barry Purves (the Case of Screen Play) 197
Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib
13 Subversive Machinery: DIY Method in the Work of

Julian Antonisz 213
Michał Bobrowski
CONTENTS vii
14 Lynsey Martin: A Case Study of 1970s Australian

Experimental Animation 233
Dirk de Bruyn
List of Contributors 253

Index 259
FOREWORD
Giannalberto Bendazzi
‘But what does that all mean?’, asked Samantha, after having examined a
Joan Miró painting. The professor had answered that same question a
thousand times. She was a patient person.
You see the contrasts of the colours, and the balance of the structure,
don’t you? This is the painting’s language. Relax and let it speak to you.
Imagine you are watching a tropical sunset. You instinctively let the
sunset speak to you. You recall many beautiful things you have
experienced; you would like to have your boyfriend next to you. You are
giving your meaning to the sunset. Other people give their own meanings,
which are possibly the opposite of yours.
Moral: Samantha still lacked an art theory, while the professor had one.
What, then, is an art (in our case, an animation) theory?
Pragmatically – not philosophically – we could say that it is any intellectual
structure that helps us to better appreciate and understand art (in our case,
animation).
An art theory may be a recipe. Although you will barely find examples of
a successful work of art created by abiding a written or unwritten law, artists
have often obeyed precepts that they share among themselves: a religion, a
political party’s ideology, or a moral cause.
An art theory may be a viewers’ guide, too. Barocco, Art Nouveau,
Pop Art, are labels attached to some practitioners’ common stylistic
approaches.
An art theory may have a lot to do with market and marketing, audiences’
tastes, or audiences’ understanding. Mass communication is full of dos and
don’ts, of rules and manuals that practitioners are supposed to learn by
heart and follow through.
An art theory should not be mistaken with the aesthetics of a philosopher’s
system. The latter is consequential to a major mindset that contains
ethics, metaphysics and so on, while a good art theory is a generalization
based on the actual works. Italian Neorealismo is a good example for what
I mean.
x FOREWORD
Few people have written about animation theory, or have written essays
that posterity would later consider to be of theoretical interest for animation;
the best ones are probably Ranko Munitić and Ülo Pikkov.
The one I most like – and the only prophetic one – was Élie Faure, who
stated:
You know, these animated drawings, still so barren, so stiff, so meagre,

that are projected on the screen are like, if you will, the forms I imagine
a child’s graffiti drawn on a blackboard compared to Tintoretto’s frescoes
or Rembrandt’s canvasses. Suppose that three or four generations of
people are harnessed to the problem of animating these images in depth,
not by surfaces nor lines, but by thicknesses and volumes; of modelling,
by values and half-tones, a series of successive movements that by long
practice would gradually become habit, almost a reflex, so that the artist
comes to using it at his pleasure for drama or idyll, comedy or poetry,
light or shade, forest, city, desert. Suppose an artist is so armed with the
heart of Delacroix, the passion of Goya and the strength of Michelangelo;
he will throw on the screen a cineplastic tragedy entirely his own, a kind
of visual symphony so rich and so complex, opening, by its rush through
time, perspectives of infinity and the absolute, which are both exalting by
their mystery and more moving by their tangible reality than the sound in
the symphonies of the greatest musicians. There, that is the distant future,
which I believe in but which I do not know can be achieved.
FAURE 1920: 361
It actually did not take three or four generations, but eleven years. Alexandre
Alexeieff and Claire Parker’s Night on Bald Mountain was screened in 1933.
Until now the theoreticians have not been numerous, so I welcome this
rank-strengthening book. The essays contained within not only scan
historical and current trends from different academic and artistic perspectives,
but also present the newest findings by the global animation studies
community. The minds that have produced it are brilliant, the subject matter
is ripe, and every year animation studies grow and expand.
I wish you all an enjoyable reading.
Reference
Faure, E. (1920). ‘De la cinéplastique’, La Grande Revue, CIV 1920 (11): 52–72.
1
Translated by G. Bendazzi.
INTRODUCTION
Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gilić,

Holger Lang, Daniel Šuljić and
Hrvoje Turković
What is Global Animation Theory? In the Foreword, Giannalberto Bendazzi

defines an art theory as ‘any intellectual structure that helps us to better
appreciate and understand art (in our case, animation)’. This structure is an
evolving interdisciplinary field. It includes different theories, methods and
perspectives from research areas such as film, media and cultural studies or
art history, but also technical and artistic approaches.
Worldwide animation studies have been rapidly expanding and
progressing in recent years, catching up with the increasing spectrum of
animated films. By giving space to this international discourse, Global
Animation Theory is at the vanguard of an interaction involving historical
and theoretical positions on animation.
This anthology is based on a selection of the most relevant and interesting
presentations from the first three editions of the Symposium for
Contemporary Animation Studies, Animafest Scanner. It offers detailed and
diverse insights into the methodologies of contemporary animation studies,
as well as topics relevant for today’s study of animation. Global Animation
Theory has given way to academic writing that is very open to the practical
aspects of animation, with several contributors not only being established as
animation scholars, but also as artists. This contact between practical and
theoretical approaches to animation is closely connected to the host of
Animafest Scanner, the World Festival of Animated Film Animafest Zagreb.
The latter was established in 1972 and is the second-oldest animation
festival in the world.
Global Animation Theory highlights various significant aspects of
international animation studies by introducing the newest developments
from different cultural backgrounds – some of them still unknown to the
English-speaking community – to the international, academic and artistic
audience. Expanded and put into a new context, this anthology allows a
xii INTRODUCTION
more reflective and thoughtful review of the presentations that support a

substantial and lasting contribution to an international dialogue.
The book features two different sections: The first section includes
‘Historical and Theoretical Approaches from International Animation
Studies’, beginning with the changing role of animation and animation
studies over the course of the last forty years. The following essays present
new theoretical approaches on of well-known filmmakers such as Jan
Švankmajer or William Kentridge, as well as feminist positions on digital
art. Additionally, the section gives an overview about less-known animation
habitats in China, Austria and Sweden.
The second section, ‘Case Studies from Around the World’, consists of
re-readings on famous artists, such as Robert Breer, Yuri Norstein and Barry
Purves. Essays on the film historian and theorist Ranko Munitić as well as
musician Tomislav Simović give an interesting insight into the vicinity of the
famous Zagreb School of Animation. Finally, some experimental aspects of
animation are investigated within the work of Polish filmmaker Julian
Antonisz and Australian-based artist Lynsey Martin.
Historical and theoretical approaches from

international animation studies
The first chapter of this section traces Marcin Giżycki’s personal animation
journey since 1980. As editor-in-chief of the ASIFA quarterly Animafilm, he
published the now infamous definition on animation, which was agreed to
at the Board’s meeting, taking place at the Animafest Zagreb in the same
year: ‘The art of animation is the creation of moving images through the
manipulation of all varieties of techniques apart from live action methods.’
The author recounts the relevance of that definition today, as well as the
way animated film has proceeded since that time.
Paul Wells explores the work of recently rediscovered Cold War
Hungarian animator, György Kovásznai in comparison with the famous
South African artist William Kentridge. The discussion addresses the
individual works of both artists, and how this is understood as directly
affiliated to art and art’s culture, and animation’s presence in the gallery
context. Further, it will seek to situate both works within a broader
understanding of the gestalt of ‘The Animation Spectrum’, and with the
presence of animation both in the academic and the public sphere.
Mareike Sera’s chapter addresses two films by renowned Czech animator
Jan Švankmajer, by applying the philosophical technique of analogical
reasoning. First, the phenomenon of analogy is discussed from an academic
perspective, as well as its role for Czech Surrealism. The second part discusses
analogical thinking in different contexts, by relating Jabberwocky (1971) to
INTRODUCTION xiii
George Bataille’s Story of the Eye (Analogy I) and Alice (1988) to the
philosophical work of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (Analogy II).
Chunning Guo focuses on a study conducted by a group of women artists
in the digital field during the 1970s and 1980s. Their leader was Lillian
Schwartz and her ‘manifesto’ could be regarded as the beginning of cross-
field (and cross-gender) cooperation in digital art. In the chapter this
movement of women artists in digital art is called ‘The Second Wave of
Digital Art’, and it includes cross-field cooperation, software explorations
and deconstructions of classic artworks.
The correspondence of the film canon built by international festivals’
recognition and top-down established cultural policies is discussed by Olga
Bobrowska in Chapter 5. Using the example of the history of mainland
Chinese animation between 1955 and 1989, a particular pattern in the
festival circulation of Chinese films is observed: international successes with
awards in Annecy, Zagreb, Cannes, Locarno, etc. of films like Where Is
Mama? (1960) and Wan Laiming’s Havoc in Heaven (1961–64) confirmed
their appreciation that had been received on a national level.
Holger Lang gives an overview about the animation scene in Austria,
which had long been overshadowed by the broad recognition of Austrian
avant-garde films. In the early 1980s a new generation of independent
artistic animators started to build the basis for today’s very diverse,
multi-faceted and versatile environment. The originally strong focus on
experimental and non-commercial animation has expanded during the last
fifteen years, and producers, authors and filmmakers now embrace a wide
spectrum of work, reaching from traditional to commercial to artistic
expressions. The chapter presents the most relevant and influential
protagonists as well as the key characteristics of their work.
The last chapter of this section features animated documentaries, prominently
featured on the Swedish animation scene and eminently represented by Jonas
Odell, Hanna Heilborn and David Aronowitsch. In Chapter 7, Midhat
Ajanović-Ajan not only presents those specific cases, but also seeks to address
the systems for Swedish production and financing animation, the film tradition
in general, technology, distribution, audience and cultural context. The focus of
this chapter is on Swedish filmmaker Birgitta Jansson, her seminal work and
her unique method of combining documentary sound with claymation, which
she introduced in Semesterhemmet (1980).
Case studies from around the world

In the first chapter of the case studies section, Edwin Carels features the
impact of the flipbook within the work of well-known artist Robert Carlton
Breer. Pursuing a highly personal and surprisingly consistent course, the
painter, filmmaker and sculptor was driven by a persistent interest in visual
xiv INTRODUCTION
perception. Through the (re-)discovery of the flipbook, he found his initial

means to problematize the relationship between viewer and artwork. With
this methodological breakthrough, the decomposition and reconstruction of
movement became the centre of focus in all the strands of his work.
Tale of Tales (1979) has been repeatedly recognized as one of the greatest
animated films of all time, and remains an enigmatic masterpiece, though its
inner message is not fully deciphered. The film’s charm and power are
indisputable and irresistible; and yet, a complete and concrete understanding
escapes us somehow. In his chapter, Mikhail Gurevich presents a re-reading
of the film through analysing its poetic structure and interpreting its not so
obvious symbolism.
In Chapter 10 Andrijana Ružić presents the chronology of film critic,
theorist and historian Ranko Munitić’s work in the history of the development
of animation literature in former Yugoslavia, focusing primarily on his
critical thought regarding the ‘golden years’ of the Zagreb School of
Animation. The chapter underlines Munitić’s pioneering work in the
development of film theory and film criticism in the early years of animation
studies in the former Yugoslavia. The author also describes why it is
important to give Ranko Munitić credit for his outstanding contribution in
the popularization of the animated films of the Zagreb School of Animation,
both in the former Yugoslavia and abroad.
The role of music in animated films is only partly similar to its role in
feature films: its task of illustration and its ability to create continuity and
dynamism, as well as its emotional suggestiveness is used in both genres. But
only in animated films does the role of music expand to the humanization of
artificial imagery. Irena Paulus summarizes her research on the music in
Zagreb film animated shorts scored by the ‘good spirit’ of Zagreb Film,
Tomislav Simović.
Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib’s chapter explores the very diverse and
innovative notion of puppets in the Barry Purves animation Screen Play
(1993) in relation to the idea of ‘puppet realism’. In this context the term
‘realism’ and ‘puppet realism’ do not describe a precise copying of life, or a
filmic record of it. Puppets are used in place of human actors acting out
different methods of live performances, mainly including theatre and opera.
This goes beyond any straightforward notion of the puppet film, as
represented and experienced by Purves’ predecessors.
In Chapter 13 Michał Bobrowski discusses Julian ‘Antonisz’ Antoniszczak,
a filmmaker from the Polish School of Animation who is remembered mostly
as the author of oddball ‘non-camera’ films, drawn, painted, scratched,
burned or woodcut-printed directly onto a 35 mm tape. The chapter focuses
on Antonisz’s pursuit for artistic independence in times of ideological
hegemony. His work is treated as an exemplification of the wider context of
Polish dissident art, which over the last two decades of communism
employed guerrilla methods for sending subversive messages.
INTRODUCTION xv
In the final chapter of Global Animation Theory, Dirk de Bruyn focuses

on Lynsey Martin’s short experimental animations, which are largely
unknown internationally. His graphic 16-mm films Approximately Water
(1972), Whitewash (1973), Interview (1973) and Leading Ladies (1975) are
analysed for their technique and cultural positions, artefacts of a productive,
but also marginalized, period of artist made films. Martin’s films stand as
historic aesthetic traces of an immediate hands-on approach to image
making that came into crisis in Australia through the disappearance of
technical education in the 1980s.
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank many great collaborators and contributors,
but particularly Katie Gallof, Stefan Stratil, ASIFA Austria and the entire
Animafest Zagreb team – Ornela Čop, Nino Kovačić, Matea Milić and
Paola Orlić most of all.
SECTION 1
Historical and
Theoretical
Approaches from
International
Animation Studies
1
Animation since 1980
A Personal Journey
Marcin Giżycki
In 1980, I participated in the World Festival of Animated Film in Zagreb as

an editor-in chief of the ASIFA quarterly Animafilm. I was twenty-eight
years old then. It was a very special moment in Polish history. The economic
crisis had caused growing social tensions, which were to explode in a series
of strikes almost exactly two months later. Solidarność, the first independent
workers’ union in the Soviet Block, was just about to establish itself as a
powerful force challenging Communist rule.
I got my appointment as the editor of Animafilm in 1979 by a grim chance.
My predecessor, Mr Mieczysław Walasek, a journalist and Communist Party
member, had died unexpectedly and some well-known Polish animators,
among them Witold Giersz and Mirosław Kijowicz, suggested to the
authorities that a young film critic interested in animation named Marcin
Giżycki would be a good replacement. I was not a Party member, which
was almost a requirement for a position of this kind, but apparently the
decision-makers had other problems to take care of, so they agreed.1 This
is how I started attending animation festivals abroad: in Annecy, Varna and
Zagreb.
So, there I was in Zagreb in June of 1980. It soon became clear that it was
not only an important time in Polish history but also in the history of the
ASIFA and animated film theory. During the ASIFA Board meeting that
took place at the festival, after a few hours of deliberation, a new definition
1
Officially, I was appointed acting editor-in-chief.
4 Global Animation Theory
of animation was produced. Let me quote it now, although I do not doubt

that every animator knows it by heart: ‘The art of animation is the creation
of moving images through the manipulation of all varieties of techniques
apart from live action methods’ (Animafest 1980: 8).
This definition appeared in the next issue of Animafilm after the festival
ended. For many reasons, it was a groundbreaking but curious definition.
First of all, it did not even mention ‘animated film’. Instead it talked about
‘the art of animation’, as if the authors wanted to acknowledge that animated
film was just one of several ways of putting images or objects into motion.
What followed was even more puzzling. As the text stated next, ‘the art of
animation’ is a way of creating moving images by all means ‘apart from live
action’. What is revolutionary here is the lack of the previously obligatory
component of every previous definition of the subject: frame-by-frame
photography. This approach certainly anticipated the advent of the computer
as a future animation tool. The most questionable part of the Zagreb
definition, however, was its rejection of live action. It raised several questions
that are still relevant today: Was Norman McLaren’s Neighbors an animation
or live action film? Were Jan Švankmajer’s The Last Trick and Punch and
Judy animated films or not? And what about rotoscoping? Where actually is
the border between animation and live action?
It seems that the ASIFA definition did not really solve existing problems
as much as it opened the door to new possibilities. So, let’s see what has
changed in animation since this historic festival took place in Zagreb in
1980.
First of all, in 1980 all films submitted to the competition were recorded
on 16 or 35 mm film. Today, most of the festivals do not even accept films
on light sensitive media, and those that still do will stop doing so soon.
Although we can mourn the good old film stock for . . . let’s see . . . actually
for what? Eight to ten years ago the answer would have been simple: for its
continuous tone and lack of pixels. But that hardly counts anymore. The
number of possible shades is in the millions now, pixels have become so tiny
that they are almost invisible, and the quality of the image is still improving.
But what I enjoy the most while watching a digital print in a cinema theatre
is its sharpness. Let’s face it: in 1980, most of the films screened in cinemas
were partially or entirely out of focus. I cannot even recall how many times
I was forced to go to the projection booth to wake up the projectionist and
make him pay attention to the quality of projection. I do not want to say
that this problem has entirely vanished, but without doubt it has improved
significantly. Now another issue is plaguing film screenings, not as bad as
focusing but still bad: the wrong aspect ratio.
I remember a festival that took place a few years ago in Poland. Almost
half of the films screened were stretched way beyond their actual format. I
had a film in the competition that was made in the old 4:3 ratio. Before the
screening, I went to the projection booth and asked the projectionist to
ANIMATION SINCE 1980: A PERSONAL JOURNEY 5
adjust the player accordingly. When the film started, I noticed to my horror
that it was squeezed to approximately square proportions. I did not want to
become a dubious hero of the festival and stop the projection, but I felt so
devastated that I left for home right after the screening, being convinced that
this disaster had ruined my chances. Two days later I got a call from the
festival informing me that the film had won an honourable mention. My
good humour was soon spoiled, though, by the thought that I had received
this distinction because the jurors had found this square format very original.
Speaking of festivals, back in 1980 there was just a handful of animation
festivals around and a few other festivals that accepted animated films. One
could more or less follow all of them, and stay well informed. Even in a
Communist country like Poland, film magazines published reports from
most of these events. Today, the number of festivals, animation festivals
included, has exploded to enormous proportions. There is no way to keep
track of even a fraction of them. At the time of this writing the most
comprehensive festival database on the Internet, Film Festivals Deadlines,
proudly lists over 10,000 festivals from all over the world, at least half of
them, probably more, accept animated films (and this amount is far from
conclusive).2 It seems like an enormous devaluation of this kind of event.3
There are upsides and downsides to all of this. The good one is that more
and more people get exposed to art house animations and other kinds of
films. The bad side is that many of these festivals simply exploit filmmakers,
asking for submission fees that often exceed their budgets, especially if one
wants to send his or her work to several events. I am especially speaking of
those competitions that call themselves ‘underground’, ‘independent’ or ‘no-
budget’ but charge $50 or $80 per film. Of course, there are some long
established festivals like DOK Leipzig, Rotterdam International Film
Festival, or Ann Arbor Film Festival worth paying the submission fee because
of their reputation, but I believe that in the ideal world the authors should
be paid for the privilege to screen their films rather than vice versa.
Putting this matter aside, there must be a reason for this proliferation of
festivals other than greed. The explanation is simple: the festivals bloom
because the number of films produced every year has grown proportionally
as well. This has been propelled in turn by the technological revolution that
has changed the whole film industry since 1980 and also enabled independent
filmmakers to make films at home on a shoestring budget.
This digital imaging revolution coincided, as Tom Sito reminds us in
Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation, with the larger
information revolution. ‘Until the late 1980s television [in the US] was seven
2
http://www.filmfestivalsdeadlines.com.
3
More about the variety of animated film festivals in my essay: ‘Just What Is It That Makes
Today’s Animation Festivals So Different, So Appealing’ (Ruoff 2012: 61).
channels – three networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC; three Metromedia or

regional stations and one PBS public station on the UHF frequency’ (Sito
2013: 7). Other well-developed countries did not have even this. In
Communist Poland, just before the collapse of the regime, we had three
channels, all of them owned by the state, and that was it. Today an average
household in America, Europe, Australia and many parts of Asia or Africa
has at its disposal hundreds, if not thousands, of cable or satellite channels
plus countless websites on the Internet. This comparison shows perfectly the
scale of changes in every aspect of human life that have been triggered by the
information revolution since 1980.
In the animation world it means lower costs, faster results and much
broader possibilities for exposure for independent artists. How this
revolution has changed the industry is apparent in the example of animation
units at big Hollywood studios. With the advent of television, they started
to shrink steadily. As Sito puts it: ‘The film and advertising industries’
conventional wisdom in the 1970s was that classic animation was good in
its time (the 1930s and 1940s), but it had become too expensive and was
too labor-intensive to ever again prove profitable’ (Sito 2013: 220). The
animation staff at Disney was reduced from 2,000 employees in the 1940s
to 175 in 1966. In 1977 Dave Wolf, a computer engineer quoted by Sito,
attended a screening of Sleeping Beauty at the University of Southern
California’s cinema school. ‘When the old Disney guys asked for questions,
I asked if they could see a role for computers. Immediately, I got a lot of ugly
looks from everyone’ – he recalled (Sito 2013: 222). This attitude started to
change in the 1980s. Today, as we all know, feature animated films turn
enormous profits, and one of the reasons for this is that computers have
taken over the whole production process. The numbers are impressive.
According to Bruno Edera in between the beginning of cinema and 1974
approximately 180 feature-length films were made (Edera 1977). Nowadays,
it takes two years or less to reach the same figure.
There is no doubt that the process of making an animated movie has
become much less elitist than it used to be twenty years ago. One does not
need a costly camera, featuring frame-by-frame possibilities, and financial
resources to cover the costs of lab processing, in order to make an animated
film. In fact, a contemporary animator does not need a camera at all.
Everything can be done on a laptop computer equipped with free or
reasonably priced software. The lack of economic barriers preventing
amateurs from invading the field of artistic activity once reserved for the
pros is not a bad thing. It finally makes animation a truly democratic art as
accessible to anyone as writing, drawing, or painting . . . Or at least almost
as approachable, since animation software, even the simplest one, is still
more difficult for some to operate than a pen or brush. Anyway, this easy
access to the means of production creates an environment in which real
talent, inventiveness, creativity, etc. is not restrained by the high costs of the
tools anymore. This situation has created a challenge to artists whose

reputations were established in the pre-digital era. Today, they have to
compete with an influx of student films at film festivals, and often they lose
to young, up-coming filmmakers.
Of course, there are still projects that require significant financial input
and here also new technologies come in handy. But an amazing thing is that
even relatively costly undertakings can be realized without the backing of
the big studios, thanks to the concept of crowdfunding. The newest film by
Jan Švankmajer, Insects, which according to the filmmaker is his last feature,
is being partially funded in this way. A Kickstarter-funded Japanese anime,
Under the Dog, directed by Masahiro Andō (2016), proves that even in the
field of commercial feature movies the big producers are losing their
monopoly. Anybody with a good idea has a chance to secure enough funding
to indulge in his or her fantasies. That might change the whole industry
radically in the near future.
So, what could be the future of animated film? Animation is already
present everywhere: on billboards, the little screens of our cell phones when
we turn them on, not to mention the animated gifs populating websites.
Animated special effects have invisibly invaded feature action, sci-fi and
fantasy films. Stereoscopic movies stopped being experimental a long time
ago. Interactive animation has already been here for a while under the
disguise of computer games. What is left? Computer-made films. I mean
exactly this: films made by computers. There are already programs, like
EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) developed by David Cope at
Stanford University, that generate musical pieces in the style of a chosen
composer, Rachmaninoff for example. Harold Cohen’s AARON can
produce drawings ‘which are hard to distinguish from those of skilled artists’
(Lopes 2010: 12). Some of them were shown in very respectful institutions
like the Tate Gallery in London or the Stedejlijk Museum in Amsterdam.
According to Dominic McIver Lopes, the author of A Philosophy of
Computer Art: ‘When one of these (drawings) was labeled “digital print by
Harold Cohen,” Coen objected, and the label was changed to attribute the
work to “AARON, a computer program written by Harold Cohen” ’ (Lopes
2010: 12).
So why not have films made exclusively by computers? It is certainly
possible with abstract films. Most of them already look like they are made
exclusively by machines with all those fractals, codes and glitches (this is
why I appreciate more those abstract movies which still display a human
touch). But with the further development of artificial intelligence combined
with CGI technologies, I can easily imagine computer generated non-
narrative representational movies in the style of, let’s say, Georges
Schwizgebel or Jerzy Kucia. Pushing this idea a step further, why not imagine
an ideal animated fable concocted by a computer fed with thousands of
fairytale cartoons? Should I expect one of those ‘ugly’ looks now?
Ok, sooner or later computers will rule the world, but still at the beginning
there were the men and women who invented them and fed them with our
human experience, knowledge and art. Definitely computers can mimic us,
but can they come up with something original? Can they surpass the vision
of their inventors? I do not think there is an answer to this question.
Certainly, I do not know it. But at least I know what we need right now:
films as a political weapon. I do not want to give the impression that there
is an obligation to create politically and socially charged films. Actually, I
fully support the kind of film that many years ago the great Polish author
and critic Karol Irzykowski described as ‘cinema of pure motion’, by which
he meant works governed by their own poetic rules based on the conviction
that the visual is the most important component of movies, either narrative
or abstract (Irzykowski 1924: 7–16). On the other hand, I believe that in the
world of animation there is a historically justified space for statements from
the other end of the spectrum – that is for all kinds of politically informed
works in which the message plays the most important part. And today, in
the time of unprecedented peoples’ migrations, terrorist attacks, growing
fundamentalisms and the popularity of far right-wing demagogues, we need
this kind of movie more than ever.
Since its birth, animated film has been used as a vehicle for propaganda
and political satire. The oldest surviving animation recorded on light
sensitive material (‘films’ drawn on paper strips had existed even before) is
a work by the Englishman Arthur Melbourn-Cooper from 1899 Matches:
An Appeal. Other artists soon followed: Quirino Cristiani with a feature-
length El Apóstol in Argentina (1917), Winsor McCay with The Sinking of
the Lusitania in the US (1918),4 to mention just a few of the most prominent
examples from the pioneering days of animated film.
Such were the beginnings of animated political cinema that later gave
birth to countless propaganda films from the times of the building of
Socialism in the USSR, World War II and the Cold War. But this is a theme
for another paper. Here it is important to stress that besides all kinds of
propaganda films serving the official policies of each of their respective
governments or political groups, relatively early art-house animated films
carrying important social messages also started to emerge. The best-known
example of them is The Idea by Berthold Bartosch from 1932, based on
Frans Masereel’s graphic novel of the same title.
So, it appears that political animations have always been around. But
today, thanks to the accessibility of the medium and the ease of its use, they
4
The film depicted the fatal German submarine’s attack on the British liner in 1915 that took
nearly 1,200 lives and convinced the United States to join World War I. It is not widely known,
though, that this was not the first animation on the subject. Immediately after the tragedy took
place, a very similar British short film (although made with much less talent) was released as
part of John Bull’s Animated Sketchbook.
can respond to political events with a speed never possible before and be
seen immediately by millions on the Internet.
An interesting phenomenon of this kind developed in Russia at the
beginning of this century: flash animated anekdots – known also as mults –
proliferated, often containing political messages. Produced by established
studios as well as anonymous artists, they used the Internet to spread
satirical comments on many aspects of everyday life. Vlad Strukov compared
them to luboks – a popular printed art form from the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries on topics ranging from the religious to the historical –
and to Russian poster designs of the 1920s (Strukov 2007). They also remind
me of slogans and graffiti painted on the walls in Paris during the students’
protests of 1968.
But this is not the only form of political animation that would be helpful
now. More complex and thoughtful works exposing the hypocrisy of
politicians, the manipulations of corporations, demagogy of all kinds,
racism, etc. – these are areas where animated film can make a difference.
Animation + the Internet = Power.
References
Animafilm. (1980). (3): 5 8.
Edera, B. (1977). Full Length Animated Feature Films. New York: Hasting House.
Irzykowski, K. (1924). Dziesia˛ta Muza. Kraków: Krakowska Spółka Wydawmicza.
Lopes, D. M. (2010). A Philosophy of Computer Art. New York: Routledge.
Ruoff, J. (2012). Coming Soon to a Festival Near You. St. Andrews: St. Andrews
Film Studies.
Sito, T. (2013). Moving Innovation: A History of Computer Animation.
Cambridge: MIT.
Strukov, V. (2007). ‘Video Anekdot: Auteurs and Voyeurs of Russian Flash
Animation’. Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2(2): 129–151.
2
Animation in the Gallery
and the Gestalt
György Kovásznai and

William Kentridge
Paul Wells
The practice of drawing – professional knowledge – can be derived from

two sources: either from universal faith, i.e. on the basis of the idea
conception, which implies a collective ideal, or on the basis of a non-
collective, individual–sensualistic, positivistically–individualistically
solitary venture of discovery
Kovásznai in Iványi-Bitter 2016: 35
We, however, who intend to do something for the people’s sake as well as
for our own glory, have to concern ourselves a great deal with politics,
and in a proper manner
Kovásznai in Iványi-Bitter 2016: 41
This chapter explores the work of recently rediscovered Cold War Hungarian
animator, György Kovásznai, and the contemporary artist to whom he has
been most compared and affiliated, South African William Kentridge. Both
were part of a co-exhibition in Budapest in 2015, and recently in London in
2016. Kentridge also appeared on a panel looking at ‘Animation and the
Avant Garde outside the Western Canon’, talking about Kovásznai’s work in
2016, in which I took part, too. This discussion will address the individual
works of both artists, looking at their approaches and outlooks, and how
this is understood as directly affiliated to art and arts culture, and animation’s
presence in the gallery context.
Further, the analysis will seek to use Kentridge’s ethos and approach to
mediate an address of Kovásznai’s perspectives, summarized in his statements
above, to situate works within a broader understanding of the gestalt of the
‘Animation Spectrum’, and the presence of animation both in the academic
and the public sphere. It should be stressed that this version of the gestalt
moves beyond the established and orthodox notions of animation as a
cinematic and broadcast practice, into contexts where it is present and
observable, but less recognized and acknowledged. This concept insists that
animation is present in a range of moving images – for example, visual
effects, virtual reality, data visualization and real-time interaction – and that
these contexts are imbued with animation aesthetics. As such they represent
an omnipresence of animation – the gestalt – that speaks to social and
cultural processes and practices, which are in turn informed by cultural and
political knowledge. This begins to suggest an ‘animification’ of human
experience that has emerged throughout the history of animation as it has
been re-configured through new technologies but, more importantly, the
techniques applied by leading authorial sensibilities.
Writing in 2005, filmmaker and artist, Lewis Klahr (2005: 234), sought
to distance himself from the idea that he was ‘an animator’, insisting ‘the
expectations of collage can help the viewer more deeply engage in and
follow the formal decisions contained in my films. The expectations of
“animation” will not’. Klahr is not alone in such preferences, of course,
merely signalling that the sources and influences in his work are much more
attuned to the Fine Arts. Interestingly, South African William Kentridge
(Wells 2016) also resists the idea that his work should be associated with
‘animation’, but only because when he first considered using the form, at
least, he felt his efforts did not have the competence and technical specificity
of classical animation, exemplified at the Disney studio. When artists resist
the view that they are ‘animators’, then, they are for the most part denying
that they are animators not merely because ‘Disney’ might represent mass
entertainment, global dissemination, serial characters and a cast of animals
(Krauss 2005: 102), but because of the regulation in the Disney classical
animation style, for a long time the dominant approach to the form. It is a
style, of course, privileging the role of drawing within the process of making
‘cinema’, and not the singular drawing within ‘art-making’.
There is some irony in this, of course, in the sense that the animators at
the Disney Studios in the Golden era were inventing and refining an ‘art
form’. The newly emergent ‘Eighth Art’ of animation was in essence the
theorization of the ‘Twelve Principles’ that govern the execution of effective
drawn animation in the early shorts and features that emerged from studios
as it established itself in Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s (Johnson and
ANIMATION IN THE GALLERY AND THE GESTALT 13
Thomas 1981: 47–69). The classical animation style that the Disney
animators perfected, though, was soon perceived less as art than as an
industrial process that serviced mere entertainment. Though the Disney
model was understood as ‘state of the art’ worldwide in the pre-World War
II period and after, and much copied by independent artists and major
studios in, for example, the UK, Japan and Russia, the quasi-Taylorist model
used to create shorts and features frame-by-frame at the Disney studio in
essence diminished the idea that it had the imprimatur of Fine Art. Disney’s
animation nevertheless retained its primary and distinctive aesthetic and, as
such, its long shadow of influence in defining ‘animation’ per se. It is this
history and orthodoxy that other artists using animation are explicitly
aligning themselves with – even if they are working in a different style or
technique – or deliberately distancing themselves from. As a consequence,
Disney’s pop(ulist) art sat in direct opposition to the experimental tradition
that emerged in Europe and elsewhere in the figures of Len Lye, Norman
McLaren and Lotte Reiniger.
This schism has characterized the field of animation until comparatively
recently when gallery shows like ‘Momentary Momentum’ at Parosol Unit,
London in 2007 and ‘Watch Me Move: The Animation Show’ at The
Barbican, London in 2012, sought to place animation – popular and
experimental alike – into the gallery space. Lawrence Dreyfuss reminds us,
though:
Contemporary art is constantly generating new mediums, the study of

which implies a radical revision of our habitual artistic categories.
Animation is one of the least known of these forms because of its
traditional production process, which places such importance on drawing,
a discipline that has long been ignored to the advantage of painting and
sculpture.
DREYFUSS 2007: 30
This observation both recovers the significance of ‘drawing’ within

industrially produced animation, but also of ‘drawing’ as a particular form
of expression that might be ultimately animated. I would further suggest
here, too, that ‘drawing’ might be understood to also stand alongside, and
engage with painting and sculpture, in the broader context of specific kinds
of mark-making. This seeks to locate ‘animation’ beyond its traditional
boundaries as a drawn form, to embrace different formal properties and
techniques as part of its vocabulary, and to promote a revision of production
history that re-situates animation in the artist’s ‘studio’ rather than in the
‘quasi-factory’ that now defines the production identity of major studios. It
follows, thereafter, that animation may be placed within parameters by
which it might be viewed and evaluated as ‘art’, measured by the codes and
conventions of established arts practices and art historical idioms and,
crucially, within an intellectual framework that properly and unselfconsciously

acknowledges the relationship between animation, philosophy and politics.
In the modern era, and with the post-digital shift, the schisms and
categorizations that separate different kinds of animation seem increasingly
unhelpful in addressing the form, and serve only to distance particular kinds
of more personal or authorial work from ‘the (American Animated) cartoon’.
This kind of positioning now seems intellectually as well as practically
redundant when artists like Mathias Poledna make Imitation of Life
(2013) – to all intents and purposes a Golden era, Disney-style, fully
animated and orchestrated cartoon, but made within the context of art
culture. As such, upon its premiere at the Venice Biennale, the catalogue
could make two significant claims.
First:
Imitation of Life appropriates and reassembles this language as it revisits

the contradictions and ambiguities that accompanied the medium’s
development. Advanced methods of production and visual ingenuity –
indebted to the syntax of European modernism in its handling of surface,
depth and color, and lauded by the avant garde and critic intelligence of
the time – coexisted with sentimental characterization and storytelling
based on age-old fables and fairy tales.
And second:
Beyond its engagement with animation, Imitation of Life incorporates

into its fleeting narrative a number of other elements from the early
history of entertainment, such as Vaudeville, silent comedy and film
musicals, and diverse artistic forms including film, music, painting and
literature. But even while it subscribes to the synergistic logic of its
medium, the film deliberately eschews a seamless whole, remaining at
once alien and utterly recognizable.
PADIGLIONE AUSTRIACO 2013
These comments serve to remind contemporary audiences of the place

of European Modernism in the development of classical animation, and
the critical recognition that attended the films, especially at the Disney
studio. Equally, Podema’s work prompts the necessary recognition that
animation is an inherently cross- and inter-disciplinary synergistic form.
This is important because these synergies are at the heart of animation as a
distinctive art form. Consequently, Dreyfuss talks about the ways in which
the varying forms of animation production suggest ‘indefinable modalities
uniting drawing and movement’ (Dreyfuss 2007: 30), and it is clear that by
understanding all animation practice in this way, it is possible to see how
technical and aesthetic innovation, prompted by varying sources, speaks to

wider discourses. In the first instance, I wish to explore this idea by defining
the contemporary ‘Animation Spectrum’, and why it then becomes helpful in
determining a gestalt, that might be understood through the ideas and
practices of Kentridge, and evidenced in the work of Hungarian Cold War
Artist, Kovásznai.
The ‘Animation Spectrum’, in the first instance, acknowledges the presence
of the form in different contexts and, as such, views it as a marker of applied
practices, using a variety of technologies and disciplines within a range of
moving image taxonomies. Crucial in this formation is what makes animation
identifiable, rather than its particular methods of production, and how,
thereafter, it becomes situated. The schemata1 in Figure 2.1 will help to
explain this idea further.
Moving from left to right, animation is first recognized as a form of
moving image practice in cinema and television (taking in features, shorts,
public information films, series, commercials, credit sequences, interstitials,
FIGURE 2.1 The Animation Spectrum by Paul Wells.
1
The schemata was first posited and explored in the author’s forthcoming book Screenwriting
for Animation.
music videos, etc.). Thereafter, as it becomes an applied tool, it becomes less

recognized in its traditional forms but is identifiable in a range of applications
(these include visual effects, gifs, motion capture, motion graphics, video
games, virtual reality and a variety of mobile and on-line operations). Once
it reaches the far right, it becomes present and observed in other normally
non-artistic forms (for example, medical imagining, data visualization, real
time interaction, etc.). Many people do not perceive the presence of animation
in many of the contexts noted as the ‘Spectrum’ moves from the middle to the
right, mainly because these practices do not readily foreground the obvious,
or even implied, presence of an artist or creative practitioner. For animation
theorists (and probably for this group alone) the artist or practitioner is
always present in animation, following Crafton’s concept of the ‘self-
figurative’ (1993: 11), which suggests that the overt artifice in the material
manipulation and construction of the animated image necessarily reveals its
maker. Such image-making resists the classical sutures and closure of
traditional cinema (that normally hides its creator) and privileges the presence
of the artist or creative practitioner as a figure that in essence is ‘deconstructing’
received knowledge of material culture and representations of reality, and
thereafter, ‘re-constructing’ an alternative point of view or epistemological
perspective. The ‘self-figurative’ is usually recognized, however, because of
the broader ‘enunciative’ identity of animation, and its ‘rhetorical’ intervention
in the representation of different modes of psychological, emotional, physical
and material reality. As such, the ‘self-figurative’ is not just about the presence
of an artist or creative practitioner, but about animation being ‘identified’ as
a mode of visualization and ‘situated’ in a context that thereafter may be
defined as playing out new iterations of social and cultural knowledge and
aesthetic innovation. Instead, then, of reiterating the normal schisms between
animation and live action film, or commercial animation and experimental
animation, or drawing for animation and drawing as pure authorial mark-
making, it is necessary to resist ‘differentiation’ in form, and privilege the idea
that animation must be best understood as a ‘continuation’ in form; one in
which the embrace of other technologies and disciplines defines its distinctive
gestalt as the mediator of ideas and issues, and ultimately leads to an
‘animification’ of human experience in its representation, and interfaces with
culture and society.
The ‘Spectrum’ thus seeks to move considerably beyond the limits implied
and imposed by Klahr, for example, and to show that rather than there
being a schism between a classical model of animation, and the Fine-Art
model of animation, these typologies have a continuum in their relationship
to materials, resources and processes. In essence, when making animation,
any artist is part of a ‘Spectrum’ that is deploying, revising or reacting to
other kinds of application and approach. This, of and in itself, provides the
platform by which animation sustains its identity as a Modernist practice,
because at any one time it might simultaneously create a new medium for
expression, as well as refine the means by which to express compelling and

radical ‘content’ that emerges from fresh sources and contexts. At one and
the same time, then, the ‘Spectrum’ provides the means to a stable model
that might organize an approach, but also permit spontaneity and innovation.
As such, the ‘Spectrum’ can accommodate the pioneering work of Disney
animators, Kentridge’s erasure technique, Kovásznai’s drawing with paint,
and a myriad of other approaches, by placing them in a proper relationship
technically, aesthetically and conceptually. Perhaps, most significantly, the
very choice of an ‘animated’ application by these figures implies that there is
the need to represent the human condition in a way that defines the vision
of the artist but also their perception of experience. One of the most often
cited metaphoric structuring devices for such an experience employed in
recent years has been ‘gamification’ – a view which suggests that in an age
of video games and simulated virtual practices life echoes games structures
and outcomes. This begs the question of how animation informs the
representation of this ‘gamification’ process and, thus, I wish to suggest that
the gestalt that embodies human experience is actually best represented and
revealed by the ‘animification’ of culture, perceived across ‘the Spectrum’,
and prompted by the numerous applications of animators, among them
artists like Kentridge and Kovásznai.
Where this becomes most clear as a principle and a point of execution
and contemplation is in the ‘installation’ – the placing of animation in the
gallery. On the ‘Spectrum’, the installation is not (necessarily) part of a linear
continuity in the exhibition of animation but rather a lateral continuity in
representing a deliberate ‘curation’ of materials in the service of a concept or
idea, taking into account all the cross-disciplinary and inter-disciplinary
aspects that place art and artifacts into a presentational environment. The
works themselves, therefore, not merely become a product of their own
technical, aesthetic and cultural evolution, but of their architectural and
infrastructural identity. In reducing difference and schism, and prioritizing
continuity, the gestalt of animation becomes much more ‘visible’ because it
does not resist its relationship to other forms of art, culture and society, but
rather demonstrates and illustrates them. Kentridge’s outlook and model of
engagement proves invaluable at this juncture in illustrating this point, and
enabling a helpful point of critical access to Kovásznai’s work.
In his exhibition, ‘Thick Time’, which took place at the Whitechapel
gallery in London from 2016 to 2017, Kentridge once more embraced
his key themes in privileging the significance of the studio as a place to
review and reorganize private and public worlds through some model of
performative enactment – a creative strategy that includes animation. His
pre-occupation with the deeper roots of Modernism was also to the fore,
stressing the continuity of arts and cultural practices, rather than any sudden
or unforeseen radicalism, and further how manifestations of the absurd or
the satiric effectively offers up a context in which epistemological enquiry
takes place, and ultimately generates new knowledge. In works as varied as

Tide Table (2003), I Am Not Me, The Horse is Not Mine (2008) to Film Flip
Books (2012), Kentridge has explored the ways in which narratives are
generated in the spaces between plausible facts and materiality and promoted
an ambivalent fictional turn that is made available by denying veracity and
embracing the perceived, the surreal, or the seemingly illogical as the
harboring agency of truth and insight. In challenging the falsehoods of
received knowledge, and focusing on reconsidering and restructuring the
‘fragments’ of experience, Kentridge both reconfigures accepted (grand)
narratives and engages with making sense of moral and political order.
Animation and its ‘Spectrum’ of both technique and discourse offers him the
mutability of expression that apprehends a continuous movement through
the world that constantly prompts metonymic suggestion. In making images
within images; books within books; moving parts within fluid mechanisms;
and making process central to the outcomes of the works, Kentridge points
up interiority/exteriority; inside/outside; and the execution of mark-making
as the evidence of the physical and philosophic urgency to express.
Krauss has addressed Kentridge’s technique of making ‘drawings for
projection’ (a term that immediately re-defines ‘animation’ yet specifically
relates to it) and his focus on ‘stalking the drawing’ by walking backwards
and forwards between camera and canvas as he accumulates and erases his
charcoal images. She notes:
The automatism he has discovered – ‘drawings for projection’ – works

itself out in a continuing series. Whatever else that series focuses on –
apartheid, capitalist greed, eros, memory – the automatism of his process
places procedure before meaning, or rather trusts to the fact that his new
medium – his new automatism – will induce meaning. ‘The hope is that
without directly plunging the surgeon’s knife, the arcane process of
obsessively walking between the camera and the drawing board will pull
to the surface, intimations of the interior’ [Kentridge].
KRAUSS 2005: 105
Kentridge’s technique seeks to use the interval between frames as a space

in which his unconscious, intuitive thoughts emerge to prompt the new
intervention in the image. This is closely related to the approach of animators
– all working in different techniques – from Norman McLaren to Nick Park
to Chris Landreth, and many others, in which the palimpsest is evoked
by the recognition that what has been erased remains in some sense present
as something new is engraved, drawn, manipulated or layered upon it. Yet,
Kentridge remains distinctive. His particular approach to apprehending the
gestalt and insisting upon ‘animification’ is achieved by the synergistic
aspects of his skill, background and consciousness in relation to the diverse
disciplines of, and beyond, the medium, and permit him his individual voice.
This is the case for all the ‘animators’ across the ‘Spectrum’. It was this kind
of ‘affordance’ or ‘correspondence’ that was noticed by The Kovásznai
Research Centre Foundation, however, when they approached Kentridge to
engage with the rediscovered work of György Kovásznai.
The Kovásznai Research Centre Foundation felt that Kovásznai needed
an introduction, both in relation to his role in Cold War Hungary and to
contemporary arts culture in the modern era, so identified Kentridge as a
figure with a parallel and related model of practice. Kentridge was always
aware that any work by a South African artist in the period before the end
of apartheid would be read in the light of the country’s segregational politics,
and this both inspired but partly compromised the artwork. Kentridge
noted:
These two elements – our history and the moral imperative arising from
that – are the factors for making that personal beacon rise into the
immovable rock of apartheid. To escape this rock is the job of the artist.
These two constitute the tyranny of our history. And escape is necessary,
for as I stated, the rock is possessive, and inimical to good work. I am
not saying that apartheid, or indeed, redemption, are not worthy of
representation, describing, or exploration. I am saying that the scale and
weight with which this rock presents itself is inimical to that task.
KENTRIDGE in KRAUSS 2005: 97
Kentridge presents the edifice of apartheid ideology as insurmountable in

the same way as Kovásznai sees the authoritarianism of Soviet Russia in the
governance of Hungary, but both see an imperative to let the art itself inform
resistance, even if it is only implicitly political. The sheer imperative to
express and individuate is to challenge orthodoxies and expectations. To do
this in animation is to also thwart anticipated norms of creative practice,
especially when it is used to embrace the gestalt in the context of installation;
to insist upon an ‘animification’ that presents its own condition as a model
of difference and resistance.
The sheer directness of mark-making in the work of Kentridge and
Kovásznai signals an immediacy of intent and purpose and, as Kentridge
remarked of Kovásznai’s work, ‘the urgency, the need to produce, the
compulsion to create is evident in the painting and the animation. This in
itself has something to say, because it is not bound up by any particular
thing it feels it should say, or must say’ (Kentridge 2016). Even when both
do have something particular to communicate, neither betrays its complexity
by propagandistic message-making, but rather by using the freedom of
expression to represent the expression of freedom, while fully knowing the
constraints against which such art needs to push.
This is where the rediscovered art and animation of György Kovásznai
becomes especially important because the cache of material, in the first
instance, simply existed as a ‘body of work’, and as such demanded

categorization, contextualization and criticism. More significantly, from the
point of view of this analysis, it is vital that the work is not explored and
rendered as part of old schisms and categories but revealed through the
gestalt; through an ‘animification’ of a previously limited material reality.
Usefully, the first engagement with the material by the Kovásznai Foundation
Research Centre took on the broad principle that Kovásznai’s paintings and
animation were equally significant, each relating directly to the other, and
that Kovásznai’s own writing would be pertinent in helping to offer both a
historiography of, and commentary upon, the pieces. This also pointed to
the idea that the work was primarily pertinent for installation, and the
gallery context, but, crucially, that it was important to identify and situate
the various aspects of the work, historically, technically and contextually.
The Kovásznai Research Centre Foundation and the cultural bodies in
Hungary essentially invested in the extent and variation of the work to
explore the relationship between an artist and the State in Hungary during
the Cold War, principally during the period of the 1960s and 1970s. Perhaps
even more significantly, though, their work was prompted by the fact
that Kovásznai was strangely absent from any prominent discourses in
art history, animation history and cultural history, and thus offered up a
curiously ‘blank canvas’ by which his achievement needed to be recovered,
evaluated and explained. It was not the fact that Kovásznai was not known,
but the confluence of his own contempt for, and distance from, such
discourses, and the State’s essential wish not to properly verify and
acknowledge his work, that led to its marginalization and loss; all except for
those who knew of it in his family and among his working cognoscenti.
Kovásznai’s own insularity and his commitment to the Hungarian context
limited his presence on an international stage. Crucially, Kovásznai was also
afforded the rare opportunity to both work as an individual and commercial
artist within the Pannonia studio, thus rendering it as both a Kentridge-style
context for private philosophical and political practice, and a place in which
he worked on studio outputs to secure his living. These factors led to what
Iványi-Bitter has noted was Kovásznai’s absence from the canon even at the
national level, but with the rediscovery of the work in a store outside
Budapest in the mid-2000s, she suggests:
[T]wo decades after the end of the Cold War, in the era of asynchronicity,
of parallel modernities, of global assemblages, we must seize the special
historical opportunity that artistic products of either the East or the West
side of the Cold War period can be compared on the basis of their
common domain of reference, on the common ground of modernism
[. . .] Kovásznai should not remain an isolated phenomenon. It is time for
his work to receive its due place in the art history of the Cold War Europe.
IVÁNYI-BITTER 2016: 306–307
There is a pertinent confluence in the idea of the ‘Animation Spectrum’,

Dreyfuss’ ‘Indefinable Modalities’, Kentridge’s ‘Modernist Absurdism’ and
Iványi-Bitter’s notions of asynchronicity and assemblage, in helping to define
a gestalt that usefully conflates animation practice with its philosophic and
political imperatives, without those imperatives being especially explicit or
polemical, again helping to further identify the ‘animification’ of experience.
Iványi-Bitter’s relocation of Kovásznai’s work, both in its period, but, more
importantly, in the here and now of an uncertain and fluid ‘Modernity’,
relates readily to the idea that while such a body of work can be retrospectively
situated, the absence of a significant critical discourse around it permits its
further relocation in contemporary debates. Equally, the work is inherently
ideologically charged, and historically specific in some core respects, so it
resists postmodern claims to mere aesthetic surfaces and glib intertextuality.
Rather, it becomes readily located in the Modernist paradigm I first explored
when looking at the emergence of the American animated cartoon (Wells
2002: 19–37). Frederick Kael insists that ‘[the] sense of Modern and
Modernism in any era is always of “becoming”. It may be new and different;
it may be subverting the old, becoming an agent of disorder and even
destruction’ (Kael 1985: 3–4) Kovásznai’s working context was one of
resistance and challenge, not merely to the oppressive politics of the regime,
but perhaps, even more pressingly, the limits of the arts establishment. It is
in this that I also wish to point to ‘animation’ as the key creative vehicle in
modernizing both art and political expression (then and now) and reconciling
high and popular culture, and evidenced through the ‘animification’ of
visual culture. Further, to take up Kael’s model of ‘radical’, ‘moderate’ and
‘conservative’ Modernism (Kael 1985: 14), Kovásznai’s work oscillated
between opposition and difference (radicalism), critical revisionism
(moderation) and satirical dismissal of known but less harmful aspects of
culture (conservatism), and this brought him into varying degrees of contact
and conflict with the authorities. Kovásznai obviously viewed this as being
in dialogue with the figures and institutions that determined Hungarian
culture, and though there was evident risk in both having his opinions and
in producing his work, he nevertheless pursued his discourse through his
art. He clearly possessed a compulsion to express, to essentially ‘become’ a
citizen as his work traced the process of ‘becoming’ in its vivid colours, fluid
metamorphoses and playful mixed-media interrogations of symbolically
charged people, places and texts. Like Kentridge, the sheer imperative to
make art, and to contribute to the understanding of the gestalt through
‘animification’, embraced its fragmented sources and fractured idioms in a
re-combinative, re-constituted way that spoke its own language. Yet, it also
achieved a universal level of expression drawn from the gestalt, while yet
working to evolve it.
The discovery of the whole oeuvre of an artist, animator and polemicist,
in a neglected farm building near Budapest, provided a dynamic, colourful
and profound insight into Hungarian art and culture in the shadow of Soviet
oppression. Recently exhibited at ‘Kovásznai: A Cold War Artist, Animation,
Painting, Freedom’, in Somerset House, London in 2016, his work represents
a relentless creative response to the Totalitarian regime and the emergence
of ‘Pop art’. Most importantly, though, it is a prolific response to his own
conflicted passions, pains and philosophical principles – an inchoate outlook
that constantly sought to express itself in the diversity of his vivid paintings,
experimental animation and philosophical essays. These works ultimately
insist upon a reappraisal of the relationship between Eastern European art
sensibilities and the Western avant garde, as it has found a confluence in the
animation gestalt, and found expression in the gallery, and in a culture of
‘animification’.
Kovásznai evidenced his unique take on Hungarian art and authority
early in his career. As a student, enamoured by the giants of Western
Modernism – Picasso, Cézanne, Matisse – and frustrated by the academy’s
oppressive arts education, he left his studies to work as a miner in Komló,
Dorog, Tata and Tokodaltáró. Fascinated by Marxist ideas but resistant to
their authoritarian application, he wanted to reacquaint Socialist Realism
with socialist reality. His experience with the real proletariat, and not the
one imagined by the government, ultimately led to his film, Joy of Light
(1965), a collage animation reminiscent of Len Lye’s Trade Tattoo (1937). It
combined photographs of the miners, painted backgrounds and Gerald
Scarfe-like drawings of the sensual energies of the miners’ excavations. If
Klahr insists Kovásznai’s art is best understood through a knowledge of
collage, it is actually the animation that reveals its purpose and identity. The
sheer diversity in the ‘indefinable modalities’ Kovásznai employs in his
composition and editing repositions the implied narratives as a set of feeling
states and emotive improvisations. This eclectic set of transitions both
challenges the limits of State-approved art and draws upon the tension
between documentary evidence and interpretive graphics to suggest a new
mode of ‘realism’ that respects and admires the miners and their work, while
exposing the challenges of Socialist ‘work’.
Kovásznai’s early films, part-collaborations with established Modernist
painter and designer, Dezsö Korniss, fell foul of the regime. Monologue
(1963), though permitted to screen for one week at the Corvin Cinema,
Budapest, was thereafter banned for pointing a far too satirical finger at
governance. Drawing upon the montage theories of Eisenstein, the influence
of Polish animation iconoclasts, Jan Lenica and Walerian Borowczyk, and
even the zany antics of Bob Godfrey and Terry Gilliam in the UK, the film
was a clear statement of a free spirit. Told from the point of view of a young
girl in her mid-twenties, Kovásznai portrays the girl’s grandparents during
the era of World War I, and her parents during the 1930s, as avatars for
a critique of the State. The grandfather’s moustache becomes a character
of its own – ‘it came, it saw, it conquered. A big moustache pleased
women’ – and operates as a direct reference to the Emperor of Austria and

King of Hungary, Franz Joseph I. The lies and infidelities of the grandparents
beneath the moral and ethical veneer they publically uphold becomes a
thinly veiled critique of his regime. The decadence of her parents in the
1930s – embodied in carefree dancing – is also cast as a complicit engagement
with the rise of Fascism, and both eras are characterized in Kovásznai’s
crossover photo-montage pop-art style by images of ordinary people lost to
war and political oppression; a widowed nation lost to its authoritarian
elites. The images speak to Kentridge’s ideas about Modernist Absurdism;
fragments and fractures recomposed to recast and animate Hungarian
culture in a light that shows Kovásznai’s distaste and disdain for the
consensual practices that allowed authoritarian powers to prevail unopposed.
Young Man Playing the Old Masters’ Gallery (1964) was to infuriate
further. A young man playing a guitar in a gallery is visibly aroused at a
female nude, a sensual experience so palpable that the nude also begins to
dance under his gaze. Again, Kovásznai’s recombinant style employs collage,
photographic effects and cut-out animation allied to a rock ’n’ roll and jazz
score to play up the phallic play of the young man and the elusive distance of
the nude. The film’s offence essentially lies in its critique of Hungarian arts
culture. Kovásznai essentially saw such a culture as complicit in its political
conservatism and, as such, showed a flagrant disregard for the sobriety and
canonical weight of past works. Both Kentridge and Kovásznai use the
implied resonance of their own moral and ethical position as it is embedded
in the work to reveal the unacceptable practices of the regimes they live
within. By essentially co-opting the iconography of artistic and social bodies
as they become politically entwined, evidencing their authoritarian agenda,
Kentridge and Kovásznai use their animation process to re-configure the
meaning and affect of culturally familiar signs and symbols – this is a crucial
aspect of the ways in which ‘animification’ occurs, and such work contributes
to an ongoing ‘animification’ of a changing gestalt in its historic period. If
Kentridge craves reform, though, Kovásznai desires and prefers the progressive
music, art and open sexuality of the West.
Metamorphoses (1964) was Kovásznai’s clearest declaration of his
intention to reinvent the animated film. ‘This film is but a painting brought
into a single movement,’ he states at the beginning of the film, before
embarking on a motion painting in which male and female ‘portraits’ in
various styles and representations mutate. Such liminal flux draws attention
to both form and content, simultaneously citing Modernist arts idioms and
the constant uncertainties of relationships. The physical and material
collapse of a man and woman into one another anticipates similar imagery
in Czech experimental filmmaker, Jan Švankmajer’s later clay animation,
Dimensions of Dialogue (1982). If Kentridge’s milieu is mark-making with
charcoal, then Kovásznai’s is paint, but both effectively ‘draw’ spontaneously
in their chosen medium, privileging erasure and mutability in the image
as the most vibrant embodiment of feeling and experience. Unknowingly,

Kovásznai also echoed the desire of the first great Hungarian to impact
upon the field of animation. John Halas, who established Halas & Batchelor
Cartoons in the UK in 1940 and made the similarly innovative The Magic
Canvas (1948) with fellow Hungarians, designer Peter Foldes and composer
Mátyás Seiber. At the beginning, The Magic Canvas declares: ‘Here is
something different from the ordinary cartoon film.’ Sadly, Kovásznai, even
after one of his films was shown at the Annecy Animation Festival, was
unaware of Halas’ efforts in ASIFA – the global organization representing
animation artists – to promote the form worldwide as the embodiment
of a utopian outlook in an ever-darkening world. Kovásznai, it seems, was
only dedicated to bringing utopia to Hungary, and carried out his work
in a way that sought to use animation – however personal and seemingly
abstract – as a documentary encounter with his own country. Crucially, this
kind of documentary encounter is yet another instance of ‘animification’,
in that such visualizations become the most significant evidence of a changing
gestalt, and not one managed or authorized by more conventional
representational means.
Employed by day at the Pannonia animation studio as one of its directors,
he continued his prolific personal production at night, embracing numerous
approaches and techniques, and drawing upon the gestalt in animation to
play out his aesthetic experimentation as political intervention. Kovásznai,
remained constantly monitored by the State, a fact established when it was
discovered that he was regularly reported upon to the counterintelligence
agency by his best friend László Végh, who described his colleague as a
‘dangerous literary hooligan’. This dangerous literacy not merely manifested
itself in his animation and huge, urgent, dynamic canvases, but in theoretical
essays on cinema and art in the periodical, Nagyvilàg, and in theatre scripts.
Kovásznai worked with illegal theatre groups, and often performed his plays
to private gatherings. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that it is his ten-minute
adaptation of Hamlet (1967), executed in simple watercolors and felt-tip
drawings in the style of children’s illustrated books, that reveals the most
about his views on spying, betrayal and the decay of the State as a place
without dignified human values – something he called ‘the Danish Stench’.
Undaunted, Kovásznai made the most of Budapest café life and the new
sensualities of popular culture as the post-Ràkosi era encouraged ‘thaw’ and
reduced ‘terror’. Kovásznai’s ‘anima-vérité’ combined personal experience
with the depiction of material culture in Budapest, and anticipates the rise of
animated documentary in the contemporary era as a way in which the
subjective is readily imbued in the indexical and verifiably realist codes of
conventional non-fiction texts (Kriger 2012, Honess Roe 2013). Blossoming
No 3369 (1971), featuring the contentious subject of a young woman
advertising in the personal column of the newspaper, was Kovásznai’s first
explicit experiment in the form, which he describes as an attempt ‘to depict
the sociographic nature of the matter, within a subjective, artistic sphere’

(Iványi-Bitter 2016: 76). It was also a vindication of his view that ‘Total
Cinema’, defined in one of his essays, combined actuality and animation; the
most persuasive moving image combination in using aesthetics to resist the
received knowledge about the State in its ‘realist’ texts. Again, this becomes
part of a cultural process in which verification of the gestalt emerges as a
mode of ‘animification’. Kovásznai produced many studies and prototypes to
represent the woman in Blossoming No 3369, but the project did not turn
out as Kovásznai originally intended, since he wanted to make seven vignettes
addressing the topic, and only one was made. It is nevertheless an important
step in the emergence of a signature style, and in once more privileging a
woman’s point of view as the mediator of difference in Socialist culture.
As in Kentridge’s later works, Kovásznai also seeks to draw upon radical
or formative modes of image making and performance to articulate subjective
interventions into social processes and inchoate urban spaces. The City
Through My Eyes (1971) and Nights in the Boulevard (1972) are essentially
Kovásznai’s ‘city symphonies’, animated hybrids of Dziga Vertov and Jean
Rouch, each seeking to capture the atmosphere of his beloved birthplace.
Memory of the Summer of ’74 (1974) aestheticizes the sunshine and sexuality
of the new pop freedoms in Budapest, but only to use this veneer of openness
and individual excess to invoke the memories of the suppressed uprisings
in Hungary in 1956, and, for him, the more recent Soviet intervention in
the former Czechoslovakia in 1968. For all his intellectual resistance,
and contrived dandyism – itself a mockery of State elitism – Kovásznai
could never fully reconcile his desire to replace the concrete limits of
an oppressive ideology with the liberation of a more personalized yet
universal consciousness. His one-man counterculture, using the synergistic
opportunities in animation, could never succeed for all his efforts. There is
some relationship here to the gestalt model developed by fellow Hungarian,
film critic, theorist and screenwriter, Béla Balàzs, and his inherent challenge
to Eisensteinian montage and a commitment to affective expression. It is
Ça-ira: Song of the French Revolution (1973), with its vivid glutinous
metamorphoses of the key figures of the Revolution – Robespierre, Marat,
Danton and Saint Just – mixed with the pictorial suggestion of ordinary
people that best represents Kovásznai’s outlook at this time. Paris, symbolized
in the mutating presence of Notre-Dame cathedral, itself signifies the impact
and affect of the French enlightenment on Hungarian art in general, but also
the tensions between individual faith and State hierarchy. The film’s fluid
manipulations of paint not merely suggest Cezanne or Van Gogh, but the
very flux of existence, and the deep ambivalence, contradiction and brutality
in the execution of State power. The film offers a perfect metaphor for
Kovásznai’s own talent and turmoil in the midst of the Totalitarian, while
also speaking to the gestalt of both animation techniques as mediators of
aesthetic and social discourse, and the ‘animification’ of culture.
Though little known, Kovásznai later made an animated feature called

Bubble Bath: A Musical Special Effects Film to the Rhythm of a Heartbeat
(1979), part of the Pannonia studio’s plan to win back Hungarian audiences
from their engagement with imported live action films. This may be seen as
an important achievement in an era when classical animation in the Disney
model was at a particular nadir, and feature animation was only saved by
the efforts of Ralph Bakshi in more controversial adult fare like Fritz the
Cat (1972) and Coonskin (1975). Inevitably, Kovásznai’s intentions were
more political than lurid, and though the jazz scored narrative revolves
around a love triangle, his real theme is the everyday implications of ‘fridge
socialism’, as the small-scale enterprise and consumerism informing the
New Economic policies in Hungary began to characterize the János Kádár
era of government.
Kovásznai died tragically early of leukemia in 1983, at the age of
forty-nine, his late canvasses imbued with the colour of blood, and the
self-conscious knowledge that the vivid colours that characterized both
his painting and animation offered an enduring sense of ‘life’ beyond his
own corporeal existence. This embrace of human experience and the
fundamental sense of ‘being’ that his work embodied uses the synergies
of arts practices and social engagement to create art that finds a ready place
in the gallery, but moves beyond its confines to speak to a wider ‘Spectrum’
in animation, and interfaces with historically situated societal concerns
to define the emergence of ‘animification’ in general. As such, his work
extends the idea of the gestalt to properly evidence the synergistic nature
not merely of animation as a form, or social infrastructures as intricate
mechanisms of complex behaviour, but as the clear representation of
consciousness engaging with its perception, reception and sensual absorption
of his world.
References
Crafton, D. (1993). Before Mickey: The Animated Film 1898–1928. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Dreyfuss, L. (2007). Momentary Momentum Catalogue. London: Parasol Unit.
Honess Roe, B. (2013). Animated Documentary. Basingstoke/New York: Palgrave
Macmillan.
Iványi-Bitter, B. (2016). Kovásznai: A Cold War Artist, Animation, Painting,
Freedom. Budapest: Kovásznai Research Centre Foundation.
Johnson, O. and F. Thomas (1981). Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. New
York: Abbeville Press.
Kael, F. (1985). Modern and Modernism: The Sovereignty of the Artist 1885–1925.
New York: Atheneum.
Klahr, L. (2005). ‘A Clarification’, in C. Gehman and S. Reinke (eds), The Sharpest
Point: Animation at the End of Cinema, 96–125. Ottawa: XXY Press.
Krauss, R. (2005). ‘ “The Rock”: William Kentridge and Drawing for Projection’, in
C. Gehman and S. Reinke (eds), The Sharpest Point: Animation at the End of
Cinema, 234–235. Ottawa: XXY Press.
Kriger, J. (2012). Animated Realism: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at the Animated
Documentary Genre. Waltham, MA/Oxford: Focal Press/Elsevier.
Padiglione Austriaco, La Biennale di Venezia 2013 Catalogue.
Wells, P. (2002). Animation and America. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Wells, P. (2016). ‘Personal Interview with William Kentridge’, February 2016.
3
On Analogical Thinking
Jan Švankmajer’s Jabberwocky

and Alice
Mareike Sera
Introduction
An ‘intense and emotionally exhausting slice of life’ (Cinephilia and Beyond
n.d.). Is film able to cut a slice of life? On the basis of an intense and
emotionally exhaustive experience? Is it able to change life? One might
think so. Understanding film as a slice of life is a common film critical
analogy. Similar to the analogy of film as philosophy (Rushton 2011, Read
and Goodenough 2005, Wartenberg 2007, Vaughan 2013, Herzogenrath
2017). These analogies touch upon mimetic issues. How are representational
and real world intertwined, the actual and the virtual? How do we
understand each in relation to the other? A dialectical understanding sets
both in dramatic tension to each other, expecting the non-identical ‘essence’
of fictional and real worlds to reveal the other, in the process of ‘becoming
Other’. This understanding accentuates the force of imagination, as Surrealist
writing and art makes quite aware. Actual and virtual worlds meet on eye
level, transform each other in the elements acted upon, but also in the
intimate transmutation of the actor and her/his perception of the world. As
André Breton (1969: 174) writes in The Second Manifesto of Surrealism ‘the
philosopher’s stone is nothing more or less than that which was to enable
man’s imagination to take a stunning revenge on all things’.
In a similar vein, Richard Rushton (2011: 2) asks: ‘Why should the
creative aspects of the world be deemed secondary, as ornaments, as products
devoid of being, a being which is reserved solely for natural or physical

objects?’ Rushton refers in this context to Cornelius Castoriadis’ ‘The
Imaginary: Creation in the Socio-Historical Domain’. Castoriadis calls on
‘the philosophers to reverse their approach and begin with humanity’s
creative acts – dreams, poems, music – as the basis of ontological enquiry’
(Rushton 2011: 2). Rushton continues: ‘Let the imaginary aspects of human
life be those that determine the reality of things’ (ibid.).
These passages indicate where one might break with the analogy of
‘film as a slice of life’. The intention is not to place fictional over actual
realities. The dialectical tension evolving around non-identity, mediation,
negation and contradiction remains intact (Kautzer 2015: 34). As this paper
would like to suggest, turning to imagination rather aims to understand the
transmutations taking place between real and fictional worlds on a different
level – the plane of analogical reasoning. The force of imagination – as
means of knowledge and practice able to act on reality and transform it
(Schmitt 2016: 232) – holds real and fictional worlds together, weaving
them indistinguishably into one another. Dialectics designate the processes
of dramatic confrontation and transformation, while analogy points towards
hidden aspects of intimate initiation and revelation. At the moment of
inspiration, of working through, of passion and devotion, real and fictional
worlds are at their very nearest – indistinguishably close. The principle of
analogy emphasizes how the imaginative experience transforms the acted
upon and the actor in due process. It liberates the experience as a form of
reflection that invites multiple perspectives, but dispenses of an ultimate
end. It takes the form of an introspection, but turns its reflective mechanisms
inward out – much like an inverted imagination.
As it will be put forward, analogy’s relation to its ‘object of imagination’
is marked by an open and integrative attitude, but also by an irritating
absence of intentionality. The lack of a specific ‘object of imagination’ does
not only apply to ‘how’ but also to ‘what’ one imagines. This is crucial to
surrealist understandings of imagination and its social role, particularly in
the context of Czech Surrealism. This chapter will focus on two films by
renowned Czech animator Jan Švankmajer: Jabberwocky (Žvahlav aneb
šatičky Slaměného Huberta, 1971) and Alice (Něco z Alenky, 1988).
First, the phenomenon of analogy will be discussed from a broader
academic perspective, while introducing in the second part Švankmajer’s
work and the role of analogy to Czech Surrealism. Parts three and four, then,
will explore analogical thinking by applying it to different contexts:
Jabberwocky is discussed in relation to George Bataille’s Story of the Eye
(Analogy I) and, in the following, Alice with reference to the philosophical
work of Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi (Analogy II). The result is a collage technique,
which is vulnerable as analogical reasoning, especially if brought in
resonance with dialectics, as will become clear. Different sets are to unfold
and enrich each other. Accordingly, the argument might appear to jump
ON ANALOGICAL THINKING 31
occasionally, with explanatory bridges missing; however, this inconvenience

appears worthwhile, as it stimulates and foments the hermeneutic passion
of the palimpsest, a page of text written, erased and written over anew
again.
Analogical thinking: the missing premise

Analogical reasoning allows us to stretch the possibilities of describing the
world and the experience of it. By comparison, one explores the conjectures
between distinct realms and learns new things about them in due course.
As Julian S. Weitzenfeld (1984: 137) observes: ‘One of the attractions of
analogical reasoning has been that it is commonly taken to be a form of
ampliative reasoning, reasoning that leads to knowledge about the target
that is not contained in its premises.’ Describing a film, thus, as a ‘slice of
life’ – to return to this example – might evoke a series of spontaneous as well
as highly developed concepts that link fiction and reality. ‘And’ is important
in this respect. Analogical reasoning and feeling explores associations in a
most open manner.
Cognitive sciences have conducted extensive research on the role of
analogy in human perception over the past thirty years (Hesse 1966,
Holyoak and Thagard 1995, Bartha 2010, Hofstadter and Sander 2013).
Models explore, for example, mechanisms such as the retrieval of relevant
source domains, analogical mapping across domains, the transfer of
information and the learning of new categories (Hummel and Holyoak
1997). With the philosophical interest, the focus shifts towards the value of
connecting and conjoining realms. Berardi’s philosophy is a clear example in
this respect, as will be elaborated. If analogy pertains to a central mechanism
in human cognition, which criteria set ‘good’ from ‘bad’ analogies apart?
This question is difficult to answer, as what is to be found, the premise, is
and is not (yet) existent. Do you want to judge analogies from the promise
of the result? Or the openness of the process?
The merit of analogical thinking emerges, once you embrace its
uncertainty. This is where it fully develops its creative potential. The outcome
is unknown and leans philosophically towards radical suspicion. The lack of
certainty does not result from insufficient background knowledge. There are
ways to methodologically work around it, such as enumeration, surveillance
and inference (Weitzenfeld 1984: 146). These operations can substantiate
arguments based on analogy. Nonetheless, suspicion works like a corrosive
force on the underlying idea of sameness that draws different realms together.
The shadow of a doubt accompanies the emerging ‘new’ and turns it inside
out. Therein, analogical reasoning represents something like an ‘inverse’
imagination, as it does not work towards an expected outcome (premise).
Analogy as inverse imagination leaves the imagined object open and
susceptible to injury and failure. It opens an intimate void in a concatenation

of references and objects, which is not indefinitely undetermined, but bare
and susceptible to radical suspicion.
Czech Surrealism, dialectics and analogy

Analogy and dialectics are usually perceived as different types of reasoning,
as incompatible or even opposed ways of thinking. The idea to perceive
analogy as ‘inverse imagination’, which the next part of the chapter intends
to root in surrealist understandings, draws a correlation between analogy
and dialectics. According to Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson
(2016: 11), Gérard Legrand (1971: 154) has spoken of analogy as the
‘ “clasp” of the dialectical necklace’, noting how ‘[t]he supreme relation of
reconciled being does not cease to be dialectical, but it proves to be (or
becomes) equally analogical’.
Correlating analogy and dialectics is important as it describes a specific
way to approach the world and with this imagination. Analogy is thought to
relate equivocally distinct but mutually participatory terms, while dialectics
are meant to relate opposed and annulled propositions. Analogates (meaning
the things, terms or concepts analogised) ‘participate’ in a congregation
bound together by an uncertain but unifying analogon (meaning analogical
principle), where the propositions of dialectics are meant to be annulled and
resolved into a higher and richer synthetic unity of opposites. Analogy and
dialectics describe different and even conflicting traditions of thought –
with analogy associated with thinkers such as Aristotle and Aquinas and
dialectics advanced by philosophers such as Plato, Hegel and Marx. Surrealist
approaches submerge these traditions. A phenomenology of imagination,
such as the surrealist’s, explores ‘ways of understanding’ in their capacity to
percolate the world and reproach social and political ills. Exploring the
means of imagination means to understand and feel its force of transformation
on reality. Opening dialectics towards analogical modes of reasoning allows
us to integrate diagnostic and imperative ends. Social ills are analysed
(diagnostic function) and acted upon (imperative function), but in a mode
that embraces passivity, fragility and failure. The ‘end’ remains fractured and
diverted towards ‘and’.
The convergence of analogy and dialectics is particularly important to
Czech Surrealism. Declarations by the group support this claim, inspired by
the theoretical work of Vratislav Effenberger (Fijalkowski and Richardson
2001: 58–93, Dryje 2012). Effenberger was a key figure in promoting and
understanding a surrealist phenomenology of imagination. He advocated a
cycle of interpretation games that linked intimately to analogical models of
thought (‘The Platform of Prague Twenty Years On’ 2001: 84). The idea was
to support phenomenological understandings of imagination in ludic and
experimental activities of the group. Švankmajer, who joined the surrealist

group with his wife Eva Švankmajerová in the early 1970s, engaged intensely
in these activities.1 Švankmajer started making films in the mid-1960s.
Before that, he worked in Black Theatre and was trained in puppetry at the
Prague Theatre Academy (DAMU).2 However, it was only with The Garden
(Zahrada, 1968), The Ossuary (Kostnice, 1970) and Jabberwocky that
Švankmajer ‘developed the form of the Surrealist imagination [. . .] in the
full light of a consciously Surrealist response to the world and a critical
reflection on his own endeavours’ (Dryje 2012: 263). An intense professional
and personal relationship between Švankmajer, Effenberger and others in
the group, such as Ludvík Šváb, Andrew Lass, Martin Stejskal and Albert
Marenčin, formed. It was accompanied by a self-imposed marginalization of
the group, a ‘double isolation’ that demonstrated the group’s distance
FIGURE 3.1 Eva Švankmajerová, Vratislav Effenberger, Alena Nádvorníková,

Karol Baron, Martin Stejskal, Juraj Mojžíš, Emilia Medková, Ludvík Šváb, Jan
Švankmajer, Albert Marenčin, 1977, collage, 38 × 42 cm. Image copyright of and
reprinted courtesy of ATHANOR, Film Production Company Ltd. Jaromir Kallista
& Jan Švankmajer.
1
Ludic experimentation leans with Švankmajer strongly towards tactilism Švankmajer (1994,
2014) and Dryje (2012: 273–285).
2
On Švankmajer’s background in theatre and puppetry see Hames (1995) and Schmitt (2012
a, b and c).
towards both bourgeois and Stalinist ideology.3 Related to this, the group
signed Charter ’77 in 1977.
The declaration attests to the first public reclamation of resistance against
uncontrolled Stalinist power. Among the first signatories was Effenberger,
who reserved the right, though, to ‘consider the need for differentiation in
the forces forming the opposition later’ (‘The Platform of Prague Twenty
Years On’ 2001: 85).
The group’s decision to enter a state of ‘double isolation’ relates inherently
to the desire to develop the perspective submerging analogical and dialectical
reasoning. Analogy allows to shield the ‘noetic and integrating aspects’ of
imagination (‘The Platform of Prague Twenty Years On’ 2001: 87) from an
idealist and positivist orientation as radical doubt works against ideological
frameworks. Dialectics address the critical function of art, its diagnostic
interest and ties it to socio-political realities. Analogy is able to breathe
within these tight confounds, as ‘the septic kernels of life’ (‘The Platform of
Prague Twenty Years On’ 2001: 89) find themselves implanted at the very
heart of analogy (radical doubt), but simultaneously worked around and
short-circuited in unexpected moments of spontaneous revelation. As these
moments are non-intentional, they possess autonomy and the ability of self-
organization. ‘The Platform of Prague Twenty Years On’ (2001: 89–90) cites
Effenberger, who understood the ‘imaginary object’ as characterized by the
tendency of the imagination to objectify and organize reality, and continues
to explain how imagination creates: ‘retroactively [. . .] reality itself, or
rather clears a way of access by creating the new imaginary object [. . .]
through the faculty of dynamising thought in the sense of the most
consequent objectification and materialisation of this thought – towards the
act’.
3
The years between 1969 and 1977 were marked by public silence and repression by
the authorities. In the brief period between 1968 and 1969, the group was able to publish
some articles, among them the first issue of the group’s journal Analogon: Surrealism,
Psychoanalysis, Anthropology, Diagonal Science. The group managed to issue it despite the
brutal end of the Prague Spring: ‘[The Surrealists were able] to take advantage of autonomous
possibilities for publication only during the brief period of 1968–69 when the liberalisers
had already retreated but the restoration of Stalinism had not yet put down roots. During
this short period, the surrealists were able to publish several books which, for the first time
in many years and for a long time thereafter, would be the only expression of their point
of view: two works by Vratislav Effenberger, part of the complete works of Karel Teige,
the Surrealist Departure Point collection and finally the first and also last issue of the review
Analogon. Once more the great silence of official death followed, decreed from on high,
forbidding all publications, exhibitions and other public activities [. . .] (the only attempt to
organise a collective exhibition, The Sphere of Dream, in a small provincial gallery in Sovinec
in 1983 was finally banned, although this was only announced on the very evening the
exhibition, which had already been mounted, should have opened)’ (‘The Platform of Prague
Twenty Years On’ 2001: 85).
The ‘new imaginary object’, thus, represents an extrapolation of dialectic

reasoning, intensified and liberated in analogy. Imagination’s pretence to
objectify and organize reality is cut lose in analogy, as the dialectic desire
to form a synthesis is diverted towards analogy. A ‘new source of motor
energy’ (‘The Possible Against the Current’ 2001: 67) rests in analogy as
creative principle: processes of inventive short-circuiting take place, fleshing
out imagination’s drive to objectify and organize, materializing it and
therein making it tangible and thinkable – before the fact. It paves the
way for the impulse to act, contemplates the desire to act as it emerges and
moves forward. The means are adopted, probed and adapted towards
finding an attitude to action rather than describing an end of action. Analogy
frees the means of creative invention and intuition by turning dialectics
inside out.
This approach aims to strengthen what Teige terms the spiritual function
of art, the auto-intentionality of the artwork. Teige (1971 [1924] in Vojvodík
2015: 28) writes: ‘The work of art is complete and represents itself alone.
[. . .] it has its own order, its own language, independent and autonomous
and a full and specific form of expression. [. . .] It does not try to change the
world or influence practical life.’ The autonomous function of art has a quite
specific meaning in this context. Rather than negation, it links to inversion:
‘the negative grounds the positivity of a totalisation which is always
essentially conserved. [. . .] the negative is a conservative principle which
describes a situation in which nothing is lost’ (Libertson 1982: 15). It is
important to understand that the missing premise in analogical reasoning
does not represent a ‘straight’ ontological negation of reasoning or the force
of imagination in the senses of ‘not possible’ and ‘not existent’. Analogy’s
premise is missing in a fragmented, discontinuous manner that relates
to time rather than space. Ontological frameworks need to be adapted
dynamically to fully understand this idea.4
Analogy I: Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye

and Jan Švankmajer’s Jabberwocky
Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye (Histoire de l’oeil 1987 [1928]), renowned
for its excessive description of sexual obsessions and violence, takes an
4
One way to adapt and adopt ontological understandings in a dynamic way is to allow the
possibility of multiple and joined ontologies in the sense of a multiverse (Henare, Holbraad and
Wastell 2006, Halbmayer 2012). The strong interest in animism as an ontological framework
that Švankmajer takes in his work points in this direction. See the author’s publication
‘Intermedial Densities in the Work of Jan Švankmajer: A Media-anthropological Case Study’ in
Pethő (forthcoming).
unexpected turn on the last few pages. The story switches to a meta-narrative
level that relates important motives of the story – for example, that of eyes,
peeing and soaking through – (auto) biographically to a (fictive) author
figure. As these details are part of the story and not, it is impossible to decide,
how they relate to the ‘real’ author of the story. Meta-narrative turns tend to
serve this function, implanting a sting of doubt into the heart of the narrative.
As if to highlight this fact, the story ends (preliminary) with the following
lines: ‘I never linger over such memories, for they have long since lost any
emotional significance for me. There was no way I could restore them to life
except by transforming them and making them unrecognisable, at first
glance, to my eyes, solely because during that deformation they acquired the
lewdest of meanings’ (Bataille 1987 [1928]: 96).
Any phenomenology of imagination is aligned to a phenomenology of
remembering. The preliminary ending of Bataille’s Story of the Eye attests to
this. Imagined and memorized facts/motives blur into one another, sharing
an unsecure ontological ‘state’ between reality and fiction. Within this state
of ecstatic displacement, they cut themselves loose, gain autonomy and the
ability to self-organize. The motive of ‘eyes’ is important in this respect. As
it says in the above lines, the memorized facts/motives lose their emotional
significance as they become unrecognizable to the eyes of the speaker/author.
In the bizarre culmination of the story, the two main characters – Simone
and an unnamed narrator – aggressively seduce and murder a Catholic
priest, at the end of which one of their companions, Lord Edmund, cuts out
his eyes. The Lord keeps one of them as a trophy and Simone pushes the
other into her vagina, while having sex with the narrator.
The disturbing imagery works strongly towards transgression and
emancipation. It objectifies and self-organizes the motives in an astonishingly
liberated manner. The emancipatory process of the characters and objects/
motives does not take place for the eyes, meaning in a transparent manner,
but is implemented in the imaginative transformation of the objects/motives
that culminates in literally divorcing them from the viewing subject and
altering/expanding the perspective of perception – as the eye inserted into
Simone’s vagina describes a radically altered perspective of experience.
The young adolescents cut themselves loose from bourgeois morals by
pursuing sexual adventures. They rebel against the moral obligations that
their parents expect them to follow and emancipate themselves in this
respect. However, the revolt does not follow a surrogate idea of a better
world.
The idea hides well ‘beyond recognition’ in the force of the images to
transgress and self-organize. It becomes unrecognizable and uninteresting to
the eyes of the writer and the reader. It no longer addresses and concerns
them directly, but indirectly. As Roland Barthes (1972 [1963]: 239) writes:
‘Although Georges Bataille’s Historie de l’oeil includes several named
characters and the narrative of their erotic adventures, he certainly does not
give us the story of Simone, Marcelle, or the narrator [. . .]. Histoire de l’oeil
is actually the story of an object.’
This object, the eye, enters, according to Barthes, a cycle of migration that
places it ‘essentially in an image system’ (Barthes 1972 [1963]: 240) that
turns its objects less into products but, rather, the substance of imagination.
The system is based on analogy, for eyes as a motive become interchangeable
with eggs, bulls’ testicles and other ovular objects within the narrative.5
These systems weave into another on the grounds of analogy, lacking the
certainty of a common premise. As Barthes (1972 [1963]: 242) points out in
relation to the biographical meta-narrative at the end of the story:
doubtless the Eye, since this is its story, seems to predominate – the Eye
which we know to be that of the blind father himself whose whitish globe
rolled up when he urinated in front of the child; but in this case, it is the
very equivalence of ocular and genital which is original, not one of its
terms: the paradigm begins nowhere.
The biographical referent stands outside the imaginary system that relates
eyes to testicles, to eggs, etc. without being able to break the chain of
signification and flow of transformation between them. The cycle emancipates
from its biographical source just as Simone and the narrator gain autonomy
of their biological parents and their moral values by having each other. It/
they concern[s] them no longer. This ‘leap’ describes a shift in focus from
‘diagnostics’ to ‘imperative’ values. The force of imagination requires a
certain degree of distance to the biographic and biological experience in
order to unfold. The immersive experience needs to be cut open in order
to transgress and expand in order to be able to adapt and adopt ‘new’
perspectives (hermeneutic passion).
Jabberwocky: phenomenology of imagination and

remembering
Jabberwocky shares this imaginative experience: interrelated, self-pertained
objects of imagination that gain autonomy from biographical and biological
sources and still remain true to them. They do not cease to attest to the ills and
lesions molesting the background that they stem from (diagnostic function).
Švankmajer’s work is known for engaging intensely with personal obsessions
and fears. Childhood is a central theme of his films, closely intertwining a
phenomenology of imagination and remembering. Švankmajer’s fascination
for marionettes, for example, goes back to a puppet theatre that he received
5
A second imaginary system uses liquid metaphors, relating tears to cats’ milk, to egg yolks, to
frequent urination scenes, to blood and to semen.
FIGURE 3.2 Still from Jan Švankmajer’s Jabberwocky (1971): The child’s playroom.
as a present in his childhood. The obsession with food relates to the experience
that he was forced to eat and sent to camps especially designed for children
with eating disorders. Jabberwocky like Alice focuses strongly on the
imaginary world of children, drawing on the filmmaker’s experiences.6 The
narrative layering is complex. The still reproduced in Figure 3.2 demonstrates
this.
In five episodes, the film evokes a child’s perspective in which the
objects develop a spirit of their own, unveiling their innermost desires. Next
to the dolls’ house stands the main character, a boy’s sailor suit, cranking
frenetically a mechanism inside the house that moves little puppets until
they fall into the mill to be ground. The overspill of energy is already evident
in the still. A number of changeovers at different speeds (cranking, grinding,
boiling, flattening, etc.) are taking place, filling the film dynamically and
exhaustively. The excitement is concerted and counterbalanced in the overall
impression of control and isolation seizing the scene. The room, the child’s
6
The third film in this concatenation is Down to the Cellar (Do pivnice, 1982), which deals
with the filmmaker’s experience of fear when he was sent down to the cellar as a child for
potatoes.
playroom, has a window, but it opens only towards a courtyard surrounded

by high buildings. The view offered by the camera is mostly up-front.
Moreover, the idea of the painstaking manipulation of the objects before the
camera in the process of object-animation speaks of control and isolation.
This impression reads in different directions. On the diagnostic level, the
imagery overtly suggests children being gradually and unrelentingly formed
to fit social roles and norms. The ending of the film strongly supports this
idea: the boy’s sailor suit is replaced by a black adolescent suit hanging
stiff in the wardrobe. The child’s creative energy is stifled by authoritarian
structures. Alienation supplants the child’s force of imagination.
However, the sheer transformative energy emancipates the imagery of
‘strict’ diagnostic readings and makes a ‘leap’ towards imaginary autonomy,
just as the boy’s sailor suit is divorced of the boy’s body and remains true to
it. Motives gather around objects of imagination and form autonomous
referential systems or, rather, analogical constellation, as this paper would
like to suggest. One evolves around boiling liquids. The boy’s suit literally
‘leaps’ out of a bowl with boiling water. The steam ‘gives birth’ to the suit,
just like the larger puppet with the smaller ones crawling out of it. Similarly,
the oven rattles with steam cooking the puppet’s parts for dinner for the
puppet family, bigger in size. Water also boils in large test tubes filled with
stones, chestnuts and shells. Another prominent example in the film involves
blood. The fourth episode begins with a knife landing on a table. It starts to
dance in the most wonderful manner, jumps and turns pirouettes with
growing enthusiasm. Suddenly, however, it loses its passion and falls stiffly
on the table. The blade snaps and blood runs from the knife’s body. The
blood of this delicate imaginary object has been brought to boil by sheer
passion.
Thus, the imagery might protest against social alienation, cultural
oppression and Stalinist/bourgeois ideology. The larger puppet family, for
example, is dressed in Victorian dress, while eating the cooked parts of
smaller puppets of supposedly lower class and therefore of ‘less value’. On
top of this, a milieu is set up where creative energy unleashes and breaks
free. The same applies to the (auto) biographical and biological details,
which inspire the imagery, but do not exhaust it. The filmmaker’s memory
of his childhood most certainly informs the design of the setting and the
emerging imagery. It serves as a source of reference. The emotional, bodily
and material experience, which adds up to create the biological milieu, adds
to this. The motives remain in contact with these sources. They also enter a
cycle of exchange and change, which detaches them from the milieu they
grow in. They begin to aspire.
At the heart of the creative force of analogical reasoning, objects distance
themselves from their utilitarian and descriptive function (directed at an end)
and turn into sovereign imaginary objects – part of a constellation – exploring
the relations emerging respectively. Imaginary objects aspire at a distance of
their utilitarian and descriptive function, a remoteness that is created in

ecstatic moments of displacement and transgression. Any phenomenology of
imagination relates not only to a phenomenology of remembering, but also
a phenomenology of aspiration. Jabberwocky intimates this in the affluent
images of boiling objects, pertaining to different milieus to remember and to
aspire: objects of everyday life, objects steeped in childhood memories,
cultural artefacts, objects from natural origin, etc. They relate and do not
relate, as the sting of doubt gnaws on their desire to conspire.7 They do
nonetheless.
Much more could be said about possible relations between Bataille’s
Story of the Eye and Jabberwocky, drawing out a field of rich analogies. The
argument intends to shift to a new setting at this point, though, in order to
gather a participatory view from ‘inside’ analogical reasoning. The shift to
Berardi and his philosophy aims to divert the argument towards a different
perspective on socio-political realities and how they might be analysed
(diagnostic function) and dealt with (imperative function) in conjunctive
and connective modes of understanding, in Berardi’s terms. The first part of
Analogy II will explore the conjunctive and the connective mode with
analogy as a theoretical model in mind, while the second and the third part
will look at autonomous structures in the imaginary and practical sense
related to Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. The shift from Švankmajer’s Alice
to Radio Alice corresponds to and performs an ‘imaginary leap’, submerging
the practical and the imaginary realm.
Analogy II: Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi and

Jan Švankmajer’s Alice
Italian activist and philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi focuses in his writing
on the experience of living in the digital and post-capitalist age. Švankmajer,
aged 83 and still active as a filmmaker, stays with analogue techniques
of filmmaking, making the new films – again – unique in this respect. One
might expect both positions to go astray, but a deep fascination with
analogical reasoning draws them together. Berardi’s work engages extensively
with the question of how relational modes might differ and converge.
In And. Phenomenology of the End (2014), Berardi argues for a shift
from ‘conjunction’ to ‘connection’ as the dominant mode of social interaction.
The shift affects the experience of sensibility and sensitivity. From a
diagnostic point of view, it results in a state of despair and a genuine
mutation of social relations. Important, again, is the relation of ‘and’ and
7
Conspirators of Pleasure (Spiklenci slasti, 1996), Švankmajer’s third feature film after Faust
(Lekce Faust, 1994) and Alice, highlights the creative principle of analogy in its title.
‘end’, as it is already intimated in the title of the book. Berardi (2014: 18)
explains:
I call conjunction a concatenation of bodies and machines that can

generate meaning without following a pre-ordained design, nor obeying
any inner law or finality. Connection, on the other hand, is a concatenation
of bodies and machines that can generate meaning only following a
human-made intrinsic design, only obeying precise rules of behaviour
and functioning. Connection is not singular, not intentional, not
vibrational. It is rather an operative concatenation between previously
formatted agents of meaning (bodies, or machines) which have been
codified, or formatted according to a code.
How these systems or constellations emerge, thus, differs fundamentally in

various instances. Berardi distinguishes between directed/intentional modes
of connection and those lacking a pre-conceived pattern or embedded
design. Due to the lacking premise, conjunction is able to create an
infinite number of constellations, each of which roots in singularity:
‘Conjunctive concatenation [. . .] is event, not structure, and it is unrepeatable
because it happens in a unique point in the net of space and time’ (Berardi
2014: 12).
There is no design to fulfill and no code to comply with, in contrast to the
connective mode. The conjunctive mode is quite reminiscent of analogical
reasoning. It requires the vibrant state of sensibility, the immersive ability to
‘process signs and semiotic stimulations that cannot be verbalised or verbally
coded’ (Berardi 2014: 30). It implies the regression to an emphatic state,
which lacks the determination of a pre-existing design and is nonetheless
able to establish links in between things and signs, revealing points of
convergence from an altered perspective.
Indicators of psycho-physical fragility relate to and reveal the dire
consequences of the shift towards the connective mode of social relations in
the digital and post-capitalist age. Competitive pressure, acceleration of
stimuli and constant attentive stress have a genuine deforming, psycho-
pathogenic effect:
The universe of receivers – the ensemble of human brains, of real people

made of flesh and fragile and sensual organs – is not formatted according
to the same standards as the system of digital transmitters. The functional
paradigm of the universe of Transmitters does not correspond to that of
the universe of Receivers. This asymmetry manifests itself in various
pathological effects: permanent electrocution, panic, overexcitement,
hypermobility, attention disorders, dyslexia, information overload, the
saturation of reception circuits.
BERARDI 2007: 81
However, strategies to escape this semiotic and productive over-agility

(or over-kill) are not easily pinpointed. The intention to decelerate and
reduce complexity runs counter to the human drive to produce and exhaust
potentiality. Another possibility that Berardi refers to is to accelerate the
‘post-human’ condition and adapt the human cognitive and bodily system
to the exigencies of the info-sphere. Finally, Berardi (2007: 85) suggests that
‘a strategy of subtraction is possible, a strategy of distancing oneself from
the vortex – but only small communities will be able to follow it, constituting
spheres of existential, economic, and informational autonomy from the
world economy’.
Alice’s empowerment: phenomenology

of aspiration
The use of masochistic imagery in Švankmajer’s Alice points to the vibrant
but vulnerable state of analogical reasoning and with this to the conjunctive
mode in Beradi’s terminology. Alice’s fall down the rabbit hole (pictured
in Švankmajer’s version as a trip downwards in an elevator passing all kind
of strange objects) reads as immersive and schizophrenic ‘atmospheric
thickening’, while the end of the film signals a strong empowerment in the
sense of a ritualist rebirth (phenomenology of aspiration). In between stands
the Mad Tea Party, in Švankmajer’s version an intensely performed masochistic
ritual: The Mad Hatter, a wooden marionette, and The March Hare move
around the table and perform the same acts over and over again, like spreading
butter on a clockwork watch (see Figure 3.3), rewinding The March Hare’s
mechanical drive, pouring tea down the puppet’s body, etc. At the end of each
cycle, a fur in the shape of a woman’s collar licks the tea cups clean.
In Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland in Logic
of Sense, the story runs along a fine, but intractable line. One side describes
the world of depth, of actions and passions with restlessly intermingling,
edible and penetrable bodies, beings, objects and creatures – while the
other side articulates the world of height, of impenetrable transcendence,
of the metaphysical surface of the event. Thus, when The March Hare
spreads butter onto the watch or the film shows tea running down
the wooden body of the Hatter, Švankmajer highlights these incompatible,
yet interdependent worlds of height and depth. Deleuze argues that
Carroll’s story can be divided into three parts, as he writes in relation to the
first part:
The first part [. . .] starting with Alice’s interminable fall, is completely
immersed in the schizoid element of depth. Everything is food, excrement,
simulacrum, partial internal object, and poisonous mixture. Alice herself
is one of these objects when she is little; when she is large, she is identified
with their receptacle. The oral, anal, urethral character of this part has
often been stressed.
DELEUZE 1990 [1969]: 234
In contrast to the first part’s relation to regression, the second part represents
a phase of transition, in which Alice gradually realizes her power to choose
between the world of regression and the world of abstraction. In relation to
the Mad Tea Party, Alice seems inclined to decide between the artist who
deals with heads – represented by the Hatter – and the animal that lives in
burrows – pictured by The March Hare. The butter on the watch exemplifies
this remarkably. Time emblematically represents metaphysical, disembodied
abstraction, while butter intimates the very essence of nutrition, namely
fat. The same seems true for the tea running down the puppet’s body, as
the puppet is unable to digest it. The edible and the inedible do not
intermingle, but forge marvellous instances of poetic imagery. They highlight
the insurmountable tension involved in the grotesque interplay between the
worlds of height and depth.
Gaston Bachelard’s reading of the trope of miniature and the notion of
patience in The Poetics of Space is telling in relation to the imaginative
processes involved in devising poetic/masochistic imagery. He (1994 [1958]:
159) writes: ‘Indeed, we have only to imagine it [this peace] for our souls to
FIGURE 3.3 Still from Jan Švankmajer’s Alice (1988): The March Hare.
be bathed in peace. All small things must evolve slowly, and certainly a long
period of leisure, in a quiet room, was needed to miniaturise the world.’
Bachelard (1994 [1958]: 174) goes on: ‘the causality of smallness stirs all
our senses, and an interesting study could be undertaken of the “miniatures”
that appeal to each sense. [. . .] a whiff of perfume, or even the slightest
odour can create an entire environment in the world of the imagination’.
Bachelard’s observations on patience and heightened sensibility in
relation to the trope of ‘miniature’ powerfully point in the direction of
masochism. The masochistic world distinguishes itself by an enriched,
saturated atmosphere that is to be bodily and structurally absorbed. It
creates a phantasm that expiates the authoritative order. The point of
subversion is the ritualistic death, forestalling the utopian event of rebirth;
in Alice, we witness this in the sequence of superimpositions with Alice’s
head being replaced by the heads of the creatures of Wonderland. After this,
Alice awakes out of her dream, while the things surrounding her appear to
have returned to a state of ‘dull’ reality, as well unaffected and unimpressed
by the enhanced, enriched world of the masochistic phantasm. This
preliminary perception, however, overturns, when she realizes that the White
Rabbit is missing. She draws out a pair of scissors and says, just like the
Queen: ‘He is late as usual, I think I’ll cut his head off!’
The radical empowerment of Alice after she has had to endure an endless
series of demeaning and cruel actions and passions clearly evokes the
association of a mythic or ritualistic rebirth that re-adjusts the world to the
maternal order. By devising a contract, the patriarchal order ends and is
subdued to the law of the mother – that kind of ritualistic behaviour that we
encounter in Švankmajer’s version of the Mad Tea Party or the Queen’s
despotic call: ‘Off with their heads!’
In this sense, Švankmajer’s Alice suggests that change in terms of a
revolutionary potential/actualization requires not only the bodily, fleshly
and intentional side of action and passion, but also the insubstantial, abstract
agency of the event. Moreover, on the level of the metaphysical event, poetic
imagery exhibits a double-edged nature of being both diagnostic and
imperative. The mimetic relation of the imagery to bodily experience and
being both diagnostic and imperative stands in direct correlation to the
artistic function of poesis. In poetic/masochistic imagery, one not only
perceives the ontological possibility of revolution. One finds encapsulated
the metaphysical surface unfolding and enfolding the facilitated sensory,
fleshly and intelligible expansion towards the world of actions and passions.
Radio Alice
Švankmajer’s reading of Alice highlights that betraying the connective mode
of social relations (and therein escaping its pathologies) is closely linked to
entering a survival mode of autonomous structures. The search for alternative

routes of communication is intimately linked to the ‘escape into reality’.
To ‘unleash’ autonomous cycles of images, ecstatically and erratically
transgressing descriptive and utilitarian functions, creates and draws on
alternative modes, as famously epitomized in Lewis Carroll’s nonsense
literature. Švankmajer’s Jabberwocky as much as Alice, engages intensely
with Carroll’s texts on this ground. Berardi’s political engagement, too,
exhibits strong ties to Carroll’s work. Berardi is a prominent participant of
Bologna’s first free pirate radio station, Radio Alice, that started broadcasting
in the late 1970s and derived its name directly from Carroll’s Alice in
Wonderland (1865).
While Švankmajer issued Charter ’77 together with his fellow surrealists
from Prague, the first open call of resistance after years of repression and
silence, as it has been intimated above, Berardi pursued a different form of
open protest related to Bologna’s creative autonomy movement of 1977. As
Michael Goddard (2011: 1) points out:
the naming was no mere accident; in part a reference to Gilles Deleuze’s

reading of Lewis Carroll and nonsense in The Logic of Sense, the name
Alice announced this radio’s desire to go beyond the rational limits
of communication and politics in the directions of a surrealistic play
with sense and nonsense, to produce a desiring form of political
communication in which poetic delirium would have as much place as
political events, or further a space in which false information could
produce real events.
The radio station’s name, thus, expressed the wish to communicate ‘more’
than rationally informed political trajectories. Just as the channel of
communication intends to break free and self-organize in a subversive way,
the broadcasting material wishes to do the same thing by drawing on ‘the
historical artistic avant-garde, Deleuzian philosophy, situationist practice and
of course Alice in Wonderland itself’ (Goddard 2011: 1). Radio Alice is an
extraordinary example of a media-ecological reorganization that submerges
the fictional and real desire to perform a ‘leap’ towards autonomous
structures, breaking free of utilitarian and descriptive principles.8
This motion towards autonomy relates to the station’s engagement
with Alice as a literary figure and its schizoanalytic interpretations by
Deleuze and Antonin Artaud. Goddard (2011: 6) explains that Radio Alice
performed:
8
An outlash of violence hindered the experiment to develop further, though the venture had,
according to Goddard, the ‘technical and social capacity to redefine what was meant by
expressions like “autonomy” and “self-valorization” ’ (Goddard 2011: 3).
a type of translation of Carroll’s Alice, but one that like Artaud’s

schizophrenic reading was also transforming its meaning; one could say
that despite or maybe because of the proximity to a schizoanalytic reading
of Alice, a new Alice emerged, Alice as a subversive, a revolutionary Alice,
whose play with sense and nonsense was directly articulated to challenge
the official, dominant semiosis of the state, capitalism and conventional
modes of political representation.
Drawing a mimetic relation between expression and experience means to

draw an actual effect-relation between the event and the action/passion,
which opens the possibility of actual change.
Conclusion
The sovereign function of art does not fulfill itself and does not withdraw
from the world. It rather has a quite specific understanding of its relation to
reality, as it is not directed in a specific manner towards some meaning and
understating of the world, but arrives at this understanding by way of
an inverse logic. It stimulates the hermeneutic passion to understand the
imaginative experience through a variety of philosophical lenses (e.g.
ontological, ethical, etc.). However, this exploring and understanding is and
is not specifically directed at the same time. The former directs unrelentingly
at the ills of social-political realities. The latter is quite clear in the respect
that ‘better worlds’ are not simply ‘imagined’. The ideal or utopian ‘core’ is
deliberately voided, safe-guarded by radical suspicion.
The explorations aligned to analogical thinking do not work towards
some imagined, utopian ‘substitute reality’. Quite the opposite is the case.
František Dryje (2012: 225) explains: ‘Surrealism was indeed concerned not
with an artificial, imaginary reality, or some kind of autonomous artistic
world, but with the empirically given world, existent, but to be expressed
in a new qualitatively enlarged spectrum of subject-object relations.’ In
relation to this, analogy creates on a cosmic scale, but the underlying
principles of this creation remain hidden. The missing premise re-routes the
desire to express and to understand ‘other’ structures of knowledge and
communication, correlations that evade und subvert positivist identity
principles. Engaging with these principles, conjoined to the desire to ‘take a
different path’, results in empowerment – an imperative empowerment
related to the diagnostic force to understand the source of inspiration.
Describing analogy as ‘inverse’ imagination, thus, means to understand
it as a mechanism that directs diagnostically at political realities, but
withdraws from the imperative to ‘mean’ and ‘describe’ in relation to
imagining ‘better’ worlds. The diagnostic and the imperative function have
different relations to the paradox of imagination, being intentional and not
intentional at the same time. One does not easily translate to the other. The
diagnostic sense observes and contemplates. It informs the desire to act
(imperative function), to act in a socially and ethically agreeable way, but it
is not able to provide exhaustive answers to ‘what’ this way might look
like and which means are needed to achieve it (‘how’). Finding answers
to these questions requires adjustment to the way of imagining them, to
contemplate and adapt possible ways. The imperative function forms a
radical intensification of the diagnostic function with regard to adjusting the
creative and critical means of imagination. It gives rise to an unknown
autonomy of the means in the relation between the real and the fictional by
obliterating the means’ intentionality. Analogy as a creative principle takes
a decisive role in this.
References
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Press.
Bartha, P. (2010). By Parallel Reasoning: The Construction and Evaluation of
Analogical Arguments. New York: Oxford University Press.
Barthes, R. (1972 [1963]). ‘The Metaphor of the Eye’, in R. Barthes, Critical
Essays, trans. R. Howard, 239–247. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
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City Lights Books.
Berardi, F. (2007). ‘Schizo-Economy’, SubStance #112, 36 (1): 76–85.
Berardi, F. (2014). And. Phenomenology of the End: Cognition and Sensibility in
the Transition from Conjunctive to Connective Mode of Social Communication.
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Breton, A. (1969). Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. R. Seaver and H. Lane. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Castoriadis, C. (1997). ‘The Imaginary: Creation in the Socio-historical Domain’, in
D. A. Curtis (ed.), World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society,
Psychoanalysis, and the Imagination, 3–18. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Cinephilia and Beyond, A Woman under the Influence: Cassavetes’ Intense and
Emotionally Exhausting Slice of Life. Available online: http://cinephiliabeyond.
org/a-woman-under-the-influence-cassavetes-intense-and-emotionally-
exhausting-slice-of-life/ (accessed 16 September 2017).
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and C. Strivale. London: Athlone Press.
Dryje, F. (2012). ‘Jan Švankmajer, Surrealist’, in F. Dryje and Schmitt (eds), Jan
Švankmajer: Dimensions of Dialogue/Between Film and Fine Art, 219–322.
Prague: Arbor Vitae.
Fijalkowski, K. and M. Richardson, eds and trans. (2001). Surrealism against the
Current: Tracts and Declarations. London: Pluto Press.
Fijalkowski, K. and M. Richardson (2016). ‘Introduction’, in K. Fijalkowski and
M. Richardson (eds), Surrealism: Key Concepts, 1–16. New York: Routledge.
Goddard, M. (2011). Alice in Radioland: Radio Alice and the Movement of 77

Through the Looking Glass, conference presentation at Afterlife of Alice, Hic
Dragones, 2. December 2011. Available online: http://www.academia.
edu/1709077/Alice_in_Radioland (accessed 16 September 2017).
Halbmayer, E. (2012). ‘Amerindian Mereology: Animism, Analogy, and the
Multiverse’, Indiana, 29: 103–125.
Hames, P. (1995). ‘Interview with Jan Švankmajer’, in P. Hames (ed.), Dark
Alchemy: The Films of Jan Švankmajer, 96–118. Westport: Praeger.
Henare, A., M. Holbraad and S. Wastell, eds (2006), Thinking Through Things:
Theorising Artifacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge.
Herzogenrath, B., ed. (2017). Film as Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Hesse, M. B. (1966). Models and Analogies in Science. Notre Dame: University of
Notre Dame Press.
Hofstadter, D. and E. Sander (2013). Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel
and Fire of Thinking. New York: Basic Books.
Holyoak, K. and P. Thagard (1995). Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought.
Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hummel, J. E. and K. J. Holyoak (1997). ‘Distributed Representations of Structure:
A Theory of Analogical Access and Mapping’, Psychological Review, 104 (3):
427–466.
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Publishers.
Legrand, G. (1971). Préface au système de l’éternité. Paris: Le Terrain Vague.
Libertson, J. (1982). Proximity: Levinas, Blanchot, Bataille and Communication.
The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers.
Read, R. and J. Goodenough, eds (2005). Film as Philosophy: Essays in Cinema
After Wittgenstein and Cavell. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Rushton, R. (2011). The Reality of Film: Theories of Filmic Reality. Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
Schmitt, B. (2012a). ‘Return to Origins: The Setting of King Stag’, in F. Dryje and
B. Schmitt (eds), Jan Švankmajer: Dimensions of Dialogue/Between Film and
Fine Art, 23–42. Prague: Arbor Vitae.
Schmitt, B. (2012b). ‘Jan Švankmajer and Johanes Doktor Faust by Emil Radok:
From Primitive Myth to the Crisis of Civilisation’, in F. Dryje and B. Schmitt
(eds), Jan Švankmajer: Dimensions of Dialogue/Between Film and Fine Art,
43–60. Prague: Arbor Vitae.
Schmitt, B. (2012c). ‘Detailed Bibliography with Commentary (I) 1934–1970’, in
F. Dryje and B. Schmitt (eds), Jan Švankmajer: Dimensions of Dialogue/Between
Film and Fine Art, 61–94. Prague: Arbor Vitae.
Schmitt, B. (2016). ‘Magic Art’, in K. Fijalkowski and M. Richardson (eds),
Surrealism: Key Concepts, 228–238. New York: Routledge.
Sera, M. (forthcoming). ‘Intermedial Densities in the Work of Jan Švankmajer: A
Media-anthropological Case Study’, in A. Pethő (ed.), Intermediality in
Contemporary Eastern European and Russian Cinema. Edinburgh: Edinburgh
University Press.
Švankmajer, J. (1994). Transmutace smyslů: Transmutation of the Senses. Prague:
Středoevropská galerie a nakladatelství.
Švankmajer, J. (2014). Touching and Imagining: An Introduction to Tactile Art.

London: Tauris.
Teige, K. (1971 [1924]). ‘Moderní umění a společnost’, in Š. Vlašín (ed.),
Avantgarda známá a neznámá, vol. I, 505–513. Prague: Svoboda.
‘The Possible Against the Current’ (2001) in K. Fijalkowski and M. Richardson
(eds and trans.), Surrealism against the Current: Tracts and Declarations, 66–75.
London: Pluto Press.
‘The Platform of Prague Twenty Years On’ (2001) in K. Fijalkowski and M.
Richardson (eds and trans.), Surrealism against the Current: Tracts and
Declarations, 81–92. London: Pluto Press.
Vaughan, H. (2013). Where Film Meets Philosophy: Godard, Resnais, and
Experiments in Cinematic Thinking. New York: Columbia University Press.
Vojvodík, J. (2015). ‘World of “Purely Artistic Conception” and a “Universal Art
of the Spirit”: Max Dvořák and Karel Teige between Phenomenology and
Surrealism’, Slovo a smysl – Word & Sense, 12 (24): 25–41.
Wartenberg, T. E. (2007). Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy. New York:
Routledge.
Weitzenfeld, J. S. (1984). ‘Valid Reasoning by Analogy’, Philosophy of Science,
51: 137–149.
Films
Alice (Něco z Alenky, 1988), [Film], Dir. Jan Švankmajer, CH, DE, GB: Condor
Film, Hessischer Rundfunk, Film Four International.
Conspirators of Pleasure (Spiklenci slasti, 1996), [Film], Dir. Jan Švankmajer, GB,
CH, CZ: Athanor Film, Koninck International, Delfilm.
Down to the Cellar (Do pivnice, 1982), [Film], Dir. Jan Švankmajer, CZ: Slovenská
filmová tvorba.
The Garden (Zahrada, 1968), [Film], Dir. Jan Švankmajer, CZ: Krátký film Praha.
Jabberwocky (Žvahlav aneb šatičky Slaměného Huberta, 1971), [Film], Dir. Jan
Švankmajer, CZ, USA: Krátký film Praha, Wester Wood Studio.
Lekce Faust (1994), [Film], Dir. Jan Švankmajer, GB, FR, DE, CZ: BBC, Lumen
Films, Pandora Film, Heart of Europe, Athanor Film, Koninck International.
The Ossuary (Kostnice, 1970), [Film], Dir. Jan Švankmajer, CZ: Krátký film Praha.
4
The Successful Chorus of
‘The Second Wave’
An Examination of Feminism’s
‘Manifesto’ of Digital Art1
Chunning Guo (Maggie)
Preface: the images of ‘Father Power’ and

the voices of women artists
When talking about computers or digital technology, most people will not
connect this terminology with the image of women. There are several male
figures that serve as representatives of the computer, such as John von
Neumann,2 Alan Turing,3 Thomas Watson4 and Steve Jobs.5 Even the
1
The paper was originally presented at the 7th annual Under the Radar conference (Vienna;
http://under-radar.com/2017/).
2
A Hungarian-American mathematician, and computer scientist. The foremost mathematician of
his time, he was a pioneer of the application of operator theory to quantum mechanics in the
development of functional analysis, and a key figure in the development of game theory and the
concepts of cellular automata, the universal constructor and the digital computer.
3
He provided a formalized concept of the algorithms and computations that would be used to
create the Turing machine, which can be considered a model of a general-purpose computer.
4
A US businessman, the chairman and CEO of International Business Machines (IBM). He
oversaw the company’s growth (1914–1956), turning it into a highly effective organization.
5
Co-founder and CEO of Apple (also served as CEO of Pixar), a pioneer of the personal computer
revolution of 1970s and 1980s, together with Steve Wozniak.
pioneers of digital art seem to be nothing more than a group of men working
in labs for NASA or Bell. However, with careful examination through the
archives and research of digital art, a group of women artists during the
1970s and 1980s must standout. In the ‘forest’ of ‘Fathers’ images’, their
voices become even more meaningful and important.
The leaders of this group were Lillian Schwartz (1927–) and Katherine Nash
(1910–1982), their ‘manifesto’ calling on collaboration among artists, scientists
and engineers could be regarded as a beginning of cross-field (and cross-gender)
cooperation in digital art. This manifesto and artistic practice offered a
new perspective with which to rethink the movements of feminism as well as
digital art. This chapter will demonstrate how ‘The Second Wave of Digital
Art’ and ‘The Second Wave of Feminism’ clashed and developed into a chorus.
And we will have a chance to review how this successful chorus offered the
dialogue of gender equality (in the work ‘Leo/Lisa’ by Schwartz) through
a digital collage combining ‘Mona Lisa’ and the self-portrait of Leonardo
Da Vinci.
‘Cold’ computer and ‘Father Power’

In 1982, ‘The Computer’ was selected as The Man of the Year by the very
influential Time magazine (who called it The Machine of the Year). Most
people only remember a man sitting in front of the computer in this Time
cover, the image of the computer seemingly related only with the figure of a
man. Even when people had a chance to see the whole front and back cover
of this issue the computer was largely seen as a tool for business when it
came to men, but for entertainment with regards to women users.
Though there were debates about the first inventor of the computer, we
see in the following list that it is all about who is the real ‘father’ of the
computing machine. In 1973, there was a court announcement regarding
the first official inventor of the computer in America; it was Atanasoff
and his student Berry. In 1942, Atanasoff shared his idea about the ABC
machine with Mauchly, then Mauchly and P. Eckert invented ENIAC in
1946.6
When we look back at the history of the development of the computer,
we find that behind the fatherly images, there are also a lot of nameless
women. In the photos recording the process of inventing and operating
ENIAC, there were females behind and beside the male scientists.
Even though some women played an important role during the whole
The name ABC machine is an initialism; A comes from Atanasoff, B comes from Berry and C
6
means computer.
THE SUCCESSFUL CHORUS OF ‘THE SECOND WAVE’ 53
TABLE 4.1 The ‘Fathers’ of the Computer

Inventor Timeline Main contributions
John von Neumann 1903–1957 Stored-program computer
Alan M. Turing 1912–1954 Turing machine
J. Mauchly 1907–1980 ENIAC
P. Eckert 1919–1995 ENIAC
John V. Atanasoff 1903–1995 ABC machine
Clifford E. Berry 1918–1963 ABC machine
process, in the writing of history prior to the 1980s, little attention was paid
to them.
One notable example was Joan Clarke (1917–1996),7 who contributed
to the development of the Turing machine. In recent years, people who
watched the feature film The Imitation Game (M. Tyldum, 2014) learned
about Clarke’s contributions for the first time. The film, based on the
eponymous novel, told us how the Turing machine was invented in order to
beat the German enigma machine during World War II and how a woman
set up the kind and warm collaboration required for this team effort to
succeed. This film presents a feminine image within the fathers’ forest, and
this woman was Joan Clarke.
Even though Clarke was excellent in the field of mathematics, she was
denied a full mathematics degree, which Cambridge University only awarded
to men until 1948. Clarke became deputy head of Hut 8 in 1944, while still
paid less than her male colleagues. Additionally, she needed to ask her parents’
permission to work as at that time women were thought to be incapable of
making decisions for themselves. In fact, there were more excellent women
scientists like Clarke who remain unknown due to the continuing secrecy
among cryptanalysts, and the systematic neglect of women’s contributions. In
the history of computing there has been a hidden forest of women, but the
‘Father Power’ has cast shadows over the presence of womanly images and
voices. This is a time to re-evaluate the roles and contributions of these
women.
7
Also known as Joan Murray. She was an English cryptanalyst and numismatist best known
for her work as a code-breaker at Bletchley Park during World War II.
The computer as an artistic medium:

absence of women artists
Initially, the computer was invented as a weapon. The Imitation Game told
us how the Turing machine was invented to beat the German enigma
machine during World War II. The computer was especially developed as a
new competitive technology during the arms race from the late 1950s to the
1970s. The early computers were inaccessible to the public and their most
popular impressions from the medium were expensive, large-scale and kept
in secrecy.
However, some of the scientists and professionals who worked in the big
labs were not satisfied with computers, these expensive devices that were
only being treated as weapons, so they also indulged in the aesthetics of
the world of computing. From the late 1940s, computers began to be
experimented with as an artistic tool.8 Most researchers regarded the solo
show named ‘Electronic Abstraction’ (1952) by Ben Laposky9 as presenting
the new stage of digital art. These works were actually not digitally drawn,
but were captured using still photography to record the electrical vibrations
as seen on the screen of the oscilloscope.
The position of digital art in the beginning is like the position of women
artists/scientists, mostly neglected by the public. This is comparable to John
Whitney’s rarely mentioned contributions to the film industry. Most people
acknowledge the collaboration between Saul Bass and Hitchcock for their
famous title, Vertigo. While not many people know that for the title sequence
of Vertigo, Hitchcock had an additional, often unmentioned, collaborator:
the distinguished animator and pioneer in several technological fields, John
Whitney.
In 1958, Whitney was hired to complete the seemingly impossible task of
turning Bass’s complicated designs for Vertigo into moving pictures. In order
to complete the task, Whitney needed to shape the graphs of parametric
equations from nineteenth-century mathematician Jules Antoine Lissajous,
as well as make them move. Whitney finally fulfilled this daunting task by
modifying an abandoned weapon as a kind of computer for use in making
animation. And Whitney’s work on the opening sequence for Vertigo could
be considered an early example of computer graphics in film.
8
For example, in 1946, Laposky began working with photographic pendulum tracings and
harmonograph machine patterns.
9
A mathematician, artist and draftsman in Cherokee, Iowa. He has been credited with making the
first computer graphics, utilizing an oscilloscope as the creative medium for abstract art.
Whitney made use of an enormous, obsolete military computer called the

M5 gun director,10 plotting the beautiful and elegant graphs of parametric
equations. To be precisely shaped, as opposed to being drawn by freehand,
it was required that the motion of a pendulum be linked to the motion of an
animation stand. However, no animation stand at the time could modulate
such continuous motion without its interior wiring becoming tangled.
Whitney realized that the gun director could rotate endlessly, and in
perfect synchronization with the swinging of a pendulum. He placed his
animation cells on the platform that held the gun director, and above it
suspended a pendulum from the ceiling which held a pen that was connected
to a 24-foot high pressurized paint reservoir. The movement of the pendulum
in relation to the rotation of the gun director generated the spiral drawings
used in Vertigo’s opening sequence.
Based on the experiences of solving problems for new visual expressions,
Whitney founded Motion Graphics Incorporated in 1960, which used a
mechanical analogue computer of his own invention to create motion
pictures and television title sequences, as well as commercials. The following
year, he assembled a record of the visual effects he had perfected using his
device, titled simply Catalog. In the first stage of digital art, the symbol is
that of the male artists with their invented machine. In addition to the
repackaging machines by Whitney, Desmond Paul Henry11 and his drawing
machines were another highlight in the period of the 1960s to 1970s in the
field of digital art.
It seems that computers as heavy, fatherly tools excluded the contributions
and efforts from women artists and scientists. Though women’s images were
presented in the pioneering digital artwork, they are shown either as
fragments, such as cut images of eyes and mouth in the title Vertigo, or as
silhouette female images ‘imprisoned’ in the monitors, as seen on the cover
of the first book about digital art history, Art of the Electronic Age.
The real voice from females in digital art would have to wait to be heard
until the 1970s, as a group of women digital artists led by Lillian Schwartz12
and Katherine Nash not only paved a new way in digital art practices, but
also called on a cross-field collaboration, and a new direction of software
development.
10
The M5 was used during World War II to aim anti-aircraft cannons at moving targets. It took five
men to operate it on the battlefield, each inputting one variable, such as the altitude of the incoming
plane, its velocity, etc. The M5 weighed 850 lbs and comprised 11,000 components, but its
movement was dictated by the execution of mathematical equations.
11
A Manchester University lecturer and reader in Philosophy, he was one of the first British
artists to experiment with machine-generated visual effects at the time of the emerging global
computer art movement of the 1960s.
12
A twentietth-century American artist considered a pioneer of computer-mediated art and one of
the first women artists notable for basing almost her entire oeuvre on computational media.
‘Manifesto’ of women artists in digital art

When the voices of women were finally heard in digital art, it changed
everything. Since the late 1970s, a group of women digital artists, led by
Schwartz and Nash, made their own voices heard to the public. Besides
calling on the collaboration among artists and scientists, they experimented
with new genres of digital artwork. They also demonstrated their art
practices and new theory, broadcast by documentaries, exhibitions and
websites.
Lillian Schwartz’s work with computers at Bell Labs was shown in the
documentary The Artist and the Computer (J. K. Ball, 1976). In an interview
in the film, Schwartz says, ‘I am always fascinated by the new materials and
tools for art creation.’ Through this film, the process of Lillian’s exploration
in digital art was revealed to the public. She experimented in avant-garde
installation, and visualized the interactive power among colours and liquids
with the pressure.
Actually, many of Schwartz’s groundbreaking projects were completed
during the 1960s and the 1970s, well before the documentary was filmed,
and well ahead of the desktop computer revolution, which made computer
hardware and software widely available to artists. Schwartz demonstrated
the wonderful result of cooperation with filmmakers (such as Stan
Vanderbeek) and engineers (such as Ken Knowlton). As a non-scientist,
Schwartz often served in the role of ‘friendly conversational sounding board’
for AT&T researchers and Bell Lab scientists looking for feedback on their
ideas. As an artist, she created a massive body of technology-based work
over the course of thirty-four years. She became a bridge for scientists,
engineers and artists and her calls for cross-field cooperation became a
milestone in the second stage of digital art.
So, the ‘manifesto’ of Lillian Schwartz came from her own successful
experiences and vision for the future of digital art:
I expect art to come from artists or artists working closely with

programmers – I do not expect much art to come from programmers
alone, solely by virtue of their clever gimmicks for doing cute things.
What this means in practical terms, then, is that we need to develop a
great deal of collaboration between artists and programmers in order to
develop meaningful, understandable, and useful sets of tools and ways of
using them.13
Ken Knowlton, ‘Computer Films’, Filmmakers Newsletter 4 (2) (1970). [As reprinted in
13
Knowlton (1976)]
With the contributions of the series of documentaries, the photos of

Schwartz are much more accessible online, while most other women artists
are not so easily found, such as the other important pioneer female artist,
Katherine Nash.
Different from the first wave of digital art’s focus on devices and hardware,
Nash realized software would be the key to break the ‘bottleneck’ for the
computer as an artistic medium; if they paid more attention to software,
artists would be more involved into the cooperation and requirements for
computers as a new collaborative platform working for art.
In 1970, Nash, then at the University of Minnesota, and Richard H.
Williams of the University of New Mexico, published a computer program
for artists: ART 1. The authors described three approaches an artist might
take to use computers in art:
1 The artist can become a programmer or software engineer

2 Artists and software engineers can cooperate, or
3 The artist can use existing software.
NASH and WILLIAMS 1970
At that time, ART 1 already existed so Nash actually encouraged artists to

choose the third path. It is interesting to see that this manifesto was not only
a call for cooperation among artists and programmers, but also a unique
‘advertisement’ for her own art software.
There was also a statement as a unique manifesto from women artists.
Though she made a series of important digital artworks, Vera Molnár
(1924–) did not really regard herself as a digital artist. She believed the
computer, after all, was merely a tool in the hand of the painter. For Molnár,
her manifesto would call on people to rethink the position and function of
computers: ‘I use the computer to combine forms, hoping that this tool will
enable me to distance myself from what I have learned, from my cultural
heritage and everything else that surrounds me; in brief, from the influences
of civilisation that define us.’14
Women artists like Molnár will pay more attention to how to set up
computers as a platform for dialogue; their aim is still for communication
through painting themselves, offering more chances for visual dialogue
between the painter and what has been painted. She hoped the public would
appreciate her artworks, not thinking about if they were made by a computer
or a physical painter.
From cross-field cooperation to software exploration, as well as rethinking
the computer as a dialogue platform, creative women artists offered a variety
of artworks based on their manifestoes; their efforts gathered up the power
http://dam.org/artists/phase-one/vera-molnar/artist-s-statement (accessed 31 October 2017).

14
of ‘The Second Wave of Digital Art’, which would flow into the historical
trend of second-wave feminism, calling attention to a successful chorus of
women to be heard.
The chorus of ‘The Second Wave’

‘The Second Wave of Digital Art’, which includes the cross-field cooperation,
software exploration and deconstruction of classic artworks, should be
regarded on a bigger scale of changes in a broader social context. ‘The
Second Wave of Feminism’ was led by Simone de Beauvoir and Betty Friedan
from the 1960s until the 1980s, in other words, the digital art movements
and Feminist movement were contemporaries, spreading more public
consciousness of gender equality in business and the arts.
Second-wave feminism is a period of feminist activity that first began in
the early 1960s in the United States, and eventually spread throughout the
Western world and beyond. Different from the first wave of feminism evoked
by Marsha Lear from the nineteenth century, which focused mainly on
suffrage and overturning legal obstacles to gender equality (such as voting
rights and property rights), ‘The Second Wave’ of feminism broadened the
debate to a wide range of issues: sexuality, family, the workplace, reproductive
rights, de facto inequalities and official legal inequalities.
The shift to second-wave feminism came about when many legal and
institutional rights were extended to women. This offers context to a deeper
understanding of Schwartz’ and Nash’s ‘manifesto’, which broke through
barriers at large-scale labs and called for collaboration, as well as making
these works of art accessible via the computer medium to the public.
Additionally, women artists pushed digital art into ‘The Second Wave’,
focusing more on software instead of hardware and drawing machines in
the first wave of digital art.
Led by Lillian Schwartz, pioneering women artists realized software
development would also attract more women artists into computer-based
creation. Coupled with morphing algorithms, reflectography, ultrasonic
imaging, holography, digital radiography and traditional x-ray, Schwartz
and Nash invented their own image software, which offered more platforms
to other artists who were interested in computers as a new artistic medium,
but felt afraid of the new uncontrolled technology.
Schwartz also developed a new art archeological theory based on her
digital art practices. She identified surprising similarities between the Mona
Lisa and the self-portrait of Leonardo Da Vinci using digitally transparent
means and created a collage using a computer. This newborn artwork
entitled ‘Leo/Lisa’, could be regarded as a symbol of the chorus of ‘The
Second Wave’ both from digital art and feminism.
On the one hand, Schwartz created a digital juxtaposition (before the

invention of Photoshop software) to demonstrate Mona Lisa as a reflection
of Leonardo Da Vinci himself, who was also deeply influenced by the studies
of art theory and morphing15 algorithms. On the other hand, Schwartz
offered the dialogue platform, the self-portrait of Da Vinci as a symbol of
‘Father Power’ was faced with the equally beautiful female symbol of the
Mona Lisa.
In fact, Schwartz would regard ‘Leo/Lisa’ not as an artwork, but as a
methodology to re-examine Renaissance master works. By revealing a
‘hidden’ Mona Lisa in her new artwork. Schwartz demonstrated how
morphing fulfills the creative decision-making steps Leonardo made starting
with Isabella, Duchess of Aragon, the first model, and the changes he made
using his own features to finally realize the celebrated face we know today.
Schwartz still took advantage of a documentary film to present to the public
and fans of digital art a step-by-step unravelling of the Da Vinci mystery.
Artworks such as ‘Leo/Lisa’ offered a pioneering example of how
computers can serve as a detective, solving mysteries like of the identity of
the ‘real’ Mona Lisa, which went on to influence the development of
morphing techniques in police systems. By the 1990s, digital morphing
techniques were commonly used by law-enforcement agencies to age or alter
the facial structure of missing persons or suspects.
Inspired from computers working to find criminals, women artists developed
more methods using faces in computers. By overlaying and blending visuals,
American artist Nancy Burson (1948–)16 made a major contribution to the
method of ‘morphing’. She regarded computers as a medium to composite
portraits, especially the portraits of beautiful women. Burson provoked the
public with an interesting question, ‘Head Shot or Mug Shot?’, by morphing
the attractive faces of female movie stars.
The game of morphing faces, just like second-wave feminism, quickly
spread through the world, also evoking cross-culture reactions and more
experiments. The Berlin-based artist Andreas Müller-Pohle opened the
images as ASCII text files, processing Western and Asian sign systems,
creating a series of works entitled ‘Face Codes’. These are selections from
several hundred video portraits recorded in Kyoto and Tokyo in 1998. The
portraits were digitally manipulated by first creating a standardized template
and then adjusting the position of the heads, eyes, lips and chins.
15
Morphing is a visual effect in motion pictures and animation that changes (or morphs) one image
or shape into another through a seamless transition. Most often it is used to depict one person
turning into another through technological means or as part of a fantasy or surreal sequence.
Traditionally, such a depiction would be achieved through cross-fading techniques on film. Since
the early 1990s, this has been widely replaced by computer to create more realistic transitions.
16
An American artist known for creating photographs using computer morphing technology,
including the Age Machine, Human Race Machine and Anomaly Machine.
‘Face Codes’ experienced a successful adventure from physical cities into

the digital world. These videos, including faces of people in Kyoto and Tokyo,
are digital video stills that were later reworked and typified using identical
parameters. The text running along the lower edge of the image, similar to
subtitles in a non-synchronized film, represents the alphanumeric code of the
respective image, which has been translated ‘back’ into the Japanese code.
This work was seemingly a salute to Sergei Eisenstein and his theory and
practices of ‘Montage’. Eisenstein was also inspired from the structure of the
Japanese haiku (a Japanese form of light and short poems) to the structure
of film editing. The Berlin-based artist reconstructed the faces in digital
moving images/codes according to the structure of written characters.
In 1983, the example work ‘Adventures in Success’ by digital artist
Rebecca Allen (1954–) is not only an award-winning animation in the
context of the chorus of ‘The Second Wave’, but also offers a unique critical
concept about success and the images of women shaped by mainstream
broadcast. Modern symbols of success, beauty blended in this music video,
turned into something ridiculous. Rebecca Allen represented women artists
calling for establishing a new image of women, as successful and beautiful
should not only be defined by fatherly power.
Through the efforts and contributions of women artists led by Schwartz and
Nash, their influential ‘manifesto’ fulfilled their own success, which brought
more success from a wider range of cooperation. These women forerunners
successfully forecasted a social trend, people need to communicate, interact
and connect from cross-field (and cross-gender), with the new power from
computers.
References
Baby, V. (2001). Vera Molnár. Grenoble: Réunion des Musées Nationaux.
Knowlton, K. (1976). ‘Computer Films’, in Robert Russett and Cecille Starr (eds),
Experimental Animation: An Illustrated Anthology, 194–195. New York: Van
Nostrand Reinhold Company.
LaFarge, A. (1996). ‘The Bearded Lady & the Shaven Man: Mona Lisa, Meet
Mona/Leo’, Leonardo, 29(5): 379–383..
Leavitt, R. (1976). Artist and Computer. New York: Harmony Books.
Nash, K. and R. H. Williams (1970). ‘Computer Program for Artists: ART 1’,
Leonardo, 3(4): 439–442.
Paul, C. (2015). Digital Art. London: Thames & Hudson; 3rd edition.
Popper, F. (1997). Art of the Electronic Age. London: Thames & Hudson.
Rush, M. (2005). New Media in Art. London: Thames & Hudson; 2nd edition.
Schwartz, Lillian F. and L. R. Schwartz (1992). The Computer Artist’s Handbook:
Concepts, Techniques, and Applications. New York: W. W. Norton.
Sporre, Dennis J. (2012). Reality through the Arts. New York: Pearson; 8th edition.
Wands, B. (2007). Art of the Digital Age. London: Thames & Hudson.
5
Seeking Truth in Facts
Historicizing Chinese Animation
Olga Bobrowska
Introduction
In the course of my research the initial approach based on the contextual
analysis of historical development of animation in the People’s Republic of
China (PRC) had to be complemented with an attempt to reconstruct the
entanglement of particular, ideologically determined cultural narratives (e.g.
festival programming, academic discourse) and the specific apparatus of
artistic production. This paper attempts to critically review the established
narration on Chinese animation canon as mirrored in the West.1 As early as
1971 the influential French scholar Marc Ferro talked about film’s status as
history and acknowledged sources deriving from the field of popular culture
and non-material culture as a historical evidence that mirrors transformations
occurring within the ideologically conditioned apparatus of culture production
(cf. Ferro 2008). The contemporary Estonian scholar and artist, Ülo Pikkov
(2010) in fact argues for similar analytical strategy. His term animasophy
describes an approach focused on the interconnection of animated forms and
human collective practices. The strength of Pikkov’s writings lies in a capacity
to demonstrate theoretical thinking through consequent case study analysis.
1
Thanks to the support of many academics, experts and filmmakers, as well as visits to China
in 2015 and 2016, I have collected much of the necessary material (primarily films from the
Shanghai Animation Film Studio, SAFS; 1955–1989). I am thankful to many academics and
artists for their support and encouragement, among them Alicja Helman, Guo Chunning, Li Yi,
Georges Schwizgebel and Daniel Šuljić.
This scholar provides the audiences of artistic shorts with a set of conceptual
tools enabling them to decipher the concatenation of authorial subjectivity,
cultural practices and particular industry specificities, in other words to
simultaneously perceive an animated film as an individual work of art, and
a certain anthropological record of historically and culturally determined
momentum. Considering and respecting the necessity of comprehending the
formal aspects of animation art, the researcher should nevertheless stay
committed to locating the phenomenon of the creation of illusionary
movement in the net structure of experiences, recollections, myths and ideas
that construct and explain humanity’s activities and interactions.
The archives of film festivals and film studios’ records, distributors’
promotional materials and film magazines filled with audience surveys and
report sections, along with interviews with the widest possible group of
contributors, might shed a unique light on the process of the crystallization
of the canon as these sources do not interpret the texts of culture (film works
themselves), but historically explain the specific event of the text’s conception
and collective interpretation (Staiger 2008 [1992]). Film Festival Studies is a
sub-field of cinema studies that provides complex and inspiring tools for the
intellectual practice of analysing the phenomenon of the festival as an
integral element of canon establishment and dissemination. This chapter
outlines several problems of Chinese animated classics’ ideological status
and their position in the historical reception as recapitulated in the English
language source literature, yet it is equally important to confront academic
sources with the evidence found in the archives (‘the evidence of the
momentum’). This chapter will also attempt to examine and revise the notion
of ‘the 1980s Chinese animation crisis’ with the aid of the printed materials
produced by Animafest Zagreb, one of the chief meeting points between
different traditions and schools of animation, between 1980 and 1988.
Animation and cultural nationalism, or the

origins of minzu style
An outline of the historical development of Chinese animation reconstructed
in reference to the source literature indicates five major phases: the pioneering
experiments of the Wan brothers2 and the establishment of the SAFS
2
The brothers, born in Nanjing, worked in Shanghai. Twins Laiming and Guchan (万籁鸣,
万古蟾), Chaochen (万超尘) and Dihuan (万涤寰) worked together on commercials and
experimented with artistic animation. Havoc in Heaven (Da nao tian gong/大闹天宫,
1961–64), an adaptation of the first part of the literary classic, Journey to the West (Xiyou ji/
西游记), was a lifetime achievement of Laiming. Guchan was a pioneer of cut-out animation,
while Chaochen worked with puppets. Dihuan collaborated with them in the early period, but
later worked in the field of photography.
SEEKING TRUTH IN FACTS 63
(Shanghai Animation Film Studio) structures (1922–1957); development of

the minzu style period commonly referred to as the ‘golden age’ (1955–
1966); the dreadful gap caused by the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution
(1966–1976); the ‘second golden age’ (from 1976 until the 1980s or early
1990s); and ‘the crisis of the 1980s’ with the climax in 1987 that marks
disintegration of the SAFS. Naturally such periodization is interconnected
with the upheavals and historical turning points experienced by Chinese
society during the overlapping time formations that can be described as the
period of the Republic (1912–1949), the Japanese occupation (1931/37–
1945), civil war (two stages: 1927–1937 and 1945–1949), Mao Zedong’s
rule (1949–1976) and the opening up and reform period (1976/78–mid
1990s). In an inspiring study, Animation in China: History, Aesthetics, Media,
Sean Macdonald declares an attempt of historicizing animation history
(Macdonald 2016: 3). The structure of this publication and films chosen for
analysis and interpretation suggest a non-orthodox approach towards the
accepted historical narrative.
Macdonald acknowledges: ‘The Wan Brothers were the first animators in
China, but the story of animation in the PRC is the story of the SAFS
(Macdonald 2016: 3) and, like other scholars and admirers of the Chinese
classic animation, he recognizes the utmost significance of the minzu style.
Macdonald’s meticulous research itself could be described as animasophic.
SAFS mass artistic production mirrors and exemplifies ideological turns
that have been influencing all aspects of social, political and cultural practices
of everyday life throughout each historical stage, so Macdonald attempts to
unveil the shifts of the doctrine through the analysis of films and the film
critique discourse of the period. In addition to this, he reflects on the modes
of the comprehension of these films in the fields of Sinology and Chinese
Studies.
It is necessary to briefly explain the liaisons between animation artists
and the Communist Party of China (CPC) before we ponder over the
fascinating phenomenon of minzu style and its ideological inclinations. The
history of Chinese animation starts with experiments of the Wan brothers
but the history of animation’s ideological engagement has even earlier
origins. The figure of Te Wei (特伟, 1915–2010), a doyen of Chinese
animation and most widely recognized SAFS artist, stands as a representative
as his life and work directly connect animated film with its significant and
ideologically engaged ancestor, the art of manhua (漫画, graphic cartoons).
Te Wei was born in the year that marks a crucial moment for the emergence
of the New Culture Movement, i.e. the release of the first issue of New
Youth (Xin qingnian/新靑年). Progressive, patriotic and educated youth
gathered around Chen Duxiu (陈独秀, 1879–1942), an early leader of the
CPC and editor-in-chief of New Youth, who postulated anti-imperialist
struggle and cultural modernization, the implementation of necessary social
conduct that would embrace both revolutionary intellectuals and peasant
masses. The press, theatre and caricature served as a tool of communication

inside the highly stratified society. Historians point out the strong polarization
of Chinese public discourse and the radicalization of social and political life
since 1928 when the Guomindang (GMD) government was installed in
Nanjing.
Te Wei was born in Shanghai, a cosmopolitan metropolis pulsating to the
beats of international business and popular culture; importantly, it was also
a centre of manhua publishing houses. He worked as a graphic artist and,
along with many other creators, Te Wei engaged his talent into initially the
political, and eventually the military, fight for leftist ideals, the rise of class
awareness and combat with the Japanese occupation. In 1937 the artists of
the so-called National Salvation Cartoons group proclaimed a propagandistic
military division under the auspices of The Third Bureau of the Political
Department of the National Military Council (collaborative body of CPC
and GMD). In 1938 the group was divided into two sections, one of them
led by Te Wei (cf. Andrews and Shen 2012; Hung 1994).
Revolutionary manhua greatly differs from contemporary, popular comic
books and cartoons. Sharp and concise messages are transmitted through
exaggeration, deformation and analogies. Since the dawn of the Republic,
visual artists have been discovering and reworking Western traditions of
painting and illustration; some acknowledged inspiration from the art of
Francisco Goya, Miguel Covarrubias, Georg Grosz or, as in the case of Te
Wei, David Low, the master of typified caricatured representations of
political actors. Initially satirical, manhua started conveying symbols
essential for the model of military engaged patriotism, i.e. images of a united
and strong nation, and visions of humiliated enemies. The artistic brigades
operated in the big cities as well as on the frontlines of Sino-Japanese and
domestic war. They organized plenty of specific performances that combined
graphic exhibitions, stage plays and indoctrination talks. The leadership of
CPC noticed the powerful impact of manhua representations on the masses,
and in this regard the 1949 decision of appointing Te Wei, instead of any
other more experienced animator, as a head of a newly formed animation
film studio does not seem surprising.
Naturally, the Chinese Communists perceived animation mainly as a
medium for the education and entertainment of children. Maoist doctrine
assumed that knowledge and ideology are equated, and aimed at establishing
a new understanding of the nation and citizenship. However, it would be
wrong to regard Maoist thought as deprived of deep and conscious historical
foundations. The problems of understanding and commemorating the
past in Chinese Communist thought is widely elaborated in Political and
Chinese Studies discourse. Animation scholars should primarily refer to the
issue of the cultural nationalism model that found its expression in top-
down proclaimed effort of developing essentially Chinese animated film
stylistics.
Minzu (民族), generally understood as an artistic method of the

transmission of the essential features of Chinese culture into a medium of
foreign provenance, has dominated the popular and academic reception of
Chinese animation. This seems only natural since the films realized as an
expression of minzu have had an undeniable impact on worldwide animated
film culture – the Chinese artists invented and mastered new forms of
animation, most notably wash-and-ink painting and Chinese silhouettes
cut-out animation. At the same time, the minzu style challenged propaganda
modes accepted in the Communist world by replacing the socialist realism
paradigm since an aesthetic and intellectual tissue of Chinese animation can
be found in either literati or folk tradition situated genuinely far from the
industrial landscapes inhabited by modern workers, soldiers and imperialist
spies.
The issue of the artistic reinterpretation of tradition remains fundamental
for the discussions between Chinese artists and intellectuals, which was
formulated already in the 1870s by the imperial dignitary Zhang Zhidong
(张之洞): ‘Chinese Learning as Substance, Western Learning for Application’
(Zhongxue wei ti, xixue wei yong 中学为体，西学为用)’ (Pohl 2016 [1993]:
1). In fact, the authors of manhua, and consequently of animation, had
to deal with the conflict of the aesthetic and ideological function of art,
and develop a position that would effectively absorb foreign influences
and inspiration into the realm of Chinese cultural production. The
country’s philosophical heritage, the leftists and Communists claimed,
required profound revision: ‘I don’t attack Confucius as a person but as a
figure that has been presented throughout the centuries, a figure that
personifies tyranny; I attack the essence of despotism,’ wrote Li Dazhao
(李大钊, 1888–1927),3 one of the most influential Chinese Marxists and
co-founder of the CPC.
A common consensus among the early doctrinaires assumed that the folk
tradition, though developed within feudal structures, was the only means of
cultural communication easily accepted by the peasant masses,4 therefore
traditional culture was cultivated in a way that would emphasize its
progressive elements and rigidly exclude its regressive ones. The absorption
of Western innovations, be it Marxism or the cinema, would require
consideration for guoqing (a specific national condition). This approach
answered the dilemma raised by the New Culture Movement’s participants
3
See Li Dazhao (1962), cited in Pawłowski (2013: 67). Pawłowski discusses ideologically
determined mechanisms of remembrance and construction of collective memory within the
CPC doctrine. The Polish scholar presents large reference section listing Polish, English and
Chinese language publications on the subject.
4
In the 1920s and 1930s when CPC formulated its doctrine, the peasantry formed the
overwhelming majority of Chinese society (ca 90 per cent), see: Pawłowski (2013: 73).
and their followers: new China did not have to choose between Western
progressive models and Chinese traditional ones, instead the revolutionary
aspects of folk culture could be enriched with adequate foreign contributions.
Such method was supposed to allow for new, progressive and national
paradigms of cultural production and historical memory to appear.
Eventually, the inclusion of certain aspects of tradition into the revolutionary
mindset and artistic expression would maintain a lineage of power between
the communist leadership and the rulers of the oldest continuously existing
civilization, a necessary and natural operation in the society subjected for
centuries to the Confucian principles, hierarchy and rituals.
The term minzu notably entered the history of Chinese animation in
1957 when Te Wei came up with a slogan, ‘The road to minzu style’, hence
the subsequent efforts of the workers became subordinated to the goal of
adjusting the animated medium to the cultural specifics of the new Chinese
national model. John A. Lent and Xu Ying (2010), Giannalberto Bendazzi
(2015), and David Ehrlich and Jin Tianyi (2011) apply this term to Shanghai
productions focused on the development of recognizably Chinese techniques
(ink and wash painting animation, unfolded paper and cut-out collage) as
well as works that use traditional techniques (cell and stop motion
animation) but directly refer to the discursive and performative Chinese
heritage (Beijing opera, literary classics, proverbs). Wu Weihua (2009)
reflects upon minzu in relation to meishu (美术, fine arts). The term that
appeared in the early twentieth century as Japanese neologism connotes
institutional modernization tendencies in the Chinese arts and evokes the
zhongti, xiyong dilemma. The Chinese scholar argues that ‘the meishu film-
related catachresis is a discourse-based cultural subversion rather than a
linguistic revision’ (Wu 2009: 32), while minzu can be considered as ‘a
collective political practice as opposed to aesthetic practice, and as
ethnographic rather than artistic imagery’ (Wu 2009: 52).
Macdonald on the other hand acknowledges the risk of cognitive
reduction, i.e. limitations imprinted in comprehending minzu as a universal
key unlocking the whole era. Additionally, he points out the interpretative
redundancy of Wu’s approach: ‘National style is very much a process, but
the cultural production that emerged alongside national style discourse
cannot be simply viewed within the frame of national style’ (Macdonald
2016: 82). The scholar argues that the national style of distinctive poetics,
immersed in traditional culture, becomes most vividly displayed in a
production that not only borrows cultural conventions and discursive
motives, but also remains a variation of traditional artistic expression,
providing an intersection of heritage and the newly adopted models of its
understanding.
Though Macdonald examines painting animation to a lesser extent than
cell and stop motion forms, it seems that films such as Where Is Mama?
(Xiao kedou zhao mama/小蝌蚪找妈妈, dir. Te Wei, Qian Jiajun/钱家俊,
1960) or Cowherd and His Flute (Mu di/牧笛, dir. Te Wei, Qian Jiajun,
1963) bear great potential for such analysis. Especially as the production of
Where Is Mama? crowns a rapid and intense development phase of minzu.
Let us take a closer look on the liminal moments of this phase and the
dominant features of the narratives applied to the so-called ‘golden age’
history.
The year 1956 appears as a turning point in the history of Chinese
animation for the frequently reported fact,5 inspired by Chinese film
historiography, of an award at the Venice International Film Festival granted
to the film Why Is the Crow Black? (Wuya weishenme shi heide/乌鸦为什么
是黑的, dir. Qian Jiajun, Li Keruo/李克弱, 1955). This first Chinese colour
animation was supposedly mistaken by the jurors as a Soviet production.
The verdict interpreted by SAFS as a depreciation of Chinese art, instigated
the studio’s pursuits for autonomous national expression. This interpretation,
however, cannot be sustained in the light of Macdonald’s findings at the
Venice festival’s archives, which will be discussed in the next section.
The historiography rather marginalizes the role of The Magic Brush
(Shen bi/神笔, dir. Jin Xi/靳夕, 1955) in the process of establishing minzu
style. This skilful puppet film tells a folk story of a boy who breaks class
divisions and learns the art of painting, moreover the magical power of his
brush helps him to conduct revolutionary acts such as overthrowing the
feudal ruler and modernizing the peasants’ work. Jin Xi, a student of Jiří
Trnka and an animation theoretician, saturated the tale with symbols and
meaningful artefacts from the past feudal culture, and dynamic dramaturgy,
accelerating the film’s revolutionary content, as well as common language
(the dialogue even includes vulgarisms). Macdonald (2016: 38) and Wu
(2009: 38), after the writings of Zhang Songlin (张松林; another notable
SAFS artist and theoretician), acknowledge The Magic Brush as the first
actual attempt of minzu style. However, most sources locate the prelude
of minzu in the production of The Arrogant General (Jiao’ao de jiangjun/
骄傲的将军, dir. Te Wei, 1957), a cell animation that evokes characteristics
of Beijing opera.
The wash-and-ink painting animation achieved the highest position
among the essentially Chinese techniques of animation, as Te Wei said: ‘[The
film Where Is Mama?] showed that this imported form of art had been
completely absorbed’ (Alder 1994: 5). ‘Guohua [国画, traditional painting]
turn’, the turn towards traditional art style, evokes a whole spectrum of a
fascinating research problems. Above all, this contemplative and immersive
animated form points the viewer’s attention to one of the fundamental
questions of Animation Studies, i.e. ‘how was the scene/the sequence/the film
made?’ Since for decades SAFS has been keeping the technological
5
See Lent and Xu (2010: 116); Wu (2009: 40); Giesen (2015: 26).
procedures applied in shuimo donghua (水墨动画, wash-and-ink painting

animation technique) secret, few pieces of information are stated in the
literature as definite.6 Certainly, a leading role in achieving the visuals of
blurred boundaries between characters and backgrounds should be credited
to a true master of animated film cinematography, Duan Xiaoxuan (段孝萱,
born 1934), a female filmmaker who has played a significant role in the
SAFS production system. The work of Duan Xiaoxuan does form inspiring
material for the gender-oriented researchers dedicated to unveiling herstory
of various cinemas.
A well-known narrative recapitulates the conception of the shuimo
donghua idea as a chain-reaction of political challenges and pledges. In
front of SAFS officials, Marshall Chen Yi (陈毅, 1901–1972) expressed a
hope to see paintings of the master Qi Bashi (齐白石, 1864–1957) in motion.
A dark and disturbing painting, ‘The Sound of Frogs Issues Forth from the
Mountain Spring for Ten Miles Around’7 was transposed by the artists into
the cheerful Where Is Mama?, a unique children’s propaganda piece that
interweaves slogans from the Great Leap Forward with the traditional,
refined imagery of frogs, fish, crabs and water flowers. The second shuimo
donghua production demonstrated the maturity and gentleness of the new
animated art. The Cowherd and His Flute is inspired by the rural motives
of Li Keran’s (李可染, 1907–1989) paintings, thus directly referring to the
concept of reworking feudal traditions according to the needs and
expectations of the new socialist society.
Incidentally, the year 1956 was marked by the infamous political struggle
between Mao Zedong and revisionists of his doctrine, i.e. the Hundred
Flowers Campaign, a brief thaw and liberation inside the CPC and working
units, and following the hardship of ‘the anti-rightists’ campaign of the same
year. Instigated immediately after these campaigns, the Great Leap Forward
brought about an economic catastrophe in Chinese society as well as a
change in Mao’s point of references in regard to historical and cultural
policies. Mao’s acknowledgement of the First Emperor Qin’s totalitarianism
was interconnected with the new social models prompted by the Great
Helmsman, such as full collectivism and non-stop efforts in radical and
rapid change of national conditions, symbolized most vividly by the
commune kitchens and domestic steel production. The year of the first
screenings of Where Is Mama?, 1960, correlates with the emergence of the
drastic symptoms of the economic failure of Mao’s policies, tragically
marked by the mass starvation and illegal migration that led to the temporary
6
Kiu-wai Chu’s (2015) article ‘Animating shanshui: Chinese Landscape in Animated Film, Art
and Performance’ stands for a highly interesting study on the subject.
7
‘Washeng shili chu shanquan’ (蛙声十里出山泉), painting from 1951, ink and colour on
paper, 127.5 cm × 33 cm. Qi Baishi was inspired by the poetry of Lao She (老舍, 1899–1966).
exclusion of Mao from direct leadership in 1962. At that time, the national
art of animation had already adapted foreign invention into ideological
goals and representational strategies.
The intellectual fervour of 1956, as well as the totalitarian order of the
Great Leap Forward, corresponded with the rigid criticism of the already
existing means and methods of artistic expression, a criticism that eventually
inspired daring undertakings realized through collective efforts. The policy
of ‘regulations’, meant to uplift the society and national economy after the
Great Leap Forward, was postulated by the opponents of Mao Zedong
(among them Liu Shaoqi, Peng Denhui, Deng Xiaoping) and welcomed by
Zhou Enlai (周恩来, 1898–1976), a loyal prime minister and a great admirer
of SAFS productions,8 who advocated the cultivation of traditional artistic
forms in accordance with the dominant doctrine. Under such conditions,
minzu style in its all multifaceted possible approaches and techniques,
matured, flourished and eventually won the hearts of domestic and foreign
audiences, prompting future nostalgia for somewhat old-fashioned imagery
designed and composed in the most mysterious and elaborated manner.
How the canon was tempered

Film Festival Studies provides a wide spectrum for analytical frameworks,
most significantly conceptualizing a festival as an element of historical,
sociological or economical reflection.9 The cultural phenomena of
competition and celebration are imprinted in the very nature of the festival
itself. A fundamental assumption about festivals’ influence on the
establishment of the canon and conventions in film history has been argued
by de Valck and Loist (2009), who classified five axes indicating directions
for film festival studies: film as a work of art; an economic continuum; the
festival as institution; audiences and exhibition; the politics of place. The
first axis, especially, triggers a reflection on the programming policies and
canon-building inclinations of the festivals. The scholars have also
emphasized the political non-neutrality of a festival as an event created
upon ideological presumptions shared by the group of the organizers, and
8
Lent and Xu recall the words of Te Wei: ‘Zhou gave his attention, spiritual support and
suggestions to animation. [. . .] On one occasion, when he visited Southeast Asian countries,
Zhou took Chinese animation with him to show his hosts’ (Lent and Xu 2010: 118).
9
Film Festival Research Network (FFRN), founded by Marijke de Valck and Skadi Loist,
stimulates academic work and provides an insightful academic database in the form of a
website (http://www.filmfestivalresearch.org) that lists FFRN bibliographical references and
further recommended readings. Among significant contributors to the emergence and
development of the discipline were also scholars such as Dina Iordanova, Daniel Dayan,
Brendan Kredell and Thomas Elsaesser.
developed in relation to the various systems of financial support distribution

as designed in individual countries or within transnational structures (cf. de
Valck 2007; Iordanova 2015; Jelenković 2016).
An emblematic example of the ideological functions of a film festival may
be found in the history of the Asian-African Film Festival, an event
established as a celebration of the Non-Aligned Movement. At its third
incarnation, held in 1964 in Jakarta, a film Golden Conch (Jinse de hailuo/
金色的海螺, dir. Wan Guchan, Qian Yunda/钱运达, 1963) was successfully
presented and won the Lumumba Prize. Choirotun Chisaan (2012)
reconstructs the dramaturgy of a power play between Islamic and Communist
political parties over the organization committee of the festival. Eventually
the Communists took over the committee and formally proclaimed the
festival’s agenda as anti-colonialist, anti-imperialist and anti-Hollywood.
The festival, limited solely to its propagandistic function, was deprived of
cultural significance and canon-building potential. Chisaan recalls the
statement of Roshihan Anwar (1922–2011), a renowned Indonesian
journalist, who claimed: ‘I was surprised that Communists made no effort to
mobilise their mass organisations to flood cinemas [. . .] The cinemas
showing the festival films were quiet and empty. Even so, the Antara news
agency reported that there was a gratifying level of interest from the viewing
public’ (Chisaan 2012: 292). Following the failed coup d’état of 1965, this
festival, originating from the Bandung conference’s agreements, was
overtaken by the Soviet Union and the first edition of this ‘new-old’ event
took place in October 1968 in Tashkent, Uzbekistan (former USSR).10
A series of screenings of Chinese live-action films in Paris and Pesaro in
1978 demonstrates another aspect of the politicized nature of the festivals
and their audiences. In Paris, a short programme was presented in six small
theatre halls, while the wider programme accompanied the Pesaro Festival
of New Cinema. Both events marked a crucial step in building cultural
relations between the Western world and China on the eve of transformation.
The Paris programme, curated by Danielle Waserman, was collated with
direct collaboration with the Chinese authorities. The curator pointed out
periods of her interest (yet the selection included five films made during
1961–1965 and one from 1974) while the officials of the cinematography
apparatus provided the body of films up for consideration. The French and
Italian press11 recalled the disappointment of the mostly young audiences –
recently Maoist, currently confused, the revolted youth of Western Europe
10
The history of the Asian-African festival is even more complex. The inaugural edition was
held in 1958 in Tashkent (see Chisaan 2012: 292, British Pathé 1958). Yet the organizers of the
1968 event decided to erase this heritage (see Djagolov and Salazkina 2016). In 1974 the
festival additionally embraced cinemas of Latin America.
11
See Scianna, Henebelle and Bergeron, cited in Reprinted materials (1978) and Ksia˛żek-
Konicka (1978).
found neither an uplifting philosophy, nor truthful representations, in an

idealized PRC cinematic model.
The programmers of Western animation festivals situated Chinese
animation on the periphery of their interests, which might be connected
with China’s politics of isolation from the 1950s to the 1970s (decades
crucial for the development of animated festival culture) and an intrinsic
feature of Euro-Atlantic cultural reflection, a variant of eurocentrism and
orientalism. Nonetheless several influential festivals placed Chinese films on
their programmes during the ‘golden era’, providing SAFS with meaningful
tokens of appreciation for wash-and-ink painting animations in Annecy,
Locarno or Odense. The already mentioned presentations of Chinese cinema
in 1978 in France and Italy suggest a Western interest in Chinese cinematic
perspectives. Festival screenings of two feature-length films (Havoc in
Heaven and Nezha Conquers the Dragon the King12) in 1978 in London and
1980 in Cannes elevated Chinese animation’s recognition outside of the
PRC. Animafest in Zagreb was at the forefront in recognition of the late/
post-Maoist era (a retrospective of six Chinese films from 1962–1976 was
hosted by the Yugoslav festival in 1978), along with the festival in Annecy
that presented China as a country of honour in 1985 and again in 2017.
Bruno Edera (1980) recalls the presentations of several productions made
during 1973–1979 held at various European events as well as the interest of
foreign film magazines in Chinese animation. Edera concludes, ‘It seems
now that the Chinese animated film is regaining its former good shape’
(Edera 1980: 39).
John A. Lent and Xu Ying (2010: 119) argue for the categorization of
the ‘second golden age’ (1976–1980) in terms of the return to the poetics
and philosophical assumptions of the pre-Cultural Revolution period and
generous state support for the animation industry. Macdonald suggests the
interpretation of Nezha Conquers . . . is an example of ‘scar animation’ and
thus emphasizes the appearance of new forms of expression. The scholar
refers to a brief, but powerful literary tendency that attempted to rework the
traumatizing experience of the period from 1966–1976. Nezha Conquers
. . . along with One Night in an Art Gallery (Hualang yiye/画廊一夜, dir.
A Da/阿达, Lin Wenxiao/林文肖, 1978) use means and stylistics developed
in the minzu-dominated period, but directly envision dreadful symbols of
the Cultural Revolution (four dragons as a figure of the Gang of Four in the
first film, symptomatic slogans such as zouzipai13 in the latter), and
incorporate motives of revenge, resurrection and reunion. If the previous
animated decade attempted to represent ideologically reshaped models of
Nezha nao hai/哪吒闹海, dir. Wang Shuchen (王树忱), Yan Dingxian (严定宪), 1979.
12
Zouzipai (走资派) means ‘capitalist-roader’ and connotes the political opponents of Mao
13
Zedong and Jiang Qing during the Cultural Revolution.

unity, memory and heritage, animation of the early reforms and opening up
period aimed at the sublimation of trauma. In this context, it is worth
acknowledging the awakening of revisionist tendencies across Chinese
artistic expression, including animation.14
The ‘Venice incident’, crucial for historical development of Chinese
animation, has been examined by Sean Macdonald who came up with a
ground-breaking finding: ‘The official program of the Venice International
Film Festival lists two films from China, accurately indicating the place of
origin and the directors, The Magic Brush and Why Is the Crow Black? [. . .]
A Czech film won the first prize for animation that year, while The Magic
Brush won an award for Best Entertainment for Children 8–12. [. . .] Very
possibly something did happen at Venice, but there is no textual evidence for
this’ (Macdonald 2016: 90–91). The historiographical mistakes regarding
the awards received by the Chinese films in international circulation seem
quite common and provide a fascinating area of archive-based research. As
an example of such tendencies, one can refer to the information about the
Certificate of Merit for The Magic Brush at the 1957 Stratford International
Film Festival (Giesen 2015: 26), which has similarly left no textual evidence15
or the more significant issue of an award for Havoc in Heaven at the 1978
London festival (Quiquimelle 1993: 186), which also finds no evidences in
the archives,16 nor festival reports from the period.17
Rolf Giesen’s filmography of Chinese animation (2015) attempts to list
festival success, though it should be noted that this undoubtedly valuable
reference at some points lacks consistency in the presentation of collected
data. Factual revision may fascinate film historians, but it certainly will not
create an impact on an established canon, especially if the discussed works
14
Similarly to Macdonald, Ehrlich and Jin Tianyi also notice the ground-breaking role of two
discussed titles and the commencement of a new chapter in Chinese animation history. Ehrlich
quotes Lin Wenxiao’s recollections: ‘When the Gang of Four fell in 1976, there was dancing
again in the Shanghai Animation Film Studio and a tremendous release of artistic energy that
had been repressed for ten long years’ (Ehrlich and Jin 2001: 17). Ehrlich and Jin use the term
‘the second golden age’ but present the diversity of post-Maoist production without delineating
its definite end (the authors refer to the 1980s as well as productions from the early 1990s).
15
‘The Magic Brush was included in the 1957 Stratford International Film Festival as part of
the Children’s Program. I have gone through our holdings and have not found any mention of
The Magic Brush winning an award or receiving a Certificate of Merit’ (an email from the
Stratford Festival Archives Coordinator, Ms Christiane Schindler, May 2016).
16
‘Checking through the 1978 London Film Festival Catalogue Havoc in Heaven (大闹天宫,
Da nao tian gong, 1961–1964, dir. Wan Laiming) was presented in the Animation Section. It
doesn’t record any awards it was nominated for at the festival, and that year the BFI Sutherland
Trophy was won by a film called The scenic route’ (an email from BFI Reuben Library, August
2017).
17
‘Last but not least in the curio section was Havoc in Heaven by Wan Laiming. Made in 1965,
this animated feature length cartoon . . . was not exported due to political intrigues as complex
as chop suey’, writes Kennedy (1978).
belong to the realm of exquisite filmmaking and hold a special position in

collective cultural memory. Referring to ‘festival data’ (printed and ephemera
materials) though might unveil the mechanisms of canon-building processes.
In the case of Chinese animation, the decade of the 1980s seems the most
interesting from this perspective.
The 1980s are also of essential significance in Chinese cultural history. In
the course of only thirteen years (1976 – the death of Mao Zedong; 1989 –
Tiananmen Square protests) China changed radically in terms of politics, art
and economics. It is impossible to single out one major direction that
brought a major impact on the society or dominated the rhythms of these
changes with its inner dynamics. The Great Cultural Discussion, a debate on
the methodology in academia, should be recalled as its conclusions remain
highly significant for the development of cinema culture. Mirroring problems
and features of the Cultural Fever, this influential academic dispute focused
on the fields of ideology and philosophy, theory of culture and artistic
practice. Three meaningful events have contributed to the debate: the
reopening of the Beijing Film Academy in 1978 (followed by the premieres
of ground-breaking live-action films such as Yellow Earth,18 The Horse
Thief,19 Red Sorghum20); the first exhibition of non-political foreign art in
Beijing in 1977 (Romanian paintings from the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries) as well as Pablo Picasso’s exhibition in 1982 (Helman 2010: 20).
Naturally the discussion touched upon the zhongti, xiyong dilemma and
attempted an examination of the Marxist and modernist principles as they
appeared at the end of the twentieth century, fractured, crumbled and
deprived of dogmatic integrity.
Alicja Helman defines the so-called rudimentary modernism as ‘a
contemporaneity attacking its myths; it is a need for work of demystification’
(Helman 2010: 17). In this brief period, the representatives of the Chinese
rudimentary modernism absorbed the significant corpus of Western
twentieth-century philosophical problems, and reworked them accordingly
to their experiences, social and artistic expectations determined by the
intrinsic nation-state world-outlook (conglomerate of Chinese heritage,
communist identity and ongoing modernization). Such intellectual efforts
resulted in an outburst of liberated creativity, leading to the reinvigoration
of artistic practice in all its sectors and possible cross-cuts, reaching a
dramatic finale between 27 April and 4 June, 1989. Animation art, depending
on the Shanghai studio (an institution strongly attached to the country’s
power structures), and witnessing a revival of visual and performing arts,
found its own valve that enabled modernized expression.
18
Huang tudi/黄土地, dir. Chen Kaige/陈凯歌, 1984.
19
Dao mazei/盗马贼, dir. Tian Zhuangzhuang/田壮壮, 1986.
20
Hong gaoliang/红高粱, dir. Zhang Yimou/张艺谋, 1987.
Undoubtedly, the structural crisis of SAFS that led to its division and
disintegration around 1987 (a process directly connected with the emergence
of free market elements within centralized, Communist economics),
decisively transformed the means and conditions of mass animated
production. New times required new models of representation and narration
that would be able to compete with foreign (mostly Japanese) television
production. Time and labour-consuming forms of traditional animation
would additionally require from a viewer a certain aesthetic sensitivity and
readiness for contemplation of its temporality. Such films inevitably lost the
attention of the newly emerging consumerist audiences, which is the most
important fact for the producers who could no longer rely on the state for
financing. The artists of SAFS struggled to improve technological aspects
and enrich traditional imagery and narrative forms with new intellectual
inclinations such as ethnic diversity (Effendi/Afanti, 阿凡提, TV series, dir.
Jin Xi, 1979–88) or religious spirituality (The Nine-Color Deer/Jinse lu,
九色鹿, dir. Qian Jiajun, Dai Tielang/戴铁郎, 1981). As SAFS entered the
path of capitalist filmmaking and production, the authors regained access to
an international circulation of films, i.e. a festival chain of communication
and exhibition.
The 1980 edition of Animafest epitomizes the significant shift that
occurred in the relations between Chinese and Western animators. Festival
jurors (Vasco Granja, Roswitha Fischer, Attila Dargay, Laurentiu Sibiu,
Zdenko Gašparović) acknowledged with a Special Mention the animation
in the film The Fox and the Hunter (Huli dalieren/狐狸打猎人, dir. Hu
Xionghua/胡雄华, 1978). The impressive cut-out collage may be read as a
highly subversive story about the hunter, deprived of power, masculinity and
authority by the loss of his rifle. The cunning forest animals (a fox and a
wolf) begin to hunt the humiliated would-be torturer. A man who lives in
poverty and disdain fears the animals who put on demonic masks. Hu
Xionghua’s film continues the line of ‘scar animation’, even if this tendency
was not officially proclaimed. It is a children’s film that develops one of the
most famous minzu techniques of animation, but whose traditional surface
(beautifully executed animation) hides strong tensions, grief, remorse and
desire for revenge. The 1980 Animafest bulletin points out another significant
cultural turn in the history of SAFS transformation and its inclusion in the
global independent art circuit.
An article under the telling title ‘The People’s Republic of China to Join
ASIFA?’ recalls the discussion between John Halas, Bruno Edera, Jin Xi (at
that time a deputy director of SAFS) and Hu Xionghua. An unknown festival
journalist writes: ‘Mr Halas pointed out as always, Yugoslavia was acting as
a friendly catalyst in the relationships of the various countries in the world’
(Animafest 1980: 8). The recapitulation of the discussion brings to light a lot
of pieces of information about the state of the Chinese industry. According
to the delegates, SAFS employed 500 workers, produced 200–300 minutes
of animated films a year; annually trained twenty students at special courses

held at the studio; produced films mainly for television, and successfully
broadcast them on Sunday mornings. Interestingly, the delegates claimed
that the inner structure of SAFS assumes a division into three sections:
directing, animating and scriptwriting. Testimonies given in the following
years and the source literature do not sustain this notion, instead they speak
of the division into cell, stop motion and collage sections. Jin Xi stated: ‘But
there are cases where one person rolls all this into one, writing, designing,
animating and directing films on his own’ (Animafest 1980: 10). During the
same festival, the Chinese delegation attended the extraordinary General
Assembly of ASIFA as observers. The records of the 1980 Animafest seem to
emphasize a value of tight international cooperation; introducing the
structure of the Chinese animation studio system, but at the same time
demonstrating the fact that Chinese artists were self-aware as auteur figures
in the filmmaking process.
Two years later the festival in Zagreb was attended by arguably the most
fascinating classic Chinese animation author. A Da (1934–1987) reported
his experience in Yugoslavia in an extended article (A Da 1983) where he
deliberates on the nature of the festival, its organization and programming,
but above all presents analyses of cinematic language and animation means
of expression. At the 1984 Animafest, SAFS was represented by three
distinctively different films: A Da’s Three Monks (Sang ge he shang/猴子捞
月, 1980), Zhou Keqin’s (钱家骍) Monkeys Fishing for Moon (Houzi lao
yue/南郭先生, 1981) and Qian Jiaxing’s (钱家骍) Mr. Nan Guo (Nanguo
xiansheng/南郭先生, 1981). A Da, Zhou Keqin and Zhong Songlin (present
in Zagreb as a deputy director of SAFS) answered the questions of
Animafest’s journalists and participated in a press conference. SAFS
delegates left Yugoslavia without any award,21 but they managed to establish
an artistic exchange with Western filmmakers, mostly thanks to A Da’s
friendship with artists such as David Ehrlich and Georges Schwizgebel.
A Da, who had already worked in the studio for thirty years and
experienced each stage of production (as a background artist, chief designer,
animator, eventually director), strongly emphasized the role of the festival as
a powerful learning experience. While referring to his art, he focused on the
efforts in modernizing an animated film language and noted features
differentiating his work from various animation traditions: ‘We have seen
some of Disney’s older films. . . . We have also seen films from socialist
21
The artists participating in the competition were probably not satisfied that the 5th Animafest
jury (Bob Balser, Saul Bass, Miloš Macourek, Yuri Norstein and Borislav Šajtinac) decided not
to give the Grand Prix. In a released statement the jury encouraged the filmmakers ‘to aspire to
deeper commitment to the marriage of meaningful content and new forms, and to the
recognition of the importance of appropriate pacing and conciseness of expression’ (Animafest
1982: 2).
countries. It is all very inspiring, but it is inspiration from other countries. We

want to make films in a certain national style. The idea expressed in my film
Three Monks is both national and international. It is a Chinese story, but the
film has been made, so to speak, in an international way. There is no dialogue
and it can be understood by all’ (Animafest 1982: 16). Descriptive and
refined voice-over narrative was common in Chinese production and its
rejection emphasized a radically new approach. Three Monks stems from a
proverb that speaks about an impossibility of cooperation between
contradictory agents, but A Da consciously changed its meaning, allowing
the caricatured monks eventually to work together in harmony. However
this somewhat propagandistic happy ending extends a simplified ideological
cliché. A Da’s film is dictated by the poetics of an anecdote, and absurd,
dynamic editing plays a primal role among the cinematic means of expression,
while the character and background design become reduced to symptomatic
outlines and attributes. Such aspects of filmmaking became more visible and
dynamic in his following short Super Soap (Chaoji feizao/超级肥皂, 1986).
The 1984 Animafest jurors (Osvaldo Cavandoli, Paul Driessen, Adrienne
Mancia, Anatoliy Petrov, Nedeljko Dragić) awarded the film Snipe-Clam
Grapple (Yu bang xiang zhang/鹬蚌相争, dir. Hu Jinqing/胡进庆, 1983)
with a Mention for special sensibility, charm and atmosphere. A collage of
cotton paper cut-out and painting animation techniques revealed a new
approach of SAFS towards the most impressive and immersive animated
achievement of the past. Hu Jinqing had been conceptualizing the film for
four years, the filmmaker’s crew had been trained in the technique for almost
five years (the actual work took eight months, the usual production timeline
of SAFS). The contemplation of the water landscape is related to the humans’
experience: ‘While two people are fighting, the third takes advantage of the
situation. It has often happened during the course of Chinese history that
two small states have been in conflict while a third would benefit’ (Animafest
1984: 7). This film anticipates Feelings from Mountains and Water (Shanshui
qing/山水情, co-dir. Wang Shuchen, Ma Kexuan/马克宣), a 1988 masterpiece
made entirely in the wash-and-ink painting animation technique that gently
reflects on the inevitable transformation of cultural values and rites.
A Da arrived in Zagreb again in 1986 with a film 36 Characters (Sanshiliu
gezi/三十六个子, 1984) that won an award in an educational film section
(coincidently, this was yet another festival edition without the Grand Prix).
This time A Da represented the Chinese Animators’ Association as its vice-
president and an ASIFA board member. He also announced preparations
for an animation festival in Shanghai, the first international undertaking of
such a kind in the PRC.22 While interviewed he focused on the overview of
22
National festivals had already been organized in PRC (most notably the ‘Hundred Flowers’
Festival), yet A Da’s and other delegates’ festival experiences in the West contributed to
establishment of the new festival model in China.
FIGURE 5.1 A Da in Zagreb (1986). World Festival of Animated Film – Animafest

Zagreb.
production conditions in the Chinese animation industry, listing the numbers

of films and awards appearing in the history of SAFS, but he also stated
directly: ‘They are over 500 people working there . . . 200 of them are auteur
in their own right’ (Animafest 1986: 13). The possibility of directly
interacting and mutually influencing artists from various cultural and
cinematographic contexts appears as something very significant for A Da.
Asked about the origins of his unique film (a certain kind of Chinese hand-
writing instructions for beginners), he says: ‘I got the idea at the Zagreb
Festival four years ago, from my friend David Ehrlich. He knows how to
write some of the Chinese characters as it is a drawn script. Instead of
talking about it, I’ll draw it for you. There, now you can learn new Chinese
characters’ (Animafest 1986: 14).
The eagerness of the Chinese authors to learn and rework Western
influences and to develop modern representative and narrative modes of
national animation was welcomed in Zagreb by the artists from Switzerland,
FIGURE 5.2 36 Characters (1986). World Festival of Animated Film – Animafest

Zagreb.
the United States and Poland. A group of experimentalists and auteurs23

created a unique collective work, Academy Leaders Variations (1987,
awarded at the Cannes animation competition). Referring to the primal and
universal film material, i.e. a film leader, the artists presented variations of a
countdown imprinted on a film tape. They changed the standard numeration
23
Georges Schwizgebel, Claude Luyet, Daniel Sutez, Martial Wannaz (Switzerland); David
Ehrlich, Skip Battaglia, Paul Glabicki, George Griffin, Al Jarnow (USA); Jerzy Kucia, Piotr
Dumała, Stanisław Lenartowicz, Krzysztof Kiwerski, Mieczysław Janik (Poland); Yan Dingxian,
A Da, Chang Guangxi, He Yumen, Hu Jiqing and Lin Wenxiao (China).
(from eleven to three) into a new one (from eight to two), each number
evoking new atmospheric and absurd or surreal imagery. A Da did not live
to see the final result of the collective work realized in this transnational
mode (all the artists worked separately from each other while David Ehrlich
coordinated the editing of the material). A Da died in the winter of 1987, as
Ehrlich recalled:
On the train to Beijing to begin the new animation department at the

Beijing Film Institute, A Da complained of a severe headache and when
he arrived in Beijing, he was taken to the hospital. When the Doctor was
told his name, he exclaimed, ‘Oh, you’re the director of the famous Three
Monks Carrying the Water!’ A Da, who has been working tirelessly for
years in creating ground-breaking films, teaching a new generation of
animators, and in bringing Shanghai animation and its artists out into the
world, answered with a sigh: ‘Yes, but I can no longer carry the water’.
He then collapsed and never again regained consciousness, passing away
the following day from a cerebral haemorrhage. He was 53 years old, as
he used to say with a laugh, ‘the same age as Donald Duck’.
EHRLICH 2001: 20
The 1988 Animafest edition commemorated A Da with a presentation

of his last film The New Doorbell (Xinzhuang de menling/新装的门铃,
co-dir. Ma Kexuan, 1986). In the same year the festival in Shanghai was
inaugurated. ASIFA China fully entered the international scene delegating
artists not only to represent their works but also to discuss and judge the
achievements of other cinematographies. Yan Dingxian, a close collaborator
of A Da in the past, joined the 1988 Animafest jury along with Richard
Evans, Jim Henson, Karel Zeman and Zlatko Bourek.
Conclusion
Reflection on distant cultural context derives from the need to embrace the
Other, i.e. to understand the cultural components applied in the creation of
the model of the Other, and the cognitive patterns that enable its
deconstruction; in so doing, one reveals one’s own intrinsic philosophical
assumptions. An outsider may come close to the inherent meanings of
cinematic art examined as a complex and dynamic record of specific cultural
practices, but never close enough to provide a fully satisfactory explication
of the discussed phenomena.
It is worth recalling Werner Herzog’s statement expressed while
interviewed about Where the Green Ants Dream (Wo die grünen Ameisen
träumen, 1984):
Absolutely no one, no anthropologist, missionary or anyone else may be

capable of comprehending their myths with all their consequences. We
are too far from both their religious concepts and their dreams. And so
the border exists, it is impossible to cross it and it would not be wise to
disregard that. I have stopped on the border of my own understanding.
The fact that beyond this border I have been still thinking is, as I believe,
a specific feature of my occupation.
HERZOG 1994 [1985]: 34
A Chinese animation researcher’s border of understanding is delineated

with a highly diverse body of classic films of alluring stylistics, works that in
general might be treated as compounds of strong ideological charge,
artistically sophisticated references, and innocent, even naive, narratives.
Existing writings on the subject, limited in number in the case of English
language studies, may be regarded as ‘check points’. Publications by authors
such as Sean Macdonald, David Ehrlich and Jin Tianyi, John A. Lent and Xu
Ying, Wu Weihua, Rolf Giesen and the earlier articles of Bruno Edera or
Marie-Claire Quiquemelle, serve as guidelines into terra incognita, present a
timeline and a filmography, trace industry characteristics, suggest directions
for further investigations and interpretations, and sometimes provide
intimate insight into individual stories. Beyond the metaphorical border of
understanding, one seeks clarification of the seemingly neutral, yet potentially
ambiguous facts from film history; awaits confrontation of the established
canon with the means and acts that led to its crystallization. The aim of such
a mapping might seem ephemeral and in this regard appears as a perfect
match for Animation Studies that put the intangible aspect of cinematic art
centre stage. However, the method must be grounded in a sceptical research
based on fact-checking and pursuit for evidence. Such an approach bears
resemblance to one of the most significant Chinese Communist leaders’
slogans of ‘seeking truth in facts’.
The presented brief overview of the bulletins and catalogues of Animafest
Zagreb serves merely as an initial step in archive-based, festival research
that would support historical deliberations. I fully realize the necessity of
researching other archive materials and applying a comparative perspective
(Animafest is a case study). Such work should be eventually complemented
with an examination of similar initiatives held in China. I have decided to
focus on Animafest for its fundamental role as a ‘meeting point’ between
West and East throughout the period of the Cold War, the direct influences
of such meetings on the artistic development and sensitivity of A Da, as well
as for the accessibility of Animafest archive that seems quite rare on the
wider background of significant European animation festivals. The analyses
of such source material contribute to the comprehension of an issue of the
canon-building process, an act of political, anthropological and discursive
nature.
Paradoxically the principle of ‘seeking truth in facts’ comprises a thought

that seems highly relevant for the studies on Chinese animated film, an area
that still requires further critical recognition. Chinese animation history is a
history of the studio, artistic collectivism, and the creation of ideologically
determined national identity and memory. At the same time, it is a story of
ambitious artistic undertakings, subversive modernisation, and eventually
of the liberation of individual, auteur subjectivity.
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6
Austria Unlimited – Chances,
Spirits and Limitations of a
Small Production Environment
Holger Lang
Introduction
When two special programmes of Austrian animation were introduced at
Animafest Zagreb in June 2015 (Kožul 2015: 192–211), festival staff asked
the curators from ASIFA Austria onto the stage. However, the initial
conversation started with an extended moment of silence. With a puzzled
expression on his face, the presenter said: ‘I don’t know what to say, I have
not seen anything like this before.’ The following lively discussion made it
clear that the knowledge of and the experience with Austrian animation
may benefit from a recapitulating overview that allows some more insight
into conditions and dynamics of the local scene.
The following text does not attempt to approach animation in Austria
from a strictly functional or factual angle, and it does not attempt to create
a complete picture of it. But, while compressing the historical evolution by
using a broad-brush strategy and by applying a fragmented focus on partially
disengaged elements in its discussion, the main intention of this proposition
is to look beneath the surface and thus to recognize underlying streams and
tendencies. By doing this the situation in Austria should get recognized as a
special case to demonstrate elements that can also contribute to the reflection
on global developments in animation theory.
On the one hand, animation cannot be the only relevant area to include
in this discussion to understand its specific qualities in Austria and on the
other hand it is not necessary to go into excessive detail with its historical
appearances to follow the rationale of the claim. In its particular

manifestation and development animation in Austria reflects a cultural
environment that has as many individual qualities as it most likely will also
have in many other countries in the world. Here the purpose is to sketch out
an integrative and interdisciplinary prospect that wants to raise some more
questions than it wants to answer. This begins with the proposal to not
describe an environment by listing individual work or through a rough
outline of a period or even a specific example that would represent the
situation. The idea is to step back and to get a sense for a general direction
of the cultural development including the specific relationship to animation.
The investigation of animation in Austria should also not get started
without referring to the overshadowing domain of Austrian avant-garde
cinema. For an extended time, the artistic work with film in this country had
been discussed with a focus on this conceptually and historically recognized
frame. Through acknowledging this academically widely examined field,
while opening up the debate to consecutives and overlaps with animation,
one may propose to adjust and modulate the external view on the conditions
in this country based on many of the well-established approaches in avant-
garde cinema. By doing this the relationship between both domains will
then also be up for analysis and exploration.
The statement presented here suggests an extensive intersection of
experimental, avant-garde and underground filmmaking in Austria, so that a
significant part of local artistic animation could get supported and
underpinned by comparing individual examples of work from both sides.
However, such a process comes from a position that would require a
balancing act, necessary to maintain the integrity of consolidated research in
established fields, while involving a much broader, expository process in the
negotiation of animation. Such a case-study based approach is not the
agenda of this text, but it suggests an even more distant view of the overall
environment. In other terms, the underlying intention of this hypothetical
review is the opening of boundaries between areas that enjoyed very different
amounts of attention, investigation, and recognition. Animation in Austria is
the related vehicle to explain why this may be useful also in a global context.1
1
Coming from inside this environment, also as an artistic participant, preoccupation and
potential bias are a comprehensible obstacle to a scholarly discourse. This is kept in mind
during the discussion, but a subjective element cannot be excluded from the overall picture and
a consciously considered aspect of the here proposed strategy as a possible way to reorganize
the view on animation in Austria from a much more associative angle. This approach is only
reasonable by applying an expanded understanding of animation, as a technique, and also as
an open conceptual method to work with audio-visual media. Based on the complexity of the
intention it is only possible to sketch out some of the underlying conditions that endorse the
hypothesis, without claiming to provide a full-scale and in-depth examination.
AUSTRIA UNLIMITED 85
There are two interconnected approaches to the proposal: The specific

working conditions in the field of animation in the country and the related
theoretical exploration of the more fundamental question: ‘Are there any
boundaries to animation?’ In both directions, plenty of space for more
thorough research is available, but the primary ambition of this text is the
promotion of an argument that can get traced through historical
developments in Austria. Today it also contains significant potential for the
consideration of animation at large. Even in the confined circumstances of
this relatively small nation the complexity of conditions allows only a
sketchy and incomplete depiction of artistic evolution and progress, but it
should be dense enough to stand up to the claims of the hypothesis.
Comparable or similar environments – namely other countries – may well
show analogies in their local circumstances, but this will not be a focus of
attention in this synoptic proposition.
From a distance – an outline of origins

and backgrounds
Countries are communities that carry and promote ideas and ideals that
occupy the people living within them. These subtle, subjacent social
conditions differ even between very closely related environments, but they
do influence the cultural microclimate profoundly. To cast some light on the
current situation in Austria one has to look back on the most defining
historical events that reverberate even up to present days. In this context,
one has to start with the Austro-Hungarian Empire during a period that is
undeniably considered the golden age of cultural and social sophistication.
What is still seen as the classical image of Austria and even more so of its
capital Vienna derives mainly from a few decades around the turn of the
nineteenth to the twentieth century. This period also marks the beginning
era of film and animation and is, therefore, an appropriate starting point for
the attempt to contextualize the development of Austrian animation.
The roots into the pre-cinematic realm do reach much further back, and
for this country it is justifiable to point out Simon von Stampfer, a professor
at the Imperial Polytechnic Institute in Vienna, as an innovator and precursor.
His stroboscopic discs represent an invention that stands equally in
significance next to the work of Joseph Plateau in Belgium. Extensive
discussion and documentation of Stampfer and his work is included in
Thomas Renoldner’s (2010: 42–54) contribution to the German language
publication Die Kunst des Einzelbilds. Unfortunately, no English translation
of the book is available at this point. This collected edition currently
represents the most extensive effort to portray Austrian animation also in its
historical context. The title, translated as The Art of the Single Frame, indeed
already casts a clear direction for the understanding of later developments

and this publication is used as one of the prominent sources for information
on the most relevant individuals and examples mentioned here.
In 1914 the oldest remaining and therefore undoubtedly confirmed
Austrian animation was presented. This silent movie was produced in stop-
motion technique and showed precisely what the title expressed: Ideale
Filmerzeugung (Ideal Filmmaking). The animation depicts all technical steps
necessary for the production of a film up to the delivery of the first copy. In
German language, animated films have long been called ‘Trick-Films’, using
‘film-tricks’ like stop-motion, as methods to create scenes and events that
otherwise could not have been displayed in cinematic environments.
Produced by Sascha-Film in Vienna and shot by Ludwig Schaschek, this
approximately seven-minute long clip is an early example of the self-
reflective potential of filmmaking and its interdisciplinary nature. The
medium was used to not only contain and transmit a message about itself,
but it was also already used as a device to represent the message within its
own manifestation (Renoldner 2010: 55). Introspection and self-observation
are not exclusive to Austria, but the contributions of Josef Breuer, Sigmund
Freud and Alfred Adler to the development of the new discipline of
psychoanalysis in Vienna should not be seen without the specific relationship
to the environment that they originated from. The coincidence of an
animated film that picked up this methodology in its essence is indicatory
and for sure more than merely anecdotal.
The historical period between 1914 and 1918 includes a rough transition
in Austria, from a large, thriving and dominating empire to a small, worn
out and almost destroyed torso of itself. The size and volume of the country
had been reduced to nearly a tenth of its previous dimensions, and it brought
the very sudden disappearance of structures, ideas and ideals that had
functioned as focal points for national and personal identification for a very
long time-span.
Of course, this situation had been experienced in various parts of the
former ‘Danube Monarchy’ in many different ways, but the experience of
radical diminishment and reduction would not be seen to the same extent in
other parts of Europe. Countries like Croatia and Slovakia, the Czech
Republic and Bosnia, all had their own, individual way out of a once-
connected history to their own independent history. What remained a lot
more specific in the country that today is called Austria is a massive
downsizing on all social, economic, cultural and political levels. The long-
lasting legacy of this dramatic change had its effect also on work with film
and animation and should be seen as an important element, subsequently
influencing self-conception, identity and introspection, specifically in Vienna.
This claim requires some crude simplification and generalization as it is
recognized as a superordinate influence, a vague, but also a prominent force
that may not be dealt with consciously on a daily basis. It can still be traced
as a real factor, even in a diluted form, up to current times. Under such

influences the development of animation as a part of the cultural and artistic
climate can also be seen as an indicator for more general changes in this
country and some of these relationships will be discussed here.
After a very short early blossoming of animation in Austria between
1920 and 1925 the success of American producers like Walt Disney and
Max Fleischer in the 1930s, and the drying out of virtually all financial
resources, led to a situation where copying the style and aesthetics of these
dominant studios turned into the main objective of local production
(Walkensteiner-Preschl 2010: 185–194; Renoldner 2010: 79–85). The
complex changes in Austria, the fact that many hundreds of thousands of
people had left the country for good, in particular, the capital Vienna, the
overall consistently worsening economic situation and the cultural down-
spiralling created an environment that was not supporting any social
progress. The brain-drain and the elimination of production environments
during this time had been distinct and widespread.
Der Filmbote (1918–1926), an Austrian cinema-journal owned by the
Association of the Austrian Cinematic Industries, described the situation in
1924 as this: ‘Already in 1922, the fate of the Austrian film industry was
sealed. This means: In its blossoming, it already found its end. Now it’s all
about stabilization and the maintenance of those companies that had a
chance to survive capitalistically and to produce on a large scale’ (Renoldner
2010: 58). Despite the turmoil and suffering that the shattering of the Austro-
Hungarian Empire created in the remaining country, significant parts of
everyday life had remained in its pre-World War I style – well up to the 1930s
and 1940s. In particular in Vienna many aspects of society had been paralyzed
and one could almost describe the situation in many areas as virtually ‘frozen’
in its development after the year 1918. To understand the slow and laborious
‘rebirth’ of film and animation in Austria one must see the restrictions created
by the overall cultural, social and political situation in this suddenly tiny
country. For Austrian animation, the decades of decline after 1918 can
therefore not be described as a very significant period; thus we jump ahead
in time – through the next war and post-war period – to the 1950s.
A new start – slow ascent to

progressive thinking
From today’s perspective, a distinctive quality and characteristic of animation
produced in Austria is its independent, exploratory, and relatively self-
contained complexion. The roots of this virtue should be seen in connection
with artistic responses to the general social and political developments
following the second ‘re-boot’ of the national identity. On 27 July 1955 the
‘Austrian State Treaty’ finally re-established Austria as a sovereign state after

ten years of occupation following World War II. In the decade leading up to
this the majority of industrial complexes in the country, especially in the
eastern parts, had been removed, either destroyed or demolished by
occupying forces. Still, on 1 August 1955 the first test-broadcasting of
Austrian Television took place – it was fully rolled out from 1957 onwards
– originally only in the major cities, until in the late 1960s television was
finally reaching all areas of the country (Dassanowsky 2005: 166). On 26
October 1955 Austria declared itself ‘permanently neutral’ and a politically
stable environment had been established.
The period between 1955 and the 1970s was predominantly characterized
by a widespread avoidance of the past and the necessary reprocessing of it.
It showed a strong conservative and reactionary tendency in many social
and cultural areas and a wish for an idealized, simple and happy life. On the
surface, this seemed to have worked for a while as even Pope Paul VI, during
a visit in 1971, still called Austria the ‘Isola Felice’ or ‘the island of the
happy’, which Austrians were truly appreciative to hear. People even started
to modify the meaning of this quote by shifting the emphasis towards the
more enthusiastic self-definition of being an ‘Insel der Seligen’ – an ‘island of
the blessed’. Such an attitude could not pass unnoticed by the cultural avant-
garde, and this is the domain where a robust intellectual resistance started
to rise.
One must also mention that, similar to the rest of Europe, this was also
the time of rebuilding countries, dominated by massively growing
consumption, by commercialization, by the pursuit of undisturbed happiness,
and by a focus on the present instead of the past or the tomorrow. At the
same time, traditional role models still influenced the lives of most people in
Austria and cultural progress, including modernization and emancipation,
had a steep ascent. Despite the recovery from the pressures of the previous
decades much of the society remained stuck in its slow and hesitant internal
social development.
In animation, only small manufacturing structures had remained actively
working. The broad disappearance of an industrial economy was a
prominent factor in the working conditions. Promotional work was one of
the few areas in Austria that provided the necessary financial resources for
production. Small production companies tried to find ways to survive
between the market demands, created by the dominating styles of
international corporations, and a local identity with specific forms of
expression. One remarkable individual who started his career during this
time and remained almost isolated in his domain was Hans O. Sindelar, who
worked with puppet-animation, creating programmes for television
(Renoldner 2010: 127–130).
Despite all structural, logistical and financial limitations artists saw
chances to explore new ways to work and started to develop innovative
approaches. Getting involved with advertising on TV and even more so for

the cinemas had an unexpected side-effect. Promotion was an area where
some production money was available. Several cases of early artistic films
were therefore also connected to a commercial application already by the
middle of the twentieth century. This most likely contributed in an understated
form to the origins of some of the Austrian avant-garde, underground films
and experimental animation.
Two examples demonstrate very well how advertising played a part
during the early years of experimental film and animation in Austria. Both
already included aspects of subsequent and long-lasting developments
that shifted the focus from a narrative and concrete style to a format that
embraces fragmented, abstracted, formal and non-narrative sequencing:
Schwechater (1958) by Peter Kubelka, originally projected as a promotional
film for a beer brand, and Humanic Varese (1959) by Hans Albala,
advertising a local shoe manufacturing company.
Schwechater is a one-minute long film with a complex internal structure
that alternates and interweaves blocks of individual frames. Peter
Tscherkassky cites a conversation between Peter Kubelka and Jonas Mekas
about the conceptual direction of this work: ‘Cinema is not movement. This
is the first thing. Cinema is not movement. Cinema is the projection of stills.’
Continuing with the conclusion that ‘In Schwechater his (Kubelka’s) aesthetic
creed is the core of the entire formal construction. The visual impression
that this film leaves on the viewer is deeply saturated by the ephemeral
properties of each individual frame’ (Tscherkassky 1995: 118).
Humanic Varese, also about one minute long, includes a catchy, drum-
driven song that provides the basis for an animation. It also uses patterns,
stylized photos of characters – women wearing shoes and ‘showing their
legs’ – and letters of the company logo. Aesthetically this clip created a
convincing bridge between the concepts of visual music and the captivating
qualities of Pop Art. Thomas Renoldner (2010: 110) qualifies this film as
Hans Albala’s ‘masterpiece’ and sees it as ‘the first commissioned experimental
film to fine artists’.
These examples already demonstrate the connection between alternative
sources of funding, the radical focus on a formal and conceptual approach
to filmmaking, and the embrace of artistic freedom and independence. This
must be recognized as a benchmark for much of the later following further
developments in Austria.
As Robert von Dassanowsky (2005: 195–196) writes in Austrian Cinema:
A History about conditions of the creative environment that nurtured such
independent and groundbreaking work:
Over one hundred films were created between the early 1950s and 1968
by the members of the Art Club movement by such artists as Peter Weibel,
Kurt Krenn, Mark Adrian, Ernst Schmidt Jr., Peter Kubelka, Otmar Bauer,
Hans Scheugl, Günter Brus and Gottfried Schlemmer. Yet for all their
startling new visions and even new performance art tactics in the showing
of these films, the lack of government and media industry disallowed
any showcasing as was available in Western Germany, where theatres
and television attempted to offer at least a taste of the avant-garde
experience.
While Hans Albala continued to produce a variety of abstract animations

for different companies, Peter Kubelka moved into a prominent position in
the global art-scene that allows us today to see him as one of the defining
protagonists of an international film avant-garde. His iconic work Arnulf
Rainer – the title corresponds to the name of the Austrian artist – is a radical
and consequent continuation of his artistic search for the essence of the
cinematic experience.
‘The film that Rainer had commissioned and financed as a documentation
of his own art of painting, consists of black and white frames, silence and
white noise, covering the entire audible frequency spectrum’ (Tscherkassky
1995: 120). The cinematic composition consists of a structure of combinations
of various sequential patterns that Kubelka strung together in a complex array.
Independent of the elimination of the camera as the device to create a frame,
and also independent of questions related to the actual content within a frame,
the focus on the fundamental visual units that define and represent film as a
medium let such work have a very conclusive impact also on animation. At the
level of Kubelka’s work, the separation between areas like film, art and
animation loses all relevance.
As much as this bold achievement must be acknowledged for both
anticipating and overshadowing a vital part of the later developments also
in artistic animation in Austria, it should likewise be seen as a reason for the
more isolated community that it created. Robert von Dassanowsky describes
the radical style as a ‘factor that made Austrian alternative filmmaking less
accessible to the audiences than their European counterparts’. Continuing,
‘The intellectual/artistic core of this film movement that totally opposed
dominant or commercial motion pictures (rather than influence them or
replace them, as was the case in France, Italy and to some extent, England),
found its ideology in modern painting and the Austrian performance art
known as Viennese Actionism. [. . .] The iconoclastic aim was to angrily
protest against what was seen as calcified, even fascistic, socio-politics and
retrograde cultural elitism of the nation’ (Dassanowsky 2005: 196).
The 1968 performance Kunst und Revolution (Art and Revolution) finally
brought to the surface in the broad public the group of people that is in
retrospect now called ‘Wiener Aktionismus’ or ‘Viennese Actionism’. These
‘actionists’ used violence, nudity and many then (and still now) socially
unacceptable activities to express their ideas and attitudes. Kurt Kren, whose
work is often referred to as ‘underground films’, is a paradigmatic example
for an artist moving between nowadays artificially separated fields –

performance, filmmaking, documentation, animation and fine arts. The
connecting attitude and artistic identity that allowed such a free flow between
genres and disciplines was identified by Austrian filmmaker and writer Hans
Scheugl by quoting theoretician Michael Siegert (1996: 12–13): ‘The Actionists
confronted the system with their sovereign ridicule, they just let their pants
down, and the authorities lost their breath. Our powerless loathing turned
into triumphant laughter’ (Siegert in Scheugl 1996: 12–13).
Kurt Kren worked as experimental filmmaker, collaborated in and
documented performances, and also explored aspects of experimental
animation. A part of his filmmaking demonstrates how the deconstruction of
recorded events, and the following reconstruction in ways that create new
mediate experiences, is playing with foundations of free exploration in
cinema and conceptual animation. In his film 48 Köpfe aus dem Szondi-Test
(48 Heads from the Szondi-Test) Kren was using a single-frame recording
process to create a montage from forty-eight examples of faces, printed for
use in a psychological test. By using these small cards as source material for
his experimental film/animation, he is expanding their original purpose to
create an exploration of perception. Kren says: ‘Yes, what does one see and
what not. In Vienna, someone wanted to bet with me for 100 Schilling after
watching the film a second and a third time, that it had actually not been the
same films. To be fair, I did not accept the bet’ (Kren in Scheugl 1996: 12–13).
To portray a historical social situation in a very brief manner, it is helpful
and efficient to use significant figures and contributors. Up to the 1970s,
the role of women in the Austrian society had been governed by a legal
situation that still had not granted them equal rights and no equal position
in society. Without question, women had also been very active as artists
during this time. However, the public appearance and even more so the
recognition had still been heavily dominated by men. Much of the extensively
engaged and influential work by women had been documented a lot less; it
had been less presented, less promoted and – which is historically even more
dramatic – less archived. It is not possible to make up for such negligence
and ignorance in this compressed review, but it is necessary to point out that
also the contribution of women to animation as part of a more complex
artistic and cultural scene in Austria during this period has never been
accredited accordingly.
VALIE EXPORT, Maria Lassnig

Artists have often performed their role in society in a consciously political
manner. On the other hand, artists’ work has repeatedly been politicized by
others, to influence or comment on a specific period or situation. The
discussion of artists’ work, their attitudes, intentions and their effects, can
and shall not get separated from the political potential that is connected to
such a process.
It is necessary to emphasize that women were able to slowly gain public
recognition in Austria in the 1970s because this effectively contributed also
to the animation scene in a very direct way. The rise of prominent female
protagonists is an indicator of the cultural development that started to take
place. However, one can still not say that today, almost 50 years later, the
society in Austria can provide fully equal rights and conditions for both
genders. Nevertheless, the effects of positive role models have a slow, but
long-lasting impact. Out of a much larger group, two women stand out as
important representatives.
VALIE EXPORT achieved international recognition with her
performances and media-related work. As a principal protagonist in the
artistic field of ‘expanded cinema’, her focus on feminism and the position,
role and significance of women in art and society represents a small, but still
significant stream of artists, contributing to the redefinition of the Austrian
identity. EXPORT did not primarily challenge traditional and established
artistic and cultural strategies and methods, although this has commonly
been seen as one effect of her work, she predominantly expressed a strong,
autonomous and self-conscious position as an artist. This unbound attitude
is an internationally acknowledged expression of creative independence in
communication with the surrounding social context. Also, EXPORT had
previously collaborated in parts with the ‘Viennese Actionists’, but her work
needs consideration in a much broader scope. Gabriele Jutz writes, in her
extensive investigation of avant-garde film in Cinema Brut, that EXPORT
successfully opened up the cinematic experience from a collective experience
in a movie theatre to the much more intense, personalized and reflective
experience of her ‘expanded-cinema’ performances.
What matters in connection to animation is the conceptual premise that
artists have all the rights to define a medium and its use, according primarily
to their own will. EXPORT aggressively displayed her views related to the
treatment and perception of women in Western society and on gender issues
in general. Her work was communicated frequently through recording
media – like film, photography and television and it reverberates up to the
present day. Although her oeuvre seemingly had no direct impact on practical
work in animation, her radical attitude, multi-disciplinary approach, and
her autonomous standpoint make her a clear identification figure for later-
born artists. ‘It’s interesting that the most “radical” protagonists of expanded-
cinema often have no desire to “enlighten” or to “liberate” their audience’,
writes Jutz (2010: 170), ‘the audience does not need to get won and resolved,
but combatted’.
Maria Lassnig was an Austrian painter who is considered one of the most
renowned artists of her generation. By the 1950s she had left Austria
together with Arnulf Rainer to live in Paris for some time, returned to Vienna
to complete her studies with Albert Paris Gütersloh and then had left the
city again during the 1960s, first back to Paris and finally to New York.
Between 1970 and 1972 she studied animated films and produced several
short pieces of which Selfportrait from 1971 and Art Education from 1976
can be seen as indicators for her own future path. Her engagement with the
depiction of the female body and its perception in society had been a central
theme in her paintings. Also, the very personal interaction with her mother
got woven deeply into her self-reflective work.
In 1980 Maria Lassnig was asked to head the painting class at the
University of Applied Arts Vienna, and by this she was appointed as first
female professor for painting at any Austrian university. The relevance of
the political decision to invite Lassnig can be recognized in response to a
coincidentally almost simultaneously occurring circumstance that intersects
the careers of her and VALIE EXPORT. In 1980 both women represented
Austria at the Biennale in Venice. Fritz Billeter describes their contribution:
‘Both women don’t whitewash the situation, they present (mainly related to
bodies and their person) the oppressed situation of their gender: poses and
situations of submission, violation, moment and revolt’ (Billeter 1980: 4).
Lassnig brought to Vienna a unique combination of resistance against
stiff social frameworks, her experience of the art-scenes of metropolitan
cities, the openness to experiments and explorations and no desire to work
for commercial, but rather for artistic goals. She even went one step further
and created a mark in the history of Austrian animation that must be
recognized as a defining turning point, which still echoes within many active
animation artists of today. In 1982, she initiated the ‘Studio for Experimental
Animation’, the first formal education for animation in Austria, being
offered as an optional element during the studies in the painting programme.
Her basic thoughts and foundations behind this were, as described by one
of her students, ideas to ‘develop films – out of the visual – or – from a visual
position (Filme aus dem Optischen heraus zu entwickeln)’ (Stratil 2017).
This class, her initial approaches, the spirit that she brought to Austria,
embedding animation mainly in an artistic context and the connection to a
broader field of visual communication are defining ingredients that affirmed
the further development of local animation. Franziska Bruckner writes in
her 2011 published work on the history and impact of the ‘Studio for
Experimental Animation’ about Lassnig’s role:
In general the stylistic and contentual diversity of Maria Lassnig’s own

animated films stands exemplary for the diversity of student-films created
at the studio. Also, the independent film scene in the USA can be
considered as an inspiring influence for the establishment of the animation
studio at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and thus also for the
emergence of an experimental animation scene in Austria.
BRUCKNER 2011: 93
There was no intention at her studio to educate animators for a commercial

environment, particularly as there was no large scale or even industrial type
of animation-production happening in this country anyway. The work was
a vital part of a painting class, where students were now also enabled to
learn about and to work with animation as a time-based medium. Nowhere
else in Austria did training or education in this field exist. Lassnig taught at
the university for about ten years, and the studio that she had installed was
continued successfully after she retired and returned solely to painting.
A long-lasting effect of the ‘artist as auteur’ approach that Lassnig had
introduced was the self-understanding of the filmmaker as the primary and
often single creator of an artwork. In an international context, this
conception can be regarded as containing a double-edged quality. It may
emphasize the independent voice of the artist and may also encourage a
confident and sincere expression of one’s ideas and attitudes. However, it
can also isolate from a broader creative environment and potentially inhibit
a more collaborative and interactive production appreciation. Nevertheless,
it contributed to the generalized notion that animation in Austria had
developed in a semi-detached, relatively ‘wild’ and artistically charged
atmosphere. For quite some time the involved players did not mind such an
external perception too much.
Exponential expansion – prospects and

expectations in an opening world
The final two decades of the last millennium entailed several events that also
had an impact on the ‘happy island’ of Austria. Inconceivable, but often
imagined incidents suddenly actually took place and had a discreet effect on
all of us. The Chernobyl nuclear power plant disaster exposed most of
Europe to high levels of radiation in 1986, the Berlin Wall crumbled to dust
in 1989 and Austria gave up its Perpetual Neutrality to join the European
Union in 1996. All this pushed Austrians to a necessary new attitude about
their general role in a global environment. Coming from a much more
secluded position this then resulted in many further chances for the
animation scene as well, but it was still a laborious path.
In 1980 the first exhibition on ‘Österreichischer (Austrian) Avantgarde
und Undergroundfilm 1950–1980’ took place. It celebrated a new Austrian
position related to the creation of art films and was organized by Ernst
Schmidt Jr., who also initiated the reconstitution of the ‘Austrian Filmmakers
Cooperative’ in 1982. Schmidt, a protagonist of the internationally
recognized group of Austrian avant-garde filmmakers, also participated in
organizing a screening of films by this association’s members at the University
of Applied Arts Vienna during the same year. Film-technologies became
affordable, and Super 8 film was at its peak, inspiring young filmmakers. In
1983 the exhibition ‘Geschichte des Österreichischen Animationsfilmes
(History of Austrian Animation)’ reflected for the very first time upon this
field in Austria, and soon students from Maria Lassnig’s class travelled to
Annecy to attended their first animation-film festival (Stratil 2017).
While the 1980s and 1990s showed the consistent growth of what Lassnig
had initiated, one has to keep in mind that substantial financial support
for animation production never existed – and still does not as of today, in
2018. Various projects were initiated to facilitate the work of animation
artists in Austria. Hubert Sielecki played a crucial role in starting the
Austrian chapter of ‘ASIFA’ (Association Internationale du Film d’Animation)
in 1985. It was created in collaboration with students from Lassnig’s class,
inspired by their previous trip to Annecy. In 1987 the introduction of the
Prix Ars Electronica for international digital animation brought significant
international attention to Austria. In 1990 ‘sixpackfilm’ was created, first to
organize screenings of Austrian experimental films but soon also to work as
an organization to distribute artistic films from Austrian – and, subsequently,
animation also gained some more space in their catalogue. In 1993 the
‘Diagonale Filmfestival’ for Austrian film-productions was organized the
first time, originally in cooperation with the ‘Salzburg Festival’, and after a
few years it was finally established as the primary festival for Austrian film.
All these individual activities encouraged animation artists in Austria, but
next to the education at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, a central
element to support production during this period turned out to be the group
around ASIFA Austria. Animation had still been based on analogue
technology and this organization provided the necessary facilities to former
students and to interested independent artists. Besides Hubert Sielecki, who
ran the university’s animation studio for thirty years, people like Bady
Minck, Renate Kordon, Mara Mattuschka, Stefan Stratil, Sabine Groschup,
Thomas Renoldner, Moucle Blackout, Daniel Šuljić, Tone Fink and many
others collaborated with and through this society.
During this time, virtually all members of this group had begun their
work as students, as artists that often had to adopt the concept of ‘low tech
and low budget’, as the available production environment remained
economically very limited. What had to be created – almost as a counterweight
to balance the lack of a reliable infrastructure – was an attitude, a mindset
and a climate that would prove to be very accepting, free and open over a
long period of time.
Even though some artists managed to gain small financial revenues from
their work, the lack of a local market for animation in Austria and the
continuing absence of a commercial production scene required the focus on
artistic integrity and independence. This did not mean that the involved
protagonists were not looking for the bigger picture, for ‘the world to
conquer’, but for a sequence of approximately 15 to 20 years, the local
development focused on the manifestation of the, today still solid, defining

qualities of the animation scene in this country. However, change was
gradually happening.
After being nominated for an Oscar with Copy Shop in 2002 (category
‘live-action short’), Virgil Widrich’s Fast Film was nominated for the Golden
Palm in Cannes in 2003. While both his films still embraced analogue work,
they also expanded the medium and demonstrated how the influence of
electronic media and digital production began to spread in Austria. Fast
Film not only bridged between traditional and new production means, but
it also achieved market acclaim and broad critical recognition. Widrich is an
example for artists who started to engage in productions that would also
contain the potential for commercial success – his company and many other
smaller companies began to shift towards digital output and extended into
non-artistic work.
With the new millennium, many new initiatives widened the scene in
Austria massively. The most significant and sometimes overlooked influence
is similar in impact to what Maria Lassnig had done about twenty years
earlier: the conscious creation of spaces to study and practice. After private
universities were finally permitted for the first time in 2001, the possibilities
for education in animation started to spread across Austria, especially
outside Vienna. Several new universities, most notably Universities of
Applied Sciences, included a focus on contemporary directions in animation,
in particular digital production. They embraced more open possibilities to
also work for an animation market, even if such a demand would still exist
mainly outside Austria. New projects consolidated the consciousness and
self-awareness within Austria. In 2001 the ‘Tricky Women Filmfestival’
started, the first Austrian event focusing only on animation and presenting
films created predominantly by women.
In 2004 the ‘VIS–ViennaShorts’ festival was founded, and Thomas
Renoldner from ASIFA Austria started the ‘One Day Animation Festival’ that
evolved into a ‘Two Day Animation Festival’ in 2017. In 2007 the first ‘Pixel
Vienna’ conference, focusing on computer graphics and animation, took place,
and the ASIFAKEIL opened, a public exhibition space to display work at the
intersection of fine-arts and animation, located prominently at the ‘Museums
Quartier’, a highly recognized cluster of museums and cultural institutions. In
2009 the City of Vienna endowed the annual ‘Content Award’ for creative
industries. In 2010 Thomas Renoldner began a collaboration between ASIFA
Austria and the VIS-festival, represented by Wiktoria Pelzer and Daniel Ebner,
to curate a series of programmes under the title ‘Animation Avantgarde’. In
2011 the first ‘Under-the-Radar’ conference, targeting international
networking, academic discourse and interdisciplinary research in animation
and media theory was held in Vienna. Several of the main contributors to
the organization of this event later also started a collaboration with ASIFA
Austria and SCANNER at Animafest Zagreb.
The same year several former animation students from Austria set up
a production company called ‘Neuer Österreichischen Trickfilm (New
Austrian Animation)’ that expanded successfully into Germany and began
producing TV programmes and animated films. In 2013 the ‘University of
Applied Sciences Hagenberg’ started a cooperation with the ‘Ars Electronica’
festival to initiate the first symposium on digital arts and animation in Linz,
titled ‘Expanded Animation’. The summer of 2015 presented the first barrier-
free short-film festival ‘dotdotdot’ in Vienna, and ASIFA Austria celebrated
its thirty-year anniversary with screenings of historical and contemporary
programmes of Austrian animation at festivals and academic institutions in
Europe and the United States. Sponsored by the University of Applied Arts
Vienna, the first ‘RADAR AWARD’ was presented during ‘Under-the-
Radar’ in 2016, honouring outstanding work by students engaging in
animation or new media at an Austrian educational institution.
Conclusion
The here mentioned list of festivals, conferences, activities and initiatives is
not complete, has changed over time and will change even more in the
future. Some people in Austria have already started to complain that ‘too
many small events’ are taking place each year, fearing that they will begin to
cannibalize each other and compete for the few available funds. Despite the
ongoing growth and acceptance of animation in Austria, the stressed
financial situation is still the main obstacle for all types of production – but
that’s not unique to Austria.
What is, however, unique and ‘special’ is the impression that the presenter
from Animafest Zagreb expressed a few years ago, right after the screening
of historical and contemporary animation from Austria. It is the unbound
spirit that has carved out its niche in this small country. The community of
artists matured, it embraced the open and interested global community
and started to connect. People began to reflect upon the local traditions and
idiosyncrasies that they worked with, often without recognizing them
consciously. To remain surprising, to stay independent and to appreciate the
voice of artists is a quality that Austria should hold on to.
Global networking, converging media, financial pressure, extensive
competition and the assimilating restrictions of markets are pushing creative
people more and more in the same direction. While filmmakers are looking
for new ways to finance their work, to collaborate and to adapt to
international tendencies and demands, it is necessary to remember questions
about qualities and characteristics that are unique to this country and that
are rooted in the local environment. Austria may be a small country, but it
has a legacy that is worth remembering. Especially on a conceptual and
theoretical level, the pioneering work of artists should remain recognized as
a rich source of ideas and arguments that carry the potential for a very
encompassing discussion of animation as a theoretical field.
Limitations had unintentionally provided fertile soil for the development
of a robust artistic identity that strengthened and stabilized the Austrian
animation scene. The focus on artistic and conceptual animation not only
reinforced a local aesthetic character, but it also created a functioning model
for productions driven by artists as creative authors. The exploratory force
that occupies independent artistic minds in Austria always tended to accept
the radical nature of resistance and revolt. Such attitudes continuously
encourage adventurous new ideas and surprising proposals.
The refined mindset that the majority of individuals in Austria engaging
in this field has, is still greatly influenced by the rich and encouraging cultural
heritage. With an ideally limitless approach, they are balancing out a lot of
the external conditions that we are all consistently attempting to overcome.
This may also be a model to discuss animation on a global scale from a
distinctively integrative, interdisciplinary and unbiased perspective, while
simultaneously being bold and subtle in one’s advance.
References
Billeter, F. (1980). ‘Werk, Bauen + Wohnen’, Architektur und Landschaft, 9(4).
Bruckner, F. (2011). Malerei in Bewegung. Vienna, New York: Springer.
Dassanowsky von, R. (2005). Austrian Cinema: A History. Jefferson, NC:
McFarland.
Jutz, G. (2010), Cinéma Brut. Vienna, New York: Springer.
Kožul, M., ed. (2015). Animafest Zagreb: 25th World Festival of Animated Film.
Zagreb: Hulahop.
Renoldner T. (2010). ‘Animation in Österreich 1832 bis heute’, in C. Dewald,
S. Groschup, M. Mattuschka and T. Renoldner (eds), Die Kunst des Einzelbilds –
Animation in Österreich 1832 bis heute, 41–152. Vienna: Verlag Film Archiv
Austria.
Scheugl, H., ed. (1996). Ex Underground – Kurt Kren – seine Filme. Vienna: PVS
Verleger.
Stratil S. (2017). ‘In Conversation with Holger Lang’, Vienna, July 2017
(unpublished).
Tscherkassky, P. (1995). ‘Die rekonstruierte Kinematografie. Zur Filmavantgarde in
Österreich’, in A. Horwarth, L. Ponger and G. Schlemmer, Avantgardefilm –
Österreich 1950 bis heute Verlag, 113–122. Vienna: Wespennest.
Walkensteiner-Preschl, C. (2010). ‘Humoristisches in den Animationsfilmen der
1920er Jahre’, in C. Dewald, S. Groschup, M. Mattuschka and T. Renoldner
(eds), Die Kunst des Einzelbilds – Animation in Österreich 1832 bis heute,
185–194. Vienna: Verlag Film Archiv Austria.
7
Beyond Self-images
The Context and Development

of Animated Documentaries,
the Cornerstones of Modern
Animation in Sweden
Midhat Ajanović-Ajan
It seems that the first decades of the new millennium have brought about a
small renaissance of documentaries, especially those that combine live action
and animated pictures and even those visualized totally by employment of
various animation techniques. My concern in the following chapter is the
conspicuous propensity in Swedish animation towards animated
documentary. In my view Sweden is the country that, besides Canada and
Great Britain, has developed the most prolific production of films that merge
documentary purposes and animated imagery.
In this chapter I define animated documentary, as I understand it. I will
also take a look into the history of Swedish animation and documentary,
with an emphasis on the features that might be the base for the development
of the animated documentary. The text will also focus on some factors in the
production and social background that, at least partly, explain why the
animated documentary is such a prominent feature on the Swedish animation
scene and, lastly, it will point at some films and filmmakers that eminently
represent the genre.
Non-photographic documentary
It is a fairly usual misconception that animation is a depoliticized art form
indifferent to reality. Actually quite the opposite is the case: some of the
strongest stories of our time have been told through the medium of animated
pictures. Owing to the animation method, which I define elsewhere as an
‘accelerated metamorphosis’;1 this art form is a unique means of dealing
with some fundamental aspects of our existence and allows for the invisible
to be seen. Animated films often successfully present a form of pictorial
microanalysis of a certain society and time; precise and ‘realistic’, so that
they are faithful witnesses of the time and space they were made in, just as
somebody’s caricature successfully presents the person’s face. An example
could be the spirit of pessimistic resistance in a great number of animated,
particularly puppet, films made in Central Europe, a region forcefully drawn
into the ‘Communist’ block during the Cold War era or the bizarre, nauseating
political fantasies that questioned the social system and announced
‘perestroika’ made by Estonian artist Priit Pärn and by Russian artist Igor
Kovalyov. Another example is the connection between British society during
the so-called ‘Thatcherism’ and the socially critical films produced by
Channel 4, etc. Most animated documentaries deal with the social and
psychological condition of human existence in a wide socio-political context.
Although the so-called ‘animated documentary’2 is a somewhat
problematic conceptual blending, this genre has been established in both
film production and researches as well. Formerly an obscure sub-genre,
animated documentaries have recently become a significant phenomenon
that has gained a strong momentum thanks to modern technological
progress. As film entered the digital age, animated documentaries have also
grown in number from year to year.
Simply put, an animated documentary could be defined as an animated
film made in accordance with the standards and conventions adopted in
documentary filmmaking. In one of the very few comprehensive books on
animated documentary, Annabelle Honess Roe, paraphrasing Bill Nichols,
insists that we can characterize this type of animation as documentary
because ‘it’s about the world rather than a world’ (Honess Roe 2013: 4). She
also proposed several categories like mimetic, substitution, mnemic,
evocation and so on
The animated documentary occurred as a result of filmmakers’ timeless
desire to depict in a believable way events that have not been caught on
1
For example in my book Animation and Realism (Ajanović-Ajan 2004).
2
Of course, it is an unfortunate name just like ‘film’, ‘comics’ or ‘video games’ but the good
news is that people easily get used to unusual names. What was unusual yesterday is the norm
today.
BEYOND SELF-I MAGES 101
camera because: (1) they happened before film was invented, (2) they are
unfilmable at the time, like space, or germs, or (3) no camera was present at
a certain, important event. The first case includes, for example, an entire
sub-genre that might be dubbed ‘dinocumentaries’, stretching from Winsor
McCay’s Gertie, the Trained Dinosaur (1914) and The Dinosaur and the
Missing Link (1915) by Willis O’Brien, to the BBC-produced mini-series
Walking with Dinosaurs (1999) and onwards.
For the materialization of the world of religions, by depicting goddesses,
angels, devils, fairies and other similar creatures, French filmmakers
used cinematic tricks and animation to reach beyond the limitations of
cinematography, with its optical and chemical restraints. This sort of
animated film was further developed within educational films in which
the animation was used to visualize various science experiments and theories
or to reconstruct historical events. Thus, the impossibility of filming some
invisible parts of physical reality was compensated entirely with the help of
different animation techniques, so filmmakers ‘showed’ for instance microbes
and viruses that were ‘recorded’ with their rostrum camera. During the
1920s and 1930s, the Fleischer brothers in the United States made animated
educational films, which in the form of funny cartoons explained Einstein’s
theory of relativity and Darwin’s theory of evolution.
Probably the most interesting is the third case, which is usually the
recreation of events that occurred in reality, but were not recorded. With his
film The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), Winsor McCay made a great
contribution to this type of animated film. The film is a ‘documentary’
consisting of hand-drawn, animated images that very dramatically and
convincingly reconstruct an actual incident and thus create the illusion of an
eye-witness report. In this case, animation compensates for the absence of a
camera at a historic event where a German submarine sank the passenger
ship Lusitania.
Actually, there have been quite a number of animated works that have
reconstructed unfilmed events since Lusitania and even before it. The
reconstruction of historic events such as the visualization of old battles had
started already with Cohl, for instance in The Battle of Austerlitz (La
Bataille d’ Austerlitz, 1909), and even Frank Capra’s crew incorporated
animated parts in the documentary series Why We Fight (1942–1945), for
instance for schematic presentation of Blitzkrieg. The Romance of
Transportation in Canada (Collin Low, Wolf Koenig, Roman Kroiter and
Tom Daly, 1953) as well as The Mighty River (Frédéric Back, 1993) are
examples of Canadian history recounted in the form of animated film.
Such films are also A Song for Hiroshima (Renzo Kinoshita, 1978) an
inside story on the Hiroshima inferno and Peter Mansfeld (Melocco Miklós,
2007), about a falsely accused and executed young boy in the aftermath of
Soviet intervention in Hungary in 1956. This film is based on the court
records, just like the feature length Chicago 10 (Brett Morgen, 2007) that
uses 3D CGI in order to believably re-enact testimonies during the 1968

trial against anti-war activists in the United States. The dark side of human
nature is distinctly captured in Silence (Orly Yadin, Silvie Bringas, 1998)
based on the testimonies by poet and Holocaust survivor Tana Ross.
We find a more recent example for that type of animated documentary in
Broken – The Women’s Prison at Hoheneck (Kaputt, Volker Schlecht and
Alexander Lahl, 2016), a powerful film revealing the sordid conditions in a
women’s prison in former East Germany. Former inmates Gabriele Stötzer
and Birgit Willschütz unsentimentally recount everyday life in the prison,
where the female inmates worked like slaves to produce export goods. The
film is evocative of the conditions humans lived in under a dictatorship now
gone, while reminding us that such things occur even in this day and age.
Visual biographies
Another, very frequent subcategory of the animated documentary is the one
in which narrative and historiographical perspectives are taken from the
filmmaker’s personal experience. Those films are usually distinguished by
storytelling based on everyday realism and autobiographical narratives.
In addition to the pictures coming from the imperfect time machine called
memory that we all have in our heads, the credibility of depictions strengthens
by the employment of authentic material, such as a person’s diary, testimonies,
documents, photos and live-action footage. Such a film was Drawn from
Memory (1995), a feature made by the brilliant animator and cartoonist Paul
Fierlinger, who collected his memories of growing up in the country of
refugees, America, after his Central European Jewish family had managed to
escape from the Holocaust. A similar issue was dealt with by Belgian artist
Jung in his Approved for Adoption (Couleur de peau: miel, Laurent Boile and
Jung, 2012). As a child adopted during the Korean War, Jung, through a
graphic novel and a film based on it, investigated his own identity. Persepolis
(Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud, 2007) is based on Satrapi’s graphic
novel in which she applied a drawing style of old Persian miniatures to depict
her childhood-memories from the turbulent years of the Islamic Revolution
in Iran. Another feature-long animated autobiography based on a graphic
novel is Tatsumi (Eric Khoo) in which the cartoonist Yoshiro Tatsumi
melancholically recounts his life and career in post-war Japan.
Anca Damian distinguished herself with two features: Crulic: The Path to
Beyond (Crulic – drumul spre dincolo, 2011) and The Magic Mountain (La
montagne magique, 2015), in which she aptly used harsh cut out-animation
to reconstruct the extraordinary fate of the people portrayed.
However, Jasmine (Alain Ughetto, 2013), another work based on
autobiographical material, might be the strongest artistic achievement in the
field. On the first level this amazing piece of work that takes place in several
time–space dimensions can be seen as a subtle criticism of Western regimes

that actually helped clerical cliques gathered around Khomeini to take
power in Iran. But the film is, above all, a story of passionate love, so strong
and genuine that it proves that time does not cure everything. Time has
passed, but deep wounds in the soul are still there. In the film, set during the
1970s, a young French animator falls in love with a drama student from
Iran. The two of them are in Tehran when the Revolution launched by the
young, burning hearts demanding democracy and justice is transformed into
a cruel theocratic dictatorship. As an alien, he is forced to leave the country.
She decides to stay in her homeland despite everything. The story is mostly
told through pictures, shades and shapes created by the touches of Ughetto’s
fingers on plasticine under the camera. By using sophisticated visual
language, symbolic figures and moving sculpture of the plasticine that
continually pulsates on the screen, the whole film feels like a gentle message
of love and affection to a beloved being. It is very rare that a movie in any
form and genre reaches such lyrical heights.
Jasmine is a film about the world, which at the same time is a world in
itself, just like every true work of art should be.
Animated interviews
The interview, one of the most frequent standard forms of documentary film,
the one that might make the strongest impression of truthfulness, has also
been applied in animation. Often one makes use of interviews with people
who know the person the film is about, or interviews with the actual subject
of the film. While most animated documentaries come across as a sort of
simulacra – a reconstructed copy of a reality never filmed – the interview
films rely on the specific individuals that share or shared the world with us.
The fact that we are watching a person talking and at the same time hear his
or her words lends a high degree of credibility. The interview film actually
developed in the late 1920s when it became technically possible to copy the
sound on the same film strip as the movie’s pictures and in precise synchrony
with them.3 Films such as Housing Problems (E. Anstey and A. Elton, 1935),
in which people talk about their lives on camera, strengthened the notion of
moving images as a realistic reflection of life. This method was later adopted
by television, becoming the dominant means of expression for TV journalism
and documentary programmes. Alongside documentary films and interview
films, the genre also evolved within the field of animation – at first as a
3
Already in Warner Brother’s film-news Introduction of Vitaphone Sound Picture from
6 August 1926 we can see rudimentary interview techniques. Will Hays announces a sound film
addressing the viewer with the words ‘Dear Friends’. In the second example from the same year,
The Voice from the Screen, Edward B. Craft uses some editing techniques and we even see his
collaborators who ask him questions.
comical parody wherein sound played a key part. For example, at WB’s
animation studio cartoonists combined caricatured imagery of a famous
person with that person’s recognizable voice – be it authentic or imitated.
The method of combining documentary sound with animation for
parodic or satirical purpose was adopted in many films produced by
Aardman, such as Nick Park’s breakthrough mockery Creature Comforts
(1990). Park interviewed several foreign students about their lives in student
homes, and then gave their comments to various charming animated clay
animals complaining about their living conditions at a London zoo. For yet
another example of how animation can cut into ‘the reality of fiction’ by
using the interview method, one can see Abductees (1995) by Paul Vester,
which combines animation with authentic voices in order to visualize real
people’s alleged experiences of alien encounters. Sheila M. Sofian based her
impressive film dealing with the war in Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina
in A Conversation with Haris (2002) on an interview with a Bosnian boy
Haris Alić whose family immigrated to the United States.
The next step in the evolution of the genre was a reworking of the actual
photographic cinematic image in order to reach beyond its surface. It is
usually agreed that animation’s illusory movement has no precedent in a
real-time movement, which is considered to be a fundamental difference
between animated and live-action films. Animation is seen as a form of
moving pictures that is unbound by reality or physical laws like gravity.
However, we have a ‘re-animation’ of previously filmed footage instead of
animating new images, something that is more and more common thanks to
technical innovations in digital media.
A crucial film in this context was Ryan (2004) by Canadian animator Chris
Landreth. His starting material was a series of filmed conversations with the
main character Ryan Larkin, who in the early 1960s made a swift career
within the state-run film company National Film Board (NFB) in Canada. He
gained international recognition with animated films where he used a
harmonious series of moving ‘stream of consciousness’ images, colourized in a
psychedelic hippie style and drawn by hand on paper instead of any of the
prevalent techniques – such as cel, cut out or puppet animation. His film
Walking (1968), a bold look at big city life, depicting the various ways in
which people walk, based on their different gender, age and background,
definitely established 26-year-old Larkin as one of the leading artists in
animation. But then Larkin’s life and career suddenly swerved off course. For
no apparent reason, he started abusing drugs and alcohol. He spent the
following thirty years in complete anonymity at a Montreal homeless shelter.
Landreth’s idea was to make a short biographical film in precisely this genre
– the animated documentary based on a filmed interview with Larkin. Ryan
became a film about alcohol abuse, which, at the same time, on a deeper level,
emphasized the artist’s irreconcilable conflict with society. But what made the
film extraordinary was the way in which Landreth processed the images. With
the help of digital 3D animation, he chipped off large portions of Larkin’s face,
turning it into a stripped fragment of his appearance. The idea behind this, of
course, was to show how alcohol had destroyed what was once a respected
human being and artist. It won the 2005 Academy Award for Best Animated
Short Film as well as more than sixty other international awards.
Another Academy Award winner and equally important film that
contributed to further recognition of animated documentary is the
feature-length Waltz with Bashir (2008), an autobiographical piece by Ari
Folman. Known previously as a documentary filmmaker, Folman was
serving as an Israeli soldier in Lebanon in 1982 at the time of the notorious
massacre in Sabra and Shatila. The main hero of the movie, Folman’s alter
ego, is a man who has lost his memory and is tormented every night by
nightmares. He searches for his lost memory by conducting interviews with
the people who served in the same unit. The quest for truth and the
nightmares are depicted in interviews transferred into animated drawings by
rotoscope, which are connected to each other associatively until the
remembrance of the main character in the fascinating final scene depicted by
live-action documentary images of massacred bodies that cause physical
pain and nausea in the spectator’s body.
Save for a few exceptions, the use of interviews is the main method in
Swedish animated documentaries. So, let us go to the second part of the
chapter where I highlight some of the details from the Swedish film and
animation history.
Bergdahl and the fact-based animation

Victor Bergdahl was a sailor, a painter, a cartoonist, a reporter, but above all
he deserves his place in history as an animator. His first encounter with
animation was in the early 1910s when he, by coincidence, had seen some
early animated film made by Emile Cohl and Winsor McCay, which gave
Bergdahl the impulse to try animation himself.4 What is noteworthy in the
4
A cinema owner ‘explained’ animation to him: ‘The magic is brought about by letting the
pictures joined together in the shape of a book dash past with the help of one’s thumbs in front
of the camera, to enable the optical illusion of motional pictures to be caught on the celluloid’
(Jungstedt 1973: 43). Hearing this, Bergdahl’s only choice was to develop a technique of his
own. To avoid drawing the same backdrop over and over again, he had the backdrops printed
in hundreds of copies on which he would drew his figures. He constructed his own version of
an animation table with light from beneath (later he also created an innovative cut out method,
with paper dolls and a movable scene from cut out parts). His first animated film The Magic
Potion (Trolldrycken, 1915), also the first animation in Sweden, with its bizarre contents and
abstract graphic elements, looks at least ten years ahead of its time. The ‘leading character’ is
alcohol, which continued to play an important role in Bergdahl’s films. He was soon to create
‘the drawn pictorial joke’ series about his alter ego Captain Grogg, a discarded sailor with a
framework of this discussion is Bergdahl’s interest in fact-based animation.

With his methods, he could produce commercials and educational films
much faster, excelling in another area of animated filmmaking he pioneered.
Actually, his last animation was a gynaecology educational film, about
female sexual organs and foetus development.
With Bergdahl, but also his contemporary colleagues like Emil Åberg and
M. R. Liljeqvist, Swedish animation received a striking start. Cartoonists
Robert Högfeldt and Einar Norelius, who learned animation from Bergdahl,
achieved another great success in this early period.5
The first factual animations

However, Bergdahl had an unusual successor in Arvid Olsson, who was
Sweden’s most prolific film animator from the 1930s up until the 1950s.
Olsson became interested in animation as a young student in Paris in the
1930s. Back in Sweden he devoted his time to commercial animation. He
created the first Swedish animated film with a soundtrack, a humorous
commercial about Swedish monetary value, The Lunar Eclipse of the Krona
(Kronans Månförmörkälse) in 1931. In 1934, Olsson became the first Swede
to work with colour film in a professional way. Among hundreds of
commercials he animated some election campaign films for the Centre and
Social Democrat Party, and also did some educational and informative
animation.
During the 1960s and 1970s many popular characters from children’s
literature became heroes of TV series and animated features. Alongside the
former Czechoslovakia, Sweden was actually one of the European countries
with, relatively speaking, the biggest production of animated feature films,
which were almost exclusively made in the Disney-inspired cel animation
technology. Thanks to such a considerable production Gunnar Karlsson,
pug-nose, armed with a pocket flask that often helps him out from difficult situations. This
was one of the first true European animations with a recurring character – there are thirteen
episodes with the liquor-loving hero. Rather frank erotic passages, jokes and innovative
animation made Bergdahl famous internationally. The real masterpiece is The Portrait of
Captain Grogg (Kapten Grogg skulle porträtteras, 1917), where both live and drawn pictures
are used in complex double exposure, a technique developed in the studio of Julius Pinschewer
around 1910.
5
They produced a Disney-inspired film Bam-Bam and Taming the Trolls (Bam-Bam, so toktas
trollen, 1934) with synchronized sound and smooth animation, which laid the foundation for
the first dominant genre in Swedish animation – children’s film. Norelius soon started his
ambitious new project – a long animated film based on Selma Lagerlof’s book The Adventures
of Nils Holgersson through Sweden, but the war put an end to this plan. After the break due to
World War II, animation production recovered in the mid-1950s when children’s films bloomed
so strongly that even today in the country there exists an idea of animation as ‘something for
children’.
Stig Lasseby, Olle Hallberg, Tor-Erik Flyght, Rune Andréasson, Jan Gissberg,
and Per Åhlin as a leading figure, built the second-generation of professional
animators.
Per Åhlin, who made a number of shorts and features as well as
commercials is perhaps the most prolific European animator. He distinguished
himself primarily as a cartoonist whose style has been characterized by
carefully studied figures and an Åhlin-typical twisted and curvy line (as if
he is sitting in a swivel chair as he draws). His animation and drawing
style was totally in tune with the most modern trends in the contemporary
world of animation, enriched with distinct Scandinavian traits and
feelings. In the early 1960s he got the chance to make animated vignettes
for various television programmes, where he began his collaboration with
popular authors and stand-up comedians Hasse Alfredson and Tage
Danielsson. They were the team behind In the Head of an Old Man (I
huvet på en gammal gubbe, 1968), an animated feature not intended for
children. It was a mild satire of the Swedish welfare state, produced with
humour and kindness. The film is situated in a retirement home and deals
with pictures from the memories of its inhabitant, the old age pensioner
Johan.
After the 1980s many talented female animators came forward, fighting
for gender equality in Swedish animation. Like in other animation cultures,
female animators in Sweden showed a propensity to experiment and use
other techniques than cel animation. A special place in that context belongs
to Birgitta Jansson, one of the college trained artists, who began animating
with Per Åhlin in the 1970s and then continued on her own. The enormously
talented Jansson, who unfortunately passed away too early, was inspired
by Will Vinton, so she used a clay technique in the late 1970s. She realized
that clay allows dimensionality and great elasticity and flexibility of the
characters’ arms and legs and stronger expressiveness in the face than it was
possible by using cel animation. Her biggest success was Sweden’s first clay
animation and the very first animated documentary, the thirteen-minute
long award winning Holiday Home (Semesterhemmet, 1981). Jansson’s
documentary-like approach was probably encouraged by the enormous
success and relevance of some contemporary Swedish live-action
documentaries.
Animation in Holiday Home brings to life conversations recorded at a
retirement home, where the tenants tell their life stories. The astonishing
modelling, timing, and especially the film’s finale, which can be viewed as a
brilliant example of postmodernity’s doubts concerning the concepts of
reality and illusion, make the film fascinating even to this day. Jansson did
not forget to pay respect to Per Åhlin by providing a cameo appearance of
Dunderklumpen, a main character from Åhlin’s successful feature.
Holiday Home is a film whose documentary qualities laid the groundwork
for a whole genre that would become an important identifying feature of
Swedish animation – animated documentary. Moreover, the method of

combining documentary recorded audio with animation has become
common since this film.
People’s Home and critical documentaries

The first question concerned with this subject matter is obvious: why are
there so many animated documentaries produced in Sweden? One reason is
practically prosaic – the Swedish Film Institute does not finance animated
films as a separate category, neither is there a commissioner (‘konsulent’)6
responsible for animation as there are for other forms and genres including
documentary. That is why some animators apply with their projects simply
called documentaries.
The other reason is, I believe, connected to the very essence of the nature
of documentary film. Documentaries never serve for entertainment only;
they are either educational or critical dealing with the oldest dogma of
moving pictures, which is truth.
Right after film emerged, it was proclaimed the first media in history to
reflect the true and accurate image of the world. But political power has
always endeavoured to chisel the truth according to its own interest. Just as
in the novel Snow, Orhan Pamuk describes a dictatorial power that has
‘nourished’ its people by meteorologists issuing an order to increase the
daily temperature by five to six degrees each day, cinema was often used to
beautify reality. Since talent and morality, unfortunately, do not always get
along, some of the most fascinating documentaries were created in the
service of propaganda. However, there have been more than enough gifted
documentary filmmakers who actively observed and critically commented
on the time and society in which they lived. Namely, unexpected and
unpredictable thought processes, as well as the look of the camera in the
artist’s hand, proved to be impossible to control so that the history of
documentary has been characterized by clashes between the ‘truth’ of the
power and the truth of independent filmmakers.
Despite its strong democratic tradition Sweden is no exception whatsoever.
What is specific in Swedish documentaries is perhaps the fact that the most
critical documentaries question certain, generally accepted assumptions
and self-images connected with the Swedish Social Democratic model, the
6
When I expressed a criticism against that illogical system in an interview to the film critic
Emma Engström, the reaction from the Swedish Film Institute was Monty-Python-like: ‘No, we
don’t need a commissioner for animation. What we need is more money for the institute.’
See more here: http://sverigesradio.se/sida/artikel.aspx?programid=478&artikel=6078748
(accessed 31 October 2017).
so-called People’s Home (‘Folkhemmet’)7 characterized by solidarity and

equality, outside the country often labelled as democratic socialism. Many
people, both in the country and abroad, are still convinced that nothing has
changed since the time of Olof Palme despite abundant evidence that the
country has fervently moved towards so-called ‘liberal’ capitalism since
the 1990s. However, documentaries have provided a lot of evidence of the
problems in Swedish society that mainstream media and politics seldom
discuss, such as some hidden aspects of structural inequalities in society,
political corruption, racism and segregation, Holocaust denial (an issue
excellently elaborated in the 2008 mockumentary Conspiracy 58 by Johan
Löfstedt), domestic violence and similar things existing silently in ‘the best
country in the world’.
As a typical Swedish documentary, one can take The Swedish Theory of
Love (2016) in which the recognized filmmaker Erik Gandini examined the
idea of a society of independent individuals rooted in the 1970 political
manifesto called Family of the Future (Familjen i framtiden). It is the system
in which the people would be free from each other. After the years in which
society had achieved a ‘comfortable life and highest standard of living,
progress, modern thinking’, the 1970s were the time to take another step
forwards and free the people from the ‘old fashioned way of thinking’.
Instead of households like in other developed countries, the welfare state
focused on individuals, ‘people working for themselves’. As the film suggests,
the experiment resulted in alienation of gigantic proportion, with more than
40 per cent of the population living alone, the highest rate in the world.
Actually, the Swedish documentary has a long and rich tradition. Its
founder was Arne Sucksdorf, who started his career in the 1930s. He was
the first Swede to win an Oscar in 1949 for Symphony of the City (Människor
i stad, 1947) and he also made the first Swedish feature-length documentary,
The Great Adventure (Det stora äventyret, 1953). Thanks to Sucksdorf’s
commercial and international success, documentaries gained more
favourable treatment within the Swedish film industry.
But arguably the most important Swedish documentary filmmaker
became Stefan Jarl, who started his career as Suckdorf’s assistant. Though
Suckdorf’s disciple, Jarl never assumed Suckdorf’s aesthetic concept and
Disney-like approach. In the wake of the British movement ‘Free Cinema’,
he employed arranged or ‘performative’ documentary with some methods
7
It is a big question whether we can talk about People’s Home any longer. After losing two
consequent elections to the right-wing coalition and the massive privatization of public
properties as a consequence, the Social Democrat Party itself moved further to the right. Even
the Swedish famous neutrality may be questioned now with American customs controlling
passengers at Stockholm airport and the Swedish army being regularly a part of NATO
missions and manoeuvres.
typical for live-action film as well as synchronized sound. Instead of dealing

with individual characters he was mainly interested in social groups,
especially the younger generation. Starting with enormous public success
was the feature-length They Call Us Misfits (De kallar oss mods, 1968), in
which Jarl confronted the lack of purpose, the futility and aimlessness of
the younger generation with the spiritual decline and moral weakness of the
older one. With this brutally unsentimental and pessimistic depiction of
the generation gap caused by arrogance and a lack of understanding for the
younger generation, Stefan Jarl set a standard for critical documentaries
that would flourish in the years to come and also with him as the leading
creative force.
In her comprehensive book about Swedish documentaries, Fight for
Reality (Kampen om verkligheten), Ingrid Esping described the long history
of clashes between researching documentaries and censorship (Esping 2001:
196) but nevertheless the documentary filmmaker continued to scrutinize
the shadowy side of the People’s Home.
When it comes to subject matter and the critical examination of society,
there are actually no differences between live-action and animated
documentaries except for the more humorous and satirical elements that are
involved in the latter, due to the multi-coded quality of animation. So, let’s
conclude the text by giving a short overview of the most representative
animated documentaries produced in Sweden.
Animated documentary foremost practitioner

Animated or not, documentaries, when they are good, are always an
interpretation, i.e. a commentary, and not a copy of reality. This is the case
with most Swedish animated documentaries that, as mentioned above,
reveal some hidden aspects of the social and psychological condition of
human existence in society, telling stories untold in public communication.
These films are usually personal, polemical, sometimes dark and pessimistic,
and even a class perspective is present.
During the 1990s Swedish animation in general was impacted by
technological developments. It was a period when digital media replaced
analogue film technology. Digitization meant democratization in both
production and distribution. Although it did not reduce production costs,
animation became accessible to more people and young people especially
embraced this medium as a way to articulate their voice. Digitization also
increased the possibilities for animated documentary, which definitely
became the most prominent genre in the new millennium. Another important
event occurred at the same time, when Konstfack, University College of
Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm founded its department for training in
animation. In addition to educational activities, the Department also
managed to conduct serious research, organize conferences and seminars,
start an animation festival and a regional resource centre for film and
animation, and present the students’ work at various places in the world.
Most important of all was the fact that over 120 pupils and students have
graduated from the College of Arts, Crafts and Design, which changed
Swedish animation for all time. Many of those students from the first few
generations of educated animators chose factual animation as their vocation.
As typical examples for the documentary approach in Swedish animation
one can take Blu-Karma-Tiger (2006), subtitled ‘a documentary about
graffiti’, by the filmmaker duo Mia Hulterstam and Cecilia Actis. In Birgitta
Jansson’s footsteps they used claymation combined with some real graffiti
artists’ authentic voices. Another successful tandem is Hanna Heilborn and
David Aronowitsch, who made the film Hidden (Gömd, 2002). Through
animated images and documentary sound, the story of 12-year-old Giancarlo
is told. He is an undocumented immigrant, hiding in Sweden, who feels
hunted by everyone. With their animated documentary Slaves (Slavar, 2008),
which presents two children’s tragic fates during the civil war in southern
Sudan, they managed to win the Grand Prize in Annecy – the biggest
international success of Swedish animation to date. Besides the aesthetic
reasons, in all these cases animation was used in order to hide the real
identities of the films’ actors because live-action recording and discovery of
their names would put them in real danger.
Maja Lindström made her reality-based films by using 3D CGI. Visually
stunning, The Gang of Lidingo (Lidingöligan, 2009) is based on an
autobiographical story about the filmmaker’s childhood in the Stockholm
suburb Lidingö. The film is a strong statement on the People’s Home
becoming a society sharply divided into one side supporting a strong welfare
state and another of so-called ‘liberals’ insisting on privatization,
globalization, low taxes and deregulation. The time when the modern
political and social environment is characterized by intense ideological and
class divisions is seen through children’s eyes.
A very frequently discussed subject matter in animated documentaries is
connected to people’s sexual habits. In her film Embryo (2013), Emma
Thorsander used interviews in order to examine the state of mind of young
women who had had an abortion. Teresa Glad explored teenagers’ approach
to sexuality and love in Ugly Feelings (Fulla känslor, 2008), which is also
based on pre-recorded interviews. Glad would also be the main creative
force behind the animation series on sexual education, Sex on the Map (Sex
på kartan, 2013), which caused strong controversy after being broadcasted
on Public Service Television because it shows explicitly rendered sexual
intercourse.
Jonas Odell, who undoubtedly appears as the genre’s foremost practitioner
– both in terms of the number of films, and artistic and cinematic quality,
also had sexuality as a topic in probably his best movie so far, Never Like
the First Time! (Aldrig som första gången!, 2005).
Together with Lars Ohlson, Stig Bergquist and Marti Ekstrand, Odell
formed the Swedish animation studio Filmtecknarna (‘Film cartoonists’) in
1981. They started out producing independent films but have also made
commercial and music videos. Revolver (1993) was their breakthrough
work. This tragic comedy about the passing of time is constructed as several
short animations combined into a kind of musical collage. A collage-like
structure can also be found in the other films that Odell made on his own,
all of them animated documentaries, a genre in which he became a specialist.
In all of Odell’s films technical brilliance and visual richness are combined
with clear storytelling. Odell employs a fragmented visual mode of
storytelling, founded on either interviews or research in order to create
‘micro physiognomic’ pictures of modern Sweden. By applying an
imaginative visual vocabulary he transfers the reality of the everyday into an
artistic reality within which he sets light to some marginalized dimension of
society, people and ways of life.
The most interesting one is, as mentioned above, Never Like the First
Time!, based on recorded interviews with four people, all telling recollections
of their respective sexual debuts. The film is not only a great artistic
achievement based on interviews and research, but also a sensitive insight
into the human condition in modern Sweden. In a personal manner, the film
highlights the relationship between our ancient carnal desires and our lives
in modern society as well as the incredible complexity of the term love. For
the three young people, obviously from the generation of ‘independent
individuals’, their sexual debut was something violent, awful or emotionless.
At the end, their experience is confronted with the 80-year-old man’s
recollection, who clearly remember what was ‘the best day in his life’,
describing it in beautiful poetic language. His memories are wonderfully
visualized through the ingenious recreation of advertising pictures from a
1930s Stockholm newspaper and the use of shifting patterns that, in the
fraction of a second, consolidate and concentrate their meaning, melting
nuances together. In doing so, Odell, as conceivable as Ughetto did in
Jasmine, shows us not only how animation can penetrate deep into the
human psyche and but also that animation in some cases can reach lyrical
areas unattainable by live-action film. The film was a major international hit
and award winner at, for example, the Berlinale.
Even in his other projects, Lies (Lögner, 2008) and Tusilago (2010),
Odell continued featuring real people’s experiences. Particularly successful
was Tusilago, a sad story inspired by the authentic biography of a woman
‘A’, which in the 1970s was the girlfriend of West German terrorist
Norbert Kröcher. The film’s starting point was a famous court case from the
1990s. The documentary quality emphasizes an innocent woman paying
the highest price for something she has no responsibility for, besides her own
naivety, while the animation and imagery penetrate deeper into ‘A’s inner
world.
In his latest film, I Was a Winner (Jag Var en Vinnare, 2016), which is the
first time he uses 3D CGI, Odell highlights another big problem that is
downgraded in public discussions – game addiction. As in his previous films
he uses metaphoric imagery, in this case three avatars that present real game
addicts, to tell the story of the most alienated people in contemporary
society.
As one of the most consistent creators of this extraordinary genre, Odell
has proven that the animated documentary has come to stay in Swedish
cinema.
References
Ajanović-Ajan, M. (2004). Animation and Realism. Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez/
Croatian Film Association.
Chunning, G. (2016). ‘The Archeology of Memory: The Exploration of Animated
Documentary’, in Olga Bobrowska and Michał Bobrowski (eds), Obsession,
Perversion, Rebellion. Twisted Dreams of Central European Animation, 42–63.
Krakow: Bielsko-Biala.
Esping, I. (2001). Kampen om verkligheten. Stockholm: Hjalmarson & Högberg.
Honess Roe, A. (2013). Animated Documentary. Basingstoke: Palgrave, Macmillan.
Jungstedt, T. (1973). Kapten Grogg och hans vänner. Stockholm: Sveriges Radios
förlag.
Lysander, E. (2015). ‘Birgitta Jansson, en animationens stjärna’. Filmrutan, 3 (16):
38–43.
SECTION 2
Case Studies from

Around the World
8
Short Circuits
On the Impact of the Flipbook

in the Work of Robert Breer
Edwin Carels
Introduction
Pursuing a highly personal and surprisingly consistent course, painter,
filmmaker and sculptor Robert Carlton Breer (1926–2011) was driven by a
persistent interest in visual perception. No matter how diverse, Breer’s works
always make us aware to what extent human perception is both culturally
conditioned and physiologically determined. The formats he developed to
achieve this lead us back to optical toys and the technological origins of
media-art. The interaction he provoked between such parameters as time,
space and movement were aimed to short-circuit viewing habits. This
chapter retraces how for Breer the fundamental decision to destabilize
the visual regime within the context of modern art came about. Through the
(re)discovery of the flipbook, Breer found his initial means to problematize
the relationship between viewer and artwork. With this methodological
breakthrough, the decomposition and reconstruction of movement became
the centre of attention in all strands of his work.
With forty-three films in fifty years, Breer remains a household name in
the world of animation and avant-garde film. And yet his career began as a
painter, with still images. Upon his arrival in Paris in 1949, Breer adopted
the radical modernist stance of abstract, neo-plastic painting. Inspired by
Mondrian, he imposed the same types of restrictions on himself to come to
the purest interplay of lines and solid colour surfaces on canvas. But in the
same year that he could have started to exhibit in the reputed gallery Denise
René in Paris, Breer had already begun to ‘decompose’ his major influences
with his first film, Form Phases (1952). Translating his own rigourous, two-
dimensional paintings into a time-based medium also led him to conceive
three-dimensional objects, starting with flipbooks. In April 1955 Denise
René placed him alongside such prominent, or then still promising, names
as Duchamp, Calder, Tinguely, Bury and Vasarely in the groundbreaking
group show Le Mouvement. And yet it would be Breer’s final act de présence
at the gallery.1 His ultimate contribution consisted of a one-off film
programme and the production of a multiple, in the form of a flipbook.
Once he had experienced the sensation of the moving image, the absoluteness
of painting was no longer an option.
The flickering, fluttering films Breer started to make are like moths
heading towards a flame: his images appear only for the briefest of moments,
always already at the brink of their disappearence. The rapid-fire animation
technique Breer favoured in his filmworks, he contrasted with a second
strand of works that evolved from the rupture with painting. Via the flipbook
Breer not only found his way into film, but as objects they also steered him
towards kinetic sculputures. Gradually these evolved into enigmatic shapes
that move about at a nearly imperceptible pace. Over the last decade this
spatial aspect of his work has been foregrounded and the radicality of his
critical practice better understood.2 The aesthetic questions raised by
blurring the distinction between sculpture and pedestal, between object and
background, between stasis and movement continue to reverberate.
Pivotal moments
After spending the first ten years of his career in Paris (with frequent return
trips to visit his family in the United States), Breer felt the real debates about
the developments in contemporary art were happening in New York. Upon
his return in 1959, he quickly became acquainted with instigators of the
Fluxus-movement, John Cage and Nam June Paik, as well as befriending
prominent Pop artists such as Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg.
1
The gallery opened right after the liberation of Paris in November 1944 with a solo show by
Vasarely. Le Mouvement ran from 8 April to 30 April 1955. Although the initiator passed away
in 2012, the gallery still continues.
2
A few examples of this reviving interest in his work: in March 2010 an article appeared in the
magazine Kaleidoscope; in November 2010 an interview appeared in Artforum; in 2011 a
retrospective in the Baltic (Gateshead, UK) and in the museum Tinguely (Basel, Switzerland)
was organized, accompanied by a catalogue.
SHORT CIRCUITS 119
His filmworks were regularly featured in the programmes of Anthology

Film Archives and Cinema 16, two hotspots of avant-garde film. Breer has
been a fellow traveller and occasional participant to many of the modernist
movements of the second half of the twentieth century, but he never really
became Op, Pop or Rock. An eyewitness as much as an actor on all these
scenes, Breer quietly, yet systematically, developed a separate category, a
parallel movement of his own. There were many pivotal moments in his
early career that led him to start questioning and expanding his field of
vision. During his training as a painter, he discovered geometric abstraction
through an exposition of Mondrian, which incited him to abandon figurative
painting.3 This implied a complete distantiation from his teachers and fellow
students at Stanford University, but Breer persevered in isolation.
When he first arrived in Paris, from early on he befriended such visionaries
as the Swiss orchestrator of sculptural machines, Jean Tinguely, and the Swedish
art collector, Karl Gunnar Pontus Hultén, which led to several collaborations in
the longer term. The former was then still developing his disruptive style that
would make him world famous a decade later; the latter would in 1973 become
the founding director of the new museum at the Centre Georges Pompidou,
opening in 1977. Another decisive moment came when Breer stepped back
from the ambition of absolute painting to focus on the transformational steps
and thought processes that lead towards the composition of a painting. In
1952 Breer picked up the camera in order to register each step of the creative
process in a sequence and soon started to explore the parameters of this new
medium. During a visit to his parental home in Michigan he borrowed his
father’s Bolex movie camera and filmed the images from his flipbook one at
a time with the camera clamped to a closet door. Breer came back to Paris
with three short films, and in 1954 he made the fourth one in this series,
Form Phazes IV.
Another step towards liberation from the abstract, geometric, post-Cubist
orthodoxy came along with his friendship with Pontus Hultén, co-curator
of the exhibition Le Mouvement. Together they set up a programme of
historical avant-garde films, including their own works. Breer showed Form
Phazes IV (1954) and, under a pseudonym, his first animated photocollage,
the anti-clerical joke Un Miracle (1954).4 Together with Pontus Hultén, Breer
also documented the exhibition.5 The first applause after a film screening
3
This was in 1947 at the occasion of a field trip to San Francisco as a student. Breer’s college
years had been interrupted by a two-year service in the US army. Right after his graduation, he
arrived in Paris in April 1949 at the age of twenty-two.
4
At its first screening, Un Miracle was still called Le Pape, and Breer presented it under the
pseudonyme of B. Dieu. Pontus Hultén’s film was named ‘X’ (1955).
5
The film is 14 min and simply called Le Mouvement (1955).
at the Brussels’ Cinémathèque in 1956 was also a moment of epiphany.6

Although he was primarily there with a solo show in a gallery, the discovery
of an entirely different audience was another motivation to abandon painting.
When Breer was back in Brussels for the 1958 EXPRMNTL festival, this
was the first occasion for several avant-garde filmmakers to meet each other.
In the company of Kenneth Anger, Stan Brakhage and Jonas Mekas, Breer
discovered there actually was a whole different context for his filmwork. In
particular, his meeting with Peter Kubelka, who also conceputalized film as
a metric sequence of autonomous frames, would lead to a long-lasting and
productive friendship.
Frame by frame
To the actual gallery show, Breer contributed the flipbook that he created as
an alternative strategy for showing film in the bright-lit conditions of a
white cube.
Although being part of a breakthrough show, for Breer it also brought a
sense of departure. His name did not appear together with Agam, Bury,
Calder, Duchamp, Jacobsen, Soto, Tinguely and Vasarely on the front of the
‘Manifeste Jaune’, which accompanied the exhibition and considerably
FIGURE 8.1 Image par Images, flipbook (cardboard, paper, 1955). Courtesy:
gallery gb agency, Paris.
6
On the initiative of the director of the Brussels’ Cinémathèque, Breer’s film was paired with
Sunrise by Friedrich Murnau. Ledoux was also the director of the EXPRMNTL festival and
invited Breer back in 1958.
SHORT CIRCUITS 121
helped to launch ‘cinétisme’ as a new art movement.7 As the youngest in the

line up of the show, and the only American under the roof of the gallery
Denise René, Breer increasingly felt that ‘at times the elitism of Pure Art
needs to be questioned too, and put in its place’ (MacDonald 1992: 27). As
he later confessed to his American collaborator Billy Klüver:
I realized I was making a lot of absolute statements, paint on canvas,

about one a week. I began to ponder how many absolutes there could be,
and wondered if the process of getting there might be more interesting
than the final resolved composition. I put together a flip book of successive
stages in a composition – one shape/color giving rise to the next on their
way to a perfect but not final resolution. I wanted to see if that could be
of any use to me analytically in showing how I arrived at the final
painting. At this time I had become aware of experimental films and I
naturally slid into the idea of preserving a flip book on film.
KLüVER 1990: 208
When Breer made his first official flipbook (the first avant-garde flipbook),
the title Image par Images signalled the fundamental insight that no image
can be totally absolute.9 Image par Images reads like a statement: every
image is the outcome of many different visual impressions, any image
consists of a multitude of images. An image is never entirely autonomous,
but is always the culmination of several images that preceded it. The French
expression Image par Images can be read as image by image, like ‘frame by
frame’ and thus ‘one after the other’, but also as ‘an image mediated by
images’ or ‘one image as the outcome of other images’. This preference for
the composite could already be retraced in the compositions Breer elaborated
on canvas in earlier stages of his career. All his abstract paintings consist of
a dynamic interplay of different colour planes that deny the gaze any self-
evident point to focus upon. In contrast with most of his fellow neo-plastic
painters, Breer often left the centre of his canvas empty to suggest an
7
The ‘notes pour un manifeste’ were written by Rogier Bordier. When the exhibition was
reprised in New York in 1975, there was, again, no mention of Breer on the catalogue cover. He
was included only by the film stills from his documentary on Le Mouvement. Even when the
Tinguely museum restaged Le Mouvement in 2010, Breer was not listed as one of the
participating artists. He did get a separate interview in the catalogue Le Mouvement – vom
Kino zur Kinetik, but in the caption accompanying the only photograph that features his
flipbook in the context of the exhibition (p. 31), again his name is not even mentioned.
8
Klüver was the founder of Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in 1966, together with
Robert Rauschenberg, Fred Waldhauer and Robert Whitman. He also invited Breer to become
part of their projects.
9
Although claiming a ‘first’ is always a hazardous affair, we base ourselves on the thoroughly
researched catalogue that accompanied the exhibition Daumenkino – The Flip Book Show,
curated by Christoph Benjamin Schulz for the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (Schulz 2005: 72).
expansion of the field of vision beyond the frame. As his friend Ponthus
Hultén noted when Breer was at the peak of his painterly concentration:
‘Breer’s preferred tactic is to stretch the surface to the limit. He often places
forms around the edges of the painting, thus giving them an important role
in tightening the canvas like the head of a drum. This creates a constant,
perfectly controlled tension, where the surface seems to vibrate in a kind of
static dynamism’ (Klüver 1990: 4).
Although after Le Mouvement Breer continued with painting for a few
more years, the process of fragmentation, of analysis and synthesis was
becoming an ever more prominent concern. When the feedback he received
after the Brussels’ screening of his film Form Phazes IV was far more
encouraging than the response to his paintings he showed concurrently in a
solo show, this also incited Breer to focus more on work for the silver screen,
rather than the painter’s canvas.
Doodle or spaghetti
But the move towards film did not mean Breer abandoned the flipbook (or
in French ‘folioscope’).10 Image par Images was produced by the gallery
Denise René as his patroness paid for the production, which involved very
simple black and white stencil on silkscreen and the extra labour of an artist
friend to operate a stapler in Breer’s studio.11 The flipbook was an edition of
500, and has now become a real rarity. One way to catch a glimpse of this
multiple is by watching out for the brief moment when Robert Breer himself
flips the booklet in the documentary he shot of Le Mouvement. The drawings
are in black and white and purely abstract. Over ninety-eight pages, a black
line that is both sinuous and angular evolves, breaks open, multiplies and
grows into more solid volumes, rounded squares, three black and one white,
all in one continous choreography. As Jennifer Burford describes in her
monography on Breer: “‘Floating line” is one of the most frequent terms
used to describe Breer’s films. The straight line is pulled taut, whereas the
doodle or spaghetti is the same elastic line allowed to fall into a random
position. Breer confers to the line an autonomy charactersistic of modern
art’ (Burford 1999: 86). What would appear as a constant motif in his
filmwork was already there in Image par Images, almost literally in a
nutshell, a small book that fits the palm of a hand.
10
Other terms for the same optical toy are: kineograph, feuilletoscope, cinéma de poche, flick
book or flicker book, thumb book, thumb cinema, flip movie, fingertip movie, riffle book, living
picture book, hand cinema, etc. (Fouché 2005: 10).
11
The dimensions of the flipbook are 12.5 × 9.2 × 1.1 cm. On the back it bears the inscription:
‘IMAGE PAR IMAGES a été édité à l’occasion de l’exposition “Le Mouvement” Galerie
Denise René, April 1955’.
SHORT CIRCUITS 123
FIGURE 8.2 Image by Images, flipbook (cardboard, screws, 1960). Courtesy:

gallery gb agency, Paris.
In 1960, shortly after his definite return to the United States, Breer created
another flipbook, hand drawn and thus existing only as a single copy.
Tellingly, the title is the same as the former flipbook, only now in English:
Image by Images. The words are handwritten in red on somewhat yellowed
paper, but the drawings inside are a close variation of his first flipbook,
without literally copying the same shapes. Also, halfway, the black lines are
replaced by red, followed by an alternation between the two colours. Large
screws replace the staples from the French edition. In this period Breer
produced two more (untitled) flipbooks, again single copies with big screws
that hold them together.12 What this ongoing flipbook activity demonstrates
is minimally that the ‘move’ Breer made at the occasion of Le Mouvement
was not simply a gimmick. For Breer, the flipbook had gradually evolved
from an instrument of research to an end in itself. In fact, as a visual artist,
Breer had already made his very first flipbook in 1950.13 Having only
recently converted to geometric, post-Cubist painting, the imagery of this
flipbook is also entirely abstract, yet covering more surface than the more
12
In the catalogue for the Baltic and Tinguely museum exhibition, the flipbooks are specified as
follows: Image by Images, flipbook, ca 1960, Cardboard, screws, 12.6 × 7.6 × 2 cm; Untitled
flipbook, 1960, Cardboard sheets, watercolour, screws, 12.7 × 10.2 × 1.5 cm; Flip Book, 1961,
Paper, screws, 5 × 1 × 6.3 × 1.3 cm (Pardey 2011).
13
Flip Book, Slidecraft, Screws, 10.1 × 8.2 × 3 cm (Pardey 2011: 38). Menegoi (2010: 46)
mentions that Breer had already toyed with flipbooks during his youth.
FIGURE 8.3 Flipbook (slidecraft, screws, 1950). Courtesy: gallery gb agency,

Paris.
minimalist dance of single lines in his later flipbooks. From a combination

of an even red square and a hatched black square, the imagery evolves
towards a dance of blue lines interrupted by red dots. As Breer explained:
‘Single images one after another in quick succession fusing into motion . . .
this is cinema. For the 60 years of its existence it has been used mainly as a
recording instrument, and as an abstract painter I first came to cinema
looking for a way to record the myriad form-color relationships I had
encountered in painting’ (Breer 1963: 69).14
Looking at his very first flipbook it immediately becomes clear that Breer
did not use the entire surface of the slides to draw on, but only the side
farthest removed from the screws, just like in all his consecutive flipbooks.
This implies that already in 1950 he understood how to make the best use
of the format, which allows us to think he made this flipbook on purpose,
not merely as an aid in the process of conceiving a film. When he proposed
Denise René a flipbook as a multiple, Breer knew what he was aiming at.
However brief the animation, the flipbook offered a cinematic experience
without the need of a projection room.
The text is dated April 1959.

14
SHORT CIRCUITS 125
Hand and eyeglasses

By the time Breer introduced this abstract flipbook in the gallery world, he
had made six films, mostly experiments using ink drawing and cut-out
animation that are wonderfully dense yet lyrical abstractions based on
Breer’s own geometric paintings (Form Phases I-II-III-IV, 1952–1954). In
the same period leading up to the exhibition, he also made a very different,
entirely figurative cut-animation film, Un Miracle (1954), as well as a film
with the title Image by Images (1954). This again became the first of a series
of four (Image by Images II-III-IV, 1955).
An important difference with Form Phases is that Breer started to
photograph objects and incorporate actual images of reality, including his
hand and his eyeglasses. Breer described it as follows: ‘An endless loop of
film composed entirely of disparate images. Through repetition, certain
images isolate themselves from the flow reforming the original pattern.’15
The loop wore out and is now lost, but it is clear that Image by Images
I (1954) freed the path to his most radical title, Recreation (1956), which
consists of nothing but three-dimensional objects photographed and
filmed under the camera. Recreation is one of Breer’s most reputed films,
because it has the impact of a visual splinterbomb, attacking the viewer’s
retina with a radically different image on each frame. But as Lebrat observes,
this provocative project did not come out of the blue: ‘Recreation breaks
definitely with Robert Breer’s earlier filmmaking style, abstract and “elegant”
films which can still be considered to stem from a ’20s avant-garde film
tradition of decomposing pictorial forms. Nevertheless, Recreation is the
result of slow maturation, for already in his earlier films, especially starting
with Images by Images I (1954)’ (Lebrat 1999: 74).
With this experiment, Breer decided to make every single frame unique,
carrying to the extreme the idea that a film is composed of discrete still pictures
visible for only a 1/24th of a second. And yet the title of the film was also
applied a year later to this stylistically entirely different, purely graphic flipbook
in 1955. The fact Image by Images could cover both hand drawn and more
photorealistic work again suggests that the philosophy behind this persistent
formulation reached further than a purely formalist interpretation. Film after
15
Text drawn from a commented filmography, compiled by Breer himself. Further descriptions
by Breer, from the same document: Image by Images II and Image by Images III (together seven
minutes) were showing simplified abstract forms with special emphasis on change of pace, both
in black and white, Image by Images IV (three minutes) was shot on Kodachrome and shows
a ‘further development of Image by Images I but in continuous band instead of a loop. A set of
images is repeated several times but is arbitrarily modified’. Information courtesy from the
Paris gallery gb agency, who runs the estate. Thanks are also due to Mark Toscano, currently
working on the restoration of Breer’s film works, and Andrew Lampert, who supervised the
transferral of most of Breer’s work onto 35mm for Anthology Film Archives.
film, flipbook after flipbook, Breer refuted the absoluteness of the single image
by stressing over and over again that no image is singular, yet every visual
impression is unique.16 Breer: ‘The next time you see the same thing it is
different because it’s the second time you’ve seen it’ (Beauvais 2006: 166).
Loops and mutations

Recreation was the outcome of Breer’s experiments with filmloops in his
studio, and by 1957 he also became interested in adopting the format of the
mutoscope to escape the linearity of the flipbooks.17 Instead of a mere few
seconds, he could now invite the viewer to endlessly crank the handle and
watch the flickering pages for any length of time.
FIGURE 8.4 Folioscope, mutoscope (plastic, metal, 1964). Courtesy: gallery gb

agency, Paris.
16
Twice Breer made another flipbook as an edition: In 1967, he contributed with Flix to a series
of flipbooks produced by the Cinémathèque québecquoise, Montréal and in 1988 he allowed a
flipbook to be released as a Christmas card by the Factory record label: Blue Monday Manual.
This was based on his work for the 1988 videoclip for Blue Monday by New Order, directed
by Michael Shamberg and also involving William Wegman. Both can be viewed on the DVD
accompanying the catalogue Daumenkino (Schulz 2005).
17
The mutoscope worked on the same principle as the flipbook and was introduced in 1894 as
an improvement of Edison’s kinetoscope that used reels of film. In early 1896 the Lumières
patented their kinora, a variation on the mutoscope in smaller format. Breer had contemplated,
in 1957, buying a second-hand historical mutoscope but the Disney company bought up
everything before Breer could act (MacDonald 1992: 29).
SHORT CIRCUITS 127
FIGURE 8.5 Homage to John Cage, mutoscope (metal, plastic, acrylic paint,
1963). Courtesy: E. Carels.
Apart from its more autonomous status as an object, a major difference

with the folioscopes was that the mutoscopes allowed one to stop a frame
and study it. Breer had a show planned in Paris at Iris Clert in 1959 where
he would combine mutoscopes with a new film to be projected onto the
gallery window (Eyewash, 1959). However, this show was postponed and
never happened, as Breer had moved back to the United States.18
By the time he would have his first solo-exhibition in New York, Breer
had already improved his ‘french’ mutoscopes and was no longer using
paper, but plastic foil that did not wear out after so many rotations.19 The
logical elaboration from folioscope to mutoscope would affect his work in
two directions: from handheld objects, he evolved towards free standing
kinetic sculptures, and from the accumulation of drawings on small pieces
18
In 1959, a show called ‘Mutascopes and Films’ was scheduled to open at Iris Clert’s tiny
gallery in St. Germain de Prés, between shows of Tinguely and Yves Klein. ‘I had made the film
Eyewash, expressedly to be shown on her front window. But Yves decided that he needed more
time and I was put off till the next fall’ (Mendelson 1981: 9).
19
Robert Breer: Constructions and Films; Galeria Bonino, New York, 12 January to 6 February
1965.
of paper he went on to adopt index cards as an equivalent. As Jennifer

Burford notes in a monographic study:
Inspired by the mutoscope, he also made sculptures from ordinary objects

such as the Rolodex. This standard office item, made by the millions and
once found on every desk, consists of a base with an axle onto which
address cards can be easily attached or removed, like in a mutascope, in
order to find a particular card, the user turns a knob on the side.
BURFORD 1999: 80
For his show Constructions and Films (1965), Breer presented not only
the folioscopes and mutoscopes he had made in the past five years, but he
also played out the principle of the thaumatrope, with its minimalist
alternation between two images, and experimented with flipbook murals as
a variation on the flipbook, but that you riffle your hand along.20 By then he
had also experienced that it was impossible to find an outlet for selling the
remaining copies of his flipbook from the Paris exhibition and thus he
stopped making unique pieces and became a sculptor.
FIGURE 8.6 Mural Flip Book (wood, metal, paper, 1964). Courtesy: gallery gb
agency, Paris.
Breer made a first Mural Flip Book in 1964 (56 × 117 × 12.5 cm). He reprised the principle
20
of having a viewer interact while moving along the work with the long panoramic peepboxes
he introduced in 2006.
SHORT CIRCUITS 129
What Breer did retain from his period of neo-plastic orthodoxy was the
notion that ‘a painting is an object and its illusions have to acknowledge its
surface as reality’ (MacDonald, 1992: 18). In his earliest days in Paris, Breer
already had an intention to study sculpture. He had signed up to study at
Académie de la Grande Chaumière to satisfy the requirements of the US
government scholarship, known as the G.I. Bill, but he actually took a
sculpture class with Ossip Zadkine at the Académie Colarossi, down the
street. However, as his later collaborator Klüver noted:
After Breer had worked with Zadkine for a few days, Zadkine wanted
him to study the plaster model in the afternoon. Breer told him he couldn’t
do that because he painted in the afternoon. . . . Zadkine replied that he
couldn’t paint and be a sculptor at the same time, he would have to
decide. Breer decided. He quit the sculpture course.
KLÜVER 1990: 6
But a decade later Breer’s research led him back to sculpture, as he wanted
to move away from an ersatz film experience of folioscopes and mutoscopes
towards a more unique concept of kinetic objects.
Adding a motor to a mutscope made it resemble film too much, so he
started to do away with the accumulation of pages. An important transition
was the broomstick with an invisible motor on one end to make it rotate
(Rotating Broom Stick, 1964). Breer:
The only reason that you can see that it’s rotating on its own base that
hangs on the wall is because the broomstick is discolored here and there.
If you pay attention, you see it’s rotating very slowly, quietly, on the wall.
It seems to me that that’s full circle. It answers all the requirements of
something that’s formally composed, self-contained, and so forth.
CUMMINGS 1973
As a mutoscope that has lost all its pages, the broomstick is painted brown
and thus evokes a minimalist branch without any leaves. At this point Breer
leaves the flipbook method with its flicker aesthetic behind and starts to
focus on the imperceptible movement of what he has labelled as his ‘floats’.
A similar transitional moment came when Breer decided to motorize a
bent wire (Untitled – Flower Pot, 1962):
It’s just a long wire that undulates and not in any regular way, except it
revolves around an invisible axis. When you revolve it slowly it does seem
to undulate, although actually it’s a wire that is turning. When you see it
in profile it looks like a wavy line and this was the way of solving the
problem of kinetic drawing.
CUMMINGS 1973
From flashing before the eyes like a lightning sketch, the simplicity of a
floating line is now slowed down to an absolute minimum.
Animated archives
In his early sculptures Breer moved away from the page by page aesthetic of
the flipbook via a series of variations on the thaumatrope, consisting of
merely two sides, two images. In his films, however, the methodology of the
thumb cinema was implemented in an ever more consistent way. From 1960
onwards Breer made nearly all his films on the same material support,
standard index cards of 4 by 6 inches. These became the key ingredient upon
which he would draw, scratch, spray or collage his visual ideas. Again, the
transition from canvas to cardboard happened when he first adopted
uniform samples of heavy paper for his 1955 flipbook. It was very likely this
bold move that showed Breer the way to a film practice based on a systematic
use of the index card. Handheld like a flipbook, the cards allowed for instant
testing of the illusion of motion. Easy to process and to store, they provided
Breer with a convenient and consistent working method. Breer did not
necessarily draw the cards in a predetermined order.
Depending on his mood, he produced one series of cards, then another
idea generated another series. He did usually number them, but that did
not prevent him from shuffling and reshuffling them, using sequences
several times in different orders within the same film or even having drawings
recur from film to film. The order of the cards and the editing of short
moments in the film could be tested as easily as cutting a deck of playing
cards.21
By using the most common index cards for his drawings and collages to
be filmed, Breer evidently opposes himself to the conventional use of a
pegbar ruler in animation. Breer never punched his file cards so that they
could be kept in place like with card catalogues. Each drawing representing
a single film frame, the ordering of so many file cards inevitably brings along
the connotation of an animated archive. With his quizzical accumulation of
doodles and randomly chosen magazine cut-outs, Breer radically parodies
the use of the index card as a standard format for storing information, as
these cards were for nearly two centuries used for making inventories
and thus accumulating knowledge and rationalizing experience. Invented
around 1760 by ‘the father of modern taxonomy’, Carl Linnaeus, cards cut
to a standard size became the conventional medium for storing small
21
Of all documentaries, The Two Dime Animator best documents the way Breer handled his
index cards like instant flipbooks.
SHORT CIRCUITS 131
amounts of information or discrete data. Adopted by the Belgian lawyer and

peace activist, Paul Otelet (who in 1904 also introduced the universal
decimal classification system, still used by most libraries), the index card
became the building brick of the Mundaneum, a visionary library conceived
as a city of knowledge that would harbour the references to all books ever
published.
At the height of his ambitions, Otelet’s Mundaneum project comprised
15 million index cards, 100,000 files and millions of images. Until the
breakthrough of the computer, the primary tool used to store and share
information remained the card catalogue.22 With his idiosyncratic use of
index cards, Breer subverted conventions, sabotaging any form of existing
categorization to create a hyper individual rather than a standardized order.
As with the Rolodex, there was the connotation of subverting a typical
component of the bureaucratic apparatus. ‘Breer seems to have sensed, with
grinning wit, that this quality of relentless and contingent movement would
come to be our environment. Our response, he knew, would lie somewhere
between awareness and reflex, science and spectacle’ (Kuo 2010: 215).
Synaptic cinema
As with the handheld flipbook, the notion of scale was another aspect that
also came into play with the index cards, only in a reverse way. Whereas the
small dimension of his flipbook resulted in a nearly unnoticed presence at
the gallery show, by blowing up index cards to fill a whole screen in a film
theatre, Breer demanded full attention for his aberant enlargement of small
cards. He recalls having a similar experience of warped dimensions in his
years as a student: ‘My art history course took place in a huge auditorium at
the University at the end of which was a screen, and slides were shown.
Mendelowitz was teaching. I saw Paul Klee on a screen the size of Lincoln
Center, and I was completely floored when I saw the first Paul Klee the right
size’ (Cummings 1973). For his own films, Breer considered this alienating
effect of enlargement as a welcome characteristic: ‘because of the scale, the
line is blown up, it’s almost like a drawing on film’ (Mekas 1973: 45). Back
in his Paris years, Breer was lauded by Michel Seuphor notably for his sense
of scale:
Breer’s paintings are full of silence and solitude. He excels in creating

immense spaces in a small area. He punctuates them with a black line or
22
The remnants of Otelet’s utopian project are now kept in a Mundaneum museum in Mons,
Belgium. Google built a data-centre in the direct neighbourhood of Mons in 2007, that became
operational in 2010.
a slight skewing of the geometry so that they seem not to take themselves
too seriously. But nothing is more serious than this lightheartedness,
nothing is more appropriate that this bit of humor. In fact, their lightness
and discrete humor are what distinguish these paintings from all others
in their genre.23
More explicit than ever was the case with his paintings, Breer’s drawing
gestures are highly present in every image. As Burford notes: ‘He is the sole
author of his images, whether they are iconic or indexical; in this sense, he
does not contest the artist’s status’ (Burford 1999: 101).
On the small index cards, Breer never ‘worked out’ his drawings. He
clearly wanted them to remain sketches, rough designs, preferring to hint at
an idea, rather than to give away every detail. His aim was primarily to put
the viewer’s mind to work by representing the activity of his own brain. The
FIGURE 8.7 Nine stills from 1970 (16mm film, colour, optical sound, 1970).
Courtesy: Simon Preston Gallery, New York.
23
From a preface by Michel Seuphor for an invitation of an exhibiton, at the American Students
and Artists’ Center on Boulevard Raspail, 11 October to 31 October in 1956 (Klüver 1990: 4).
SHORT CIRCUITS 133
utterly fragmented flow of information becomes a stream of consciousness

by the way the viewer’s mind completes the allusive imagery. The drawings
are showing us Breer’s frames of mind, seismographic registrations of the
most varied and minute motions in his awareness, the electroencephalography
of a protean artist. Considered individually, the majority of these cards do
not even contain any ‘readable’ information or representation. They merely
show indirect indications of an action, like the scribbles in a traditional
cartoon that indicate speed, but then with all figuration erased from them,
or like exclamation marks without the surprised faces. Comparable to
diagrams that do not signify anything without a reader’s prior knowledge of
the codes that form their basis, Breer’s rapid-fire procession of index cards
remains pointless if we are not willing to reflect on the functioning of our
eyes and brain.
His scribbles often evoke purely abstract patterns, and do not represent
any recognizable form or a conceptual scheme. They rather illustrate what
the mind sees when looking inwards, what has been labelled a hypnagogic
vision: random lines, patterns of speckles produced by phosphenes. Behind
the radical abstraction on Breer’s index cards lies the project of a synaptic
cinema that has the phenomenon of visual thinking at its core. Any experience
of an optical illusion is also a demonstration of how the brain works.
A semantic cinema
The company of the artists of the gallery Denise René may also have felt
uncomfortable because Breer found it hard to take the same purist, elitist
stance. He was rather a rebel and an iconoclast, as explicitely illustrated by
the subversiveness of his early short film, Un Miracle. Breer was not only
interested in Mondrian and Klee, but to the same degree in Kurt Schwitters
and his Dadaist mix of typography, newspaper and all sorts of humble
materials. As he explained in 1957: ‘By jamming together and mixing both
abstract and representative material, I find that I can satisfy my need to
express both pure plastic sensation and ideas of ideational nature without
compromising either. I believe that the fixed image is unable to serve this
double purpose without the return to old and worn-out conventions’ (Pardey
2011: 22).24 Although he never really came close to the Situationist
movement, Breer was in Paris at the same time and applying a similar
liberating strategy. Films such as Recreation (1956–57), Jamestown Baloos
(1957) and Fist Fight (1964) can be considered as equivalents to the dérives,
the derailing guided tours the situationists undertook. When knowledge
equals control, Breer propagates deregulation and chaos.
A quote from Robert Breer is cited in Laurance Sillars’ text, Time Flies.
24
Giving an apparent order to particles of life via a linear consecution of

film frames, Breer has systematically refused to subject his viewers to
any conventional narrative or logic. He prefers to incite an outburst of
free association in each individual mind. To get rid of the diegetic impulse
inherent in film, he always tried ‘to counter one movement with another.
A deliberately incoherent rhythm and the dispersal of vision into an allover
field – with no single point of focus – was Breer’s discovery upon his
initiation into film circa 1952’ (Kuo 2010: 215). In Breer’s semantic cinema,
the viewer is challenged to decode every instant, every index card on its
individual characteristics and experience how the brain fails to work at
such speed. Breer’s cards do not represent a textual universe. They do
not inventorize by means of words or numbers, but through different
types of markings: tracings, blots and other forms of graphic signs. Most
of the cards do not even offer drawings in the traditional sense, but
rather show furtive annotations, elliptic representations of objects and
figures.
If anything, Breer is rather heir of the French physiologist Étienne-Jules
Marey than of his British contemporary Muybridge. Having discovered
his avant-garde predecessors in the French Cinémathèque, Breer must
have been aware of Marey, as the director of the Cinémathèque Henri
Langlois had already organized a pioneering exposition on Marey in 1955,
and then another one in 1963. In 1949, the year Breer arrived to spend a
decade in Paris, the Cinémathèque had an exhibition on about the birth of
cinema, focusing on Joseph Plateau, Émile Reynaud, the Lumière brothers
and Marey.25 Although the scientist Marey motivated his research with
the optimization of human actions in mind, his mapping of the body and
the translation of movement into purely graphic markings are quite akin to
the poetic abstraction of the ‘floating line’ that Breer started to pursue, half
a century later. On a purely formal level, the major difference between
Muybridge and Marey is that the former lined up his image sequences in a
disciplined, severely regimented order, whereas the latter preferred to
condense multiple exposures onto one negative, with often quite a lyrical
result. One can be considered a precursor to photorealistic cinema, the other
to animation, which always involves a degree of abstraction.
Whereas Muybridge spent great care in giving his sequences a perfectly
linear layout, Marey compressed his multiple exposures onto one photographic
plate, to make a motion pattern instantly visible. Marey’s graphic approach
also required a plurality of exposures to obtain a single image. This also became
the central principle that Robert Breer championed throughout his career and
in all aspects of his work: it is always about the dynamic interrelation of things.
There is nothing static in his universe. Breer:
For documents on these early exhibitions by the French cinematheque (Païni 2014).
25
SHORT CIRCUITS 135
I find myself combining freely very disparate images and finally using
continuous motion simply as a means to connect up the various fixed
images. This technique tends to destroy dramatic development in the
usual sense and a new continuity emerges in the form of a very dense and
compact texture. When pushed to extremes the resulting vibration brings
about an almost static image on the screen.
RUSSETT and STARR 1988: 13526
Multiple firsts
Although apparently reduced to merely a footnote during the 1955
exhibition of Le Mouvement, Robert Breer did eventually acquire equal
billing in the international circuit that promoted Kinetic Art.27 Particularly
with his ultra slow moving ‘floats’, he gained notoriety among his
contemporaries, culminating in the big outdoor installation for the Pepsi
Pavilion at the world exhibition in Osaka 1970.28 With his film works he
gained recognition even sooner, promoted by such stakeholders as Jonas
Mekas and his magazine Film Culture.29 A selection committee that included
kindred spirit Peter Kubelka canonized fifteen of Breer’s films by making
them part of a regularly rotating ‘essential cinema’ cycle at Anthology Film
Archives in New York.30
26
The quote is originally from Breer 1963.
27
The exhibition Vision in Motion/Motion in Vision (Antwerp, 1959). Breer was part of a
group show comprising Bury, Klein, Mack, Mari, Munari, Mecker, Rot, Soto, Spoerri, Tinguely
and Van Hoeydonck, but again he was the only one without an entry in the catalogue. With
Bewogen Beweging (Amsterdam, 1961, moving on to Stockholm the same year as Movement
in Art), he was part of a massive show that included Kaprow, Calder, Gabo, Mack, Moholy-
Nagy, Piene, Rauschenberg, Schlemmer, Tinguely, Duchamp and Vasarely. The catalogue
(merely 25 pages) does not feature Breer. In 1968 Pontus Hultén included Breer in his exhibition
for the MoMA New York: The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, with a
separate entry in the exhibition catalogue on page 192. In 1970 Breer was included in the
equally expansive show Kinetics in London where he did get equal billing in the publication.
However, in the recent restaging of Le Mouvement (Basel, 2010) Breer was again not listed
as part of the original line-up, but got a separate page with an interview at the end of the
catalogue.
28
For a longer reflection on how Breer aims to choreograph both the space and the viewer, see
Carels (2013).
29
At the occasion of his Independent Filmmakers award, extensive coverage of Breer was
published in the issue #56–57 of Film Culture in 1973, but Breer had already been given
serious attention in previous issues, namely in #26 (1962), #22–23 (1962–63) and #42
(1966).
30
For an overview of the entire programme, see http://anthologyfilmarchives.org/about/
essential-cinema (accessed 31 October 2017).
At the basis of these complementary strands in his work, the fast films
and the slow sculptures, lies the flipbook, which had by 1955 already
become an end in itself. In retrospect, it was perhaps in all its modesty the
most unique and radical statement of the kinetic art show. Le Mouvement
actually acknowledged, by the inclusion of Calder and Duchamp, that
kinetic art was not a totally new manifestation, but rather an elaboration of
these earlier practices. What makes Breer’s Image par Images unique is
paradoxically that it is an edition, not a unique piece of art. It is not only the
first modernist flipbook to be included in an exhibition, it is also a multiple.31
Only a decade later the publication of artists’ books and ephemera would
really take off, in the slipstream of the activities of Fluxus artists, the
expanded cinema events and the conceptualization of para-cinema as a
critical response to the ideology of the filmic dispositif.32
What distinguished Breer perhaps most from his colleagues at Denise
René was his lack of instinct with regards to self-promotion, something that
Vasarely mastered to the extreme. Breer was never interested in claiming
‘firsts’. He realized very well that his film practice was influenced by Hans
Richter, Fernand Léger and several other first generation avant-garde
filmmakers he had discovered in Paris. Even for the revolutionary visual
overload of Recreation there were at least partial precedents to be found,
such as (at particular moments) the fast editing pace of Dziga Vertov or Abel
Gance. But Breer was only secondarily inspired by film history. In the art
world Duchamp had already subverted all sculptural conventions by
presenting ready mades such as the Bicycle Wheel (1913), In advance of a
Broken Arm (1915) and Fountain (1917). For Recreation Breer equally
appropriated the most mundane objects to make a film that flickered as fast
as possible. Of course, when put in motion, Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel
offered a similar experience of rapid flicker, only more abstract. Breer had
the opportunity to show Duchamp his Recreation when the godfather of
conceptual, post-retinal art visited his studio.33
Duchamp was included in Le Mouvement with his Rotary Demisphere
(Precision Optics) (1925).34 Curiously, the film programme Pontus Hultén
and Breer had compiled did not feature Anémic Cinéma (1926), the film
31
A year later another artist’s filmbook was made, but as a single copy only (Roth 2005:
112–113).
32
The avant-garde filmmaker and live performer Ken Jacobs (born 1933) was the first to coin
this concept during his film classes around 1974. The term has since been reintroduced by
Walley (2003), Levi (2012) and others.
33
Breer says about the meeting: ‘I was able to invite Duchamp to my studio in Montparnasse
one day – his comment: “Very nice, but don’t you think they’re a bit too fast?”. That tickled me
very much’ (Breer 2010: 149).
34
Painted papier maché demisphere fitted onto velvet-covered disk, copper collar with
plexiglass dome, motor, pully and metal stand.
SHORT CIRCUITS 137
Duchamp had conceived on the basis of the same research on illusory

depth.35 Perhaps the insertion of verbal puns at regular intervals made the
film not ‘pure’ enough for the largely abstract statement that Le Mouvement
intended to make? With his spoken soundtrack for Recreation, however,
Breer did demonstrate that he personally enjoyed verbal puns and nonsense
poetry as well. Breer must have known that Duchamp also made an edition
of Rotoreliefs, similar to the ones used for his film. In 1935 Duchamp issued
what is regarded as the first multiple in the art world, a set of six cardboard
discs, printed on both sides in colour offset.36 For the New York reprisal of
Le Mouvement in 1975, Denise René included these Rotoreliefs, rather than
the Rotary Demisphere.
Subverting the aura

Son of an engineer, Breer may also have been aware of the several boxes
with notes that Duchamp issued, the first one already in 1914.37 In a
commercial photographic supply box Duchamp offered facsimiles of sixteen
manuscript notes and one drawing for sale. Refusing to bundle his conceptual
notes in a linear bookform or give them any sense of systematic order,
Duchamp accentuated the sudden manifestation of an idea, not unlike the
furtive incoherence of Breer’s filmed index cards that evoke a brain at
work.38 Duchamp’s predeliction for loose scraps of paper does not exclude
an interest in flipbooks. Although there is no actual proof that he occupied
35
The playlist for ‘Un Programme de Film Abstraits’ (21 April 1957) demonstrates Breer’s
awareness of the first wave of avant-garde cinema from the 1920s and 1930s (Eggeling,
Chomette, Fischinger), but perhaps to avoid overlap with the regular programmes of the
Cinémathèque, most titles in of Le Mouvement were from the 1940s and 1950s (including
three films by McLaren, two by Mortensen, two by Breer) (Wetzel 2010: 80).
36
Duchamp, Marcel: 12 Rotoreliefs, Lithography, each 20 cm in diameter, designed to be
rotated at 331_3 rpm in a circular plastic holder (25 cm in diameter). Text of the accompanying
instruction leaflet:
‘12 Rotoreliefs. These discs, turning at an approximate speed of 33 revolutions per minute, will
give an impression of deft hand, the optical illusion should be more intense with one eye than
with two. The 12 drawings will be best seen kept in their black frame, the large ones through
the larger side of the frame. In order to make use of the turnstile of the long-playing record
machines, see drawing showing how to place the pack of discs, above the pin, on white
cardboard. Marcel Duchamp.’
37
The title of Duchamp’s first cardboard box with facsimiles was: Box of 1914, 1913–14; it is
in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, PA, USA.
38
‘Cornell’s dossiers and Duchamp’s fascimile projects are a testament to a school of note-
making that found even the most rudimentary tablet unnecessary. Certainly, no leather-bound
journals were in evidence. Instead, both artists wrote on any scrap of paper at hand. Cornell
especially was fond of overwriting printed materials, squeezing words into every blank space,
front and back, sideways or upside down’ (Koch 1998: 249).
himself with them, there are many instants in his work that illustrate he
enjoyed appropriating diverse forms of vernacular entertainment. And when
for instance Guillaume Apollinaire already had a portrait of himself turned
into a flipbook in 1914, this demonstrates that flipbooks were indeed around
and not unpopular, even among avant-garde artists.39 Duchamp also must
have seen the various thaumatrope adaptations that his friend and fellow
‘scrap’ artist Joseph Cornell made in the 1930s.40 It is clear then that optical
toys had already surfaced in the context of modern art, long before 1955.
With or without such prior knowledge of other artists appropriating the
format of the flipbook or film, Breer’s trajectory in painting did culminate in
a questioning of the value of painting itself: ‘It was a kind of philosophical
effort to pose the question of multiplicity versus the one original act. It was
in the air and I thought, my god, film, here it is and the original is worthless’
(Cummings 1973). Breer was attracted by the notion that filmprints as such
don’t have value (or ‘aura’ in the terms of Walter Benjamin) except when
they are projected. From his 1955 flipbook onwards, Breer addressed the
issue of the artwork in the age of mechanical reproduction, as he realized
that ‘uniqueness enhances the market value of art, but I didn’t want to
participate in that way of thinking. I had my democratic idealism to justify
working in film – and I didn’t even need that: film was just fun’ (MacDonald
1992: 31).
Subverting the aura and authority of the single image through a multitude
of cards and film frames did not mean that Breer altogether abandoned the
hanging of frames against a wall. But to keep the eye restless and the mind
active, he quite systematically persisted in applying his concept of generating
one image through an accumulation of visual impressions. Although the
original loop of Recreation 1 got completely worn out, the work still exists
as a photographic print that consists of dozens of photograms.41 In the film
version of Recreation (1956) Breer cut one print into strips of equal length
to sandwich it between plexiglass.42 Once as he started using index cards
for his films, Breer also mounted some of the cards he had filmed into
39
Guillaume Apollinaire im Gespräch mit André Rouveryre (1914) in Schulz (2005: 24–25).
Apart from the artist’s flipbooks documented in this catalogue, from its inception the flipbook
(or Kineograph, as it was patented in 1868 by Barnes Linnett) was also used for scientific
purpose, as for instance during the International Congress of Meteorology of 1900, to show
meteorological maps in motion.
40
Cornell, Joseph: Jouet surréaliste and Le Voyageur dans les Glaces (both thaumatropes,
c. 1932); Object (Hotel Theatricals by the Grandson of Monsieur Phot Sunday Afternoons)
(box with marbles, referencing Muybridge and Marey, 1940); ¾ Bird’s-Eye View or ‘A Watch-
Case for Marcel Duchamp’ (bow with thaumatropes, 1944).
41
Untitled (Recreation 1), 1956–57 (190.5 × 76.2 cm) reproduced in Beauvais (2006: 17).
42
According to the Paris gallery gb agency, coordinators of the estate, this version was made on
the occasion of the opening exhibition of the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1977, at the request
of Pontus Hultén.
SHORT CIRCUITS 139
FIGURE 8.8 70 (seven original drawings on wooden panel from the film 1970,
1970). Courtesy: gallery gb agency, Paris.
compositions he could exhibit. He thus frequently reprised selections of

drawings on cards, actual components of his short films, like the series culled
from the film 70 (1970) and mounted on several 244 cm long wooden
panels, each presenting seven of the original, small cards.
On each panel, regular-broad intervals separate the abstract images that
were used in the film. On other occasions, Breer joined together side by side
four or even twenty-four images, selected from one film into a single frame,
like in a grid. Once they had been recorded on camera, however, most his
drawings on cards never left their storage space – a simple cardboard box.
The drawings from A Man and his Dog out for Air (1957), the unique film
for which Breer did use a pegbar and transparent paper, he exhibited by
stacking a whole section of the film behind a piece of glass, so the viewer
could clearly see through the first layers.
Although Breer did not want to return to showing ‘ultimate’ images in
isolation, this nevertheless raises questions regarding the status of drawings
originally made to be exposed under the camera, in order to appear in front
of our eyes for only a flash of a second. Once it is permanently visible,
hanging fixed behind glass, its impact is entirely different. How to approach
in an exhibition a drawing identical to the one featured in a film projection?
In general, film stills or photograms extracted from live action films are
rarely considered to have the autonomy of a work of art. They remain
documentation, a reference. Intermediary components like painted cells,
paper with drawings or charcoal traces, or other graphic elements from
animated films do sometimes end up as works in their own right, but then
they lose their dynamism and promote a different quality instead.
Back and forth

After he quit painting, Breer never really upgraded a single image into a self-
sufficient work of art again. Even within a single frame he preferred to
confound and frustrate longer scrutiny of his graphic work by always bringing
multiple elements together. When he did include drawings on a single sheet of
paper in his exhibitions, they usually had the appearance of a study, a sketch
that often combines a preliminary drawing of a project with some handwritten
notes, not unlike the boxed notes Duchamp put in distribution. Some drawings
contain a sequence that suggests a transformation, like the flower and the
American flag in the drawing Untitled (1971), but most are working sketches
and ideas put on paper without any aesthetic pretense.
On one such drawing from 1960, Breer says: ‘I have contrived myself a
funny problem; How to get back to the fixed image by way of cinema. I like
to cross back and forth dragging elements from both worlds. I like to cross
back and forth between cinema and fixed imagery. I like to have the
belongings of one into the world of the other, and never get caught.’43 As
soon as Breer had mastered abstract composition on canvas, he started to
deconstruct it again by foregrounding the preliminary steps of how a
painting comes into being. Once Breer had discovered his working method
to make films with index cards, he questioned himself how these intermediary
steps could gain a significance of their own.
As he had already made clear in 1955 with his contributions to
Le Mouvement, the multifarious Breer did not categorically distinguish a
projection from an exhibition, or a sculpture from a flipbook. It was the
interval that appealed to him. As he made clear with his title Image par
Images: our impression of an image is always the outcome of an accumulation
of a whole string of images. Even his seemingly monolithic sculptures (that
he always presented in groupings) loosen their impact if they are considered
in a static pose and from a single vantage point. Their specific aesthetic lies
in the succession and combination of different viewing positions. Whatever
medium Breer adopted, the central question always remained the movement
of the beholder vis-à-vis the artwork, be it the movement of the eye scanning
a selection of cards grouped in a frame, or the brain fusing the rapid-fire of
frames during a projection, or of the entire body relating itself to a sculpture
moving almost imperceptibly on the floor. The function of the work, even
the graphic work, is there to choreograph the viewer, to activate both body
and brain, and to short circuit all the viewing habits that traditionally come
into play when we a approach a painting, a sculpture or a film.
References
Beauvais, Y. (2006). ‘Interview with Robert Breer’, in M. Denaës (ed.), Robert Breer
– Films, Floats & Panoramas, 157–169. Freddy & Teicher, Gaël, Montreuil:
Éditions de l’oeil.
Breer, R. (1963). ‘A Statement’, Film Comment, 29: 69.
Robert Breer: Untitled (drawing on paper, 15.5 × 10 cm) 1960 (Beauvais 2006: 62).
43
SHORT CIRCUITS 141
Breer, R. (2010). ‘Interview on the Occasion of the Exhibition Le Mouvement, from

Cinema to Kinetics’, in R. Wetzel (ed.), Le Mouvement-Kino zur Kinetik,
147–150. Heidelberg: Kreber Verlag.
Burford, J. L. (1999). Robert Breer. Paris: Éditions Paris Expérimental, RE: Voir
Éditions.
Carels, E. (2013). ‘Spaces of Wonder: Animation and Museology’, in S. Buchan
(ed.), Pervasive Animation, 292–316. London: AFI Film Readers, Routledge.
Cummings, P. (1973). ‘Oral history interview with Robert Breer’, 10 July, Archives
of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. Available online: https://www.aaa.
si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-robert-breer–11951
(accessed 31 October 2017).
Fouché, P. (2005). ‘Versuch einer Geschichte des Daumenkinos’, in C. B. Schulz
(ed.), Daumenkino – The Flip Book Show, 10–23. Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle
Düsseldorf.
Hultén, P. (1968). The Machine, as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age. New
York: The Museum of Modern Art.
Klüver, B. (1990). Robert Breer – a Painter in Paris. Paris: Galerie 1900–2000.
Koch, P. (1998). Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp . . . in Resonance. Ostfildern-
Ruit: Cantz Verlag.
Kuo, M. (2010). ‘Everything Goes – An Interview with Robert Breer’, Artforum,
November 2010: 214–221.
Lebrat, C, (1999). ‘Robert Breer’s RE-creation’, in Jennifer Burford (ed.), Robert
Breer. Paris: Éditions Paris Expérimental, RE:Voir Éditions.
Levi, P. (2012). Cinema by Other Means. New York: Oxford University Press.
MacDonald, S. (1992). A Critical Cinema 2: Interviews with Independent
Filmmakers. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Mekas, J. (1973). ‘An Interview with Robert Breer Conducted by Jonas Mekas and
P. Adams Sitney on May 13, 1971 in New York City’, Film Culture, 56/57
(Spring 1973): 39–55.
Mendelson, L. (1981). Robert Breer, A Study of His Work in the Context of the
Modernist Tradition. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press.
Menegoi, S. (2010). ‘Engineering Uncertainty’, Kaleidoscope Magazine, 3: 42–47.
Païni, D. (2014). Le musée imaginaire d’Henri Langlois. Paris: Flammarion.
Pardey, A., ed. (2011). Robert Breer. Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag.
Roth, D. (2005). ‘Entwurf zu Material 5’, in C. B. Schulz (ed.), Daumenkino – The
Flip Book Show, 112–113. Düsseldorf: Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.
Russett, R. and C. Starr (1988). Experimental Animation. New York: Da Capo
Press.
Schulz, C. B., ed. (2005). Daumenkino – The Flip Book Show. Düsseldorf:
Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.
Walley, J. (2003). ‘The Material of Film and the Idea of Cinema’, October 103
(Spring 2003), 15–30.
Wetzel, R. (2010). Le Mouvement-Kino zur Kinetik. Heidelberg: Kreber Verlag.
9
‘. . . The Film Is Not
About That’1
Notes on (Re)Reading
Tale of Tales
Mikhail Gurevich
Preface
My attempts at interpretative writing on Tale of Tales have a rather long
history. The first lengthy essay on the film I wrote around 1987; it was
published, in Russian, in a preprint-type collection of articles Multiplicatsiya,
Animatograph, Fantomatika under the auspices of First All-Union Animation
Festival Krok–89 (held in Kiev, not yet in floating-on-the-ship format). In
the following years, I had a chance to discuss this topic in different forms at
a couple of SAS conferences. In the 1990s, Jayne Pilling tried to prepare my
text for publication in her Reader in Animation Studies and even
commissioned a third-party translation to assist in my then uneasy English
writing; those rather laborious efforts, however, did not result in publication
in the end (I was using certain wording from that translation and joint
editing in subsequent work). Much later, at Giannalberto Bendazzi’s
1
The recurrent phrase in proposal and script treatment for the film; published in English
translation in Kitson (2005: 123–130) (though this particular phrase, as well as a few others,
quoted further, are, in translation, different from mine). Unless indicated otherwise, all other
translations of Russian-language sources are mine.
suggestion, I wrote a new and different version for his Animation: A World
History (among numerous other contributions). While this book was
underway and hanging in publishing limbo, I delivered the paper, in a
sketchy abridged form, at the first Animafest Scanner conference in 2014.
The fuller version, thoroughly edited, was finally published in 2016 in
Volume 2 of the Animation: A World History, under the title ‘Dream of
Eternity, Lullaby of Re-birth: Notes on Re-reading Tale of Tales’. Here
I’m submitting yet another, largely expanded and reworked version,
incorporating elements of the previous ones (also, at the special request of
Animafest in 2014, I wrote for the festival programme book a short, more
general essay, ‘Breathing a Soul into the Things Existent: Animation
According to Norstein’ – from which I’m borrowing here a few formulations
as well).
The text offered here presents a combination of different critical
perspectives and styles; being aware of the risks involved, I nevertheless
hope that this kind of deliberate inconsistency in method and take might
still be of some merit, if it can possibly spark a light of understanding.
Of expectations and frustrations

When it was shown for the first time as a finished product at the ‘artistic
council’ of Soyuzmultfilm studio, in the summer of 1979, the recorded
reactions of sympathizing (and trying to help, no doubt) colleagues ranged
from ‘contemplation on a future of our country and of humanity as a whole’
to ‘a summation of the experience of Soviet poetry’, and to ‘a new form of
animation expression’ (Kitson 2005: 107). With all the considerations of
place and time, and undercurrents involved, this range and tone of response
remains, in retrospect, quite characteristic and telling – both in degree of
recognition and in its vague generalized nature.
Giannalberto Bendazzi recalls the reaction at the Zagreb selection
committee screening in March 1980: ‘We viewed the film almost without
breathing, hypnotised. From then on, we never referred to it by title, but
only by the masterpiece.’ And writing about that twenty-five years later, he
still holds: ‘Tale of Tales is the ultimately enigmatic, cryptic film. You don’t
doubt its great art. You just hardly understand what it is all about’ (Bendazzi
2005). Clare Kitson also testifies:
What sort of animal was it, then, living in that abandoned house, and
roasting potatoes, burning its fingers (paws?) as it ate them? And who
was that old woman, suddenly popping up in the middle of the abandoned
house to stoke the fire? What is all that about? These were the kinds of
not very profound questions that exercised audiences at the 1980 Zagreb
International Animation Festival, as they tried to get to grips with Tale of
‘. . . THE FILM IS NOT ABOUT THAT’ 145
Tales. [. . .] Despite its mysteries, everyone sensed that this poetic, wistful
work, full of idiosyncratic humour, was a masterpiece.
KITSON 2005: 1–2
She goes on to note a quite unique overall effect and ‘frisson of expectations’
at the award ceremony (Kitson 2005: 3). Years later, in the introduction to
her book on this film she admits, once again, the sense of puzzlement as the
major reception point. Kitson sympathetically refers to the film’s scriptwriter,
Lyudmila Petrushevskaya, who also confesses in a letter to Norstein: ‘Only
when you had finished shooting the film did I begin to grasp your idea. I
have seen Tale of Tales no less than fifty times. But the mystery never goes
away’ (Kitson 2005: 4).
And that kind of admission-reservation would become common place in
the entire discourse on and around the film, up to regular media journalism
or the newest film buffs’ blogs. For sure, that can also be seen outside Russia
or the orbit of its native language. However, within the domestic cultural
realm that would be noticeable too, if only being gradually substituted rather
with some kind of shy matter-of-course acceptance and satisfaction with safe-
to-apply vague generalities, which is probably the sign of the same perplexity.
Well, I myself can attest to more or less the same, recalling the moment,
clear in memory, when I watched it for first time, around 1981, in the only
place available – our first and the only multiplex of that time, the movie-
house Rossiya in the very cultural centre of Moscow, and at a short strike
from Soyuzmultfilm studio’s main facility; there was apparently a special
arrangement to screen some new releases here in the smallest theatre, with
just a few dozen seats in capacity.
This purl of images was hard to decipher clearly; yet, the mere fact that
they are ‘pregnant’ with (certain) meaning was tangibly obvious. The image
ligature did not seem clear-cut, but still felt needful, bounden, which only
pushed even more to the duty and labour of understanding – and at the same
time not promising easy ways, if any at all. I suspect that today, almost forty
years after its creation, Tale of Tales, having been repeatedly recognized as
the greatest animated film of all time, still remains an enigmatic masterpiece,
its ‘cryptic’ meaning or message not fully deciphered. The film’s charm and
power are (still, I believe) indisputable and irresistible; and yet, the sense of
or hope for complete and concrete understanding still escapes us somehow.
When I first attempted a critical reading of this film back in the mid
1980s, not much of the (recorded) discourse around it had been yet
generated. By now, however, it is probably one of the most reflected upon,
or at least talked about, animated films in history. Especially, and mostly,
through the self-reflection of the director himself, in his numerous lectures,
talks, interviews (eventually collected/re-edited into several books). Virtually
every move and image is described and attributed, in terms of origins and
connotations, and put tightly within a film(making) context.
And yet, one would hardly find there anything close to a wholesome,
explicit articulation of the message or meaning of the film. Partly, perhaps,
due to the fact that practically the entire body of this most extensive self-
commentary was recorded after Norstein, by different people and under
different conditions, not actually written by him. And besides, while having
extreme riches in creative practice and observations to share and being quite
a deep artistic personality, capable of insights and paradoxes, and uncanny
sensual memory, Norstein is not really a creature of reflection in a strictly
intellectual sense, rather he is more for a meditation of sorts, which might
provoke a lot on a receiving side – but might need yet another effort in
deciphering and contextualizing.
That became, for the most part, a task in the book, which finally appeared
in English, by Clare Kitson, to justified acclaim, inevitably becoming a
primary reference source: a quite detailed, close to exhaustive, account of
the work process, surrounding circumstances, real-life context and such,
immersed in direct or indirect dialogue with the creator(s). With all due
credit, Kitson does try along the way to give meaning to certain details, to
trace motives, to hint at parallels; yet, the book culminated in merely a
descriptive record of the film material in the final cut, presented in its entirety
and attempting to include every minor move – but with no real inclination
to an interpretive reading per se, it seems. That might be justified by the very
genre chosen and, moreover, seen as a special merit – as Nick Park rightly
indicates in the introduction: not to over-explain and thus spoil the magic
. . . Nevertheless, this kind of persistent ‘perception gap’, manifested through
times and methods, must have something to do with the artistic nature of
the subject at hand, with its poetics and structure.
Of plot and verse

Getting back to my personal history of perception and reading – yes, again, I
do remember all too well my first impression of Tale of Tales – it was
stupefaction at the unknown quality of the ‘cartoon’: the density of this artistic
text was just striking; and, also, the feeling/sensation of fluid continuity,
wholeness, harmony. ‘An uninterrupted discourse, a unified poem’: this crossed
my mind early, before any spoken or written conversations, in which the
comparison to verses and poetry was quickly becoming a common reference.
And how do we deal with poetry in the first place, in the initial attempt
of ‘reading’? – of course, we recite, albeit in an inner voice, gradually learning
by heart, thus appropriating the meaning in its only possible form-
inclination; and simultaneously, or later and sometimes for years to come,
we go through elements, look through rhymes and motives, and tropes, thus
interiorizing the form and substance in sync. In that, we engage in retelling,
inwardly, if or until we are not forced otherwise.
Perhaps that’s the mechanism in play that drives practically everyone

talking about Tale of Tales to do ultimately the same: to sort and list the
stuff in the content and how it falls into memory – the visual impressions
per se.
. . . The old house, the boarded-up windows, the stove, and the fire in the
stove, and the old woman in its reflected light; the yard, the old tree. The fire
from the burning leaves, which vanishes after a brief flash; and the sparse,
ghostly little wood; and earlier, the old-fashioned, wretched street light over
the tiny dance floor; and men, torn from the dance by the crackle as the
gramophone needle is plucked off, and the rainproof marquee, extending
into the sky, and the women’s eerily solitary tango, the invalid accordion
player, the tears on the glass; and then, throughout, the strange creature
staring fixedly at everything . . .
And there are also other worlds: dimensions of existence, parallel ones,
separate in style and storyline. Another house, by the sea, and a family, a bull
(Minotaur?), a poet, and a traveller. And yet another family, on their Sunday
walk; a woman with a high hat, a man with a bottle, a boy with an apple,
and crows in the snow. Here and there, a day in life, in its simplest and main
elements. And in both places, there is a child: a happy slip of a girl
participating in the ritual flow of the everyday; and a poor little boy, held
tightly by the hand, but deprived of anything worth participating in, a
dreamer and a rebel, alone within and by himself.
Three worlds, three planes (and correspondingly, a stylistic collage – of
clearly ‘quoted’ styles); three dimensions – of what? They are separated, but
is it by space or time? Warmly mythologized, shabby and dear past; vulgar
and itchy, and still deserving compassion, mask-wearing present; and
mysteriously transparent, elemental and so close to eternity. Characteristically,
we find the similar kind of ‘preliminary’ retelling of the motives and in
sorting the imagery in the very beginning of this film’s history, in
Petrushevskaya’s script texts, in different stages:2 ‘The washing on the lines,
the bull with the ring through its nose, full of terrible, fatal passions, the
little old man with one leg; our neighbour, who came back from the war like
that . . . All this can be organised into a simple plot, but a particular plot, a
concertina-plot, which moves apart, expands’ (script proposal, in Norstein
and Yarbusova 2005: 21). In her script proposal, Petrushevskaya seems to
2
A genius author in her own turn and right, she was especially good at drafting scripts and
sketches for the film; in my mind, even her earliest sketch, the ‘proposal’, in all its generalized
vagueness, offers the true feeling and inspiration, and foresees the interplay of motives, which
moreover justifies getting back to her and their joint formulations here (proposal and treatment
are officially attributed to both Petrushevskaya and Norstein; the treatment as translated in
Kitson (2005: 125–130); the proposal – rather in my version of translation from Russian text
incorporated in more than one of Norstein’s books, here as in Norstein and Yarbusova (2005:
20–21).
leave out just one obvious word: a lyrical plot. That is what the authors
were striving for from early on – and this shift in genre is quite significant.
It is no less of a turning point in animation (genre) history than the move
towards the social parable, towards the conventional grotesque of two
decades earlier.
This important distinction also brings up in a different light another
persistent trait of common discourse around the film (and a facet of the
‘perception gap’): laments on the lack of narrative clarity, if not the absence
of narrative structure per se, suggesting that we deal with a non-narrative
flow of images . . . – as if we just cannot assume the idea of a non-linear
narrative as such, not action-based and determined, but rather within the
logic of associations, sensations, thoughts, after all. Which is exactly the
type of lyrical narration, plot-development – or, for that matter, of an essay,
in its initial sense and shape, from Montaigne on, but also in certain film
genre varieties, in fiction and documentary categories.
And what is also essential in this regard is, ‘The great themes of lyric
poetry are not always “eternal”, but are always existential in the sense that
they are concerned with the fundamental aspects of man’s existence’, says
Lidiya Ginzburg (1981: 153), an outstanding Russian theorist and historian
of literature; lyric poetry as such is ‘a kind of exposition of values’ (Ginzburg
1986: 95).
Tale of Tales is a poetic utterance par excellence, and it is shaped, basically,
after the literary examples, verse per se (one more testament to the literary-
centred nature of the Russian culture-mentality), as was noted years ago and
not by this critic alone. What is worth clarifying, however, is a more precise
reference(s) to literary sources and influences. Although, as Petrushevskaya
testifies, in the work process Norstein would bring along many books of
poetry: ‘all the romantics, García Lorca, Pablo Neruda, Nazym Khikmet’
(Encyclopedia of the National Cinema n.d.), and the film borrows its title
from a short poem by Khikmet (a Turkish political émigré in the Soviet
Union), the poetics traces its roots rather to different and sophisticated
modernist lyrics of the twentieth century, not in a sense of cerebral
construction, for Tale of Tales is not cold and cerebral at all, and on the
surface its imagery seems ingenuously plain-hearted, but rather in terms of
the interplay between the implicit motive-impulses and explicit moves and
images that are to manifest them.
In a Russian tradition, that would be, maybe (though on the surface
distant from Norstein’s intuitive taste), the poetry of Osip Mandel’štam is,
at first glance, often totally enigmatic, the free flight of seemingly unrelated,
albeit strikingly precise, tropes, which, however, at close reading and analysis
would reveal absolute coherence and cast-iron logic in the unwinding of
metaphors into an ultimate narrative of meaning. A similar mechanism is at
work in this narrative of visual poetry: the flow of free distant associations,
visualized impressions, pregnant of metaphors, which are nevertheless
solidly grounded and interlinked on a deeper level, beyond the frame and off
the screen. Once in a film-school lecture, Norstein quoted Mandel’štam’s
lines: ‘One feels the crackle of an apple // In the frosty sound of a sleigh’, and
goes on to hold this as an example of complex structuring when ‘the line
grows in different directions, in a single instant attracting the multiplicity of
sensations. Upon the same principle, you build up a film shot’ (Norstein
2005: 136).
With all the seeming dissociations, this ‘purl of images’ does build an
integral world. There is indeed a common ground for all the things and beings
here, in the world of the film itself, that is the whole of the author’s utterance
is sewn through with many reiterated and harsh threads, refrains, repetitions,
momentary flashes: a dry leaf, gliding down to the ground, an echelon,
marching past, violent tapping, and the table-cloth, flying down off the tables,
covering the whole town, rolling itself into a ball in the sky, as if it were
alive . . . For that is how a poetic utterance is created, and that is how a
lyrical plot (narrative) takes shape, and it is precisely in the ‘lyrical induction’
(Lidiya Ginzburg’s term; see, for instance in Ginzburg 1981), as an attribute
of the poetry of our age, from the specific to the general; from the concrete,
the detailed, the material and perhaps the profane – to the existential.
In some of the general and most impressive sketches for Tale of Tales, the
film’s designer, and director’s wife, Francheska Yarbusova, had on a single
sheet, as if the whole storyboard was in loose order, images and scenes
(plotlines, for that matter) juxtaposed in simultaneous existence. This
principle of free composition feels to me quite essential, and in the film, it is,
in one way or another, consistent on all levels, unrestrained, and that is
exactly the point. A similar freedom is adequate to the composition of our
consciousness, the structure of human memory. A lot was said about Tale of
Tales regarding these kind of things, and, probably, not without reason. This
is the freedom of deeply personal, even of autobiographical lyricism, and in
that, not so much of memory per se, as of recollection, the sheer act of
recalling from one’s memory. This by definition is subjective and unique, and
there is tact and precision in that. It ought to be somewhat out-of-focus, that
is unpremeditated, not pre-organized into a structured system, but chaotically
instinctive, with a vacillating weave of fragments, sparks of memory, lighting
up something out of the darkness at will and through whimsy.
The blissful mumbling of a child’s dream; the blissful self-sufficiency of
poetic speech . . .
Of dreams and visions

‘It must be a film about memory. Do you remember how long the days were
during childhood?’ (Norstein and Yarbusova 2005: 21). It is hard to
overlook, but even harder to unambiguously accept this animation piece as
a confessional film. But what is this confession about? And what did it,
deliberately or not, reveal?
In fact, the narrative structure proper of Tale of Tales is not exactly
memory-like (as suggested first by Mikhail Iampolski3), and not simply that
of recollection (as this critic had suggested earlier), but rather it is of an
oneiric nature. A dream screen, where even the fleshly real images with
straightforward connotations inevitably acquire a degree of conditionality.
And yet what complicates things is the ‘agent’ of dream(s), the Little Wolf,
who is himself an oneiric element, a chimera of dreams. Moreover he is a
character of a lullaby, who at the end sings over the cradle the very song
about himself . . . There are even signs formally indicating the dream in
conventional cinematic language: luminous spatial openings, like doors,
that can or must be treated as second-order screens inside a lager screen, the
frame of the film as such. And the punctuated appearance of mirrors, of this
or that kind, hints at the same framing technique. The ‘reality’ of this dream-
world is doubling and reduplicating itself, blurring in the gallery of mirrors,
but in a strange, paradoxical way it is also obtaining a new degree of
substantive density.
It is the dream about a vision, a fantasy of insight, a dreamy state of
awakening. It is indeed about awakening, after all, if it is not spiritual, in a
narrow sacramental sense, then it is at least that of mind and soul. The
previous iteration of my ‘reading’ was entitled ‘Dream of Eternity, Lullaby
of Re-birth’ – now I’d rather reverse the logic: the film is in fact a lullaby of
eternity and the dream of rebirth. At a certain point, the whole symbolism,
at first so obscure and tempting, no longer calls for deciphering, it has
become transparent and almost . . . unnecessary.
After all, Tale of Tales is really a very simple film. As Norstein himself
says: ‘Life consists of very simple moves of the soul, of very simple human
conjunctions’ (Norstein 2005: 138). The apple is an apple, the house is a
house, and the Little Wolf is a Little Wolf, because he really does exist.
Indeed, he alone exists as a certainty. His modality is indisputable. Only, it
goes without saying, not in the material world of events, flowing biographies,
changes in the weather, in governments, fashions, but in the inner world of
personality, the intimate universe of a thinking and sensing, and reflecting
being. In those geological deposits of inner biography, the Little Wolf
from the lullaby is the first horizon, a reference point for the conscious
memory.
Norstein provides, however, yet another marker or foundation, though
this one belongs rather to the ‘collective unconscious’, than to the personal
biographic memory. Its ‘literariness’ is evident: Madonna and Child, a
See, for instance, his essay ‘The Space of the Animated Film: Khrzhanovsky’s I Am With You
3
Again and Norstein’s The Tale of Tales’ (1987 [1982]: 104).

canonical subject, a cultural archetype. And not accidentally this shot/image

serves as a headpiece, a lead-in, for it is not from this subjective-unique time-
space, not from the history of a concrete conscience. It belongs, strictly
speaking, to pre-memory. That’s why it lies practically ‘beyond the frame’,
outside the brackets of the lyrical plot. But in a different, grand sense, in the
memory of his cultural, conscious self, it is of fundamental values, and that’s
why it turns up as a brief refrain in soaring culminations. And the Little
Wolf that looks eye to eye at the baby suckling the breast, this is, perhaps,
the sharpest juxtaposition of the worlds or planes here. A collision between
the personal and the super-personal. In other words, between recollection
and knowledge, and, correspondingly, between lyrical elements and the epic
modality of the myth.
The guardian angel, or house-spirit of my childhood, that lives in and
through the semi-delirium of my first sensations, suddenly takes a look at
what had happened before he came about, in the very beginning, when no
one had sung lullabies, when individual memory had not yet started. And it
feels as though he, the angel-house-spirit, the chimera of babyhood dreams,
has started an act of ‘cultural introspection’: he reaches out for the clean
sheet, the empty page, coming to surmise that the word equals life, and
beginning to understand the mystery of creation as the secret of man’s birth.
This point, this contraposition is probably the most profound accent in
Norstein’s work.
However, the true, essential problematics of his confession, of his lyrical
message, lie elsewhere.
Of times and spaces

‘Every day stood as it was, things of today became true today, and the
happiness of tomorrow could wait till tomorrow . . . The film is not about
that’ (Norstein and Yarbusova 2005: 20).
Is the film about memory? The film is about what we are left with. It is
about the axiological framework of existence, albeit hardly articulated by
the creators in that sort of high-brow lingo. At the risk of losing the poetic
nerve, let us nonetheless try to somehow ground this thorough vision in
(historic) reality, both in space and time, starting just with plain topography.
Maryina Roshcha (which the director constantly evokes as a ‘holy land’ of
his childhood and a principal protoplast of the filmic space) is not really a
suburb of Moscow, as some Western commentators would hold. Once, a
long time ago, it was the town’s woody edge (as the very name hints:
‘roshcha’ stands for ‘grove’), then a shabby, sort of blue collar, tenement
barracks, almost shantytown, outskirt, notorious for its low-life and hide-
outs. It was also one of the areas where Jews, coming from the Pale, were
traditionally settled, legally or not, back in tsarist times, and then later still
going to this spot.4 Now it lays practically within the city’s central belt, a
fifteen to twenty minute bus ride from the Red Square vicinity, halfway to
the TV tower and broadcasting centre Ostankino (symbolically enough),
while the real outskirts are about ten to fifteen kilometres further on.
Norstein left the neighbourhood around 1967. I moved in, maybe the
same or following year, but already into a different environment. My family
left communal dwelling in Moscow’s central quarters for a separate,
individual apartment here. The same reason drove Norstein from the area.
The sign of changing times, the entire era in fact, that was taking place
gradually, from the early 1960s onwards. Old tenement buildings, or
‘barracks’ in common lingo, were being demolished to give space for a new
variety of more or less the same: pre-fabricated panel middle-rises, five-
storied buildings.5 But with that, the very basics of (co)existence were subject
to change with certain, essential ideological shifts.
In one of her most remarkable and revealing sketch-drawings, Francheska
Yarbusova shows the entire block of barrack houses, linked like train cars,
being bent upwards into the sky, as if they were about to take off, to fly
away. The entire way of life, a complete universe of sorts, was being pushed
away by bulldozers, and Yuri Norstein was not the only one who felt a
phantom limb pain. Actually, that was a common thread or theme in the
literature, theatre, and film of the period: a meditation on the loss, nostalgia
for the poor and pure past. Some authors would look deeper and sharper.
Yuri Trifonov’s then famous novella was entitled Exchange, with
connotations not only to an apartment swap, but to betrayal, the selling out
of moral values and ethical codes that come along with the process. It seems
that Norstein shares, to an extent, this kind of sentiment.
This period marked, basically, the end of the ‘classic’ Soviet history and
way of life, which was transforming itself into the late degenerative phase,
essentially, neo-petit-bourgeois, in terms of real values of the everyday, which
was quite a tangible departure from the (proclaimed and in some sense
interiorized) austerity, sacrificial spirit and ‘equality in the common misery’ of
the heroic and tragic era. And on a certain level Tale of Tales clearly, albeit in
an oblique metaphorical way, documents the dubious nature of the
emasculated ideological empire that tries to adjust somewhat to ‘normal’
human conditions at the price of a gradual decline in moral disrepair.
4
I do not see much of meaningful manifestations of a ‘Jewish theme’ in his work. However,
Kitson dwells somewhat on Norstein’s personal reflections in this regard. And with a much
stronger emphasis, given the sharpened focus, the issue is addressed by Maya Balakirsky Katz
in Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation (2016); her loaded
argument on this motif’s weight in Tale of Tales (in a special chapter 2006: 204–225) calls for
a separate discussion.
5
Infamous ‘khrushchobs’, nicknamed after Stalin’s successor on the Soviet throne, under whose
rule these housing developments, as well as other steps on promoting a relative improvement
in living standards, were initiated.
In the world(s) of Tale of Tales, those ‘eras’ and ‘codes’ are manifested by
almost the direct juxtapositions of their material, object epitomes: a rusty
old sewing machine of once reputable German brand Singer (that likely
served the needs of the entire apartment block for generations) vs. a glossy-
new Zhiguli, a compact car produced under Fiat license at turn-key
purchased Italian plant. There are palpable, sensible signs of change.
Remember how Little Wolf swings on the treadle of the Singer, and steps off
to look into the car’s wheel cap as if into a magic mirror.
In the film’s virtual space and time, it is as if Little Wolf is a ‘missing link’
between the worlds, either a liaison or spy, who penetrates them all.
Amazingly, he can go out of the old house through the luminous door,
leading into the eternal one, and even come back. But, by some deeper
reason, not into the snowy park of the present, that path is locked, and that
boy is not under his wing. Strictly historically, however, Little Wolf, as an old
dwelling’s house-spirit, materializes, naturally, when the walls are falling,
exactly on this crucial divide (and that’s where the film’s authors, along with
this conditional alter ego, found themselves), somewhere perhaps in the late
1960s or early 1970s, rather than in exactly the (post)war time. Norstein
himself, born in 1941, certainly carries war in his bones, not as an actual
conscious experience, but rather as a family’s or communal memory, and it
is exactly through imagery and tone of impersonal or common recollection
that this motif plays out in the film.
But there is more to that. This is a collectivist experience par excellence.
And it is exactly the collectivist ethics, code of conduct, presumably, the core
facet of ideology’s ‘human face’, and the cornerstone in the communal
survival that is being washed away by the flow of time. Houses with their
backyards, and street corners under the lamp-post, and the tables put together
cannot escape the bulldozers, cannot fly straight to heaven, only the village-
long tablecloth will wind itself into a strange ball (an unborn child?) in
mid-air. The very (ethical) foundation of existence (and of educating, bringing
up the new generation) is gone, new times are marching in, and they are like
a new Iron Age, deprived of bygone warmth and depth, and tragic clarity.
Another foundation is needed, but will it be this time an individualistic
one? Not exactly or not necessarily so. The Little Wolf, a lyrical protagonist
(and maybe the actual authors hidden behind him, too), is rather left striving
for yet another community, if only of a different kind, and it seems that he
had discovered a virtual one, in the (mythologized) depths of cultural
tradition and artistic canon. The fisherman fishes, the mother feeds the child,
the Bull swings the rope, the girl stamps her feet, and the poet twangs the
lyre. Where they are all of equal rights and merits. Where, once again, they
all have a place at the same table. A true golden age, this harmony of simple
existence. And it is no longer a matter of generation, but of deeper kinship.
More accurately, of belonging to humanity and to culture. And, besides, an
escape from these dear contemporaries, away from the mores of the times,
from this simplicity (worse than thieving, as the saying goes) in patent-
leather boots, and cocked hats – the way out is also through here.
The artist-witness would take, nonetheless, full responsibility for all the
dust and groans of a generation’s common fate, of the flow of history. This
moral obligation is not cast off. Just as it is not cast off for this poor, dear,
tragic, zany, immortal baseness of the everyday; that’s why there is so much
concealed pain in the grotesque parable about the family walk in the wintry
public garden. All the obligations are still valid. The artist does not renounce
his participation in this world, his own past and present, nor memory.
Simply, his true place, his ecological niche is there.
Of eras and escapes

The late William Moritz, one of the most keen and deep animation scholars,
viewed Tale of Tales (along with the key films of Walerian Borowczyk/Jan
Lenica, Jiří Trnka and Priit Pärn) as an example of ‘narrative strategies for
resistance and protest’. In some generalized sense this is true, especially with
certain reservations Moritz allows: ‘Rather than a specific protest against
government policies, the message of Tale of Tales urges artists to accept the
burden of keeping better times alive through Art’ (Moritz 1997: 41). But the
heart of the matter, I believe, lays elsewhere.
In my longstanding view, the principal undertaking of the Soviet 1970s
generation (that is to say, the certain part of the ‘progressive’ intelligentsia,
except for the thin layer of dissidents and much thicker layer of those who
would choose hopeless conformity if not officialdom) was a (quasi) spiritual
journey ‘inside themselves’. In the wake of the reaction that followed
Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’, the turbulent 1960s, comes the quest for a (new)
cultural identity, realized mainly through emersion, studies and quiet
experimentation. In a sense, this dim time was perhaps the most fruitful
period in the late Soviet era, in which major intellectual, if not spiritual,
breakthroughs were taking place, the most influential ideas were being
discovered and discussed, and artistic insights were occurring.
At forty, part of the (younger) 1960s generation, and the already (older)
1970s, Norstein looks back and, with a vague anxiety and lyrical excitement,
attempts to understand who we are and where we are from. There is a
parallel within the boundaries of one in particular of all the film’s worlds,
this world of there and then: the town’s outskirts, the House. How is an
individual biography linked to the path of a generation? The Little Wolf
swings on the Singer sewing machine and gets scared by the Zhiguli car. He
remembers the bread in the stove, and does not remember, does not know
how to behave on the highway . . . He is from there, from the time of
primuses (kerosene heaters), tables under a common table-cloth, of stoves
and bread. And we, where are we from?
‘The film Tale of Tales has begun for me with the lullaby and the sun-lit
long corridor,’ says Norstein (1983: 118). Just so, with the subjective, with a
patch of light, drawn from what has been deeply embedded in the
consciousness, with a sign of one’s own memory. But it is exactly the common,
historic experience and memory that Norstein grapples with, in other words,
that of the generation. The house, the joined tables, the Singer machine and
so on, are signs of the communal historic existence. And for this, consciousness
(which equals memory) is almost like a primordial myth: the poor golden
age. It seemed as if he were somehow under obligation to remember (which
is – to record, to embody) all this, all the building blocks of the indispensable
background behind an individual life. And later to provide a nostalgic respect
for and memory of the war, echelons and dance floors, and the inherent
tragedy of life, the inescapable and proud poverty, ascetic simplicity, all that
would penetrate into a generation’s moral code. And, needless to say, he holds
those things sacred, and of course understands in full, and he is quite sincere,
he is even convincing, but . . . But that is not the crux of the matter.
‘If only we could go back now to that poor childhood, sustained by ration
cards, to that long corridor, to the sunny Sunday yard – without grown-ups’
(Kitson 2005: 125).
That corridor of childhood, suspended in the ray of sunlight, what did it
promise and what did it mean? The boy drifted through it – what for? Where
to? Is it in the realm of fantasy, of a poetic dream? No, not exactly there, it
just stepped right into that mystic golden pillar of light, drawing closer to
the smell of the rooms that would live in you forever on, to all the sensation
of living that would spark in subsequent recollection. But, to be more
precise, this is a path into his memory of himself. That is, of the future artist,
whose very core grows out of this memory alone. And that is why this
corridor morphs into a light-path beaming into eternity. Or into the
primordial. It is all the same here. That is why that hand-drawn world
‘beyond the screen’ is something more than the world of ‘poetry’, or ‘myth’;
this is the realm of ideal existence. In other worlds, it is the world of an
artist. And if it is also a myth, then only in the sense of the inner mythology
of an individual creativity, isomorphic to the grand mythology of Culture.
This, if you like, is the escape into oneself, but also the way out. Let-out,
a variation on the life-path, is a means of overcoming historic memory, the
experience of a generation, which seems to have suddenly been discovered,
but oh, how gradual and hard this revelation came to be for the generation
born in 1940. From the old house, which is doomed, but still alive, from the
lonely widows at a dance-floor, from the family stories of front-line death
letters, and troop echelons, from the cobble-stone outskirts, which became a
meadow of the child’s play, to the timeless, eternal, existential. ‘To the shores
of deserted waves’ (Pushkin 1977 [1827]: 23). On those shores, where
everything is natural and essential, where everything has its proper and
undistorted place.
Of gaps and subtexts

Liberation from the ‘household chores’ of historicity, no matter how dear to
the heart, understanding that there is another, different realm of existence,
with a different framework of reference, and yet a different sort of
community, uncovering anew primary values: that is what was underway, in
this or that fashion, through the 1970s, the emancipation from the
imprisonment of the here and now, of the given, while finding a new/old
foundation for self-reliance of free human spirit.
Not without limitations, though. Let us be honest, with all its insights and
free spirit, Tale of Tales is, at a certain level, a deeply ‘Soviet’ creature, and lies
exactly within this universe. As is The Mirror for that matter. And, similarly,
it is vulnerable, exposed to possible doubts and concerns. First of all, one can
question the lacunas, look at what’s absent in this kind of (historical) memory,
and the manifested experience. It may easily lend itself to descriptions of
the work of ‘soft memory’ within the ‘politics of mourning’, belonging to a
repressed, post-catastrophic socio-cultural mentality, in the words of
Russian–British cultural historian, Alexander Etkind:
In Russia, where millions remain unburied, the repressed return as the

undead. They do so in novels, films and other forms of culture that reflect,
shape, and possess people’s memory. The ghostly visions of Russian
writers and filmmakers extend the work of mourning into those spaces
that defeat more rational ways of understanding the past. Embracing the
confusion of present and past [. . .] the melancholic dialectic reenactment
and defamiliarisation produces a rich but puzzling imagery.
ETKIND 2013: 18–19
Petrushevskaya, upon recalling all the troubles and tribulations the project had
to undergo, consoles the director: but now, look, they would show it on TV at
each and every World War II Victory Day6 celebration. A somewhat dubious
consolation or compliment, on consideration. Does it not really mean that the
film also lends itself to a rather easy appropriation by the (new) official-
propagandistic myth-making, which appears to be somehow isomorphic to the
film’s inner mythology, in its very vocabulary and drawn boundaries?
The most gruesome, and in that the most crucial, parts and/or imagery of
the deeply troubled history, and thus memory, seem as if by definition
excluded from the narrative and/or the metaphoric field – or are they, really?
And that is not just a matter of plain censorship, external or internal (self-
6
A longstanding national holiday on 9 May, growing even more in official recognition in recent
years with the demise of other milestones of Soviet history, like the October Revolution
anniversary day.
imposed); at least, it’s not that simple and clear-cut of a case. Among
numerous things over which Norstein had to struggle with Goskino (State
Cinema Committee) functionaries, was, reportedly, the episode where Little
Wolf, alone in the deserted courtyard, cooks potatoes on the bonfire and eats
them burning-hot, ping-ponging in his hands – and in this very scene, now a
textbook reference to Norstein’s signature ‘poetic realism’, the over-zealous,
or overcautious, bureaucrat’s eye sees a hint of a deserter from the fronts of
the Great Patriotic War . . . Today’s scholar brings it up as an example of the
characteristic, the ‘witch-hunt taken to absurd’ (Krivoulia 2002: 74). Well,
we can question instead: why would it not be, in fact, implied here? After all,
the motives and characters of this knotty nature, and even worse, did manage
to penetrate published and released war-themed novels and live-action films
of the period, with difficulty, sure, but not being completely forbidden and
cut-off. Here, of course, it is a reading-in on the censors’ part; however, they
had sensed something with the right intuition, I’d argue. The depth of life in
Norstein’s ‘realistic’ dimension appears multilayered, akin to his cut-outs,
going to the very ‘elemental’ foundations, constant fixtures of existence on
this land and within its history or tall stories. Therefore, a particular episode
or character can indeed, even if obliquely or not quite deliberately, encompass
different kinds of references, including, yes, that of an eternal figure of a lost
soldier, or of any lost soul, for that matter.7
Of the plane and the amalgamated

On visiting his native land of Maryina Roshcha with his cameramen
Aleksandr Zhukovsky right before its ‘once-noisy life’ would ‘turn into
humus’ by bulldozers – and as field-trip preparation for the film, Norstein
notes: ‘Sasha took over a hundred photographs. The departing world was
taking on a fine silver amalgam’ (Norstein and Yarbusova [2005] in Kitson
2005: 63). For me, this brings to mind a parallel with Joseph Brodsky’s line:
‘Even thieves here steal apples by scratching the amalgam first.’ His metaphor
underlies the portraying of ‘sorry quarters’ with the ‘sense of abundance
supported by puddles’ (Brodsky 2000: 38); but its ironic complex nature
needs some deciphering: not real fruits, but those displayed in the store
window are being stolen in this weird manner, destroying their display from
inside out. And in a larger act of deconstruction the poet is involved here, in
his rather topical-declarative poem of 1969, in a way summarizing his
7
Compare also with an intuitive comprehension of today’s animation blogger: ‘there’s a
philosophy that creeps through: unmistakably Eastern European in its conviction that we are
ultimately doomed to recreate past mistakes and lying stagnant in the present. [. . .] Memory,
in this telling, is less what shapes our present and more the thing that haunts us, but it is not a
hopeless film’ (Brayton 2016).
pre(forced) emigration period, The End of a Beautiful Era – well known,

even in early ‘samizdat’ circulation and certainly later in the official Nobel
laureate’s publications after perestroika.
Thus, Norstein might have known it too and then had that in mind as a
reference point – or maybe not. But regardless, the contrast is telling, or at
least this parallel is hinting to a principal difference in the very approach of
preserving the vanishing past with photographs. Moreover, by reincarnating
it in bits and pieces of cutouts on the animation stand, Norstein does exactly
the opposite: he fills the amalgam in an order to re-construct, or rather to
re-mythologize. And he reveals almost an opposite attitude in flying over the
natural sarcastic scepticism of dissident-underground poet, both in terms of
ideology and aesthetics.
Artistically, Tale of Tales encompasses, it may seem, too much of a
territory. This is really a ‘mill of styles’,8 from Picasso to Chagall to Russian
folk primitivism of the fifteenth century and Soviet book illustration of the
1930s, including some pretty trite, trivial and overexploited pieces as
propagandistic-kitschy cliché imagery, especially in the ‘war’ theme. The
same goes for certain filmic devices that look like unabashed borrowings
from Soviet cinema of a somewhat affectedly pathetic kind (along, for
instance, with visual quotations from Tarkovsky’s Mirror), and even so for
the music score, where a sweet and stale tango intertwines with Bach and
Mozart. Yet, we tend to happily accept these neo-eclectics and to perceive all
the unevenness as strength, not as weakness. A true son of the land and
completely a product of the larger era, a self-made artistic personality,
remarkably self-educated through a laborious personal journey, absorbing
various influences and with the help of co-workers and a friendly circle, this
artist is luckily free of snobbish limitations of refinement. He does embrace
the universe of the everyday and its historical-cultural context, and his own
artistic quest – as a (stylistic) whole, equalizing all the elements and
harmonizing them in the thin air of a higher purpose (isomorphic in a way,
to ethical move – fidelity to all facets of historical experience).
In a word, he just manages to deeply interiorize the elements of dubious
‘collective memory’ – the root of rather vile mass-pop mythology – melting
them ultimately in the mythology of the self, and a very specific one.
Of wolves and incarnations

. . . Still, there is yet another twist, and we recognize the main theme-overtone
only close to the end, although it was somehow announced virtually from
8
A familiar expression in our critical discourse of the time; first introduced by Mikhail
Iampolsky.
the very beginning: ‘The film is not about that. It must be a film with a poet
in the leading part, although the poet does not necessarily have to appear on
the screen’ (Norstein and Yarbusova 2005: 20). This is what has taken us
unawares: the expectation of direct personification!
Especially in this light, the Little Wolf is a brilliant find, a stroke of genius
in all its inconsistency. A chimera of the subconscious, a character with a
profound folkloric origin, he is at the same time a lyrical ‘ego’ (albeit of a
quite unconventional nature), according to the law of ‘substitution’ that the
director himself speaks of: that is what embodies the make-believe
protagonist and incarnates, channels the inner voice of the true ‘author’. A
liaison between the worlds, he is indeed a link between layers of being;
between memory and consciousness; between a man and an artist. This is,
perhaps, what the film is more about. This might be its last (or first) horizon
of meaning: its core existential theme. Herein lies his exposition of values.
He runs, wild and stern,

Full of sound and flurry,
On the shores of deserted waves,
Into the rustling of the leafy oak grove . . .
PUSHKIN 1977 [1827]: 23
Classics of national poetry comes to mind, and into play, not without
reason. From his work with Andrey Khrzhanovsky on films after/about
Pushkin, Norstein took out not only the visual stylistics of the ‘mythic’ part
of Tale of Tales arising, by his own admission, at the meeting point between
Picasso’s graphics and Pushkin’s manuscript drawings, but also something
more: ‘We shall speak of Pushkin as the author of his own destiny . . . We
shall show him “self-directing” his creative personality’ – that’s how
Khrzhanovsky defines the thrust of his ‘animated Pushkin studies’ or, referring
to Yuri Lotman’s words: ‘the carrying over into reality the freedom of poetry’
(Khrzhanovsky 1986: 160). Playing as animator, a ‘drawing actor’, the role of
Pushkin, animating self-portraits (and self-caricatures) from the manuscripts,
Norstein couldn’t help but learn, hands-on, some classical lessons in artistic
self-reflection (that shapes the self-standing of creative personality).9 And the
mysterious sense of harmony that permeates Tale of Tales, dare one say it, is
that of Pushkin’s origin, emanating from this universe.
9
Petrushevskaya’s own plays are entirely ‘of this world’ and fundamentally tragic; if they are at
all illuminated or harmonized, it is only through paradoxical catharsis of the hole-and-corner
of sorts. In the script-proposal it’s not just a slip of the tongue: this concertina-like plot ‘finally
boiling down to one simple sound: “we live”. . .’ (Norstein and Yarbusova 2005: 21). This is
her grand-theme and her ‘exposition of values’. As to Norstein alone, he would seem to rather
boil down his implicit plot into yet different sound: we create. . . (One phrase runs through
their joint script like a refrain: ‘yet all the same I am a poet . . .’.)
It seems that the glowing, luminous sheet of paper, as a recurring image,

as a material sign of the Word and its eternal symbol, comes from the same
work as Pushkin’s manuscripts. And the boldest, contrapuntal metaphor in
the film, the scroll that turns into a child, a newborn, who has entered the
world, is a hint at the ultimate sameness, the identity of art and reality, of
creation and life; and that, too, within the broad tradition of culture,
essentially resonates as Pushkin’s reference.
. . . All that would, at last, be quite essential in the film’s final turn.
Whether a new human being was born, or the same full circle completed, all
the same he is ‘from there’, it just cannot be otherwise. That’s where we
descend from, after all, in that incarnation of primordial memory, dwell
Madonna and Child, a quotation, the seed of tradition that builds and
preserves the culture. He will grow up here, at the ashes of hearth and home;
but he came from there. Where else from? And the light-radiating sheet of
paper, which Little Wolf steals from the Poet (not accidentally, kind of a
composite portrait of many poets, from Pushkin to Mandel’štam to Gumilev,
with hints of others and more), is the deed of estate. Here is inscribed the
word, the genetic code of culture, inherited by the newborn and the new
artist. And the Little Wolf’s job is still the same: to sing this old lullaby, so
that it too would be memorized . . .
As for the director himself, he would rather downplay that a bit. ‘I wanted
to use animation to make a documentary about life, as it had passed through
me,’ Norstein reportedly once said, addressing the screening audience.
Maybe, however, the film is not about that either.
References
Balakirsky Katz, M. (2016). Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age
of Soviet Animation. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press.
Bendazzi, G. (2005), ‘Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey’,
Animation World Network, 19 September. Available online: https://www.awn.
com/animationworld/book-review-yuri-norstein-and-tale-tales-animator-s-
journey (accessed 4 December 2017).
Brayton, T. (2016). ‘The Wolf at the Door’, Alternate Ending, 10 October. Available
online: http://www.alternateending.com/2016/10/the-wolf-at-the-door.html
(accessed 4 December 2017).
Brodsky, J. (2000 [1969]). ‘The End of a Beautiful Era’, trans. D. Rigsbee, in A.
Kjellberg (ed.), Collected Poems in English, 1972–1999, 38–40. New York:
Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Available online: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/
poems/57938/the-end-of-a-beautiful-era (accessed 4 December 2017).
Etkind E. (2013). Warped Mourning: Stories of the Undead in the Land of the
Unburied. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Encyclopedia of the National Cinema (n.d.). http://2011.russiancinema.ru/
index.php?e_dept_id=2e_movie_id=5993 (accessed 4 December 2017).
Ginzburg L. (1981). ‘The Particular and the General in a Lyrical Poem’ [‘Chastnoe i
obshchee v liricheskom stikhotvorenii’], Issues of Literature [Voprosy literatury],
10: 152–175.
Ginzburg L. (1986). ‘The Meaning of Life – in the Life Itself . . .’ [‘Smysl zhizni – v
zhisni, v nei samoi’], Youth [Yunost], 12: 95–96.
Gurevich, M. (1987). ‘Stones and Cathedral [‘Sobor i kamni],’ Interview with Yuri
Norstein’, Soviet Screen [Sovetskiy ekran], 7: 16.
Gurevich, M. (1989). ‘This Is not the Film about That’ [‘Ne ob etom film’],
Animation, Animatograph, Fantomatics [Multiplikatsiia, animatograf,
fantomatika], First All-Union animation festival KROK–89: 122–149.
Gurevich, M. (2014). ‘Breathing a Soul into the Things Existent: Animation
According to Norstein’, Animafest Zagreb, 24th World Festival of Animated
Film (Program Book), 152–154.
Gurevich, M. (2016). ‘Dream of Eternity, Lullaby of Re-birth: Notes on Re-reading
Tale of Tales’, in G. Bendazzi (ed.), Animation: A World History, vol. 2,
309–311. London: Focal Press, Taylor & Francis.
Iampolski, M. (1987 [1982]). ‘The Space of the Animated Film: Khrzhanovsky’s
I Am With You Again and Norstein’s The Tale of Tales’ [‘Prostranstvo
multiplikatsii: I s vami snova A. Kharzhanovskogo i Skazka skazok Y.
Norsteina’], Film Art [Iskusstvo kino], 1982 (3): 84–99; in English: trans.
A. Braddel, Afterimage, 13: 93–117.
Khrzhanovsky, A. (1986). ‘Journey to Arzrum during the Campaign of 1829 by
A. S. Pushkin. Projection onto the Screen’ [‘A. S. Pushkin. Puteshestviie v Arzrum
vo vremiq pokhoda 1829 g. Proektsiia na ekran’], in A. Prokhorov, B.
Raushenbach and F. Khitruk (eds), Problems of Synthesis in Artistic Culture
[Problemy sinteza v khudozhestvennoy kulture,] 157–205. Moscow: Nauka
Publishing.
Kitson, C. (2005). Yuri Norstein and Tale of Tales: An Animator’s Journey.
Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Krivoulia, N. (2002). Labyrinths of Animation [Labirinty animatsii]. Moscow:
Graal Publishing.
Moritz, W. (1997). ‘Narrative Strategies for Resistance and Protest in Eastern
European Animation’, in J. Pilling (ed.), A Reader in Animation Studies, 38–47.
London: John Libbey.
Norstein, Y. (1983). ‘Reality Created by the Artist’ [‘Realnost, sozdannaya
khudozhnikom’], in S. Asenin (ed.), The Wisdom of Make-Believe: Masters of
Animation on Themselves and their Art [Mudrost vymysla: mastera animatsii o
sebe i o svoem iskusstve], 116–120. Moscow: Iskusstvo Publishing.
Norstein, Y. (2005). Snow on the Grass [Sneg na trave]: Fragments of a Book,
Lectures on the Art of Animation. Moscow: VGIK.
Norstein, Y. and F. Yarbusova (2005). Tale of Tales [Skazka skazok]. Moscow:
Krasnaya Ploshchad.
Pushkin, A. (1977 [1827]), Complete Works in 10 Volumes [Polnoe sobranie
sochinenii v 10 tomakh], 4th edn, Leningrad: Nauka Publishing.
10
The Importance of Ranko
Munitić’s Work on the Zagreb
School of Animation
Andrijana Ružić
Art should be poked, no matter what. Then it gladly starts to

dance, colorful and human. Like every abandoned human message
that cannot fade away, even if nobody listens to it. Pronounced, no
matter what.
DUšAN MAKAVEJEV , film director and screenwriter
(MUNITIć 2012: 49)
Introduction
Ranko Munitić (Zagreb, 1943–Belgrade, 2009) was one of the most esteemed,
acute and controversial Yugoslav film critics, a film theorist and a film historian,
scriptwriter and excellent connoisseur of film, animated film and comics. He
published his first text in May 1961 in the high-school magazine Polet, and his
first professional review in November 1962, in the art and culture magazine
Telegram. Munitić collaborated on several scripts for live action films and
wrote a number of scripts for animated films. In the 1970s and 1980s, as a
member of the Board of Directors of the ASIFA, he took part in the
popularization and promotion of the Zagreb School of Animated Film1
1
Both the names – Zagreb School of Animation and Zagreb School of Animated Film – are
widely used.
worldwide. He was a member of juries and selection committees at around

twenty international festivals of short and animated films.
Munitić organized about a hundred retrospectives of Yugoslav short
films at home and abroad, most notably of the works of the Zagreb School
of Animation and the Belgrade School of Documentary Films. His versatile
talents and his innate curiosity brought him to write about various film
genres, animation, television, comics, actors and actresses. As of today,
Munitić’s seventy-eight books written in Serbo-Croatian have been published
in various republics of the former Yugoslavia.2
In his continuous efforts to foster the animation medium and thus
promote its high artistic value in the former Yugoslavia, Munitić wrote
about a dozen books on cinematographic animation. Half of these books
were dedicated to animated films born in the ‘workshop’ of the Zagreb
School of Animation. One of his books is regarded as a milestone in the
history of Yugoslav animation studies: Zagrebački krug crtanog filma
(Zagreb Circle of Animated Film) in four volumes, edited by Zlatko Sudović,
while his Estetika animacije (Aesthetics of Animation) is the first published
book on the aesthetics of animation in the world. In order to enrich this
official biography and better understand the personality of Ranko Munitić,
I thought that this short autobiographical note, where he presented the most
significant facts about himself in the third person, should be added. His
particular, Dalmatian sense of humour3 and the taste for ironical syntheses
are evident in these light-hearted definitions:
Lives his childhood in Trogir, receives education in Zagreb.

Travels around the world. Settles down in Belgrade in 1972.
His nationality: a man from the seaside.
His political aspirations: a film fan.
His vocation: criticus vulgaris.
His conviction: a nonconformist person.
His status: a freelancer that is a marginalized person.4
From 1961 he publishes shorter or longer essays on live action film,

animated film, comics, science fiction films, on television, on acting and
actors. He believes in the right of his own choice and in life until death.5
Munitić was deeply fascinated with the professional figures of actors and
animators. In one of his books of film memories he explained why he always
felt deep admiration for animators:
2
http://www.rankomunitic.org/en/books (accessed 25 May 2016).
3
Dalmatia is the coastal region of Croatia in which he was born and spent his childhood.
4
http://www.rankomunitic.org/en/ranko (accessed 25 May 2016).
5
http://www.rankomunitic.org/en/ranko (accessed 25 May 2016).
THE IMPORTANCE OF RANKO MUNITIĆ’S WORK 165
I have learned from them how much the process of art creation is a
difficult, long and very expensive phenomenon. Expensive from the
inside, of course, in the sense of that part you have to melt and shape into
the material with which you work and give to that creation, that ‘artistic
being’, the most important thing: a ‘soul’. I have learned from animators
the most important fact that the things you cannot comprehend by your
rationality, analysis and written diagnosis, you shouldn’t even try to
discover. You simply just feel the presence of a miracle and that’s it. And
what remains is silence and gratitude.
MUNITIĆ 1997: 101–102
In my opinion Munitić had two pioneering roles in the development of the

history and theory of animation in the former Yugoslavia and in his critical
opus he preferred a historical and theoretical approach to the subject matter.
His first pioneering role as an animation historian was his elaboration of
the first systematized history of animated film production made in Zagreb.
His work consisted of archival research, and he collected, prepared and co-
edited (with Zlatko Sudović) all the reviews of Yugoslav film critics contained
in the first (1978), the third (1978) and the fourth volume (1986) of the
book Zagrebački krug crtanog filma. His incessant and argumentative
criticism of animated film production in the former Yugoslavia was closely
linked to his historical approach to the subject matter, although he has
written several books on film theory and film criticism.6 His most important
critical essays of the Zagreb School of Animation’s films are to be found in
the third and the fourth volume of Zagrebački krug crtanog filma, among
the texts of other critics and journalists. These reviews did not only contain
Munitić’s highly subjective, independent and argumentative evaluations of
the animated films, but were at the same time severe critical observations of
the superficial and amateurish way that some critics and journalists wrote
about Yugoslav animated film in general.7
Munitić’s second pioneering role as an animation theoretician concerns
the invention and the development of a specific method of ‘morphological
and comparative analysis of animated films’8 that had not existed before in
Yugoslav film theory. This particular methodological approach, developed
and perfected in his continuous reviews during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s,
led him to write the very first book on the aesthetic of animation in the
world, published in Belgrade in 1982.
6
Munitić also wrote film theory books: O dokumentarnom filmu (1975); Filmske zvrsti in
žanri (1977); Dokumentarni film – da ili ne? (1982) and Filmska slika i stvarnost (2009).
7
Munitić edited a historical collection of Belgrade film criticism, Beogradski filmski kritičarski
krug 1–3 (2002, 2005, 2007). See also Munitić (2012).
8
This approach appears for the first time and is thoroughly explained in Munitić (1973).
Genesis of an almanac – Zagrebački krug

crtanog filma
Zagrebački krug crtanog filma, a pioneering attempt of historiography, is an
almanac that consists of four volumes, and I shall discuss the first, the third
and the fourth, in which the chronology of the development of animated
film production in Zagreb is laid out.
The idea to write an almanac on this topic was born in 1965 at the Film
Makers Association of Croatia (Društvo filmskih radnika Hrvatske).
Screenwriter, scriptwriter and film director, Zlatko Sudović (1929–2017)
was an editor of this book and the almanac is usually listed under his name
in bibliographies. He was the initiator of the idea to collect, systematize and
publish the most important articles about the films from the Zagreb School
of Animation. Many important facts about Munitić’s contribution to the
completion of the almanac are to be found in the short acknowledgement of
the first volume written by Sudović:
This publication is the result of enormous, collective efforts,9 but we

especially would like to mention the contribution of Ranko Munitić. He
was extraordinarily accurate in the research of both known and unknown
data, always taking into consideration even the insignificant details that
seemed unimportant in the first place. Consequently, he was convinced
that in every effort, even in the ones that seemed unsuccessful, there was
an origin of this phenomenon we proudly call today the Zagreb School
of Animated Film.
SUDOVIĆ 1 1978: 12
In the first volume of Zagrebački krug crtanog filma, Munitić’s archival

research inspired him to come up with a new chronology of animation in
Zagreb, revealing some unknown facts and names in its history (for example
the origins of animation in Zagreb with the pioneers Sergije Tagatz, the
Maar Brothers and Viktor Rybak; Kamilo Tompa’s first experiments in
puppet animation in the 1930s).
This volume presents the history of Zagreb animation from 1922 to 1978
through the collection of the most significant paragraphs of the articles and
reviews about animated films published in international and Yugoslav
newspapers and magazines as well as interviews with Croatian and foreign
animators regarding the films of the Zagreb School. The list of festival
participation, the list of Yugoslav and international achievements,
9
Animation authors and their collaborators were the key contributors to this achievement
since the ‘film archive in Zagreb was almost nonexistent. The biggest part of the Croatian film
historical fund was irreversibly lost, destroyed or dismembered’ (Sudović 1 1978: 12).
acknowledgements and awards for the studio and a filmography were

compiled by Munitić, except for the biographical chapter, ‘Who is who in
Croatian animation’.
For the second volume of Zagrebački krug crtanog filma (Sudović 2
1978), Munitić selected and prepared the scripts and storyboards of fifty-
two of the most significant films produced in the history of animation in
Croatia before 1972: from How Kićo Was Born (Kako se rodio Kićo),
directed by Dušan Vukotić and Josip Sudar, produced by Duga Film in 1952,
to Tup-tup directed by Nedeljko Dragić, produced by Zagreb Film in 1972.
The third volume of Zagrebački krug crtanog filma (Sudović 3 1978)
consists of the bibliography and the collection of around eighty of the most
significant texts about animated films of the Zagreb School published in
Yugoslav newspapers and magazines from 1951 to 1972. Zlatko Sudović
edited the book, while Munitić selected the texts, which were chosen for
their own value and for their informative and polemic nature. In the
acknowledgement, Munitić describes the Zagreb School of animation as
‘the most valuable phenomenon of Croatian and Yugoslav cinema so far’,
and hopes that with the proposed critical analyses ‘the mysterious freshness
of the films of the Zagreb School of Animation’ (ibid: 17) will be discovered,
appreciated and understood better. Munitić’s ten critical essays are to be
found in this volume; the first one ‘Suprotne obale’ (‘Opposite Shores’) was
written in 1962 and the conclusive one is ‘Kritička retrospektiva: Zagrebačka
škola crtanog filma’ (‘The Critical Retrospective: Zagreb School of
Animation’), written in 1972, in which he chooses and analyses ten
anthological films of the Zagreb School.
The fourth volume of the almanac, Zagrebački krug crtanog filma,
comprises the period from 1979 to 1985; Munitić figures here, again, as the
only author who had been systematically collecting the material (articles,
essays, short critics) over the years and selected them for the occasion. In the
foreword of the fourth almanac the animator Nikola Kostelac gives credit
to Munitić:
A great number of essays and articles (in this book) are signed by Ranko
Munitić who has already published numerous critical notes, analysis and
several books on animated film. He accurately follows the development
of animation in Yugoslavia10 and is the only author that does so
continually and with constancy. In my opinion Munitić’s article ‘The
Tamers of Wild Drawings’ is one of the best analysis of the Zagreb School
of Animated Film examined from the various aspects. I find also very
interesting Ranko’s observations in his analysis ‘Off – Zagreb, Twenty
10
Munitić wrote a chronological overview on Yugoslav animation, Kinematografska animacija
u Jugoslaviji, Beograd, 1979 and Pola veka filmske animacije u Srbiji, Beograd, 1999.
Years of Some Valuable Animating Experience’, where he explains the

importance of an organizational basis necessary for the development of
animation art in any country.
KOSTELAC 1986: 15
This volume contains the chronology of Zagreb animation (Zagreb Film,

Filmoteka 16, Adria Film and Jadran Film companies) and a filmography of
the animated films produced in Croatia between 1972 and 1982. It also
includes the list of festival participation, the list of Yugoslav and international
achievements and awards for Zagreb Film’s studio, scripts and the storyboards
of twenty-one of the most significant films. The selected bibliography, along
with twenty-nine critical articles and essays on the films from the Zagreb
School of Animation published in Yugoslavia from 1972 until 1982, close the
story of an achievement called Zagrebački krug crtanog filma.
Theory of animation and animation aesthetics

Munitić wrote the first book on the aesthetics of animation in the
international history of animation studies, and published it in Zagreb in
1982. The genesis of this pioneering work is described by the author himself
in the prologue of the book Estetika animacije (Animation Aesthetics).
Munitić was discontented with the absence of arguments with which
Yugoslav film critics reviewed the Zagreb animated films, and above all he
himself was not satisfied with his own, early, critical articles published in
1962 and 1963 (please note that Munitić started publishing film criticism in
the Yugoslav reviews when he was only nineteen). He thought that there was
a strong necessity to invent a new approach to the methodology problem.
Munitić set up a model of animated film criticism, inspired by the method his
art history professor Vera Horvat Pintarić in her lectures on the ‘morphology
of style’ developed and perfected at the faculty of Art History at the University
of Zagreb (Munitić 1997: 56–57). This new critical approach to animated
film was defined as a comparative morphological analysis.
‘Animation is a specific morphological system of values whose sense and
significance becomes legible by an analysis of its certain shapes and
morphological characteristics. In this judgment value, we should use the
comparative approach (a simultaneous analysis of two or more phenomena
in order to comprehend its essence) based on evident similarities and
differences that define their structure’ (Munitić 1973: 5). Animation’s
specific aesthetics, its expressive and formal condition, required a division of
the elements of animation into two constitutive parts: visual and kinaesthetic.
The visual elements of animation are line, surface, volume, space and colour
whereas the kinaesthetic ones are animation, film shooting, editing, sound
effects and film music.
Munitić’s five theoretical essays published in his book, O animaciji (On

Animation), illustrate the suggested five types of methodological and
analytical possibilities of animation analysis: 1) the analysis of a single
film, 2) a comparative analysis of several films within a unique, single
author’s opus, 3) a comparative analysis of two different authors’ opuses,
two independent concepts and models of animation, 4) a comparative
analysis of several films that represent an evolution process of a specific
phenomenon, current or school, 5) a comparative analysis of classical and
modern system values within the global framework of animation.
This new methodology of analysis and its interpretation of animated film
is fully represented for the first time in Munitić’s article ‘Suprotne obale’
(ibid: 31), published in the magazine Filmska kultura in 1964, where the
animated artistic worlds of Vatroslav Mimica and Dušan Vukotić were
examined and compared. In this morphological approach to animation,
Munitić tried to get rid of ‘arguments’ connected with the emotional
experience and to decode the film structures in their formal significance.
This text generated several negative reactions from his colleagues; most of
them objected that a film critic could not possibly write about animation by
analysing lines and stains of colours (Munitić 1997: 58). Nevertheless
Munitić continued to use his new method, proclaiming that: ‘The problems
of aesthetic structures are to be resolved on the level that is superior to
everyday qualifications of beautiful and ugly, positive and negative, useful
and useless’ (Munitić 1973: 37).
In his article ‘A Critical Retrospective: The Zagreb School of Animated
Film?’ (ibid: 36), a comparative analytical expertise of the most influential
creative period of the Zagreb School from 1958 until 1968, written in May
1972, in occasion of the Seventh Festival of Animated Film in Zagreb,
Munitić used very severe criteria in order to present the best ten animated
masterpieces born in Zagreb Film’s studio for animation. The ten analysed
films were listed in chronological order: The Avenger (Osvetnik) by Dušan
Vukotić, The Inspector is Back! (Inspektor se vratio kući!) by Vatroslav
Mimica, The Piece of Chagreen Leather (Šagrenska koža) and Don Quixote
(Don Kihot) by Vlado Kristl, The Substitute (Surogat) by Vukotić, A Little
Story (Mala hronika) by Mimica, Bećarac by Zlatko Bourek, The Fly (Muha)
by Jutriša and Marks, Curiosity (Znatiželja) by Borivoj Dovniković and
Passing Days (Idu dani) by Nedeljko Dragić. The criteria for this selection
were:
I. The demonstration of personal variations on the common theme of

reduced, stylized animation developed by the Zagreb authors in their
films.
II. Selected films as morphological (formal) and revolutionary
milestones in the evolution of the Zagreb School style and their
further influence on future artists.
‘Criteria are not invented by the theoreticians and aesthetic critics: art
itself creates them. Each new triumph elevates previously reached value
limits and imposes a new dimension. Our selection here is based on the
division of the results that the School offered as the final ones and in which
she overcame itself in a certain moment’ (Sudović 3 1978: 284), concludes
Munitić in this 1972 anthological selection of the ten best films produced
in Zagreb.
In the meantime, Munitić wrote three books of animation theory (O
animaciji, published in 1973, Dežela animiranih čudes in 1976 and Teorija
animacije in 1981) in which he continued to improve and polish his new
method. This new and improved methodology practised throughout the
years led Munitić to write his aesthetics of animated film. The book was
entitled Uvod u estetiku kinematografske animacije (An Introduction into
the Aesthetics of Animated Film) and was published by a synergy of Zagreb
and Belgrade publishers, in 1982.
In 2007 Munitić enriched and updated this book in which he treated all
the essential problems on the animation medium. The new volume, published
in Belgrade, called Estetika animacije (The Aesthetics of Animation),
discusses the issues about the structure of the animation medium, the
techniques of animation, the evolution of its development (from classical era
to computer animation). The last chapter of the book contains a curious list
of the 100 most important animated films of all time (from 1892 until 2004)
selected by animation historian Giannalberto Bendazzi, animator Rastko
Ćirić and Ranko Munitić. Another edition of this book was published under
the same title in Zagreb in 2012.
The most important of Munitić’s achievement in this particular
morphological approach is condensed in the following passage:
Animation, in our understanding, demands a special approach, a specific

notion and categories, instruments of analysis, it demands discovery and
interpretation of its specific material and shaping of distinct analytical
apparatus. It is ‘against’ a subjective experience rephrasing as well as
applications of notions and methods of another, different area of artistic
morphology.
MUNITIĆ 2007: 24
Critical reviews and theory of critics

In the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, the animators of the Zagreb School of
Animation were more appreciated and highly respected abroad than at
home. Ranko Munitić’s friend and ‘teacher’, influential Hungarian and
British animator and theorist, John Hallas, once said:
I’ve heard that some of your films are accused of being too intellectual
and dedicated to highly cultured persons. However, I disagree with this.
You have to give a certain amount of time to the public to get used to
your very original style that is at the same time clear and close to the
people. Disney’s films that do not make you think spoil today’s audience:
in his films, everything is explained. The key value of your films is that
they make you think.
SUDOVIĆ 1 1978: 156
However, the Yugoslav critics were seldom full of doubts lamenting mainly
the narrative and visual contents of Zagreb animated films and describing
them as hermetic, abstract and uncommunicative. One can easily discover
this negative attitude by browsing the bibliography of the third and the
fourth volume of Zagrebački krug crtanog filma. It contains the most
important articles published in the Yugoslav newspapers and film magazines
in the period from 1951 until 1986. Munitić was constantly encouraging
Zagreb animators to continue in the affirmation of their individual and
personal animated shapes of content, criticizing at the same time the film
critics who wrote the pessimistic, superficial and non-argued reviews of
Zagreb Film’s authors (Sudović 3 1978).11
With his critical essays on animation issues, written for several leading
Yugoslav film and art magazines (Filmska kultura, Umetnost, Oko),
Munitić’s main intention was to urge Zagreb animators to continue with
their experimental and innovative way of doing animation. Munitić was
convinced of the idiosyncratic artistic values of their short films and was
constantly defending these values in certain so-called ‘periods of crisis’ that
the school faced around the first years of the 1960s, according to Yugoslav
cultural public opinion. He was a fervent supporter of modernism in
animation and often wrote about innovative, abstract, experimental films
usually ignored by other critics.12 In his critical look at Vladimir Kristl’s film
Don Quixote (Munitić 1986: 369), written in 1973 for the art review
Umetnost, he concludes that Kristl, ‘the poet of chaos and confusion’, was
the only author able ‘to visualize the notion and to represent with a vivid
sign not a person or an object, but idea, notion or essence, or if you wish, an
ideal archetype of a certain person or an object’.
His predilection for Nedeljko Dragić’s formally and narratively condensed
films is crystallized in the following sentences from his article published in
11
See Munitić’s articles ‘Mladi animatori’ (p. 202) or ‘Izmed̄u filma i publike’ (p. 222).
12
Croatian scholar Hrvoje Turković emailed me on 26 June 2016: ‘I give a credit to Munitić
since he was the only one that valued positively Aleksandar Srnec’s important contribution in
Dragutin Vunak’s film Man and the Shadow (Ćovjek i sjena).’ In 1960 Turković reviewed the
same film in his article ‘Neprepoznata avangardnost crtanog filma ćovjek i sjena i neostvaren
projekt apstraktnog animiranog filma’.
the magazine Oko in 1974: ‘The meaning of Diary is the medium of drawn
animation itself, or to be more precise, a visualized dialogue of the author’s
curiosity with constitutive potentials and constructive possibilities of this
animation technique. The content of Diary is the fundamental animation
movement understood as an autonomous, self-sufficient dialectical and
poetical value.’13 In the article ‘Moralni pobednik’ (‘Moral Winner’),
published in Filmska kultura in 1979, Munitić reviewed Zdenko Gašparović’s
film Satiemania defining it as: ‘a step forward from the film Diary (directed
by Nedeljko Dragić), a kind of renaissance of Kristl’s untidy and uncleaned
animation magma – realized without an illusion about the necessity of
external uniformity and formal harmony’ (Sudović 1986: 437).
In the article ‘Off-Zagreb, Dvadeset godina dragocjenog animacijskog
iskustva’ (‘Off-Zagreb, Twenty Years of Precious Animation Experience’),
written in 1979 for Filmska kultura, Munitić indicates the principal features
and results of two-dimensional animation production in the Yugoslav
studios in Ljubljana, Sarajevo, Belgrade, Novi Sad and Skopje. This text is
important because it emphasizes the importance of the experience of the
Zagreb School’s authors in the fields of animation production, organization
and research and its indirect influence on other Yugoslav animation centres
(Sudović 1986: 438).
There is also another important essay, particularly significant for
Munitić’s predilection for modernist authors, entitled ‘Napad izvana i
iznutra. Joško Marušić i njegov permanentni vizualni eksperiment’ (Attack
from Outside and Inside. J. Marušić and his Permanent Visual Experiment),
written for Filmska kultura in 1982. Munitić defines Marušić’s creative
ascent as ‘one of the most important and most complex events in the eighties’
since this young animator from Split ‘tried and succeeded to imply in his
films the change, revaluation and enrichment of all dimensions of the
complex cinematographic animation organism’ (ibid: 459).
Conclusion
When I started to study Munitić’s reviews about the world of animated film
(in which he also wrote about the importance of the role of a film critic in
the Yugoslav history of animated cinema), I was amazed by the elevated
measure of zeal in Munitić’s stubborn and continuous intentions to
determine the most appropriate definition of the term ‘film critic’. In some
of his texts on the topic, it is clear that he did not feel very comfortable being
defined as one. I had an impression that he felt the urgent need to justify and
clarify the reason for the existence of such a profession.
Ranko Munitić, ‘Nedeljko Dragić i njegov Dnevnik’ (Sudović 1986: 372).

13
Here are the two most pertinent examples of definitions of the term
‘criticus vulgaris’ he came up with. A Belgrade film critic and theoretician,
Dušan Stojanović (1927–1994), wrote one: ‘A critic is someone who gives
his personal opinion in public in order to give a chance to other people (who
are also critics, but so called the private ones) to compare their judgments
with his. Only that, nothing else’ (Munitić 2012: 20).
The other definition, a quite pretentious one, is provided by a philosopher
and professor of aesthetics from Sarajevo, Ivan Focht (1927–1992): ‘The art
criticism could not be the criticism of art, but a criticism that is art in itself’
(ibid: 20). American critic John Simon defined a good critic as a person who
possesses four chief virtues: intelligence, good taste, capacity of good writing
and moral integrity (ibid: 16). If we agree with such a definition of a film
critic, we are in a position to conclude that Munitić definitely possessed all
of the above-mentioned virtues in question.
I remember the conversation I had with the animator Pavao Štalter some
years ago. When we mentioned his film The Last Station (Poslednja stanica),
he confided in me that he was not satisfied with the way he ended it, and
added, in a low voice: ‘Ranko Munitić noted the same thing and told me so.’
This significant example illustrates the fact of how much the artists from the
Zagreb School appreciated, asked for and accepted Munitić’s opinions
about their films. It couldn’t be otherwise since Munitić was often with them
(he was their ‘companion and not just a passive observer’ (Munitić 1997:
58)), in the studio or visiting festivals together. Animators accepted him as
one of them and trusted only this animation fan and theorist who analysed
their films in an objective, profound and serious way.
Each year the animators from the Zagreb School (and this is a fact that
few people are aware of) had to earn their place again from the very
beginning within the Yugoslav cinema hierarchy in spite of the fact that they
had had enormous success abroad, or maybe even precisely because of that
fact. The dubious and discontented minds of the Yugoslav public cultural
opinion rendered the animators suspicious and acerbic towards the film
critics and journalists (Sudović 1 1978: 226–227). 14
In the introduction of the first volume of the almanac Zagrebački krug
crtanog filma, referring to every single author of the Zagreb School, Munitić
writes:
Each author has at his disposal the key to the sense and the meaning of
animation, each one of them is in possession of the poetics derived from
their intimate inclinations and the infinitive opportunities of the medium
that challenges him with its possibilities.
Sudovíc 1978: 17
Testimonies of Borivoj Dovniković and Zlatko Grgić.

14
Allow me now to invert the subject and to rewrite this phrase as follows in
order to conclude this chapter: The film critic and theoretician Ranko
Munitić had at his disposal the key to the sense and the meaning of
animation. His poetics derived from his intimate inclination and the infinitive
opportunities of the medium that challenged him with its possibilities . . .
The conclusion seems even better when using Munitić’s own words from a
television interview, found on YouTube, but no longer available on that
platform: ‘I am a film fan and I love writing about film.’
References
Kostelac, N. (1986). ‘Foreword’, in Zlatko Sudović (ed.), Zagrebački krug crtanog
filma 4, 13–16. Zagreb: Zavod za kulturu Hrvatske.
Munitić, R. (1973). O animaciji (ogledi). Beograd: Jugoslovenska kinoteka.
Munitić, R. (1975). O dokumentarnom filmu. Beograd, Zagreb: Institut za film,
Filmoteka 16.
Munitić, R. (1977). Filmske zvrsti in žanri. Ljubljana: Univerzum.
Munitić, R. (1982). Dokumentarni film – da ili ne? Beograd: Institut za film.
Munitić, R. (1986). ‘Vladimir Kristl: krotitelj suprotnosti – pjesnik haosa’, in
Zlatko Sudović (ed.), Zagrebački krug crtanog filma 4, 367–370. Zagreb:
Zavod za kulturu Hrvatske.
Munitić, R. (1997). Filmski prijatelji, autobiografski putopis. Novi Sad, Beograd:
Prometej, Jugoslovenska kinoteka.
Munitić, R., ed. (2002, 2005, 2007). Beogradski filmski kritičarski krug 1–3. Niš:
NKC Art Press.
Munitić, R. (2007). Estetika animacije. Beograd: Filmski centar Srbije, Fakultet
primenjenih umetnosti.
Munitić, R. (2009). Filmska slika i stvarnost. Beograd: Filmski centar Srbije.
Munitić, R. (2012). Pitanje filmske kritike. Beograd: Filmski centar Srbije.
Sudović, Z. 1, ed. (1978). Zagrebački krug crtanog filma 1, Zagreb: Zavod za
kulturu Hrvatske, Zagreb film.15
Sudović, Z. 2, ed. (1978). Zagrebački krug crtanog filma 2. Zagreb: Zavod za
kulturu Hrvatske, Zagreb film.
Sudović, Z. 3, ed. (1978). Zagrebački krug crtanog filma 3. Zagreb: Zavod za
kulturu Hrvatske, Zagreb film.
Sudović, Z., ed. (1986). Zagrebački krug crtanog filma 4. Zagreb: Zavod za
kulturu Hrvatske.
15
In spite of the great contribution of Munitić to Zagrebački krug crtanog filma, bibliographies
and libraries list it under the editor’s (Sudović’s) name.
Bibliography of Munitić’s books on animation

Animated film: Theory
O animaciji [On Animation], Beograd, 1973.
Dežela animiranih čudes [The Land of Animated Wonders], Ljubljana, 1976.
Teorija animacije [The Theory of Animation], Beograd, 1981.
Uvod u estetiku kinematografske animacije [An Introduction to the Esthetics of
Animated Film], Zagreb–Beograd, 1982.
Kritička retrospektiva Zagrebačke škole [A Critical Retrospective of the Zagreb
School], Zagreb, 1982.
Estetika animacije [The Esthetics of Animated Film], Beograd, 2007.
Zbornik o animaciji [A Collection of Texts on Animated Film], Beograd, 2009.
Estetika animacije [The Esthetics of Animation], Zagreb, 2012.
Animated Film: History

Zagrebački krug crtanog filma I [The Zagreb Circle of Animated Films I], Zagreb,
1978.16
Zagrebački krug crtanog filma II [The Zagreb Circle of Animated Films II],
Zagreb, 1978.
Zagrebački krug crtanog filma III [The Zagreb Circle of Animated Films III],
Zagreb, 1978.
Kinematografska animacija u Jugoslaviji [Animated Film in Yugoslavia], Beograd,
1979.
Pet svjetskih festivala u Zagrebu [Five International Festivals in Zagreb], Zagreb,
1984.
80 filmova zagrebačke škole [80 Films of the Zagreb School], Novi Sad, 1984.
Zagrebački krug crtanog filma IV [The Zagreb Circle of Animated Films IV],
Zagreb, 1986.
Pola veka animiranog filma u Srbiji [A Half-century of Animated Film in Serbia],
Beograd, 1999.
See previous note.

16
11
Animation Experienced
through Music
Tomislav Simović and the

Zagreb School of Animation
Irena Paulus
To match visual modernism: music with

its own imaginary space
Since cartoons can, by definition, do things that we can’t (or shouldn’t) do,
the music exaggerates and celebrates that difference. Cartoon music does
more than simply add life to cartoons – it makes cartoons bigger than life.
GOLDMARK and TAYLOR 2002: xiv
This may be said for American animated shorts made in the first half of the
twentieth century (the 1930s and 1940s), but is even more valid for movies
made within the so-called Zagreb school of animation.1 The first animators
1
The term Zagreb school of animated film was associated with the group of enthusiasts who,
during the 1950s, gathered in Zagreb, Croatia, in the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia.
Part of the ‘team’ were Borivoj Dovniković, Aleksandar Marks, Zlatko Bourek, Boris Kolar,
Zlatko Grgić, Vlado Kristl and Dušan Vukotić, who, alongside Vatroslav Mimica, became a
leading figure of the first phase of the school’s development. They were primarily interested in
animation as a way of artistic expression and they found their home in the Studio for Animated
Film (est. 1956), within the newly formed Zagreb Film company (est. in 1953). During the
1960s, 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s others joined them, for instance Nedeljko Dragić,
in this group developed their skills through trial and error. Their reduced
animation and tendency towards avant-garde graphics, reflecting
contemporary tendencies in the visual arts of the 1960s and 1970s, led them
to develop their stories around the ‘common man’, but also around his
‘horrors of existence’, the ‘desperation of man caught in the web of modern
civilization’ and especially as a critique of the ‘trivialities of popular
(American) culture’ (Bendazzi 2016: 70). These animated films were
considered the summit of world animation of the twentieth century; they
FIGURE 11.1 The Substitute’s Oscar for Best Short Subject (Cartoon).
Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Croatian State Archive/Zagreb Film.
Ante Zaninović, Vladimir Jutriša, Pavao Štalter, Zdenko Gašparović and Joško Marušić. They
worked as freelancers (none of them was employed in Zagreb Film) and each of them preserved
his own approach (Majcen Marinić 2014: 14).
ANIMATION EXPERIENCED THROUGH MUSIC 179
brought numerous awards to their authors including an Oscar for The

Substitute (Surogat/Der Ersatz), made in 1961 by Dušan Vukotić.2
Also, stylistic, aesthetic and narrative solutions of the Zagreb school of
animation were adopted by the international animation scene during the
1960s and 1970s. Majcen Marinić concludes that the Zagreb school may be
considered the best articulated ‘modernist movement’ in animated film of
the era (2014: 9–10).
With regards to music, this meant the usage of modern means of expression:
short motives instead of long themes, unusual chords instead of consonant
ones, merging with other sounds (i.e. Foleys), accentuated rhythms, using
unusual ‘live’ and synthetic instruments separately or altogether, using
unusual techniques of playing, sometimes in conjunction with electronica
and tape music. Beyond the merging of sounds, animated films from the
Zagreb school allowed for the merging of different musical styles and
different musical genres, enabling the usage of modern classical music,
together with folk music, jazz, different types of dance music, rock, pop, etc.
It is interesting that this kind of musical writing is attributed only to
one man: Tomislav Simović, often listed as Tomica Simović (1931–2014).
Just like some other ‘sound people’ who occasionally worked in Zagreb
Film (such as the creator of artificial sounds, i.e. ‘Foley genius’, Miljenko
Dörr, and music supervisor and music editor Tea Brunšmid), Simović
was considered a part of the Zagreb school team (Majcen Marinić, ibid:
11–12). Even so, some people think of Simović as the author and equal
member of the Zagreb school of animation, not only because of the
enormous quantity of scores he produced (175 of them just for animated
films, altogether 300 film scores) but because of his careful re-thinking of
animated material.3
Simović’s music education was elementary (he went to music school
where he learned to play double-bass and piano),4 but in terms of
composition, especially the composition for animated films, he was self-
taught. For example, he passionately followed news about jazz, buying
magazines and listening to American radio shows, notably ‘World of Jazz’,
which was apparently recorded and sent to him by friends from the United
2
The Substitute was the first non-US animated short to win this award.
3
Other composers also made their contribution to animation in Zagreb. Before the school
started, Duga film, the very first studio for animation in socialist Yugoslavia, hired Eduard Gloz
(The Big Meeting/Veliki miting, 1951; Merry Adventure/Veseli doživljaj, 1951), Vladimir
Kraus-Rajterić (How Kićo was Born/Kako se rodio Kićo, 1951; The Enchanted Castle in
Dudinci/Začarani dvorac u Dudincima, 1952), Ivo Tijardović (Revue in a Courtyard/Revija na
dvorištu, 1952) and Milutin Vandekar (Gool!, 1952). When Zagreb Film came to prominence,
the composers were also And̄elko Klobučar, Vladimir Kraus-Rajterić and Živan Cvitković, all
of whom previously worked for Dubrava film, but also Aleksandar Bubanović, Miljenko
Prohaska, Igor Savin and Ozren Depolo.
4
The Vatroslav Lisinski music school in Zagreb.
FIGURE 11.2 Tomislav Simović. Photographer unknown. Courtesy of Jučer Danas

Sutra.
States (Paulus 2016). As a composer, he showed a considerable amount of

imagination and creativity: his musical approach to films was never the
same. By accommodating the style of the visuals and the story (if there was
one), Simović developed his own philosophy:
The image of animated film needs its own imaginary space that, as
opposed to the music which is surrounded by silence, has its determined
structure within which fluctuate variations, variability of colour, free
perspectives, concentration that swiftly jumps from object to object and
creates an impression of fantasy. . . Looking for similarities in visual and
auditory is not the rule, and that is where, for me, writing the music for
animated film starts.
PAULUS 2011: 41
Musical modernism of Diary

Simović’s description of Zagreb Film’s animated visuals, which he sees as
inseparable from the music, may be a description of any animated film from
the Zagreb school, but is particularly close to the perception of Nedeljko
Dragić’s Diary (Dnevnik, 1974). As the ‘suppression of believability’ and the

‘creation of a continuously moving and mocking universe’ (Bendazzi 2016:
265), and as extremely subjective, but also extremely vivid description of the
author’s impressions of his visit to the United States, Dragić’s highly praised
Diary brings music solutions that reflect the stylization and fragmentation
of the visuals. It can be said that the style of music is highly modern, but
it escapes any categorization. The score combines several contemporary
music styles – such are serialism, pointillism and bruitism – which were, at
the time, accepted by many composers, scholars and intellectuals.5 But
contemporary classical music with combined modernistic styles is not the
only layer of the score. Rather, it is ‘one of the many’ since it merges with
jazz, popular music, old medieval music, musical folklore, etc. Moreover, the
perception of some parts of the score changes if listened to with the movie
than if listened to without it – one example is a short transition with a red
car and symbols of traffic where a sound, like the buzz of bees, could be
interpreted as a pop melody when heard without images.
The simultaneity of musical styles and genres goes even further: at times,
the sound of musical instruments becomes unrecognizable and many times we
are not sure if we are listening to a sound effect, speech, or music. For example,
in a middle section of Diary, a cat appears in a highly stylized, almost antique
apartment – here, a kind of plucked, maybe string, maybe electrical, instrument
is heard. This instrument sounds like a harpsichord, but could be anything
else. Earlier in the film, a head turns into an egg, and there is a sound which
could be identified as a wooden percussive instrument, but it has the semblance
of a voice. A roughly sketched bird comes out of the egg, and it sounds like a
jumping ball. At the first sight of a sketched party of business people, music
babbles like human beings and acts like speech, even a quarrel, although we
are aware these sounds come from blown instruments, perhaps trumpets.
Structurally, although fragmented, the film shows a tendency towards
closure. In the last scene, there is a subtle music allusion: the man wears a
cowboy hat and that is enough to evoke the feeling of Ennio Morricone’s
music from the spaghetti westerns, played on an instrument, what could be
a saxophone. But, when we hear a flute again, and another flute which
resonates with the technique of flutter-tonguing,6 and a specific jazzy rhythm,
we know that this is the end of the movie. We do not need to see repeated
visual elements; we know because these are the musical motives that we
recognize from the beginning of the film.
5
The association brings forth a thought of the Zagreb Music Biennale, the International
Festival of Contemporary Music, founded in 1961. Simović’s composition ‘Lady Frankenstein’,
subtitled ‘Monstrumonium for mezzosoprano, 4 clarinets and piano’, was performed at the
Biennale in 1983.
6
Flutter-tonguing or Flatterzunge is technique of playing wind instruments in which the
performer flutters his/her tongue to make the characteristic ‘Frrr-Frrr’ sound.
FIGURE 11.3 A man with a cowboy hat in Dragić’s Diary. Courtesy of Croatian
State Archive/Zagreb Film.
For the end credits of Diary, there are only two cards representing the
crew. The first one shows two names: Nedeljko Dragić, who did the script,
drawings, animation and direction; and Tomica Simović, who was the
composer of the music. These two are thus perceived as the most important
contributors. The second card registers other people who worked on the
film, the animators, trick camera operator, and other collaborators, among
them two important names related to technical handling of the music: the
music supervisor Tea Brunšmid, and the sound editor Mladen Prebil.
According to the critic Željko Luketić, who profoundly studied Simović’s
personal material related to his film score composition – audio tapes, scores,
notes, receipts, bills, etc., Simović created Diary’s soundtrack by recording
each element of the score separately.7 Elements of separate sounds (like
acoustic drums or string instruments which were hit like drums) were
layered one above the other, or were put in succession of one after the other,
creating specific, harsh sounds. Moreover, Luketić emphasized that Simović
approached the scoring of Diary as a tape music, which was considered very
modern at the time. Composer manipulated sounds with the tape by using
7
Simović recorded no less than three hours of music material, which he used to cover a mere
eight minutes of the film (Paulus 2016).
montage, cut-ups, scratching, and other techniques, as well as lugging, which

can be easily heard by an experienced ear. The process of composing matched
the process of creating visuals: Dragić and Simović, each one within his own
art, started from abstractions and impressions, and continued through to
improvisations, letting them lead somewhere ‘out of the box’ (Paulus 2016).8
Professor Balthazar and Maestro Koko:

scientific dance-music for an elephant
Diary fascinates with its creative visuals and musical avant-garde, which
reflects not only Dragić’s (negative and unpleasant) perception of the United
States but different experiments and new creative approaches in
contemporary classical music. Unfortunately, artistic recognition of Diary
was mostly confined to circles of connoisseurs and animation scholars. So,
if Dragić’s film was highly praised,9 what Simović did with music stayed
mostly unrecognized. Nevertheless, the composer reached the broad public
with another project – music for twenty-five episodes (from the total of fifty-
nine) of the animated series Professor Balthazar (Profesor Baltazar).10 Three
authors of Professor Balthazar, Zlatko Grgić, Ante Zaninović and Boris
Kolar, invited Simović only after composer Aleksandar Bubanović wrote
music for the first episode, Inventor of Shoes (Izumitelj cipela, 1967, Zlatko
Grgić). Bubanović wrote a quite neutral, jazzy musical background mostly
concentrated on establishing the moderate tempo, continuity and
atmosphere; Simović’s task was to develop themes and to make the sound of
the episodes more recognizable. He joined the crew from the second and the
third episode, both made in 1969: Flying Fabian (Leteći Fabijan) and Windy
Tale (Vjetrovita priča).11
8
Luketić mentions an illegal bootleg edition of Simović’s music for Diary in Mexico (published
by Dolor Del Estamago – MISA under the name: ‘Nedeliko Drajéc/Tomica Simović: Animation
Soundtrack’). This is amusing, Luketić said, since the music for Diary was labelled as ‘vex
sound background’ (Ajanović-Ajan 2008: 268) and the film itself as ‘weird’, ‘very strange and
disconcerting-and not altogether pleasant’ (O n.d: Dnevnik (1974)). Of course, concludes
Luketić, it is nice that some people in Mexico like this music, but Simović deserves better, and
legal editions (Paulus 2016).
9
In 1975 Diary was awarded with the Grand Prix of Animafest Zagreb, The City of Zagreb
Award, Gold Medal in Chicago and Will Wehling Award in Oberhausen.
10
The Zagreb school mostly concentrated on artistic films, but the authors were aware of the
lack of animation for children. Professor Balthazar was their first attempt to fill the gap.
11
Komisija za predikatizaciju (Committee for predicates), in charge of labelling films to decide
which were going to get additional state financial support, corresponding to the committee’s
grade, characterized Flying Fabian as a ‘likeable children’s movie and one in a genre which was
domestically quite neglected. Considering that it has some pedagogic and coloristic values, it
deserves to be stimulated’. It was graded with the lowest mark C–2 (Munitić 1978: 235).
To represent Simović’s musical mastery in Professor Balthazar, I take as

an example its fourth episode, Maestro Koko (1969). It was the first in the
series to be co-produced by the German studio Windrose-Dumont Time,12
and also the first among many Balthazars (and other films of the Zagreb
school) to use music as the subject of its story.
Maestro Koko is an elephant who is an appreciated musician of Balthazar-
town. Every day, he plays his trunk in front of the big audience and every time
he gets standing ovations. He also plays at home, to his best friend Filip (who
is a human). As a reward, Filip always brings Koko his favourite meal: ice-
cream. One day, Koko falls ill from eating too much ice-cream. He is cared for
by his best friend, and after two weeks, gets well. But following the illness,
Koko discovers that his trunk is of no use for playing any more. Completely
shattered, Koko disappears. Filip is terribly worried and must ask Professor
Balthazar for help. The professor invents a car and joins Filip on a journey in
search of Koko. Finally, the two find him in the North Pole. Koko is happy: his
newly found friends, the penguins, dance while he showers them with his trunk.
Maestro Koko is created within the already established scheme of the
series: it presents the characters, develops a story and introduces the problem.
The problem seems unsolvable, so the character(s) must go to Balthazar to
find a solution. Parallel to the story-scheme, Simović established recognizable
musical material for the main elements of the film’s structure. These are:
‘Music for credits’, ‘Music for the narrator’s introduction’ and ‘Invention
music’. Each of these musical ideas contains several smaller musical
statements. ‘Music for credits’ contains the Zagreb Film logo (trumpet
fanfare), the introduction to the theme song (made of parts of the ‘Invention
music’) and the ‘Balthazar song’.
The ‘Balthazar song’ is a prime example of Simović’s mastery: he used the
simplest musical means, i.e. a catchy melody put against the world’s simplest
text made of the main protagonist’s name (‘Bal-Bal-Balthazar’). The
repetition is key here, so after a short instrumental bridge used to prepare a
modulation, the melody is repeated in a new tonality that marks a second,
concluding strophe. The song is simple but melodious and it became one of
the most beloved children’s songs in Yugoslavia. To establish the musical
theme of the song, Simović used a short instrumental variant of it once again
in the ‘Narrator’s introduction’ section (the melody is played on a mouth
harmonica now). This part introduces the story by using a voice-over, the
voice of an invisible narrator over visuals that show Balthazar-town.
The voice-over in Professor Balthazar was an exception for the Zagreb
school’s treatment of sound, and the authors were very careful with it. They
12
Winrose-Dumont Studios signed the contract with Zagreb Film after seeing Flying Fabian
and Windy Tale. Maestro Koko was credited with the Silver Hugo Award as the most amusing
film of the Chicago Festival in November of 1969 (ibid: 239).
did not use it in other projects, but felt that animation for children must
have a voice-over to help the understanding of the story. Despite the
possibility of jeopardizing the autonomy of the visuals, colours and
animation, the result showed that these fears were needless (Munitić 1978:
229). The voice-over was used sparingly, summarizing the main points of
the story, alternating its explaining function with the visuals and the music.13
Simović was also very careful when it came to voice-overs or using voices;
he cleverly composed music around the voice-over or the dialogue. For
example, he seized a musical phrase on the dominant to give space to the
narrated words (‘His best friend was Filip’), but at the same time he used the
same dominant for an introduction of new musical material (as Koko walks
to his friend’s house, a steady strings passage comes at the place of
background variation of Koko’s theatrical musical number from the previous
scene). Also, the same interval is repeated (literally or with variations) to
give way to the ‘dialogue’,14 or to create tension (as during a scene of
Balthazar thinking about how to solve a problem).
Enjoying the story, the viewer is a little (or not at all) aware of the smallest
bits of time given to the composer to express himself. But Simović was quite
confident: his trick was to use the simplest musical means in the most
effective ways. Repetition is one of them, the other one is the use of variations
(for example in the scene were Filip searches for Koko).15 With variations,
the composer sometimes develops a musical form (theme and variations),
which is often used to give a sense of, at first glance, only nonsensical musical
material. Besides the theme and variations, a bipartite and tripartite form is
also frequently used. For example, the form of three parts is given to the
scene of Koko eating an ice-cream; and the ‘Balthazar song’ has two parts
(two strophes conjunct by the musical bridge).
The ‘Invention music’ on the other hand, consists of at least four different,
but recognizable components. The beginning of Invention is Balthazar
thinking about a problem and searching for a solution. He walks up and
down, and strings accompany him by ‘jumping’ up and down, by repeating
and changing only one rhythmically presented interval. The goal of such a
musical solution is not a mickey-mousing of Balthazar’s walking, but
building association with the ticking of the clock, that is, the passage of
13
For example, in the sequence of Koko’s illness, voice-over and visuals literally supplement
each other. The voice-over says: ‘He was ill one day. . .’ and visuals show Koko in bed with Filip
pouring him a cup of tea; ‘second day. . .’ voice-over continues and visuals show Koko still in
bed with Filip bringing him medicine; ‘third day. . .’ and we see Filip measuring Koko’s
temperature, and so on.
14
Characters in Professor Balthazar communicate with non-articulated sounds. Nevertheless,
with the help of music and visuals, the viewer does not have a problem understanding them.
15
Luketić claims that Simović kept tape with seventy minutes of recorded variations of
‘Invention music’, which lasts only a few minutes in each episode (Paulus 2016).
time. When Balthazar rethinks the problem, the ‘ticking’ stops shortly by
reaching one tone, and then, as Balthazar runs to his ‘invention machine’,
the downward sequence in triplets, this time played by wind instruments,
bridges towards the beginning of new musical material.
Balthazar’s invention machine is a strange engine composed from unusual
objects (the viewer recognizes an ear, an umbrella, bulbs, buttons, some
circles, laboratory instruments, etc.) and the music accordingly sounds
messy and chaotic. It again associates with the ticking of the clock, and gives
the feeling of a busy tempo. The musical ‘mess’ clears up with the sounds of
a melody victoriously played by strings, associated both with Balthazar’s
good thinking and the invention itself.16 A drop of ‘wizardry’ liquid turning
into an invention (in this case, a car) is accompanied by the sound of a
vibraphone, which gives it a ‘magical’ sound.17
As the merging of different types of music with different textures played
in different tempi shapes the ‘Invention music’, its interesting sounding owes
much to the instrumentation. Simović uses a small, but varied ensemble of
acoustic instruments,18 which become very important in the process of
shaping and ‘enlivening’ the characters. Balthazar is associated with string
instruments, and the elephant Koko with a bassoon. Also, Koko’s trunk
naturally sounds like a trumpet – so, when Koko plays his musical piece in
front of the big audience it sounds like a serious, virtuoso piece of classical
music composed for a trumpet solo. The piece could be comic, but Simović’s
understanding of animated humour goes further than that: many times, he
avoided the direct illustration or literal repetition of the visuals in his sounds,
considering the music an autonomous entity, approaching the story in its
own way.
On the other hand, Koko’s music for Filip is more entertaining and less
serious, showing the warmth of the home’s atmosphere. Both pieces are
dance-like, the one for the big audience is played in the ternary metre of a
waltz, and the one for Filip is played in the binary metre of a joyful ‘domestic’
dance. In Simović’s mind, dance and choreography were akin to animation
and animated sound. Even so, he thought of the Professor Balthazar series
as an ‘animated ballet’ and treated its characters as ‘figures who dance’
16
Strings are easily associated with Balthazar because, subconsciously, they have the same
positive value as Prokofiev’s string melody for Peter in his orchestral illustration of children’s
story Peter and the Wolf.
17
Simović called ‘Invention music’ simply ‘Formula’ (Zvukopis 2017), which partly puts into
question my interpretation of this music as ‘magical’.
18
We do not know which musicians performed Simović’s music. Željko Luketić shows that
Simović had an orchestra called Tomica Simović’s Orchestra or Tomica Simović’s Ensemble. He
used it to record some of his pop music (songs), jazz music and unconventional classics. On the
other hand, Simović himself mentioned the existence of the Symphonic Film Orchestra of
eighty members that recorded for Vukotić’s feature The Seventh Continent (Sedmi kontinent,
1966; cf. Pata 2007: 28). From an informal conversation with Luketić (2016).
(Paulus 2016). Does this not ally with the thesis that ‘with its incessant and
lively motion, the cartoon really represents a kind of dance’ (Prendergast
1992: 184) stated long ago by the composer Ingolf Dahl and restated later
by the music editor Roy Prendergast?
Annoyance and overlapping in The Man

Who Had to Sing
Another animated short of the Zagreb school, which had music as its subject,
was The Man Who Had to Sing (Čovjek koji je morao pjevati, 1970). The
film was directed by Milan Blažeković, Nedeljko Dragić wrote the script
and Simović composed the music. Unlike the two previous films, this one
needed the participation of the Foley artist, Miljenko Dörr.19
The Man Who Had to Sing is a tragicomic story about a man who
devoted his life to singing the same melody. ‘The melody is not ugly, the
voice is not unpleasant, but everything is constantly the same’ (O n.d:
Čovjek koji je morao pjevati). Singing the same melody brings the hero into
trouble: he is kicked out from his parents’ home, from other people’s homes,
from his wife’s home, from a madhouse, from the military, from a hotel, etc.
The melody annoys everybody and, at the end, the man is killed and buried
– but he doesn’t stop singing, even in his grave.
The film was structured around the melody, which was cleverly forged in
a classical manner: by repeating and developing the main motive (according
to Midhat Ajanović-Ajan, a tune was borrowed from Frank Sinatra’s
repertoire).20 Singing without words put the melody in the foreground, its
triviality came more from the repetition of the same syllable ‘ye’ than from
the melody itself.
On the other hand, the trick was to develop an overlapping of the musical
materials: the foreground music (which is always the melody of the Man) and
the background music (which is, actually, never in the background); or, what
is in the feature film more distinct, diegetic music and non-diegetic music. For
example, the Man sings his little melody simultaneously or successively with
other people. He sings with children who, led by their teacher, sing their
‘school’ music represented with the musical major scale – do re mi fa so la ti
19
In all the three films discussed, the sound engineer was Mladen Prebil, who often recorded
sound for the Zagreb school. The tasks of the ‘sound and music people’ were constant in
different films, but their roles were still frequently changed. Majcen Marinić (2014: 14) and
Dovniković (1998: 6) emphasize that functions of director, cartoonist, animator and scriptwriter
were not strictly separate in Zagreb Film. This was the key element for the emergence of
auteurs, who did most of the work by themselves (directing, drawing, animating, scriptwriting).
20
From unofficial conversation with Midhat Ajanović-Ajan in autumn 2016.
do. Two pieces – a ‘ye’ melody and solfege melody – contradict each other; so,
the teacher tries to ‘correct’ the Man’s singing, but does not succeed. The Man
is persistent, and gets kicked out of the school.
The overlap of two different melodies, or the singing and playing of
different tunes, is not uncommon in life. It happens here and there, and the
tunes sometimes do not match: the result is a cacophony. Overlapping
non-diegetic and diegetic music in film – which, especially in a feature film,
have different qualities and different roles – can be disturbing. Diegetic/
non-diegetic overlapping is common in The Man Who Had to Sing. The
Man’s singing comes simultaneously with the nursery music, with the military
trumpet, with the musical background for a man who tries to adopt him as a
baby, with the policeman’s music, etc. This is a procedure that filmmakers of
features try to avoid. But used in an animated short, it is perceived differently.
Here, the Man’s tune is the film’s subject, and diegetic/diegetic and diegetic/
non-diegetic overlapping is quite acceptable in the service of the story.
Moreover, Simović employs music and musical fragments because of
their associations. There are two Croatian, well-known drinking songs –
Samoborci, piju vino z lonci (People from Samobor drink wine from jugs),
sung by a policeman with the neutral syllable ‘lai, lai, lai’ (which is the way
of singing the refrain of this song), and Još ni jedan Zagorec (Not a single
man from Zagorje), which appears as an instrumental version, accompanying
a group of drinkers who will later on join the overall chase of the Man.
Tango as the music of love-and-jealousy in the scenes with the Man’s wife,
the trumpet as a signature of an army and several dramatic drum beats as
an announcement of the death penalty are also recognizable musical
signatures. However, besides the Man’s song, there is only one genuine
leitmotiv, and that is a nursery instrumental, which is played every time
when the Man’s Father reappears with a family picture, trying to bring the
Man back home.
It seems that Simović had less work with composing the new material
than with the clever assembling of well-known musical signs. Still, his music,
again inspired by the film’s visual solutions (such as the treatment of the
mental institution as a factory) follow the main idea of the film; that is, a
repetition as the main device of artistic expression.
Different faces of musical ‘tapestry’

in The Substitute
As mentioned before, Tomica Simović’s creative work marked animated
shorts of different authors. The most fruitful collaboration he had was with
the director Dušan Vukotić who was the first to invite him into the world of
animated film. Vukotić chose a composer for his animated short Abrakadabra
(1957) by listening to recordings of radio-shows in the record library of

(today’s) national Croatian Radio (Hrvatski radio). At that time Simović
quite often composed for radio, and his music was very suggestive. The
collaboration with Vukotić marked Simović’s first experience in the field of
animation and of film in general.
The composer quickly adapted to the genre, and although he composed
for other genres as well (thirteen feature films, fifty-one documentaries and
eleven commercials) he became irreplaceable in Zagreb Film’s production of
animated films.21 He felt the pulse of each film, and his music ‘behaved’ and
changed swiftly and promptly. At one point, it could be a quotation, at
another it became a sound effect, in the third it turned into the sounds of
a circus hurdy-gurdy, and in the fourth it transformed to jazz. Simović did
not use only instruments, but human voice as well, either sung in an
unrecognizable language, murmured or hummed.
Humming became synonymous with the famous Zagreb Film short,
Dušan Vukotić’s Oscar winning The Substitute (Surogat).22 The humming
was performed by Ozren Depolo, a composer and multi-instrumentalist, but
the composer was Simović. The importance of the voice became vivid in the
very opening credits, which was musically based on a repetition of the word
Surogat. It is a little unintelligible, but we recognize the procedure as it is
repeated in the opening of the animated serial Professor Balthazar as well.
The only difference is that Balthazar had a melodic tune, which became
famous and well-known among small and grown-up children, and The
Substitute remained with its unintelligibility. It had only one instantly
recognizable musical element – rhythm.
Rhythm becomes the latent driving force of the musical accompaniment
for Vukotić’s famous film. There is a rhythm of steps of the figure that
‘metamorphically’ changes its appearance and its form in Dragić’s Diary.
Ajanović-Ajan noted that this rhythm stays with us constantly, until the end
of the film (2008: 266). The same thing happens in The Substitute. The
rhythm binds Ozren Depolo’s humming, the sound effects of pumping,
digging, laughing, screaming etc, with the background musical ‘tapestry’.
When the tempo changes, with the banal evocation of the love-on-the-beach
music, we still feel the rhythm. It becomes the basis of bonding different
musical elements. It also bonds the music with the visuals in the unifying
21
Simović also composed classical music – orchestral works, chamber works, piano pieces,
songs and a ballet. His chamber music piece Professor Balthazar’s Adventures and Misadventures
(Zgode i nezgode profesora Baltazara) for wind quintet, is clearly inspired by his music for the
animated series.
22
Besides an Academy Award, The Substitute was awarded with First Prizes in San Francisco
(1961) and in Belgrade (1962), The City of Zagreb Award (1962), Special Jury Award in
Oberhausen (1962), First Prize and Audience Award in Prague (1963), Special Merit Award
in Philadelphia (1971).
whole, which makes it clear that this and other films of the Zagreb school
are created as the result of team work, and creative and imaginative
brainstorming, not only of the author of the visuals, but also of the composer.
The merging of the voice, music and sound of bursting balloons in the
opening credits announces the film’s theme. By rhythmically repeating the
word of the title (‘Su-rro-gat-s-s-s-su-rro-gat’) it takes away the verbal
quality of the word, inviting the viewer into the fantastic world of animation
and sound where everything is possible. The quality of the voice is clearly
changed or transformed – it sounds unreal, as if the singer inhaled helium:
the voice sounds as if it were a child, not an adult who is singing. All this,
combined with the sounds of numerous balloons, which occasionally burst,
announces the playful story about reality/fantasy in which everything, even
the main character, is fragile and artificial. In this playing with different
layers of the film’s meaning, the voice becomes extremely important.23
It is interesting to remember how careful Zagreb Film animators were
when it came to voice-over in Professor Balthazar. In The Substitute, the
voice of the Man from the beach equals his leisure. Words are not important,
even a melody is not important. But the atmosphere is. When the story is
becoming complicated, with the sexy Girl who rejects the Man to be with a
more handsome Surfer, the Man’s humming disappears. He is angry and
must act, for humming does not have a place in this part of the story. When
things clear up, when the Surfer and the Girl are ‘dead’ (deflated, that is), he
continues to hum as if nothing has happened.24
Humming is part of the musical composition. So, at times, it is replaced
by a musical instrument (for example, when the Man hides the Shark behind
his back, his humming is replaced by whistling, which is performed by a
flute). Part of the composition has sound effects, too. For example, music
seizes or stops for a moment for the sound of pumping up objects to be
heard. Music also replaces sound effects by imitating them (for example, the
sound of throwing things out of the bag is done by orchestral instruments).
This makes the merging of all the sounds complete; they are all equally
important in realization and in function.
At first, the music sounds neutral, with only the task of creating
atmosphere. But a closer listening reveals numerous details that participate
23
Animated films often reverse the sound hierarchy of a feature film. Instead of the hierarchy
(1) dialogue/monologue (i.e. voice), (2) sounds and effects, (3) music, they put the music, which
acts for and substitutes other components, in the foreground. So it becomes: (1) music, (2)
effects, (3) voice. The Substitute has its own hierarchy: (1) music, (2) unintelligible humming
(i.e. Voice), (3) effects. In this hierarchy, music and voice are almost of equal importance.
24
Girl sounds like a small animal (by transformation of human voice). This draws attention to
the treatment of female characters in Vukotić’s films (the female android in SF feature Visitors
from the Arkana Galaxy/Gosti iz galaksije, 1981 vacuums and prepares food, outshining The
Writer’s girlfriend).
FIGURE 11.4 The Girl and the Man in The Substitute. Courtesy of Croatian State
Archive/Zagreb Film.
in ‘catching’ the movement, following and subtly commenting on the story.

The ‘jazzy background’ or musical ‘tapestry’ turns out to be very active in
using a small ensemble of instruments (there are lots of pizzicatos, tenutos,
the sudden movements of a bow, staccatos and short notes of a trumpet and
other instruments) in colouring the story, creating its tempo and even its
thematic characterization.
Some motives and short themes are used as leitmotivs (for example, the
‘sexy’ saxophone melody signals the Girl; a short theme from the opening
credits signals the Man). To be sure in his musical comments, on the verge
of parody, Simović deliberately used clichés: low tones for the Shark,
increasing the volume of the music in a rhythmically accentuated scene of
the Man walking in anger; a ‘Hollywood’ melody on trumpet to show how
the Surfer fell in love with the Girl; dramatic tremolo to increase suspense
when the Surfer decides to commit suicide by pulling out a cork (an amusing
gag here is combing his hair first, so he can die handsome). We also receive
an appropriate musical commentary of the scene, that is, a variation of the
Third movement of Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor, better
known as the Funeral March.
FIGURE 11.5 A page from The Substitute’s score. Composer’s manuscript.

Courtesy of Jučer Danas Sutra.
Music of great diversity

The role of music in feature and animated films – at least at first glance – is
similar: it sets a mood, it ‘fills’ gaps, helps the narrative and creates the
continuity of the story. But – ‘the genre’s debt to music as both a dynamic
and illustrative device went far deeper’ (Cooke 2008: 287). Firstly, music
reinforces the movement and makes animation believable. Secondly, music
participates in the characterization of animated beings, which could be
humans (such as an old and smart professor-scientist), but also plants (like
flowers), animals (like an elephant), different objects (such as balloons) and
other non-living things. Music uses its emotional suggestiveness to humanize
the artificially created imagery. According to Cooke, ‘cartoons were often

distinguished by a satisfying symbiosis of music and image as mutually
supportive dynamic entities, each contributing equally to a compelling
choreography of sound and movement’ (ibid.).
Cooke learned these characteristics of the music of animated films by
studying music written by Carl Stalling of Warner Brothers, Scott Bradley of
MGM and Frank Churchill, Paul Smith and Leigh Harline of Walt Disney
Studio. The same could be said for the music of Tomislav Simović, the ‘good
spirit’ of Zagreb Film, who gained his musical education only partly through
official institutions.25 He stayed true to his love of music and, after involving
himself with the Studio for animated films in Zagreb Film, displayed
extremely wide interests, musical curiosity and openness to all artistic
possibilities. He shared a life with the authors of the Zagreb school; only
they knew that the ‘secret’ and obligatory ‘ingredient’ of their animated
shorts was Simović’s music.
In light of contemporary thinking about music and animation, Simović,
who discovered this world on his own, started from a standpoint that all
music genres are of equal value. ‘The layman asks if the music is merry or sad,
the educated musician asks if it is good or bad,’ he wrote (1989: 49). Simović
did not like the separation of music genres, and that was an attitude of great
importance for his compositions, especially for his music for animated films.26
The composer understood well that film music ‘doesn’t act independently
but always as an applied complement to the image’ (1985: 27) and he felt
within his heart that music for an animated movie can do much more.
Finding the need to explore both mediums and possibilities of their
conjunction, Simović worked out his scores to the smallest detail. The result
wasn’t, however, fragmented (as one might think), but he always managed
to put logic in the otherwise strangely chaotic score of diverse music
materials. By doing so, he composed (with ease, one might say, considering
the number of his scores) in the manner of Scott Bradley who also succeeded
in conjuncting different musical styles and genres in the logical and likeable
scores for the Tom & Jerry serial.
The ‘fragmented’ approach opened to all musical genres, swift changes
and rapid thinking marked both Bradley’s and Simović’s music. It is not
known if Simović knew the music of Scott Bradley but, considering the
eagerness with which he followed musical events of all types (especially in
contemporary classical music and jazz), it is possible that he was well
acquainted with Bradley’s style. He was encouraged to develop his own
25
Eventually, Simović studied History of Fine Arts.
26
Simović’s only long-play record published during his lifetime, Zagrebačke impresije
(Impressions of Zagreb, Jugoton LSY–66081 1979), was not accepted well, because of its
unusual mixture of genres – jazz, film music, electronica and easy listening music (Paulus 2016).
approach, although the parallels of the two composers go as far as entering

the world of – in a feature film widely avoided – twelve-tone technique.27
With its visuals, which were highly innovative and different even in terms
of the Zagreb school of animation, Dragić’s Diary could be approached
with a dodecaphonic score as well. But Simović decided to go with something
different, so he applied the notion that any sound can be music, and that any
technique, even non-musical ones, could be used as a composing tool.
Diary’s musical score becomes an example of musical montage, a technique
that Simović occasionally used in other, less modernistic films, even in the
children’s series Professor Balthazar.28
In Professor Balthazar, Simović’s most popular score, the composer’s
diversity comes to the foreground. Namely, he was not only the composer of
‘highbrow’ classical music, but he composed, arranged and orchestrated
popular songs for the most prominent music performers in former
Yugoslavia.29 To compose a catchy song for a children’s animated movie was
not a problem at all, but he was smart enough to make it simple and
accessible to all of the public. On the other hand, Simović’s most famous
film in terms of awards was The Substitute.30 This animated short not only
uses numerous musical details but also successfully hides them within
threads of highly profound and diverse musical textures.
We can discuss Simović’s use of themes and hidden use of leitmotivs, we
can say much about clichés and musical quotations, and their usage as
recognizable archetypes (as in The Man Who Had to Sing and other shorts
as well) or pay attention to the relationship of the film’s narration and
27
Bradley occasionally used twelve-tone technique in Tom & Jerry shorts (for example, Puttin’
on the Dog, 1944 and The Cat that Hated People, 1948). Simović partly used the technique in
Marušić’s Fisheye (Riblje oko, 1980), which he described in the magazine of new music, Ear
(1985: 27) and Filmska kultura (Film Culture, p. 52) in detail. Simović used an unusual
ensemble of seven cellos and divided the score into two parts. The first part (for the idyllic
landscape of a fishing village) is tonal and played arco exclusively – the composer used
variations of a popular old song To My Green Pine Tree (Boru moj zeleni) as a main theme. The
second part, which shows a massacre, is atonal, and Simović used twelve-tone technique. Cellos
play only pizzicato in this segment.
28
‘The cutting desk can also be an “instrument for composing” if we record, having analysed
the image and using any technique, several differently designed musical elements, intervals,
melodies, rhythms, moods without getting outside the meaningful framework of the image.
Parallel editing of these independent “passages” produces very interesting and rich layers which
often have a more active effect within the rational sphere of the image than the pre-planned
content of the score’ (Simović 1985).
29
Arsen Dedić, Tereza Kesovija, Višnja Korbar, vocal group 4M and other Yugoslav popular
music stars owe much to Simović’s arranging and orchestrating skills (Paulus 2016).
30
For The Substitute Simović was credited with an Honorary Award for music at the Festival
in Belgrade. During his life, he received many awards, including the Award at the International
Festival of Animated Films in Ottawa (1980) and the ASIFA’s Life-achievement Award (2011)
presented to him in Zagreb.
musical form, or call forth incredibly imaginative orchestration. . . Instead,

I decide to follow Simović. Still aiming to show how great (and neglected) a
composer he was, I quote his words:
The film image provides an inexhaustible source of material, but the

composer knows only of the measurable tone and arranged tonal system,
melody and harmony and their rhythmic manifestations. . . . There is no
objective approach to the experience of music, for only that which has
been objectivised – the work itself – is important. The extent to which
music and the moving image become an artistic unity depends on the
artists themselves.
SUDOVIĆ 1985: 27
References
Ajanović-Ajan, M. (2008). Karikatura i pokret. Zagreb: Hrvatski filmski savez.
Bendazzi, G. (2016). Animation – A World History 2: The Birth of A Style – The
Three Markets. Boca Raton: CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group.
Cooke, M. (2008). A History of Film Music. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge
University Press.
Dovniković, B. (1998). ‘Jedna velika karijera – Dušan Vukotić Vud’. Hrvatski
filmski ljetopis, 4 (15): 3–14.
Goldmark, D. and Y. Taylor, eds (2002). The Cartoon Music Book, Chicago:
A Cappella Books.
Majcen Marinić, M. (2014). Prema novoj animaciji. Zagreb: Meandarmedia.
Munitić, R. (1978). ‘Zagreb film 1956–1972’, in Zlatko Sudović (ed.), Zagrebački
krug crtanog filma, 1, 129–266. Zagreb: Zavod za kulturu Hrvatske, Zagreb
film.
O: ‘Čovjek koji je morao pjevati’, Zagreb film katalog. Available online: http://
www.zagrebfilm.hr/katalog_film_detail.asp?sif=99 (accessed 1 May 2016)
O: ‘Dnevnik (1974)’, Internet Movie Database. Available online: http://www.imdb.
com/title/tt0475949/ (accessed 21 March 2017).
Pata, N., ed. (2007). Dušan Vukotić Vud. Zagreb: Korpus, Zagreb film.
Paulus, I. (2002). Glazba s ekrana. Zagreb: Hrvatsko muzikološko društvo,
Hrvatski filmski savez.
Paulus, I. (2011). ‘Disney kao uzor?/Disney as a Role Model?’, in Marta Kiš and
Karla Pudar, (eds), trans. Z. Šaškin, Surogat stvarnosti/Surrogat of Reality,
38–49. Zagreb: Hrvatsko društvo likovnih umjetnika.
Paulus, I. (2016). Interview with Željko Luketić, raw material recorded for the
purposes of the radio show Zvukopis.
Prendergast, R. M. (1992). Film Music – a Neglected Art. New York, London:
W. W. Norton & Company.
Simović, T. (1985). ‘Animation and Auditory Surrealism’. Ear, 9 (5)/10 (1): 27.
Simović, T. (1989). ‘Kompozitor i “živa” slika’. Filmska kultura, 178: 48–53.
Zvukopis (2017). Croatian National Radio 3, 15 February 2017, 10.30 pm.
12
The Puppet as Not-Puppet
The Notion of Puppet

as ‘Human in Theatrical
Performance’ in the Works
of Barry Purves (the Case
of Screen Play)
Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib
A puppet is a puppet is a puppet. Wrong! Puppets subjugated to the

purposes of animation are distinctly different from all other figurative
forms and figurations that are generally subsumed under this term.
Animation puppets are not hand puppets or marionettes – although
they are to be looked at, they are not decorative . . . Their life
expectancy is usually quite brief because they are commodities
. . . It is not the puppet that counts, but its cinematic image.
BASGIER 2003: 97
The puppet animations of Barry Purves show his continued passion and
fascination with theatre, opera and other forms of live performance. Purves’s
puppets in films such as Next (1989), Screen Play (1992), Rigolletto (1993),
Achilles (1995), Gilbert and Sullivan: The Very Models (1998) and Tchaikovsky
(2011) take the place of human actors in acting out different methods of live
performances. Most prominently, puppets are used in place of actors in theatre
and opera performances, and go beyond any straightforward notion of puppet
films as represented and experienced by Purves’ predecessors. This approach
to puppets is also dissimilar to the great amount of puppet animation series
Purves has made for children as an animator or director, and to the animal
characters in his film Hamilton Mattress (2001).
Purves as a master puppet animator has worked for animation companies
since 1978. However, in his independent films, he emerges as an auteur of a
canon of films with certain themes and iconographic elements that give a
central weight and significance to his puppets to the point of ‘blurring the
line between actors and puppets’ (Purves 2008: 20).
This chapter explores the very diverse and innovative notion of puppets
in Purves’s films, epitomized in his Screen Play, as the main case study in
relation to the idea of ‘puppet realism’. The terms ‘realism’ and ‘puppet
realism’ should be used with caution as in this chapter I do not take them to
mean the precise copying of life, or a filmic record of it, which is often
understood as ‘realistic-ness’ or ‘lifelikeness’. Purves himself is not at all
inclined to understand realism in the sense of simulating physical reality
point by point. Reminiscing about his childhood memories of Snow White
in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), he compares the exaggerated
stretched and squashed movement of the dwarves with those of Snow
White’s ‘realistic timing and movements’, and concludes that the illusion
created by the dwarves’ exaggerated actions were much more truthful and
credible than Snow White’s rotoscoped performance based on ‘real’ action.
Her movements to his judgement had ‘an unsettling effect’ that he would
rather not watch (ibid.).
As for Purves, the animator must be a performer per se, and thus his
puppets, whatever role they play, must be credible:
There are moments in my films when the animation becomes invisible.

I’m pleased that the audience doesn’t always notice my black figures in
Screen Play, nor do they assume that the lifeless characters in Next or
Achilles are actually animated. These characters seem to fall with
appropriate weight and react naturally to being picked up . . . I like the
irony of putting as much effort into making something look lifeless as it
does to make it look full of life.
PURVES 2008: 251
Yet, Purves’s puppets hardly fit into traditional definitions. A closer

examination of Purves’s independent works shows that, for Purves, the
concept of puppet is neither heir to how it is understood in puppet theatre
or ‘a cartoonish character’ that has made its way into the three-dimensional
THE PUPPET AS NOT-PUPPET 199
realm; these are rather ‘humans in a theatrical performance’. From the very
realistically rendered and animated puppets in Next, Screen Play, Achilles
and Tchaikovsky to more stylized ones in Rigolletto and Gilbert and
Sullivan: The Very Models, all of Purves’s puppets represent human ‘actors/
actresses’ rather than cartoon characters or anthropomorphized animals,
and they ‘perform’ as if on a live ‘theatrical’ stage, ‘filmed’ by a camera of
sorts. It is as if all that is possible in the stop-motion technique serves Purves
to simulate and create his own version of theatre, albeit in animation. This
is Purves’s imagined, rather extravagant theatre, made possible by stop-
motion technique and his elaborate skill of animating and performing with
detail and precision.
By concentrating on the works mentioned, and Screen Play as the key
exemplar of such an unconventional and rather unusual approach to puppet
realism in animation, this chapter theorizes on the question of realism in 3D
puppet animation. The approach to realism in these films, it is argued, makes
the question of realism peculiar to a disparate notion of realism rather than
what is generally understood as realism – or ‘hyper realism’ as termed by
Wells (1998) – in commercial and mainstream works of companies such as
Disney, Pixar, DreamWorks, Aardman and Laika.1
The scarcity of studies on non-CG 3D animation and puppet animation
as an immensely varied form with a historical cannon of endless styles,
techniques and approaches, makes any discussion of 3D animation hard to
launch. The puppet films of Barry Purves, especially his Screen Play made in
1992, provide a rich site to study a type of realism that may contribute to
the debates surrounding realism in puppet animation. Furthermore, the
centrality of the notion of the puppet as a non-puppet or as ‘human beings
in performance’ in Purves’s work creates a space to discuss a typology of
puppets in puppet animation in general.
The problem of realism

Historically, it seems that the question of realism in animation was raised,
and mostly rejected, even in the early days of cinema theory, by the few
cinema theorists who bothered to discuss animation at all. The 2D ‘animated
cartoon’ was the dominant form of animation emerging from the United
States in the early decades of animation history, therefore animation was
considered to be synonymous with this technique. Based on the now infamous
thesis of ‘medium specificity’, early theories considered animation (2D
cartoons) as belonging to the realm of fantasy and imagination, as opposed
1
In fact, this is part of a much bigger query researched in my PhD thesis on realism in
stop-motion animation (Hosseini-Shakib 2009).
to live-action cinema, which was vastly believed to be the ‘right’ and

‘appropriate’ field for physical reality and its image. Hence, debates over
realism, if any, rotate solely around the legitimacy or otherwise of animation
to represent physical reality the way live-action cinema does. In this, the
whole argument is reduced and reshaped as prescribing certain missions for
animation, in contrast to the missions prescribed to live-action cinema.
Yet, realism as an essential style of imaging, drawing or painting has not
been as much of a problem for animation as it has when compared with the
use of live-action cinema’s narrative tools and cinematic language. Thus, the
problem with realism in animation may be epitomized in Disney features,
beginning with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand, 1937).2
Other films in one way or another follow their recipe in adopting the codes
and conventions of mainstream cinematic narrative. Siegfried Kracauer, an
important theorist of realism in cinema, expresses his belief in the
unsuitability of animation to represent what he called ‘camera reality’, and
offers a fundamental definition of animation as ‘life reproduced in drawings’
(Kracauer 1960: 90). He criticizes the realist tendencies that ultimately
dominated Disney’s aesthetics: ‘There is a growing tendency towards
camera-reality in his [Disney’s] later full-length films. Peopled with the
counterparts of real landscape and real human beings, they are not so much
“drawings brought to life as life reproduced in drawings”’ (Ibid).
In Understanding Animation (1998) Paul Wells asserts that in contrast to
all Disney’s attempts at realism, animation is a medium that inherently
‘resists’ realism, and instead creates several styles that are ‘about realism’.
Wells, himself deeply dissatisfied with the prevalence of Disney’s style
causing other forms to be overshadowed, still suggests Disney realism to be
the ‘yardstick’ to measure other types of realism in animation (Wells 1998:
25). What Wells means by hyper-realism is the particular manner by which
a somehow exaggerated account of physical reality is mixed with cartoon
conventions and cinematic language to shape a form that does not exactly
resemble reality, although it is not far from it, and at times goes beyond the
possibilities of physical reality using the cartoon’s unique vocabulary of
exaggeration and fantasy.
The anti-realist stances towards animation can be summarized as the
problematic relationship between live-action and animation, specifically,
the copying of ‘cinematic-realism’ of live-action by animated feature films
of Disney and the like.3 Elsewhere I have tried to demonstrate how
3D animation, like many non-mainstream or non-cartoon forms of
2
Hand was the supervising director of the film.
3
In comparison, the many forms and styles of 3D animation have suffered a total lack of
attention and theorizing by scholars. Thus, Wells’s and other studies of realism in animation,
while seminal in the study of 2D Disneyesque realism, may not always assist in understanding
3D and puppet animation.
animation, has been subject to two types of discrimination. First, in defining

animation, only the most common form of animation is taken into
consideration (the 2D, drawn cartoon). Thus, most of the issues and debates
surrounding the aesthetics of animation, including realism, disregard the
specific properties of other forms of animation. Second, a historically
medium-specific perspective, based on such a generic definition of animation,
prescribes missions for all types of animation, even if the basic specific traits
of the common form are absent. It has been suggested that these ‘generic’
definitions of animation create more problems than they solve. Thus, I
would argue that any discussion of realism in animation should take into
account the associated technique and medium, as each raises specific issues
and has different relationships with the representation of reality (cf.
Hosseini-Shakib 2009: 8–16).
On the other hand, while 2D animation, especially in its cartoon form,
has suffered hostilities and controversial disputes in relation to realism
(Wells 1998; Rowley 2005; Moritz 1988; John Hallas and Joy Bachelor
cited in Hoffer 1981: 3), 3D and stop-motion animation have enjoyed a
much easier relationship with it. From inception, the form not only existed
along with 2D ‘animated drawings’ and later cartoons,4 but was also widely
used for special effects integrated into live-action footage to represent
imaginary creatures, worlds and events without much difficulty (Frierson
1994: 98). Historically, however, it is possible to distinguish the beginning of
early forms of 2D and 3D animation; whereas Emil Reynaud’s Théâtre
optique was developed in 1888, and thus technically 2D animation was
possible before the invention of the cinematographic camera, it seems 3D
and puppet animation could not have existed without the availability of
such a registering mechanism. Interestingly enough, in his short, but thought-
provoking essay, ‘In the Puppets’ Universe’, Thomas Basgier stresses the
historical bond between cinema and puppet animation, and its distinction
from the generic rules of ‘animation’: ‘in all pre-cinematographic techniques,
such as the optical theatre, which often must be simultaneously categorised
as the forerunners of the animation technique, puppets rarely play a role’
(Basgier 2003: 99).
Donald Crafton goes even further to emphasize the centrality of the stop-
motion technique in the process of the maturation of animation from its
very early forms. Believing that the stop-motion, ‘trick film’ genre initiated
by George Méliès was the main source that created more developed forms
of animation in the first place, he proposes that ‘the iconography and
primitive narrative structure of animation’ developed from those films that
began to use the stop-motion substitution technique (Crafton 1993: 9).
Here I would like to stress again that theorizing 3D animation (including
4
In Dreams of Toyland (Arthur Melbourne Cooper, 1908), officially considered the first puppet
film, toys come to life in a boy’s dream (Bendazzi 1994: 40).
realism) requires one to go deeper than generic definitions of animation and

realism, and pay attention to the ontological differences it has with that of
2D animation. Basgier is among the few who draw attention to the affinities
between puppet animation and film, and seek definitions for 3D animation
outside ‘the two-dimensional primacy’5 (ibid.).
Apart from that, perhaps Michael Frierson’s influential study of American
clay animation is amongst the very few works so far dedicated to studying
the form. The question of realism is explicitly raised here, in a chapter
examining the works of Will Vinton and his realistic approach to the clay
puppets. There are also a few other books that have recently emerged, most
prominently Barry Purves’s Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance
(2008), in which he shares a broad range of experience, insights, observations
and more, regarding his masterful expertise in puppet animation. Yet, on the
side of theorizing and critically thinking about animation, the works dealing
with 3D animation remain few, and the literature meagre.
In Clay Animation: American Highlights 1908 to the Present (1994),
Michael Frierson proposes that, compared with 2D drawn animation, the
nature of 3D animation, including clay, is more real. He thinks that ‘clay
metamorphoses – and at some level, any dimensionally animated action –
benefit from the fundamental realism of cinema by being an objective
recording of raw, three-dimensional reality’ (Frierson 1994: 24). He believes
that three aspects of cinematic realism, as shown by Bazin, can be found in
3D animation: ‘objectivity’, meaning that the images are photographs of
tangible objects in the real world; ‘rawness’, meaning that the medium is
transparent or ‘effaced’, much as in live-action where the viewer is unaware
of the medium involved; and ‘three-dimensionality’, meaning that the real
and three-dimensional space is shown as it is, using the same process as
live-action cinematography (ibid.).
Thus, this somewhat ‘relaxed’ attitude to the adoption of cinematic realism
by puppet, and most 3D animation may be a result of the medium’s cinematic
ontology. The cinematographic shots in puppet animation are, after all, real
instead of drawn. The innate cinematographic quality of puppet, and in fact
all 3D animation, elevates the camera’s status from a simple inscription tool,
as in 2D drawn animation, to a vehicle with narrative ability. Summarizing
the previous discussion, it may be suggested that the question of realism in
the world of puppet and clay animation falls into three major areas:
I. Ontological: spatial realism (realism of spaces, objects, textures and

the material world).
5
‘It was film itself – through representation of moving objects in space and later through
camera movements in space – that was able to create a perceptual experience that suddenly
became a perceptual need’ (Crafton 1993: 99).
II. Technical: cinematic realism (the use of cinematographic techniques

of inscribing and constituting shots as well as established codes of
narration peculiar to conventional narrative cinema).6
III. Character: puppet realism (specific to puppet animation).
While it is easy to imagine the realism of spaces and objects and how a
cinematic recording of them would be comparable to a cinematic recording
of real spaces and objects in live-action film, the ‘puppet realism’ is not that
apparent or, for that matter, considered as ‘inherent’ in the form. As Wells has
argued with regard to 2D animation, the animation generally ‘resists realism’,
which in the case of puppets means the realistic movement and action of
puppets is not so ‘natural’ or expected from them, and is thus the main
challenge in achieving a realistic animation. Perhaps that is why all traditional
theoreticians of puppet animation regard realistic puppets as unacceptable
or, in their medium specific polemics, not suitable to the medium.
The multifarious concept of ‘puppet’ in puppet animation, being part of
the grand neglect, has also hardly been studied or taken seriously except for
a few scattered references and general discussions. One of the few scholarly
discussions of puppets in puppet animation comes from Bruce Holman’s
(1975) rather old book, where, putting Kracauer’s medium-specificity hat on,
he asserts: ‘a work should be in keeping with the medium in which it is executed’
(Holman 1975: 75), stressing the ‘puppet-ness’ of puppets in animation. In this,
he suggests that the characteristics, parameters and limitations of the medium
should be defined in order to achieve a form that coheres with its medium. His
position is evidently based on a definition of puppet animation as heir to
puppet theatre and thus distinct from both live-action and cartoon characters.
Praising the puppets of Jiří Trnka, the Czechoslovakian master of puppet
animation as the highest point ever achieved in this form (by that time),
Holman emphasizes the centrality of puppets in the medium:
a puppet is a puppet. He is neither a live actor nor a cartoon film character,

he is unique and in a medium of his own. To force puppet animation
beyond its point of efficiency by over-elaboration, or to waste carelessly
the potentials which puppets possess, are violations of the principle of
poetic economy . . . The integrity of the medium, however, should be
respected. Style and presentation, and much of the form itself may change,
but there should not be conscious attempt to imitate other media, nor
should puppet animation be forced into a configuration to which it does
not lend itself.
HOLMAN 1975: 76
6
The terms ontological and technical are borrowed from Kracauer’s categorization of ‘cinematic
properties’ (Kracauer 1960: 41).
In a similar line of argument, Bendazzi’s pro-Trnka stance sees puppet animation,

especially in the former Czechoslovakia, as the ‘natural’ continuation of the
country’s grand tradition of the puppet theatre.7
Bendazzi opposed ‘non-Trnka’ puppet animation, in which puppets were
engineered to resemble real human beings with lip-synch and non-theatrical
performances. Trnka puppets have solid painted faces, with unblinking eyes
and fixed mouths. Bendazzi regarded them as ‘true’ puppets that did not try
to look human (Bendazzi 1994: 170). He sees in Trnka’s method a notion of
puppet faces as theatrical masks ‘to be fixed and sacred as masks’ (ibid.).
Bendazzi, thus, regards these puppets, ‘characterised by contained expressions
and almost stately movements’ as superior to those of artists who ‘loosened’
their puppets’ joints, making them look like ‘animated drawings’ (ibid.
stresses are mine). In this, importantly, he implies that lip-synch and facial
expression are attributes of 2D drawn cartoon.
Thomas Basgier’s account of puppets, too, draws attention to the two
poles of live-action and 2D cartoon characters, and places puppets
somewhere in between, in a hybrid universe and a ‘medium of reconciliation
between two diverging worlds, that of the great cinema of people and the no
less moving cinema of puppets’ (Basgier 2003: 102).
Indeed, the history of animation to the current day shows that so many
anti-realist theories have not stopped 2D cartoon animation from becoming
increasingly and madly obsessed with cinematic realism, they have not
succeeded in persuading animation puppets to stay in their ‘puppet-ness’
realm. In reality, puppets in puppet animation, pre- and post Trnka, have
certainly represented different approaches to animation and the puppet
itself. Sometimes the puppets are closer to 2D cartoon characters, from
George Pal’s wooden puppets, to Tim Burton’s puppet animations (e.g. The
Nightmare before Christmas; Henry Selick, 1993 and Corpse Bride, Tim
Burton, Mike Johnson, 2005), or Nick Park’s Wallace and Gromit films.
Sometimes they remind us of live-action actors, such as clay puppets in
Derek Hayes and Stanislav Sokolov’s Miracle Maker (2000), or more
recently the most live-action-esque puppet animation Anomalisa by Charlie
Kaufman (co-directed with Duke Johnson, 2015).
There are also puppets that may represent ‘real’ people in everyday
situations, closer to observational documentaries, films such as Going
Equipped (Peter Lord, 1989) and many others made in the earlier phases
of Aardman Studio’s works. From storybook puppets in Soviet and East
European puppet animations, to Will Vinton’s clay puppets in Rip Van
Winkle (1978) and The Adventures of Mark Twain (1985), towards the
7
‘There is no visible hiatus between puppet theatre and animated puppet cinema. The transition
occurred smoothly, with those minimal changes required by the new means of communication
but with the same acting and scene design’ (Bendazzi 1994: 168).
novel use of puppets in surreal works such as Jiří Barta’s The Vanished
World of Gloves (1982) and Toys in the Attic (2012), to the original
experiments such as Madame Tutli-Putli (2007) by Chris Lavis and Maciek
Szczerbowski, there is a broad range of animation puppets, none of
them adhering to the old-fashioned puppet-ness dominion. As technical
advancements have allowed for more experiments and explorations into the
possibilities of puppet animation, a rather exciting range of approaches to
puppet animation has been erupting onto the scene, from Aardman’s The
Pirates! Band of Misfits (Peter Lord, Jeff Newitt, 2012) to Laika’s uses of
optical printers in Boxtrolls (Graham Annable, Anthony Stacchi, 2014) and
Kubo and the Two Strings (Travis Knight, 2016), in which Laika created the
most precise shape, texture and movement on their ground-breaking
puppets, mixing very different sets of capabilities and features, although still
remaining in the realm of cartoon characters. Hence, there is a range of
imaginable approaches and styles of puppet animation and puppets that all
fall outside the narrow lines of traditional puppets pertaining to puppet
theatre.
In contrast, for instance, in Trnka’s grand work A Midsummer’s Night
Dream (1959) taken from the Shakespeare play, he used the codes and
conventions of cinematic narrative of his time without any prejudice or
problem in order to narrate his story (in a feature length running time);
yet his puppets were obviously ‘puppety’ both in appearance and action.
His world consists of puppets with static faces with the obviously doll-like
clothes and hair, animated by the innocently, uncomplicated movements
of puppets (instead of mocking elegant human-like theatre performances)
and surrounded by simple storybook settings instead of accomplished
realistic ones.
Cataloguing animation puppets

To the witness of the history of the medium, puppets in puppet animation
are typically ‘cinematic or cartoon characters’ of various sorts rather than
limited puppet-puppets, and in many instances, they may be a ‘hybrid’. The
idea of the puppet in animation as a means of copying or simulating different
sorts of characters, or importantly ‘create a filmic image’ of it, makes them
go far and beyond what puppets stand for in traditional or even modern
puppet theatre. As indicated earlier, a stop-motion puppet may be animated
to look like and move as freely as a real human, or as limited as any type of
puppet in puppet theatre (string puppets, glove puppets, bunraku puppets),
as they may be animated to look like lifeless ‘dolls’. The list is endless,
including whatever can be termed and named as a puppet in animation,
such as shapeless objects or non-human things that may play the role of
their own object-ness (a fork being a fork) or put on the symbolic mask of
humans, such as anthropomorphized vegetables representing the main

characters in Oedipus (Jason Wishnow, 2004). Last, but not least, we have
a long history of the anthropomorphism of animal puppets, which was
common as early as the works of Starevich in the Tale of the Fox (co-directed
with Irene Starevich, 1939) or more recently in Anderson’s Fantastic Mr Fox
(2009).
From reviewing all these, I come to a general conclusion that the
puppets, as important parts of the stop-motion animation technique, may
be regarded as ‘means of simulating effects’ of different sorts, including real
or fictional characters. After all, the whole history of special effects in
live-action cinema is full of diverse uses of stop-motion as ‘real’ or fantasy
creatures and events, disguised and integrated into the fictional world of
the film.
Thus, for the sake of clarification and based on the very distinction
Holman and Bendazzi have made, I have ‘artificially’ categorized puppets in
three groups, each representing a central point within an imagined ‘spectrum’
with ‘puppets as puppets’ at the mid-point, and cartoon puppets and human-
like puppets at the polar extremes.8 Puppets as puppets stand somewhere
between a resemblance to human beings, with different degrees of abstraction
and restrictions of movement, and some symbolic behaviour taken from
reality; their representation is based on an imaginary account of characters
from fairy-tales, epic stories, children’s stories and so on. Cartoon puppets
are copies of 2D cartoon characters; as such they are mainly comic and
exaggerated renditions of puppets in cartoon contexts, but they are also
parodic copies of live-action actors. Puppets as human beings are neutral
‘simulations’ of real human beings, with no exaggeration and minimum
abstraction; as such, they may be copies of an imaginary live-action reference
(fictional or otherwise).
Obviously, puppets may be hybrids that fall into more than one category,
and different types of puppet may coexist in a single film, so this is only a
general method of locating puppets in different films.9 The categories are
shown in Table 12.1.
In my study of Aardman animated documentaries I had concentrated on
puppets as human beings in real-life situations, in films that were mainly
simulations of observational live-action documentaries or interviews. In the
case of Barry Purves’s works and especially his Screen Play, I am going
to concentrate on the concept of ‘puppets as humans in performance’.
8
The last two may be seen as hybrid forms that draw their formal properties from both reality
and fantasy.
9
The categories are not comprehensive: the possibility of imagining or creating other kinds of
puppet cannot be dismissed. In object animation, for example, objects may represent people in
an abstract or surreal way.
TABLE 12.1 Puppet Categories

Puppet as cartoon Puppet as puppet Puppet as human being
character
Puppets in 3D cartoon Traditional puppets in Many Aardman early shorts,

animations and puppet animation including On Probation,
anthropomorphized such as in many Down and Out, Confessions
puppets, e.g. The Trnka films or . . ., Going Equipped . . .
Nightmare Before Russian/German/ Purves’s puppets in films
Christmas, Wallace and British puppet such as Screen Play,
Gromit, Boxtrolls, Corpse animation. Puppets as Tchaikovsky and Rigoletto.
Bride . . . a continuation of The Puppets in Anomalisa.
puppet theatre in
fairy tales, children’s
stories, so on.
Barry Purves’s puppets: the puppet as a

human being in theatrical performance
The works of Barry Purves under question, especially his Screen Play,
compared with those of Trnka’s are useful examples to demonstrate the two
very distinct approaches to puppets. It is possible to generally claim that
Barry Purves is obsessed, not with the puppet theatre, but with many diverse
forms of live theatre performances for adults, which he borrows from and
re-enacts with animated puppets. Performance, then, for Purves seems to be
a central theme and preoccupation and puppets are not puppets, but humans
who are performing theatrical roles. The notion of theatrical performance
and a camera (Purves’s eyes) to capture it seems to be all that Purves has
attempted to do in these films.
In Screen Play a still camera is apparently ‘filming’ objectively, and
without intruding, a Japanese Kabuki theatre on a rotating stage in which
all the codes and conventions of such a theatre performance are observed –
this is of course until the end of the faked ‘happy ending’ when another
story unfolds, something I will come to later. In Rigolletto, on the other
hand, an elegant and sophisticated opera is performed by very life-like,
opera-esque puppet/singers and a moving camera, as a sophisticatedly
directed televisual recording ‘presents’ the performance to the viewer. In
Next, Shakespeare himself is auditioning, for Peter Hall, performing and
interacting with a life-sized ragdoll and much more. In Gilbert and Sullivan,
a very much naturalistic puppet of Richard D’Oyly Carte interacts with
two stylized, almost caricature-like, puppets of Gilbert and Sullivan with
huge paper heads. Yet, all three are regarded as human actors performing
on a stage with a dark background, while lip-synched, with dances and

performances similar to such actors in real-life operas, though with a very
complicated mise-en-scène that may not be easily performed in live opera. In
Achilles, again an imaginary theatre is performed by very realistic, nude
puppets in an empty dark background, and a half-circle stage.10 Screen Play
uses no conspicuous cinematic device for its narration as the camera stays
motionless during the main Kabuki theatre segment, but in the three other
films the camera and a cinematic language is used to add to the variety and
possibilities of narration. Yet in all these films the puppets are animated to
resemble real human actors and actresses that are sometimes going far
beyond their human abilities by the magical tricks of animation.
The film Screen Play importantly consists of two sections. The first, longer
one is the Kabuki theatre in which the love story between Takako and
Nayoki is told and seen from a non-moving camera in which all that moves
is within a non-moving, non-changing frame. No cuts, no zooms in or out,
or any camera movements are used here. The story is narrated by the codes
and conventions of an imaginary Kabuki theatre and a Japanese traditional
tale (of course accompanied by Purves’s use of specific animation tricks
that are not normally possible in a live theatre such as morphing the puppets’
heads repeatedly). The second part, however, when the traditional happy
ending arrives and the spectator expects to see the final credits, is where a
‘cinematic’ (to be read as: alternative) account of the story begins, ending
in disaster. Instead of living happily ever after, the two lovers are killed in
a bloody battle with the jealous, revenging Samurai, their bodies and love
nest destroyed in fire.
I will initially concentrate and analyse the first theatrical part, investigating
the concept of the puppet in it. Later I will come to the second part, the real
end of the film and the way the notion of puppet, as opposed to the first part
and in line with the rest of the narrative style, changes to provide a completely
different world of puppet film.
The Kabuki theatre section

In this section, which comprises most of the film’s running time and may be
considered the main story, and a finished work in its own right, what we
may call puppets includes a host of different things. The narrator who uses
sign language and stands in front of the scene, the puppets of the main
10
It is worth mentioning that complex camera work is at play in all these films except Screen
Play in its main part, which needs specific attention. Purves exploits an eclectic, unconventional
operation of camera shots and movements to create a narrative that is not similar to any
conventional cinematic narrative.
characters (Takako, Nayoki, Takako’s father and her old maid), and the
all-black-clad puppeteers/actors. On one level all these puppets stand for
human beings who play different roles; the narrator and the rest of the main
characters play human roles in a conventional stylized manner as expected
in a Kabuki theatre, while the black-clad ‘actors/actresses’ are ‘invisible’
humans who move and play ‘puppets’ such as the suitors’ masks – which are
in fact bunraku puppets – butterflies, and hold or play objects that are
shown to represent certain things symbolically or directly in the play
according to the story’s requirements. At times these all-black humans/
puppets are seen to sit idle and motionless to ‘wait for their turn’ to start,
next to the colourful setting and ‘acting’ puppets. They also change the
setting by moving the sliding wooden screens or doors; hold, open up and
close umbrellas and paper fans to form shapes and patterns; and move strips
of blue cloth to suggest the ocean, or shoot red-coloured strips to imply
blood and killing, and so forth.
The human characters, on the other hand, move and act according to the
codes of action in this kind of play. They all wear a kind of heavy make-up
or rigid masks, without any motion, facial expression or change in their
faces. All the changes in the mood and body expressions are achieved either
by change in the style and methods of lighting or setting, or by the symbolic
acts and movements of their body. The occasional change of the narrator’s
face to Takako’s father or her old maid, and vice versa, although achieved
by tricks of stop-motion replacement, are acted out and visible in front of
the camera/audience. As such, there is always an act or move that resembles
a change of facial mask to change a character in the play. The body language
and movements of the narrator, while playing the narrator role and standing
outside the story space, is much more ‘realistic’ and expressive in natural
ways compared with those human characters ‘inside’ the story.
All the real events, human feelings and natural phenomena have a
symbolic equivalent in the vocabulary of the Kabuki theatre. Things such as
blood, ocean water, shooting, strapping, escape, distress, anger, love-making
and so forth are demonstrated by objects and symbols, and symbolic moves
such as colours and coloured cloth (the drowning of the father), round
screens or paper fans on which a ‘shadow play’ shows part of the story (such
as the lovebirds escaping). Some narration, especially in relation to change
of scenes, space and time, is also made by the use of traditional paintings on
narrow screens (suggesting a garden, an island, a boat), or the rotating stage
itself that brings a new location/time to the story. Thus, the spatio-temporal
narration is a non-realist, non-linear one in which time lapses and places
merge (e.g. showing the nightmares of Takako in the same space as she is
sitting and thinking).
Such is the role and place of puppets in the first part, humans directly or
invisibly acting out their roles in a supposedly ‘live’ theatre performance.
Nothing in the settings and design of the puppets reminds us of puppets and
their puppetness. Even the overtly self-reflexive method of representation in

which all scene changes happen ‘in front of the viewer’ – which is of course
only a simulation of such a thing – does not stop the ‘real viewer’ (us)
accepting that these animation characters are there to represent and be
understood as human actors and actresses, and not puppets.
These three species of human beings in the performance (the narrator,
main human characters and black-clad players) serve different functions
within the play as if it were a real live performance, and as for the animated
version, they serve different functions all accomplished by a generic term:
‘puppet’. A similar argument applies to Rigolletto in which all ‘puppets’
stand for professional opera singers, in an impressively luxurious high-brow
opera setting and a breath taking complex ‘filming’ of the event with
complicated camera movements, the use of various cameras and a masterful
combination of each in representing the opera, which is assumed to be going
on on the stage. This is the essence of a kind of approach to puppets that has
never been so fully developed or consciously exploited to simulate a bottom
up, imaginary performance as if it were happening in real life. Such
conventionality of any representation of puppet and puppet animation can
only be fully understood if we begin to compare and contrast the first/main
section with the second in which an alternative ending is suggested.
The cinematic ending section

Motivated by revenge and robbed of his bride, the raging Samurai, who was
only referred to as a painting on the paper screen so far, tears away the
painting and emerges from behind, beginning a new story.
Stylistically, the ‘puppet’ of the Samurai does not resemble any of the
previous puppets we have seen before. He is a furious evil warrior whose
mask resembles more of a monster than a human. From this scene onwards,
the cinematic editing, change of shot angles and framing, along with the uses
of close-ups, fast editing, and action style begins. The narrator, whose ‘real’
identity as the old wise man we know by now – turns back with surprise at
the scene of the raging Samurai; almost as fast, he is beheaded by Samurai’s
sword, his head rolls on the ground, gushing ‘real’ liquid blood and smearing
the scene. In all that follows a fast editing of close shots shows us the event,
the Samurai opens the door of the lovers’ bedroom where the two are resting
together, follows them as they escape, and Nayouki is hit by the sword. Then
we see the backyard of a ‘real’ traditional Japanese house in which the
Samurai and Takaki fight, as he is also killed by his own sword in a ‘heroic’
act from Takaki. Later she kills herself (we don’t see her suicide as the
camera moves upwards showing the house in flames and the two lovers
‘dead’ bodies resting next to each other). In this part of the film, of course,
there is no narration.
The linear time, the conventions of spatio-temporal continuity editing, the

uses of certain editing styles, the use of a suspense element and the final scene
(the superimposition of the house in flames, Takako’s bloody head resting next
to Nayuki’s, the finalizing music as the camera moves upwards towards blue
sky and a branch of a Japanese cherry tree) may be seen as that in a Samurai
genre film. Unlike the theatre version, here puppets are seen from a much
closer distance and from different camera angles and sizes where the details of
red liquid (blood) and the synthetic doll-like hair and clothes can be seen, and
the settings are realistic. Stressing the ‘reality’ of the three-dimensional space
with a roaming camera, and more importantly a visible change in the ‘acting’
of puppets as now they are human beings, as film characters, divides the
two worlds totally apart. The puppets still have no facial expressions or lip-
synching, yet the codes of action and narration makes them totally different
puppets, moving them even farther from any notion of being puppets.
Purves cleverly plays with our knowledge of the conventions of performance,
of cinema, theatre and television, and shows us two different stories with
apparently the same puppets. Barry Purves takes his puppets and us wherever
he wants as his puppets can play Kabuki theatre, sing and play in opera, and
play in films. He gets what he gets from his puppets, as his puppets can allude
to all or some of the listed functions. The last scene, when, with a gradual
zoom out we are taken to see ‘behind the scene’, the setting and a photo of
Purves in a newspaper among the rest of the stuff, and the filmmaker’s hand
ticking a box and closing the file of yet another successful film, once again
refers to the old notion of the creator and the creation, a notion much loved
by Purves, the master of puppets.
References
Basgier, Th. (2003). ‘In the Puppet’s Universe’, in Fantoche Catalogue, Baden: The
Fantoche International Animation Film Festival: 96–103.
Bendazzi, G. (1994). Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation. London:
John Libbey & Company Ltd.
Crafton, D. (1993). Before Mickey: The Animated Film. Chicago; London:
University of Chicago Press.
Frierson, M. (1994). Clay Animation: American Highlights 1908 to the Present.
New York; Toronto: Twayne; Maxwell Macmillan International; Maxwell
Macmillan Canada.
Hoffer, Th. (1981). Animation: A Reference Guide. Westport, Connecticut:
Greenwood Press.
Holman, B. (1975). Puppet Animation in the Cinema: History and Technique.
South Brunswick; New York; London: Barnes; Tantivy Press.
Hosseini-Shakib, F. (2009). The Hybrid Nature of Realism in the Aardman Studio’s
Early Animated Shorts, PhD Thesis, Farnham: University for The Creative
Arts@Farnham, UK.
Kracauer, S. (1960). Theory of Film: The Redemption of the Physical Reality.

London: Oxford University Press (reprinted in 1976).
Moritz, W. (1988). ‘Some Observations on Non-Objective and Non-Linear
Animation’, in John Canemaker (ed.) Storytelling in Animation: The Art of the
Animated Image, Volume 2, 21–32. Los Angeles: American Film Institute.
Purves, B. (2008). Stop Motion: Passion, Process and Performance. Oxford;
Burlington: Elsevier (Focal Press).
Rowley, S. (2005). ‘Life Reproduced in Drawings: Preliminary Comments upon
Realism in Animation’, Animation Journal, 13: 65–85.
Wells, P. (1998). Understanding Animation. London: Routledge.
13
Subversive Machinery
DIY Method in the Work

of Julian Antonisz
Michał Bobrowski
In 1984, The Polish Film Chronicles (Polska Kronika Filmowa, PKF, 1944–
1994), a weekly propaganda newsreel used by the Communist government
for communicating with Polish moviegoers, dedicated two-and-a-half
minutes to an extravagant filmmaker and inventor, Julian Józef ‘Antonisz’
Antoniszczak. Antonisz was known to a significant number of Polish viewers
mostly as the author of oddball ‘non-camera’ films, drawn, painted,
scratched, burned or woodcut-printed directly on 35 mm tape. For a film
historian, this piece of archive footage may prove interesting or even
inspiring, for it provides a peculiar example of dialogue between two
antithetical discourses functioning within a very specific public debate that
remained strictly controlled and regulated, but at the same time constantly
renegotiated, dynamized by inner tensions and polemics. By the time the
issue PKF 84/271 was released, Antonisz had completed six episodes of his
1
‘The issue featuring the material on Antonisz is built upon a model structure of The Polish
Film Chronicles. It contained six items: two mandatory propaganda news pieces focused on
successes of Polish industry (a segment praising brimstone mine in Tarnobrzeg) and friendship
between socialist countries (meeting of Polish and East German youth); two critical items
which are meant to create an impression of objectivity (insufficient production of socks in
Aleksandrów Łódzki, and a case of bad management in the town of Pińczów); two entertaining
items (a clip from Opole pop music festival and a segment devoted to Antonisz titled An
Unconventional Artist/Artysta niekonwencjonalny). Such formula ensured the newsreels a
genuine popularity among viewers who usually approached them with a mixture of true
fondness and distrustful ‘we all know it’s just a game’ attitude’ (Cieślinski 2006).
parody of The Polish Film Chronicles. This subversive and surprisingly

independent ‘do it yourself’ project, titled boldly Polish Non-Camera
Chronicles (Polska Kronika Non-camerowa; twelve episodes, produced
between 1981 and 1987), twisted the audiovisual language of the political
apparatus into an aleatoric carnival with the use of the limited means of
expression of hand-made animation.
Let us try to put ourselves in the situation of an average citizen in 1984,
post-martial law People’s Republic of Poland who occasionally visits cinema
theatres and therefore is well acquainted with the poetics of the official
newsreels, who may have recently watched one of Antonisz’s offbeat
mockeries of the late socialist realism and who is suddenly presented with
the two coupled together in an imposed coexistence2 (the newsreel PKF
84/27 contains excerpts from Antonisz’s films). The characteristically
pulsating opening credits of Non-Camera Chronicles, which are accompanied
by an insanely joyful musical theme deriding the hyper-optimism of the
socialist propaganda, are recaptured by the Big Brother’s eyes and ears
embodied by the camera lens and microphone of The Polish Film Chronicles.
There is something perverse about this specific case of a ‘film within a film’
situation. Together with the 1984 viewer, we have a chance to observe how
the official channel, representing the voice of the dominant ideology,
transmits its own distorted reflection in order to lighten its image with the
use of the familiarizing quality of self-irony. We witness the process of the
seizure of the discourse – an attempt to tame, takeover and assimilate
the subversive content. But quickly we are happy to realize that Antonisz
is ready to take up the game. The artist willingly employs the strategy of
a court jester in order to disarm the omnipotent ideology infusing every
semantic layer of the transmission.
After the short introduction read by one of the most recognizable speakers
of The Chronicles, Jerzy Rosołowski (the Non-Camera Chronicles are
cordially referred to as ‘the competition’), the voice is granted to the artist
himself. Hidden behind his misleading reputation of a harmless eccentric,
Antonisz seems to feel quite comfortable in this ambiguous situation. With
a sarcastically pleasant tone of voice he expresses a sort of a gratitude for
the economic insufficiency of the socialist system, which he describes as an
artistically stimulating factor. ‘Difficult conditions temper and allow for the
new techniques to appear,’ he claims, ‘I couldn’t live in the West, I’d just die
out of lack of possibilities for creative fulfillment. Out there everything can
be bought in shops, there’s no need for self-constructed cars or tractors.’
Antonisz’s voice-over commentary is illustrated by shots taken in his studio.
Surrounded by numerous technical inventions constructed by the artist
2
A full cinema screening included an obligatory issue of The Polish Film Chronicles, a short
film (often animated) and a feature film. Antonisz’s work was distributed mostly in bigger cities.
SUBVERSIVE MACHINERY 215
himself, he resembles a clichéd ‘bonkers’ professor from a science-fiction

B movie.
Described by Marcin Giżycki as the most colourful figure among
filmmakers gathered around the Animated Film Studio in Krakow (Giżycki
and Zmudziński 2008: 64), Antonisz was a multi-talented creator, an
experimental filmmaker, musician, visual artist and a skilled innovator who
did not differentiate between art and technology, and who nonchalantly
rejected everything that constituted commonly understood professionalism
in filmmaking. His vivid artistic personality by far exceeded the grey and
gloomy reality of Communist Poland and yet his work epitomizes certain
features of this particular era. The economics of shortage, to use the
widespread term coined by János Kornai (1980), compelled people living in
the territories of the Warsaw Pact to act like the two popular characters
from the Czechoslovak puppet series Pat and Mat (started under the title . . .
A je to!), who exercise technical creativity in reusing, recycling or substituting
rationed products. Developing know-how accordingly to the DIY principle
was not a lifestyle choice, but a matter of a practical necessity. These hard
circumstances made Antonisz’s art flourish. His witty comment in the
Chronicles was essentially honest – the director was perfectly aware that his
work undeniably benefited from the situation of constant deficit, and as an
artist he remained intrinsically connected with the reality of the authoritarian
country just as the Non-Camera Newsreels were inseparably coupled with
The Polish Film Chronicles.
Bakhtinian inspirations
When writing about Antonisz for the international readers one has to take
into account a colossal disproportion in the reception of his work in Poland
and abroad. Although in his lifetime Antonisz’s films had gained significant
success at European festivals (especially in Oberhausen3), nowadays they
are rarely screened outside Poland. Regretfully, Antonisz’s output is known
almost exclusively to the small group of experts on the niche genre of direct
on tape animation and remains virtually forgotten by the international
3
Antonisz had a special relationship with the Oberhausen Festival, where his films were
frequently awarded. The Grand Prix in 1984 was granted for the sixth issue of the Non-Camera
Chronicles, which included a segment titled Weg zum Nachbarm, dedicated to the festival
itself. The festival in Oberhausen appears also in Antonisz’s animated reportage from his trip
to West Germany, titled Oberhausen, Duisburg, Düsseldorf, Dortmund, Hannover, a Non-
camera Report on the Federal Republic of Germany (Oberhausen, Duisburg, Düsseldorf,
Dortmund, Hannover, Hamburg, czyli non-camerowy reportaż po Republice Federalnej
Niemiec, 1985).
circuits of animation aficionados.4 On the other hand, in Poland Antonisz’s

artistic persona was surrounded by an aura of a legendary enfant terrible of
the Polish School of Animation, and he was well appreciated for his ability
to reconcile the experimental approach to film with the absurd mockery of
socialist reality, appealing primitivism and insane burlesque. Highly praised
in his lifetime, also after the artist’s premature death in 1987, his films have
never lost their acclaim. Antonisz’s artistic method based on radical
dedication to a DIY philosophy, his anarchistic sense of humour, as well as
his natural distrust of authorities and mainstream doctrines earned him high
esteem among young people identifying themselves with the punk movement,
which in Poland was especially vital in the 1980s.
In the next decade Antonisz’s status as a cult classic was cemented. His
films circulated on blurry VHS copies and were frequently presented on
underground ‘unofficial’ night screenings in bars and clubs. In the new
millennium, the interest in Antonisz has even increased and his animations,
especially How a Sausage Dog Works (Jak działa jamniczek, 1971) became
hits of online video channels.
The spontaneous popularity of Antonisz’s shorts among film buffs has
been skilfully accelerated by professional curators and film culture
promoters. Especially in recent years the director’s name has appeared on
posters advertising a whole range of events, from large undertakings like the
retrospective of all his thirty-six films presented in 2007 by one of Poland’s
major film festivals Era Nowe Horyzonty, to local, intimate screenings in
squats like the ones organized by the independent distributor, Animation
Across Borders. It is necessary to mention the dedication of the artist’s
daughters, Malwina and Sabina Antoniszczak, in preserving the memory of
their father’s work among Polish cinephiles and art enthusiasts. Thanks to
their efforts, most of Antonisz’s films were digitized and the large collection
of his inventions and notes was scrupulously catalogued. In 2013 the
collection became a basis for a major exhibition ‘Antonisz: Technology for
Me Is a Form of Art’, curated by Joanna Kordjak-Piotrowska, held in
Zache˛ta National Gallery of Art in Warsaw and the National Museum in
Krakow. The event was complemented by the publication of a beautifully
printed catalogue, as well as a volume of Antonisz’s comic strips and graphic
novels containing such treasures as his childhood story, The Adventures of
Hitler (Przygody Hitlera), where the Führer, like Wile E. Coyote, finds
himself in one painful mishap after another, or a storyboard for the never
completed film Thunders (Pieruny) about Silesian miners who drill a tunnel
through the centre of the earth straight to Australia.
4
One of the few exceptions was the retrospective ‘Rebel Without a Camera – Films by Julian
“Antonisz” Antoniszczak’ presented as a part of ‘Animarchy Retrospective’ at 26th Animafest
Zagreb (6–11 June 2016).
The disproportion between the domestic and international reception of

Antonisz’s work is equally visible in the critical and academic literature.
Authors of English language books on the history of animation certainly
do not consider Antonisz films as a part of the core canon of the Polish
animation, which itself has gained a significant recognition among international
critics and scholars. It strikes one as symptomatic that in the second volume of
Giannalberto Bendazzi’s Animation: A World History, in a twenty-four-page
chapter devoted to Polish animation in the period 1960–1991, Antonisz’s
name appears only in a short text in a footnote provided with an annotation:
‘A disambiguation note necessary for the archivists’ (Bendazzi 2016: 245). The
only substantial English language publication on the subject is a translation
of the catalogue Antonisz: Technology for Me Is a Form of Art (Kordjak-
Piotrowska and Homely 2013), which is valuable not only as an art-book
filled with big scale reproductions of the artefacts presented on the exhibition
(mainly Antonisz’s inventions and handwritten notes) annotated with detailed
descriptions, but also as a relevant academic source.
Contributors to this collective volume, all of them acknowledged Polish
film critics and art theorists, ponder over various aspects of Antonisz’s output.
Especially compelling are the new perspectives on the artist’s work that can
be found in Joanna Kordjak-Piotrowska’s thorough analysis of the so-called
‘Ideabooks’ (numerous folders and notebooks filled with Antonisz’s notes,
sketches and cut-out collages) as well as Łukasz Wojtyszko’s remarks on the
linguistic level of the director’s films. Regretfully a small number of the book’s
copies was printed and currently it is practically impossible to obtain one.
Another valuable academic publication on the subject is Ewa Borysiewicz’s
(2013) monograph focused on political aspects of Antonisz’s films. Analysing
the strategies through which the director undermined the authoritarian
power reflected in the dominant discourse, Borysiewicz puts an emphasis on
Antonisz’s conscious rejection of a classically narrative approach to cinema
in favour of the impression-oriented understanding of the medium. ‘The
cinema based on impression is by far more resistant to actions aiming at
upholding the hegemonic relations’ (Borysiewicz 2013: 73). Both in the
book and in her article in the above-described collective work, Borysiewicz
frequently refers to the concept of a carnival as understood by Mikhail
Bakhtin. The Bakhtinian context is by all means adequate, for in his artistic
undertakings Antonisz released the counter-cultural creativity of the
unreduced, ambiguous laughter that breaks down the established hierarchies
and their oppressive, homophonic narrations.
The atmosphere of a preposterous carnival that fills Antonisz’s non-
camera animations seems to be a spontaneous response of a disobedient
individual confronted with the symbolic violence of the official doctrine.
The author’s strategy of carnivalistic diversion is distinctly visible in his
Non-Camera Chronicles. Protected by the bulletproof shield of pure
nonsense, the artist broke into the very core of the dominant discourse and
replaced the required idealization, smoothness and pathos with a cacophony

of noise, pop-music and shreds of psychedelic voice-over commentaries
loosely corresponding with the kinetic anarchy of vibrating shapes and
colours.
In his frequently cited quote, which incidentally might serve as an accurate
description of the relationship between The Polish Film Chronicles and
Antonisz’s parody, Bakhtin states:
We have already spoken of the structural characteristics of the carnival

image: it strives to encompass and unite within itself both poles of
becoming or both members of an antithesis: birth-death, youth-old
age, top-bottom, face-backside, praise-abuse, affirmation-repudiation,
tragic-comic, and so forth, while the upper pole of a two-in-one image is
reflected in the lower, after the manner of the figures on playing cards. It
could be expressed this way: opposites come together, look at one another,
are reflected in one another, know and understand one another.
BAKHTIN 1984: 176
Certainly, in the case of Antonisz’s complex and multidimensional artistic

output, the wide intellectual perspective open for the coincidentia
oppositorum principle should prove far more efficient than the classical,
Aristotelian binarism.
As Kordjak-Piotrowska points out, Antonisz’s films and drawings are
populated by essentially ambivalent, hybrid creatures that belong to ‘the
repertoire of the language of grotesque explored by Mikhail Bakhtin where the
body is presented in a state of transition, the phase “in-between” the animal,
the plant, the machine and the human’ (Kordjak-Piotrowska 2013: 16).
This insightful observation may be extended to other, non-diegetic aspects
of Antonisz’s oeuvre, where the line separating the usually dichotomous
categories of original and replica are as blurry as the division between a tool
for the creation of art and the artefact itself, or the borders between inanimate
technology and biological life. In the following parts of this chapter I shortly
reflect upon these three pairs of antithetical playing card figures (original-
copy, technology-art, technology-life). The text concludes with some more
remarks on the political inclinations of Julian Antoniszczak’s work.
Original-copy or the curse of the

reproduction
Antonisz’s artistic career visibly divides into two major chapters. The turning
point came with the proclamation of the Non-Camera Manifesto in 1977,
when the filmmaker declared the artistic programme of the ultimate rejection
of photography from the filmmaking process in favour of direct on tape

animation. In the first decade of his career the artist experimented with
various techniques, treating direct on tape animation as one of various
means of expression. His well-deserved status of an outsider among the
Polish School of Animation’s authors does not mean that he was not
influenced by some of his more experienced colleagues. The technical
experiments of Antonisz’s early films follow the footsteps of artists who in
the late 1950s explored the territories situated between cinema and visual
art. Among Antonisz’s predecessors it is necessary to recall Andrzej
Pawłowski, the author of Cineforms (Kineformy, 1957), a live-action
recording of an abstract ballet of elusive shapes and colours achieved thanks
to the projector designed especially for this purpose. Adriana Prodeus
mentions in this context the experiments undertaken by Mieczysław
Waśkowski whose short film was inspired by the art informal, titled
Somnambulists (Somnambulicy; 1958, made in collaboration with Tadeusz
Kantor). This film is composed of colourful, amorphous patches of liquid
paint spilled on a glass surface (Prodeus 2013: 43).
Undoubtedly the strongest and most direct impact on Antonisz’s early
work was made by Kazimierz Urbański, his teacher and advisor, who himself
was an influential, experimental filmmaker, founder and a long-time head of
the Film Drawing Workshop (Pracownia Filmu Rysunkowego, established
in 1957) at the Fine Arts Academy in Krakow. This was the first Polish
academic unit specialized in animation and the first European film
department at an artistic academy (see Margolis 2016: 217). Forced to deal
with a low-budget and low-supply working conditions, Urbański motivated
his students to exercise the DIY method. Due to a very limited access to film
stock, first year students did not get to shoot films. Instead the professor
encouraged them to exploit the possibilities generated by direct contact with
the film material. Textures achieved by the students’ direct interventions on
short fragments of reused film stock were complemented with abstract
shapes and strong colours, achieved during the projection through live
manual manipulations with different oils and fluids as well as chemical and
thermal processing of the stock itself. In a statement given by Urbański in an
interview from 20135 he claims that the entirety of Antonisz’s artistic career
was in fact an extension of what he learned during the first year of this
animation course.
Besides being an artist and a pedagogue, Urbański was a skilful organizer
and activist, pursuing creative independence in times of political control.
Thanks to his efforts in 1966 a branch of the Warsaw Studio of Film
5
Video interview available at the Mediateka website, an online media archive under the
auspices of the Ministry of Culture and the National Heritage and National Museum in
Krakow: http://www.mediatekamnk.pl/obiekt.php?id=1526 (accessed 12 May 2016).
Miniatures was opened in Krakow. In 1974 the studio gained legal autonomy
and functioned as the Animated Film Studio until 2003 when it was
eventually shut down. The studio gathered the most talented filmmakers of
the Krakow animation scene, artists such as Antonisz and his younger
brother, Ryszard Antoniszczak, Ryszard Czekała, Jerzy Kucia or Krzysztof
Kiwerski. In her interesting article on Urbański Hanna Margolis argues that
in his diverse endeavours the artist negotiated with the authoritarian,
centralized structure of state institutions in order to create within its
framework a space for an artistic movement resembling American and West
European underground film scenes (Margolis 2016: 217). Antonisz, who
was an integral part of the Animated Film Studio community, was deeply
inspired by its creative atmosphere, which influenced his way of thinking
about films, not only regarding their content but also their production and
distribution.
On a purely technical level Antonisz’s early works bear certain similarities
to Urbański’s 1960s films such as Playthings (Igraszki, 1962) and The
Lament of the Thug (Tren zbója, 1967) in which liquid, non-geometric
abstraction was used for backgrounds. However, from the very beginning
his work was marked by the unique, individual touch manifested in the
bizarre aesthetics, as well as the reappearing set of themes and authorial
obsessions. For instance, the author’s debut, Phobia (Fobia, 1967), at certain
moments (particularly in the opening sequence) may bring to mind
Urbański’s Moto-gas (Moto-gaz, 1963), yet youthful flippancy of Antonisz’s
film makes the work of the doyen of the Krakow circle look rather old-
fashioned and academic. Cheerfully exploring the photogeny concealed in
decomposition, ugliness and dirt, the director tells a surprisingly coherent,
utterly enjoyable story of a pretentious, egocentric painter searching for
inspiration in the countryside and his painful journey into his own
subconscious hiding the shocking truth about his talent and his wife’s
fidelity. The film is a wild, explosive mixture of direct on tape techniques
and various tricks and optical effects learned by the author in Urbański’s
classes.
It is worth mentioning that originally Phobia functioned as a live picture
show, resembling performances of proto-cinematic magic theatres. Antonisz
entertained audiences of cultural centres with the effects achieved through
the mechanical manipulation of the stock, but also by burning it with
corrosive substances or a too-strong projector bulb, as well as drowning it
in colourful liquids. For the purpose of the film, the live tricks were projected
on the screen and recaptured by a camera (set either on live-action or frame
by frame mode). Although Antonisz’s aesthetic convictions were yet to be
crystallized in his future non-camera programme, we may assume that the
director must have been aware of a certain, cryptic sadness of this technique.
Even if the film feels overfilled with the spontaneous spirit of improvisation
and acceptance of chaos, the uniqueness of the original performance has
been irretrievably lost. Antonisz, who treated the techniques of reproduction

as a necessary evil and who was always happy to run special screenings of
his hand-made films from the original tapes, greatly valued the artistic
energy of a singular occurrence, a quality he missed in the mainstream
cinema, understood as a tool of mass communication.
In this respect Antonisz’s views were convergent with the ideas developed
by the Frankfurt School’s theoreticians who claimed that the individual aura
of an artwork cannot be reproduced by the means of industrial technology,
which itself always remains influenced by political forces. In his classic essay,
Walter Banjamin writes:
The aura surrounding Macbeth on the stage cannot be divorced from the
aura which, for the living spectators, surrounds the actor who plays him.
What distinguishes the shot in the film studio, however, is that the camera
is substituted for the audience. As a result, the aura surrounding the actor
is dispelled – and, with it, the aura of the figure he portrays.
BENJAMIN 2003: 260
Even if in the case of Phobia the photography was still an unavoidable part
of the process, the film, along with other animations made by Antonisz in
the early 1970s such as How a Sausage Dog Works or two amusing
educational films for children explaining the secrets of paper production
(How Science Made it Out of the Woods/Jak nauka wyszła z lasu, 1970) and
television transmission (Agnisia Asks How It Is That We See a Teddy Bear
on the Screen/Jak to sie˛ dzieje pyta Agnisia że na ekranie widzimy misia,
1970), to a significant extent anticipates the style of Antonisz’s later non-
camera films.
The other current in his work is the usage of live-action footage, usually
mixed with animated sequences. In many cases the movement recorded in
real time is purely automatic. For instance, in films like A Thousand and
One Trivia (Tysia˛c jeden drobiazgów, 1972) and Film about (Office) Art
(Film o sztuce . . . (biurowej), 1975) instead of actors we are presented with
Dadaist mechanical objects carrying out some obscure, seemingly pointless,
tasks assigned to them by their constructor. Occasionally the author
employed living actors and staged some more conventionally narrative
scenes, often marked by a distinctive flair for the vintage atmosphere of
early cinema visible in the grainy textures of usually black and white
photography, but also in over-expressive acting techniques from insane
slapstick (the sequence At The Dentist in Horror Film/Film grozy, 1976) to
campy burlesque (In the Grips of Sex/W szponach sexu, 1969; A Few
Practical Ways to Prolong One’s Life/Kilka praktycznych sposobów na
przedłużenie sobie życia, 1974).
In the Grips of Sex is arguably Antonisz’s most successful live-action film.
This witty satire, somewhat resembling the mood of French and Czechoslovak
new wave cinema, tells the story of an attractive single lady with an
apartment who wishes to find love through a matrimonial ad. The film is
rather daring (considering the moral standards guarded by the censors) in its
depiction of contemporary erotic life. Even though we do not see sex and we
do not hear it being mentioned in the dialogue, the whole film is filled with
easily readable hints suggesting sexual intercourse (repetitive bouncing on
beds, animistic screams and yells, etc.). One by one the heroine rejects her
lovers who have failed to satisfy her physical and emotional needs (each
split-up scene begins with the actress dropping artificial tears into her eyes).
Finally, there comes a good-hearted champ that may remind audiences of
the male protagonist of John Cassavetes’ Minnie and Moskowitz (1971)
who wins her heart with a line: ‘Perhaps what you need is a little warmth, it
seems that the central heating is broken.’ Due to direct on tape colouring,
their faces transform into a kitschy wedding photo, the immortal token of
marital happiness.
The stylistic strength of In the Grips of Sex lies in the dazzling combination
of the film’s techniques. Again, it is possible to point out one of Urbański’s
films that seems to have inspired Antonisz. The way the latter artist
approached the live-action footage is analogous to the method employed by
his older colleague in Sweet Rhythms (Słodkie rytmy 1965) – an elusive
collage of the real-time recording of beehives and vibrating shapes, and
patterns burned or stamped directly on the film stock. Using essentially the
same idea of applying the direct techniques onto the developed tape
containing live-action footage, Antonisz in a certain way confounded the
abuse of the mechanical copy and restored the aura of originality. This
burning need to escape the curse of reproduction (quite an unusual urge for
a filmmaker), visible already in Antonisz’s earliest films, eventually led him
to the radical anti-photographic turn. As he argued in one of his interviews,
The weakness of animated film derives from the advantage of technology

over art. An author, usually a visual artist, supported by a group of
animators draws the original piece of art on paper or celluloid. And then
they make a diminished and visually reduced copy. The original graphic
compositions, the very essence of art, are being disposed. It’s as though
Picasso would take a picture of his Guernica, throw away the original
painting and exhibit the photograph in a museum.
ANTONISZ and ZAREMBA 1977: 14–15
In order to transcend what he considered the limitations of frame by frame

photography, Antonisz reached out to the technique that enabled him to
realize his profoundly paradoxical desire to project on the cinema screen
the original creation, instead of its mere reproduction. As Ülo Pikkov puts
it, ‘direct animation gives the author a chance to create the visual universe
of the film without relying on cameras [. . .]. While other animation
techniques are essentially recordings or reproductions, direct animation is,

by definition, a direct presentation. Both the achieved illusion (of motion,
space etc.) and the film stock (or material) itself become objects of film’
(Pikkov 2010: 122).
Technology-art or the soul of an instrument

From his early years Antonisz revealed an extraordinary talent for technical
work, and throughout his entire artistic career his carnivalesque visual
imagination was supported, complemented and inspired by his true passion
for various kinds of machines and automata. The director enjoyed observing
and analysing their mechanisms, reading about them in the professional
press, but above all, constructing them. Antonisz’s fondness for the DIY
method became a subject of countless anecdotes. For instance, Ryszard
Antoniszczak reminisces about assisting his brother in constructing a
muscle-engined car built indoors out of two bicycles and then lowered down
from the window. A Krakow-based critic, Jerzy Armata recalls how he once
complained to the artist that due to short supplies of glass he had not been
able to find a glazier willing to fix his broken window. In response, he heard:
‘screw the glazier, just take some sand, some tap-water and make your own
glass!’ (Armata 1996). Symbiotically adjusted to the hard circumstances he
frequently visited junkyards, digging for potentially useful materials.
‘Antoniszczak seems to perfectly fit the model of a 20th-century avant-garde
junk-artist – whose practice uses all manner of litter, leftovers, used-up,
useless and discarded objects whose status was reduced to that of garbage’
(Kordjak-Piotrowska 2013: 20).
In his apartment, the director constructed several advanced technical
devices designed to make the animation process simpler, faster and more
precise. In time, the collection accumulated into a private, self-sufficient
manufacture of direct on tape films. Antonisz’s first film made without using
any photographic technologies was The Sun (Słońce, 1977). The film is not
one of his most artistically successful accomplishments, yet it is worth
mentioning for its historical value (the premiere was accompanied by the
publication of the Non-Camera Manifesto) and technical innovativeness. It
was made with the use of a 35-mm film-printer, a device inspired by the
traditional graphic printmaking techniques, which impressed a template
image on following film frames (the illusion of a vibrant movement was
achieved due to the small differences between individual prints). It appears
that the relatively limited narrative potential of this method made Antonisz
turn his attention to another old technique, which has been used in
architecture and the visual arts since the seventeenth century.
The basis of the large number of machines constructed by the filmmaker
was the instrument known as the pantograph, a duplication drawing tool
allowing one to automatically enlarge or minify an image with the use of

mechanical linkage (based on the principle of parallelograms) that transmits
the movement of a pen to another pen, which draws a proportionally
scaled copy of the original image. With his ‘Pantograph Animagraph’
(‘Pantograf animograf’), the artist was able to draw a picture on an A4
sheet of paper, while the arm attached with a needle simultaneously copied
the drawing onto the stock (scratched contours were later coloured
manually). The machine was equipped with an optical projection system
(based on the idea of an epidioscope, or the opaque projector), making
it possible to preview the animated frames. Over the years, the artist
built several versions of this device constantly modifying and improving
it. His famous ‘Antonisz’s Piano’, or ‘Pantograph 24 Frame Phasing
Animagraph’ (‘Pantograf-animograf fazuja˛cy 24-kadrowy’), which is
perhaps his most incredible invention, used basically the same idea, but
multiplied by twenty-four. Although it is hard to believe, thanks to his
‘piano’ it was enough for Antonisz to draw the first and the last frame of the
twenty-four-frame sequence as the remaining in-between images were
automatically generated.6 The only difficulty was that he had to draw with
two hands at the same time.
It was due to these and many other, equally amazing inventions that it
became possible for Antonisz to develop his own recognizable style, distinctly
observable, especially in his work after 1977 when he was focused exclusively
on his non-camera projects. Paradoxically, his anti-photographic turn,
motivated by the need to escape the limitations of reproduction, was possible
due to a complex machinery creating a distance between the author and
the material. As a matter of fact, Antonisz’s non-camera films were not
drawn directly on tape. Although the advanced technology of non-camera
remained completely parallel to the one predominating in the mainstream
culture, it was based on the essential principles of mechanical reproduction,
not only duplication (simple pantograph), but also automatization (phasing
animagraph, 35 mm printer). This paradox appears even more striking
once we realize how his major innovations, based on the most fundamentally
6
The mechanism of ‘Antonisz’s Piano’ is best described in the catalogue Antonisz: Technology
for Me Is a Form of Art: ‘An elaborate pantograph was equipped with two arms, used for
drawing on A6-sized paper, connected by a mechanical linkage with 24 needles that scratched
film. Owing to the establishment of correct points of support and the placement of the needles
in relation to the pantograph’s arms, the device was able to produce the intermediate phases of
movement in a film shot. The use of a “phasing pantograph” made it possible to work on 24
frames at a single time, which corresponds to one second of film. The artist drew using both
hands simultaneously: drawing the first phase of a given shot with his left hand, and the last
with his right hand. The images of the intermediate phases of movement were drawn
automatically on the film’ (Kordjak-Piotrowska and Homely 2013: 194).
old-school technology, which in most cases did not even need any electric
power, have anticipated the simplicity and efficiency of flash animation.
‘Constructing the machines is strictly connected with artistic activities.
Machines inspired the films, films influenced the machines’ (Fejkiel 1981:
46). Indeed, in the case of Antonisz’s work it is impossible to set a border
between the tool and the artistic creation. First of all, the technology itself
belongs to major themes of his films. Antonisz’s unmistakable iconography
consists of all kinds of mechanical parts, toothed wheels, gears, cranks,
levers, irrational devices designed for ridiculous tasks, and bio-mechanical
hybrids. Moreover, Antonisz’s inventions themselves certainly deserve to be
treated as works of art. In some ways, they are a more complete realization
of the creator’s vision than the films, for the machines do not bear the
‘original sin’ of reproduction. Fascinated with the era of early pioneers, the
prehistory of cinema when technological inventiveness and the artistic
process were inseparable as two sides of a coin, Antonisz once provocatively
stated that the cinema died with the advent of Lumière brothers (Fejkiel
1980). Indeed, his approach to cinema was in many respects outdated,
rooted in the times from before motion pictures became an industry. In his
work, Antonisz tried to evoke the original spirit of the magical illusion,
hence his esteem for the physical materiality of the film tape itself, as well as
the machinery that allows the creation and recreation of the streams of
moving images (Fejkiel 1980).
Naturally, Antonisz was not the only filmmaker developing the direct on
tape technique. His strong inclination towards visual experiment makes his
work akin to internationally acclaimed artists such as Norman McLaren,
Stan Brakhage and Len Lye, but also authors of the next generations like
Steven Woloshen, Boris Kazakov and Mitja Manček. However, in comparison
with all these artists, Antonisz’s output appears less hermetic and exclusive.
Another blurred border in Antonisz’s case is the one separating the realms
of avant-garde and pop-culture. The distinctive feature of his output is the
combination of radical visual experiment and tawdry playfulness of the
proto-cinematic picture shows. In the majority of Antonisz’s films this ludic
quality assumes the form of the humorist voice-over commentary that
structures the seemingly random streams of animated images and helps to
maintain the viewer’s attention. If devoid of the literary text the director’s
films would be far more difficult to ‘digest’ and most likely would have
never reached the wider audience. In order to verify that last remark one
should see his films People Wither Away Like Leaves (Ludzie wie˛dna˛ jak
liście, 1978) and A Light in the Tunnel (Światło w tunelu, 1986). On the
visual level neither of the two films differs significantly from Antonisz’s
other non-camera works. However, the replacement of the usual voice-over
with more abstract sound design containing noises and hums scratched on
the tape with a razor (naturally, Antonisz used one of his own inventions, a
device called ‘The Unique Razor Blade Sound Machine’/‘Dźwie˛kownica
unikalna żyletkowa’) greatly affected the general atmosphere of both films,

which are darker and more tiresome than other Antonisz shorts, closer to
the kind of experimental films we are used to watching in half-empty art-
house theatres.
Antonisz’s films were meant to be audience-friendly and the great majority
of them are comedies, even if the humour is not always bright, varying from
bitter satire to existential irony. One of the main reasons for his films’ success
is his unconditional anti-professionalism. The director emphasized hand-
made and home-made qualities of his films. The animation in his non-
camera films looks harsh and clumsy, just like the live-action footage in his
early works is often blurry or underexposed. The editing of both sound and
image seems rapid and chaotic. The maniacally cheerful music, usually
written and performed by the director himself, is poorly recorded, full of
discords and mistakes. But, above all, the voice-over narration – Antonisz’s
trademark – is in many cases read by non-professional actors (most famously
Aniela Jaskólska, a janitor at the Krakow Animated Studio), who frequently
stammer or mispronounce the difficult lines, filled with neologisms and
pseudo-scientific jargon. According to the director’s method, they were
supposed to read the text, which they had not seen before, from a piece of
paper covered with Antonisz’s unclear, handwritten notes. Such longing for
imperfection seems to be a logical consequence of his essential aesthetic
beliefs. In order to preserve the aura of the singular occurrence, the author
constantly pushed for broadening the space for blind chance and artistic
disarray.
Biology-technology or the DIY organisms

‘Two themes seem especially important in this extraordinary imagery: the
human body and technology, closely bound together and full of – as the
artist proves – analogies’ (Kordjak-Piotrowska 2013: 16). Searching for
ideas, Antonisz used to rummage among scientific books and journals. On
his shelves, books on modern technology, chemistry and physics shared
space with anatomy albums and academic textbooks in subjects like zoology,
botany and medicine. In his art, he frequently tested the possibilities of
combining these two sources of inspiration. The most vivid and explicit
evidence of Antonisz’s fascination with organic machinery is his famous
How a Sausage Dog Works, a film that might be described as a psychedelic
reinterpretation of the Cartesian concept of an animal as a biological
automaton. The animation begins with a one-minute long sequence
presenting miscellaneous examples of imaginary, surrealist mechanisms
with ridiculous names such as ‘cherry lemondripper’, ‘diffusion sawcuterling’
and ‘electrosauerkraut’. The introduction concludes with the narrator
stating the question that became the film’s title. What follows is a Dada
anatomy lesson ‘explaining’ the complex machinery of the animal organism.

The sausage dog appears on a screen in a spinning zoom and the first thing
he does is crow like a rooster at dawn. In accordance to the principles of
educational genres, we are presented with the creature’s longitudinal section
– among pulsating veins and organic looking intestines we may observe
Antonisz’s characteristic toothed wheels, foreign mechanical elements
actually added on the celluloid tissue of the film by means of a method akin
to Tadeusz Kantor’s assemblage technique.
The intentional inconsistency of the presented reality is manifested in the
film’s composition, characterized by the jazzy levity of Antonisz’s best films.
Watching it feels like the author’s ideas pop out, like it was an improvised
process, an animated stream of consciousness. The lecture on the sausage
dog is brutally interrupted by the character named Ewaryst (one of the
reoccurring strange names in Antonisz’s films, hilarious for Polish ears)
crushing the dog with his heavy foot. The poor creature dismantles into a
pile of bio-mechanic waste. ‘Let us not destroy the sausage dog, for it is a
complicated machine that makes a computer look silly!’ – exhorts the
narrator (the voice-over is read by an older lady with the characteristic
accent from eastern Poland), ‘Let us not destroy a kitty! Let us not destroy a
pickerel! Let us not destroy a butterfly,’ she continues. This way the Cartesian
vision of an animal as a soulless machine (suggested by the use of the word
‘destroy’ instead of ‘kill’) becomes a point of departure for an unexpected
humanitarian, environmental argument, involving a backbreaking method
of estimating the economic value of a butterfly. We learn that an eye of a
butterfly comprises thousands of biological photodiodes, and since the price
of one photodiode in a shop is 75 zloty, by eradicating a single specimen,
one destroys a biological equipment worth roughly 30 million.
In Antonisz’s universe the DIY principle does not have to be limited to
the domain of inanimate technology, but can also be applied to living
organisms. Moreover, in the crude reality of the People’s Republic of Poland,
the science of genetics must not be restricted to advanced laboratories, but
should be available to enthusiastic amateurs, such as the protagonist of
Magister Kiziołł’s Additional Digestive Goitre (Dodatkowe wole trawienne
magistra Kiziołła, 1984), a courageous inventor who finds an indefectible
solution to a potential economic crisis (the narrator assures the viewer that
currently the economy is booming). In order to be able to digest cellulose
Magister Kiziołł undertakes a biotechnological experiment on himself. At
first, he uses a mechanical implant that pre-digests the grass and leaves, but
soon his body develops its own additional organic goiter, which looks like a
pair of gigantic testicles hanging from the character’s proud phallic neck. An
equally bizarre example of biological DIY may be found in the tenth episode
of the Non-Camera Chronicles, which includes a segment presenting the
brave new method of revitalizing the seniors, which should turn out to be
the solution to the lack of supply on the labour market. Like used cars, the
pensioners are being dismantled into parts that are later reused to construct
Frankensteinian creatures capable of performing their working duties. The
narrator praises the glory of the socialist science and explains the secrets of
the technology while the viewer watches gruesome figures like the three-
headed steel mill worker or the three-legged blacksmith with a gigantic
hammer instead of a penis.
Antonisz’s carnivalesque imaginary, exploiting the comical potential of
breaching universally accepted taboos, was in some strange way linked with
his true love of nature. An emblematic example of this curious combination
is the fourth episode of the Chronicles, which contains a segment exposing
the treacherous conspiracy of plants.7 The viewer is informed that people
are nothing but tools in the hands of plants – lifeforms that are far more
intelligent and technologically advanced than we are. They function within
an ecological matrix and communicate with the use of some mysterious
green network of data transmissions. The civilization of plants is to blame
for all global conflicts. They manipulate the world leaders with the use of
the aggression enzyme, for their goal is the nuclear annihilation of mankind,
and overtaking the planet fertilized by the carcass of the dead soldiers.
This strange and hilariously misanthropic sci-fi tale reworks the global
anxieties of the late Cold War era, but at the same time reveals Antonisz’s
own intimate obsessions. Both his films and his private notes are overfilled
with motifs of illness, entropy, corrosion and passing of time usually
approached with morbid humour that scarcely conceals the author’s
profound fear of death. His preoccupation with the bio-machinery was
strongly connected to the ultimate existential absurdity of the human
condition. In A Few Practical Ways to Prolong One’s Life, one of Antonisz’s
underrated outstanding achievements, comparable to David Cronenberg’s
auto-thematic short Camera (2000), the author put forward a theory of the
‘biological relativity of time’ that explains why it is that with age time seems
to run faster and faster. The premonition of his early death, articulated more
or less directly in many of his films and notes, seems to be the reason for the
incredible tempo of his work, as well as his gradually growing concern for
his own health. In one of his notebooks Antonisz wrote: ‘Remember that
you are a robot . . . a human biological machine (take care of your
parameters’ (Catalogue 2013: 18).
7
The ecological messages, reappearing in Antonisz’s films since How a Sausage Dog Works, are
not always mixed with such transgressive grotesque elements. Sometimes, as in the cases of the
segments about the pollution of the Vistula river and the decreasing number of bees (both
appear in the second episode of Non-Camera Chronicles) or the segment about plans for
building a steel mill on the top of one of Poland’s highest mountains (the ninth episode of the
Non-Camera Chronicles), the environmental content is relatively obvious and straightforward,
albeit embellished with characteristic elements of parody and linguistic humour.
Antonisz: art, politics, laughter

In his films, especially the ones made in the 1980s, an extremely unstable
decade in Polish history, Antonisz frequently tested the limits of both the
audience’s and the censors’ endurance. Already his second short, In the
Grips of Sex, had caused major problems. The censor’s office expressed
reservations in regard to the film’s depiction of contemporary sexual
customs, but the biggest issue was the fact that the film referred to the
difficult housing situation – a serious concern of the government, which was
not supposed to be openly discussed. After many complications, the film was
finally accepted for limited distribution and caused an outrage among
Catholic morality defenders accusing Antonisz of youth deprivation (there
was even a plan to collect and destroy all copies of the film, see Armata
2005). The artist directly addressed the subject of censorship in one of his
most remembered non-camera shorts, ironically titled Sharp Engaged Film
(Ostry Film Zaangażowany, 1979). The double meaning of this ludicrous
story of a greedy kiosk keeper was accurately discerned by the jury of the
1980 Krakow Film Festival (former Polish Short Film Festival) whose
unusual decision to give the prize for the best Polish film to an animated film
was intended to be read as a political statement (a critique of the state’s
censorship, which banned quality documentaries from the selection; see
Janicka 1980, Giżycki 1997–1998).
Watching some episodes of Non-Camera Chronicles one may ask the
question, ‘how on earth did it pass the office?’ It is a well-known fact (see
Bendazzi 2016, Giżycki 2016, Sitkiewicz 2011) that in Communist Poland
animated film served as a medium allowing many authors to smuggle their
‘artistic contraband’ – elements of the forbidden political critique hidden
behind allegories. However, unlike artists such as Daniel Szczechura and
Mirosław Kijowicz who use the Aesopian language of hints and suggestions,
in Antonisz’s work the critical content is openly exposed. Let us take a brief
look at the sixth episode of the Chronicles, a very representative example of
Antonisz’s late period. The whole piece is simply sated with carnivalistic
anti-propaganda. It opens with a segment The Pumped-out Nation,
explaining that the reason for the country’s economic insufficiency lies in the
bad quality of state-produced rubber that makes the Poles lose all their
energy on pumping up bladders and tyres (‘No wonder that in the Federal
Republic of Germany the economy is blooming,’ says the narrator, ‘while we
were pumping, they were building their prosperity’). In the next sequence
the viewers are encouraged to try the new specialty of Polish cuisine known
as ‘pizza crisisiana’. Furthermore, the episode contains two characteristic
DIY segments (how to make a car out of a horse and how to make shoes
out of a mink coat). It concludes with an exquisite piece dedicated to the
Oberhausen festival openly referring to the Cold War arms race paranoia.
As we can see, the political comments and jokes are rather blunt and
direct. It seems that thanks to the oddball style of his generically unclassifiable
films, equally extravagant as his artistic persona, Antonisz created for
himself a special negotiating position in the framework of his compelling
relationship with the authorities. But this certainly could not satisfy his
hunger for unconstrained artistic expression. Antonisz wished to liberate the
art of film from the studio system that was strictly controlled by the
authoritarian state. All his non-camera inventions served one major goal –
to enable him to limit the studio to his own room and thus to escape from
the official circuit of production. In his passion for developing technological
alternatives to the mainstream models of film production he postulated a
general change both in the accustomed approach to storytelling and in the
distribution process. Antonisz dreamed of recreating the unique magic of
the times from before cinema was dubbed the most important art form,
giving the medium of film ‘back to the people’, making the communication
between author and viewer as direct as possible, devoid of institutional go-
betweens. He believed in the great potential for a grass-roots cinema
movement and heralded a Renaissance of small cinemas accompanied by an
explosion of self-produced and direct animations, manufactured by amateur
craftsmen in their attics or garages and screened in local cinemas.
Antonisz’s utopian dream of a non-camera, audiovisual revolution has
not come true. Nonetheless, his own prolific oeuvre became a significant
part of the motley landscape of Polish dissident art in the last two decades
of the socialist regime. Similar to the activists of the Orange Alternative,
who proclaimed the artistic programme of socialist surrealism and exposed
the absurdity of the dominant ideology through outdoor events and street-
art, the punk rock bands playing illegal concerts and encouraging their
audience to spread their bootlegs on audio cassettes, or the publishers of
underground press and photocopied fanzines, Antonisz employed guerrilla
methods for establishing unrestrained channels of communication and
distribution of art and ideas.
References
Antonisz, J. and B. Zaremba (1977). ‘Film bez kamery, albo twarza˛ w twarz z
Julianem Antoniszem. Julian Antonisz w rozmowie z Bogdanem Zaremba˛’ [‘A
Film without a Camera, or Face to Face with Julian Antonisz. Bogdan Zagroba
Interviews Julian Antonisz’], Film, 32: 14–15.
Antoniszczak, J. (2013). Opowieści graficzne [Graphic Stories]. Kraków/
Wydawnictwo: Ha!art.
Armata, J. (1996). ‘Urwany film Antoniszczaka’ [‘Antoniszczak’s Broken Tape’],
Gazeta w Krakowie, 28.
Armata, J. (2005). ‘18. rocznica śmierci Juliana Józefa Antonisza’ [‘18th
Anniversary of Julian Józef Antonisz’s Death’], Gazeta Wyborcza Kraków, 28
January. Available online: http://krakow.wyborcza.pl/krakow/1,35796,2517791.

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Julianem Antoniszem [‘Cinema Has Died with the Advent of Lumière Brothers
. . . In conversation with Julian Antonisz’], Kultura, 27.
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Warszawa: Zache˛ta – National Gallery of Art, National Museum.
14
Lynsey Martin
A Case Study of 1970s

Australian Experimental
Animation
Dirk de Bruyn
Introduction
I like to think of much of my work as being finely crafted with great
attention given over to editing where each frame is important and the film
is as short or as long as it needs to be.
MARTIN 2015
The history of experimental animation in Australia remains largely unknown

outside its borders. Although Norman McLaren and Len Lye’s films are
recognized internationally within animation practice such experimental
hand-made cinema generally sits less comfortably under a traditional
animation umbrella. Such work occupies its creative and innovative margins.
Australian experimental animation’s obscurity can be further explained
by this activity being embedded in and framed by the avant-garde, non-
narrative experimental film cultures present in Sydney and Melbourne in
the 1960s and 1970s rather than being presented publically under an
animation banner.
Understandably, such local activity can fly under the radar even within a
broad historical sweep of national animation cinemas, like Giannalberto
Bendazzi’s Animation: A World History, Volumes I, II, III. Bendazzi

recognizes the deserved international reputations of Australian animators
Dennis Tupicoff and Adam Elliot and the innovation of Bruce Currie, Ann
Shenfield and numerous others (Bendazzi 2016). The experimentation of
Corinne and Arthur Cantrill, Sabrina Schmid and Neil Taylor is evident but
not the abstract and graphic experimentation of Lynsey Martin, Michael
Lee, Jonas Balsaitis and Hugh McSpedden, all so much part of the local
Melbourne activity focused on here.
The emergence and amenity of digital technologies and the resultant new
image manipulation strategies have impacted animation’s definition. This
shift invites a re-calibration and re-evaluation of such 1970s Melbourne
experimentation in terms of animation strategies and techniques. We can
locate rudimentary forms of those image manipulation strategies that now
populate the filter menus of digital editing software within such work. In the
networked-society the impact of the tyranny of distance on Australian
culture’s visibility and accessibility also dissipates to some extent. As a result,
the generation of Australian experimental animation to which Lynsey
Martin belongs and within which he plays a critical role can be made visible.
This discussion examines Martin’s practice and its position in relation to
other local Melbourne experimental animation activity.
The situation into which Martin’s work emerged was enabled by the
earlier experimentation of Arthur and Corinne Cantrill in Melbourne and
the Ubu Collective in Sydney. In Melbourne, the Cantrills promoted hand-
made experimental animation through their magazine and workshops. This
advocacy was influenced by the Ubu Collective’s earlier activity in Sydney in
the late 1960s and early 1970s. The Ubu Collective1 included artists Albie
Thoms, Aggie Read and David Perry, and the experimental animation Bluto
(Thoms 1967) is representative of the Ubu Collective’s multiple outputs in
this area. The Cantrills foregrounded hand-made and abstract film, including
this Ubu work, in their film culture magazine. Cantrills Filmnotes was first
published in roneoed form in 1971. Despite this magazine’s international
presence, it is interesting and ironic that many of the films by the artists
populating its pages remain obscure. Lynsey Martin’s neglected output is
representative of this state of affairs.
1
This group further participated in Sydney’s alternative artist collective The Yellow House
from 1970 to 1973 through multimedia events, light-shows, workshops and screenings. The
Yellow House was initiated by Martin Sharp on his return to Australia from London. His
notoriety rested on his involvement with OZ magazine. Sharp’s psychedelia also created
Cream’s Desreali Gears record cover. Sharp is considered an influence and antecedent to the
artists behind the irreverent Mambo Graphics clothing label. In 2000 the Mambo style was
showcased in the Sydney Olympics opening ceremony, through Reg Mombassa’s cartoon-like
sculptures that are also reminiscent of Robert Crumb’s cartoon style.
LYNSEY MARTIN 235
In step with Ubu’s Bluto Martin’s films use hand-painting and direct on film
techniques applied to the film’s surface. These films further relate back to
abstraction, the diary film and found footage cinema. They use collage and
design elements to test and explore the act of looking in both public and private
space. Though incorporating, like the Cantrills, formalist elements, Martin’s
films relate back to the suppressed and invisible traces of everyday life,
expressed though technical strategies that lie outside normal viewing habits.
Martin’s experimentation first came to public view in 1972 through a
Cantrills filmmaking workshop documented in Cantrills Filmnotes. Martin
describes his animation work as a self-funded artisanal practice: ‘My films
are essentially self-made, self-produced in the sense that as an artist, I aim to
exercise control over as many aspects of the medium that I possibly can.
That is production direction, photography editing, sound etc.’ (Martin
2013). Martin’s experimental 16mm cinema remains largely forgotten in
Australia today despite a portion of his innovative thinking available in
Cantrills Filmnotes (Nos 9, 12, 16, 17/18, 23/24, 29 and 30) and a solid
public screening programme through the 1970s and 1990s, before such
16mm experimentation was replaced in public screenings by Super 8, video
art and new media. Film curator and artist Jim Knox has described Martin’s
short innovative films as ‘some of the most extraordinary cinema ever made
in this country, and still largely unknown’ (Knox 2009: 49).
Background
Born in 1951, Lynsey Martin was introduced to photography through his
father’s Minolta Rangefinder 35mm camera. In the late 1960s and early
1970s, he studied photography, film and graphic design at Preston Institute
of Technology and Victoria State College in Melbourne. This was a time
when these institutions’ curriculum was loosely structured, allowing the
freedom to follow your own intuitions (Martin 2015a). Beginning with the
use of his father’s camera Martin started to collect the still and moving
image run-ins, which are part of the normal practice of loading still and
moving image cameras. When loading these cameras Martin advanced the
film to avoid the fogged area. Without looking through the camera’s
viewfinder he would routinely shoot the window of his room. These short
redundant strips of film were saved, compiled and re-animated through the
1970s for the still incomplete work-in-progress, Frames. Such collected
ongoing gestures mark Martin’s preoccupation with the mundane and
everyday events at the core of his film work. Similar habitual material
appeared in the 3-screen version of Parts 1–6 in 1973.
After his tertiary training Martin worked in graphic design and
educational film and television production and later for more than 20 years
as a Secondary school teacher. Martin taught subjects such as Visual
Communication and Design, Art and Art History. He has identified Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Kasimer Malevich’s House Under
Construction (1914) and El Lissitzky’s Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge
(1919) as influences in his teaching and moving image practice. Lissitzky’s
painting especially manages a strong narrative through its graphics. ‘As an
Art teacher at Lakeside Secondary College in Reservoir, much of the work
that I taught was heavily design based with a high emphasis placed on
attention to detail, accuracy and fluency in the communication of ideas’
(Martin 2015).
Expanded cinema
While still at secondary school Martin began experimenting with multimedia
projection using, this time, his father’s 35mm slide projector.
In the late 60s, I was fascinated by photographs that I saw in magazines of

‘psychedelic light shows’ that formed the background to rock concerts in
America where artists such as Jimi Hendrix, The Cream, Janis Joplin etc.
performed. All music that I was heavily into and the images were mostly
abstract. I was already painting abstract pictures in acrylics on canvas.
MARTIN 2015
Using inks, enamel and acrylic paints on coloured acetate and combining
these techniques with found or discarded sections of 35mm film, Martin
created similar light show images to the ones found in the rock magazines.
These images were further informed by the works of abstract expressionist
painters such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline.
‘Some of these images were very delicate, detailed and like mini works of
art in their own right’ (Martin 2015). Using as many as seven slide
projectors, ‘It wasn’t long before I was doing light shows myself at High
School social functions with as many school projectors that I could
commandeer’ (Martin 2015).
Such light shows were pursuits undertaken by a number of Melbourne
contemporaries. James Clayden’s and Hugh McSpedden’s early performances
incorporated projected slide material. Clayden’s John Cage-influenced three-
screen film and slide event, Black Dog (1971), incorporated half-tone
positives and negative slides cut out of discarded sheets that were projected
onto other images (Clayden 1971: 20).
Commencing in the late 1960s Hugh McSpedden, as the Edison Light
Company,2 continually expanded his light show techniques. These strategies
2
McSpedden was the Edison Light Show, although he also enlisted other artists, like Michael
Lee, to manipulate his hand-built contraptions during performances.
LYNSEY MARTIN 237
also found their way into his 16mm abstract animated films. McSpedden
constructed hundreds of transparencies of hand-painted images and
crystalline structures. To this archive McSpedden added moving and rotating
filters and prisms to transition from slide to slide. These performances
became known as the ‘Giant Edison Screw’ and were notorious fixtures at
alternative music events like the TF (Too Fucking) Much Ballroom in
Fitzroy, Melbourne. This music venue was organized by John Pinder and
McSpedden’s brother, Bani, and could accommodate up to 1,500 patrons.
Mike Rudd, lead singer of the celebrated Australian innovative rock band,
Spectrum, recalls ‘We also had the Edison Light Show, which was Hugh
McSpedden’s thing, which was projected over the stage and made it a very
heady, acidy thing’ (McIntyre 2006: 181). McSpedden’s arsenal creatively
emerged out of poverty and scarcity. ‘I had something like two ultraviolet
tubes and a flicker wheel and a few chunks of mirror and my 8mm projector’
(McSpedden 1971: 14).
Influences
Martin’s filmmaking is uniquely intertwined with the Cantrills’ practice. He
contributed to Cantrills Filmnotes from its 1970s beginnings and emerged
out of their workshop activity. Billabong (Will Hindle 1969) and Sirius
Remembered (Stan Brakhage 1959) were films that the Cantrills had lobbied
the national library to purchase and they featured them in the first issues of
the magazine (Cantrill and Cantrill 1971a). ‘Billabong & The Great Blondino
are the first in a group of films with which the national library has begun to
rejuvenate its study collection’ (A. Cantrill 2008: 140). The other films in
this initiating acquisition were Sirius Remembered, Breathdeath (Stan
Vanderbeek 1963) and Watts Towers (Gerard Varney 1967).
During the 1970s and 1980s Corinne and Arthur Cantrill screened such
16mm experimental films to a group of artists and colleagues in their home
on Sunday evenings. These were both local films and films from the Film
Study Collection held at the National Library in Canberra at this time.
Martin attended these informal screenings along with other Melbourne
artists such as myself, Michael Lee, James Clayden, Hugh McSpedden, Jonas
Balsaitis, Chris Knowles and Maggie Fooke. This was our de facto initiation
into experimental and abstract film. The induction ranged through viewings
of formalist work, personal cinema, avant-garde animations, artist film and
video and innovative documentary. Such events included animated works by
Robert Breer, Pat O’Neill, Oskar Fischinger, Malcolm Le Grice, Kurt Kren,
Peter Kubelka, Lotte Reiniger, Jeff Keen, Berthold Bartosch, Bruce Conner
and Stan Brakhage. ‘Saw Billabong and Sirius Remembered, read Gene
Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (3 times, McLuhan, Buckminster Fuller,
and John Cage)’ (Martin 1972: 11).
Over the next twenty years Australian experimentation was incorporated

into this Library resource, eventually including Martin’s Approximately
Water (1972), Whitewash (1973), Inter-View (1973), Leading Ladies
(1975–1979) and Automatic Single Continuous (1982). This availability
enables this analysis. This work was here placed next to work that had
influenced Martin, the earlier hand-made Ubu Collective films and work by
Corinne and Arthur Cantrill.
The Cantrills incorporated films like Albie Thoms’ Bluto (1967) into
their workshop presentations and re-published the Ubu Collective
‘Handmade Film Manifesto’ in their magazine. In Thoms’ Bluto images
were incised with pins, razor blades, styli, sandpaper, steel wool and coloured
with texta pens. Ben Goldsmith and Geoffrey Lealand remark that Bluto
‘reflected artist Paul Klee’s concept of taking a line for a walk’ (Goldsmith
and Lealand 2015: 80). The Cantrills noted hand-made film’s marginal
cultural position: ‘Hand Made film “painting and scratching on film”, is the
touchstone of contempt expressed by the commercial/professional critics
and film industry technicians’ (Cantrill and Cantrill 1971a: 4). When noting
that hand-made film can sharpen perception, ‘to nuance the movement
quality and subtlety of calligraphic forms’ (Cantrill and Cantrill 1971a: 4),
they identify the unique movement and flow that Martin demonstrates in
Approximately Water.
Despite its current invisibility, in 1980 Sam Rohdie sought out and
highlighted Martin’s work in a survey of Australian avant-garde film. Rohdie
linked it into the self-reflexive structural work emanating out of the London
Filmmaker’s Co-Op. He also referred to the 1967 Ubu Manifesto on the
Handmade Film, penned in Sydney by the Ubu Collective. ‘The means of
image production coincides with the image produced-the films are “about”
scratch, incising paint and dye’ (Rohdie 1980: 183). For Rohdie, Martin’s
‘carefully controlled system and structure’ (Rohdie 1980: 207) sets it apart
from the more anarchic Ubu work.
Even with this difference Martin does share with Thoms and others a
political edge, discussed in the examination Inter-View and Leading Ladies
in particular. For Thoms Godard’s idea of making films politically rather
than about politics was critical. Though abstract the Ubu films like Bluto
participated in Australia’s anti-war movement, screening at anti-war events.
For Thoms these films reflected ‘the anxiety of the times, created by
Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War and the conservative
government’s resistance to change’ (quoted in Cox 2010: 234).
Martin echoes similar sentiments in the thought bubbles of a political
cartoon published in Cantrills Filmnotes. ‘Smash down the doors of
repression, liberate film stocks and equipment and discourage the current
trend of regressive nostalgia’ (Martin 1972a: 1). Martin’s films performs
what the Ubu Collective laid out in their manifesto for hand-made film: ‘Let
no media be denied to hand-made films – they can be scratched, scraped,
drawn, inked, coloured, dyed, painted, pissed on, black and white, or
LYNSEY MARTIN 239
coloured, bitten, chewed, filed, rasped. Punctured, ripped, burned, burred,

bloodied, with any technique imaginable’ (Mudie 1997: 77).
It’s worth noting that in 1967 Thoms participated in the 4th International
Experimental Film Competition at Knokke-le Zout in Belgium. Thom’s film
Bolero (1967), made with a grant from the Royal Belgian Film Archive, was
a finalist, sitting next to films by Michael Snow, Steve Dwoskin and Werner
Nekes. Bluto was also screened during this festival at an information
screening. Thoms’ participation in this influential international film event
suggests that it is really this next generation of Australian experimentation
that followed the Cantrills and Ubu that is unavailable internationally.
Apart from these aesthetic and political considerations, Martin’s work
colleague, film editor Tony Paterson, has provided sustained technical advice
and influence. Tony Paterson was already an experienced film editor when
he began working with Martin producing educational films. Paterson was
renowned for cutting episodes of the television cop shows, Homicide and
Division 4 at Crawford Productions. Upon completing his tertiary studies
Martin worked with Paterson as a graphic designer and assistant director
making educational films and television, exhibition design and publications.
This relationship across film art and the commercial sector began during the
Australian film industry’s resurrection, in which Paterson played a key role.
Paterson edited the first legendary Mad Max (George Miller, 1979) for
which he won the AACTA (Australian Academy Cinema Television Arts)
editing award. The frantic editing tempo of the action sequences of Mad
Max were at a pace not previously realized. Paterson encouraged Martin’s
experimentation with technical advice on films like Leading Ladies and
Automatic Single Continuous and by providing sound editing and equipment
support for these films.
Formalism
Everything is visual information which either communicates something
about itself (A STATEMENT) OR about someone or something else.
MARTIN 1972: 15
Despite the formal bent identified by Rohdie, Martin’s own assessment of

the structural work emanating from the London’s Filmmaker’s Co-Op
(LFMC) was mixed. On a visit to London for ‘a self-imposed exile for four
and a half months’ (Martin 2014: 27), he reported in correspondence back
to Cantrills Filmnotes. ‘It seems to me that the structural film movement in
general, is attempting to aim for the same degree of purity that painting and
conceptual art have achieved’ (Martin 1976: 33). The discussions around
structuralist film he witnessed in London were both “stimulating and
depressing” (Martin 1976: 9) and ‘seem to totally disregard perceptual
experience and any sort of aesthetic appreciation and enjoyment. The
approach is one of cold and clinical intellectualizing. Everything is reasoned

and artisanal. The intuitive has no place’ (Martin 1976: 9). Martin responded
similarly to semiology, its signs and signifiers: ‘I felt that theory and dissection
were important but their approach was somehow divorced from reality. A
kind of almost clinical, scientific approach to an inherently humanistic,
expressive endeavor’ (Martin 2014).
These personal reactions to LFMC’s structuralist project in particular
suggest that the formalist approach Martin developed may have embraced
formalism and explored the nature of perceptual processes but retained a
place for the personal and the impact of everyday life he adduced as lost to
the work he encountered in London. Similar hybrid approaches are evident
in the Melbourne based graphic cinema3 explorations of this period that
emerged out of painting. Jonas Balsaitis explored a dynamic mesh of content
and form, Bill Anderson built a meta-narrative of abstract form and
performance, Michael Lee explored a dynamic recreation of form inspired
by Henri Bergson’s thinking on the nature of time while the Cantrills’
experimentation emanated out of a personal and intimate laboratory in
which their interpersonal dialogues played a key role. The technical and the
formal were evident in these approaches but the personal and the intuitive
remain in place.
Painter Jonas Balsaitis describes his hour-long film Processed Process
(1976) as ‘completely romantic in concept, symbolic content and decorative
in quality’ (Balsaitis 1976: 49) in his manifesto-like script. The organized
layering of iconic and graphic elements are: ‘Geometric structures in
continuous transformation through space and time. The code contains the
information’ (Balsaitis 1976: 50). Bill Anderson’s feature-length film Cross-
Sections (1977) is similarly positioned to Processed Process as a mixture of
formal strategies further framed with more performative material. It is
described in the NFSA database as: ‘An experimental film including negative
footage, animation and collage images to produce a cross-section of different
film techniques’. Cross-Sections contains hand-drawn graphic sequences,
cut-out animation of an automobile manual, kaleidoscopic effects and rear
projections: ‘The implicit content then is recent art phenomena and history
and this of course includes art movements like impressionism, post-
impressionism, expressionism, cubism, futurism, dada, surrealism, abstract-
expressionism, minimal, pop and so on. You might call it a cartoon and a
parody of this relatively recent art phenomena’ (Anderson 1978: 68).
The kaleidoscopic effect deployed in Michael Lee’s short film National
Geographic (1972) is also reflexively informed by the technical considerations
of film projection. Images are faded in and out in series, so that each image
3
Such painting and moving image work by Jonas Balsaitis and Bill Anderson was showcased
at Bruce Pollard’s Pinecoteca Art Gallery in the early 1970s. The gallery’s screenings also
included films by James Clayden and Michael Lee.
LYNSEY MARTIN 241
overlaps and fades into the next. This metamorphosis has the perceptual effect
of focusing the viewer’s attention not so much on the image itself but on subtle
changes in focus and framing. Essentially this technique softens the hard edge
of the implicit flicker at the base of projected film and the foundation perceptual
phenomenon of persistence of vision at cinema’s base. Lee’s technique was
informed by Henri Bergson’s critical thinking around duration and the nature
of time. ‘His idea was that things continually recreate themselves. It’s not a
linear structure, it’s a continual recreation. And I visualized this as something
out of focus and coming into focus’ (Lee 1972: 6).
Critic and artist Vikki Riley has also remarked on such a mixture of the
technical and the aesthetic in the Cantrill’s three-colour separation works:
‘This illusion of condensed time, synthetically produced by the three-colour
separation technique of shooting three apparently similar scenes and
printing them together, for me secures a Romantic ideal of Cinema as a
laboratory, a factory where experimentation is lovingly practised and
celebrated’ (Riley 1985).
The films
Apart from the ephemeral expanded cinema work and often with a multi-
year gap Lynsey Martin has completed fourteen single channel self-funded
films between 1969 and 2017. As stated, his early work, Approximately
Water (1972), Whitewash (1973), Inter-View (1973), Leading Ladies
(1975–1979) and Automatic Single Continuous (1982), is available from
the NFSA Non-Theatrical Lending Collection, which was previously housed
at the National Library in Canberra. These films, with Light and Dark
(2006), form the body of the following analysis and are discussed in order
of completion.
Approximately Water (1972, four minutes)

This film emerged out of a two-week film workshop organized by Corinne
and Arthur Cantrill while Martin was a second-year student at Phillip
Institute of Technology:
We wanted to give the workshop an orientation towards new cinema

concepts-film as a means of personal communication, rather than a
general filmmaking course imitating film industry procedures. The idea
was not only to make film, but for the participants to see as much new
work as possible, to meet other filmmakers, and to be aware of the
relationship of film ideas/concepts to style and technique.
CANTRILL and CANTRILL 1972: 4
FIGURE 14.1 Filmstrip: Approximately Water (1972) by Lynsey Martin.
Approximately Water is a conceptual work, focusing on the filmstrip’s

materiality of film and the mechanics of film projection. It is a straightforward
recording of a stream of running tap water. The image-stream is one long
continuous shot on a stationary camera. Over the duration of the film
different direct-on-film techniques are layered over the running tap-water.
The soundtrack is also of running water.
What Martin ‘was interested in was the old thing of abstraction vs.
reality and the use of the mundane, day to day phenomena as a vehicle of
expression’ (Martin 1972: 6). The film’s content reiterates the medium’s
mechanics, a strand of film streaming through a film projector or camera
gate. The mechanics of the film projector and the film strip are the subject
of the film. It is a time slice of running water. When you scroll through
the film over a light table every drop of water that passed by the camera lies
before you in sculptural form. Approximately Water both de-familiarizes
and reduces the commonplace to a perceptual exercise in pattern
recognition.
This dialogic flow between water, time and film introduces in rudimentary
form what Corinne and Arthur Cantrill later explored in their three-colour
separation landscape film, Waterfall (1985). The same rhythm is also present
in their silent Floterian – Hand Printing from a Film History (1981). This
film was produced by contact printing strips of 35mm, 16mm and 8mm
onto discarded 35mm negative film. ‘The selection of material was done
rather arbitrarily. Four-foot lengths of 16mm, standard 8mm and Super 8
film were hand-contact-printed onto 35mm Eastmancolor negative, using
room. The light source was a low-level flood of light and also a beam from
a pencil torch, moved along the film’ (Cantrill and Cantrill 1988).
The politics of these films differ. In Waterfall the Cantrills transport
Martin’s mundane view of urban everyday existence into a picturesque
Australian landscape and in Floterian they frame the privilege of history.
Martin’s Approximately Water remains steadfastly stationed in the
commonplace, at a routine water fixture servicing the suburban garden.
LYNSEY MARTIN 243
Whitewash (1973, four minutes)

Whitewash was conceived as a piece of ‘pure’ hand-made film: ‘its realization
as a piece of pure hand-made film is that it is created purely with incising
and sanding instruments on perfectly transparent, colourless film’ (Martin
1973: 14). As with a number of other short films this work was completed
over an extended period of time, ‘conceived as a piece of handmade film in
1969 it wasn’t until a 3-day week-end early in 1973 that I finally got down
to realizing the piece’ (Martin 1973: 14).
This film’s soundtrack is appropriated from Pink Floyd’s The Narrow
Way, from the 1969 Ummagumma album and part of band member David
Gilmour’s creative output. Gilmour uses multiple overdubs to combine the
instruments played, a pre-digital practice opened up by magnetic multi-
track recording devices that became a standard strategy in the 1960s. Such
sonic overdubbing is a similar technical strategy to the visual layering
Martin employs in both Approximately Water and Whitewash.
Martin describes Whitewash as not having a beginning, middle or
end. The scratches on clear film stock, produced by incising and sanding
instruments, communicates a constructed invisibility that resonates with
Martin’s stuttering public profile. These are ephemeral and fleeting incisions
that are difficult to identify. Its first inscriptions are vertical lines, which then
shift to horizontal movements and other effects like hole punches and the
pulsing effect of scratching intensely on one frame and then leaving the next
frame blank to create a soft flicker effect. There is also the subtle rhythm of
watermarks created by leaving sprayed water to dry on the film after being
over-sprayed with a fixative.
The images of the film documented on the pages and cover of Cantrills
Filmnotes in 1973 were produced from the original scratched material and
highlight the scratches in a way not available in a viewing of a print of the
film. These stills were shot with light from the side of the frame as well as
from behind the image to produce a three-dimensional quality. The incision’s
cavity and its removed residue are visible. This original Whitewash is
materially different from its fogged-like copies. Essentially this film, through
its reproduction, white-washes itself. Every new generational copy made of
it is whiter than the original. The mutilations disappear. Such erasure stresses
an essential characteristic of analogue film that sets it apart from the digital
moving image where each copy is a perfect clone. Analogue decay is
progressive where digital decay tends to crash a file completely. Whitewash’s
content is the progressive material process of whitewashing.
The title Whitewash invites multiple meanings. Whitewash originally
described a low-cost lime and chalk based paint used on farms to aid
in equipment sanitation. During World War II in winter ‘whitewash’
camouflaged military equipment. In the laundry boiling white cloth with a
whitewash additive brightened these textiles. Such uses have been transformed
into metaphors utilized in public and political debate. Whitewash came to

describe one-sided sporting contests, or the act of cleaning up of one’s
political profile, to neutralize any negative implications. Whitewash can be a
metaphor for censorship; ‘to gloss over or cover up vices, crimes or scandals
or to exonerate by means of a perfunctory investigation or through biased
presentation of data’ (Merriam-Webster Dictionary n.d.).
Today ‘whitewash’ can also be a derogatory term describing a racial
minority that has successfully assimilated into western society. In Australia
‘whitewash’ can indicate a racist event or agenda. There is a powerful scene
at the beginning of Phil Noyce’s Rabbit Proof Fence (2002) that demonstrates
the White Australia policy’s originating fervour in relation to indigenous
Australians. Neville, Protector of Western Australian Aborigines in 1931, in
a slide slow presentation demonstrates how half-caste aborigines will be
‘bred out’ through the whiter offspring of succeeding generations. This is
Neville’s demonstrated definition of the government’s assimilation policy.
Martin’s use of the title Whitewash is read here as an ethical yet inarticulate
revulsion against such racist views. The skin of the film is a metaphor for
the skin of the Australian body as performed by Neville and Martin’s
self-mutilation of it.
Whitewash sets in train a serial self-mutilation. When we inscribe our
own bodies in this way, it is considered a form of traumatic self-harm. As a
psychological term, self-injury is the act of deliberately harming the surface
of your own body, such as cutting or burning yourself. It’s typically not
meant as a suicide attempt. Rather, this type of self-mutilation is an unhealthy
way to cope with emotional pain, intense anger and frustration. ‘Self-injury
is defined as the intentional destruction of body tissue without suicidal
intent and for purposes not socially sanctioned’ (Klonsky 2007: 1039).
Whitewash also brings to mind acts of obsessive cleaning. Again, within
clinical psychology this is a well-known form of obsessive compulsive
disorder and it is characterized by the presence of recurring repeating
intrusive and unwanted thoughts, images and impulses. Inside Martin’s
formalism, the personal and the political return as a material mutilation that
discounts itself.
Inter-View (1973, twenty-five minutes)

Certainly, the revulsion, self-harm and censorship at the heart of Whitewash
takes clearer form in Martin’s next film Inter-View. Here, related erasure
strategies are directed at newsreel footage connected to the Vietnam War
and the numbing effects experienced by Martin of propaganda and
censorship identified in the nightly television news.
Inter-View has two parts, the first is of news connected to the Vietnam
War shot directly off the television screen with a Bolex 16mm camera. The
LYNSEY MARTIN 245
television monitor’s signature rolling bars are intermittently visible. The

second part is composed of original 16mm television broadcast material,
discarded black and white out-takes of interviews. Martin did not scratch
the original broadcast footage, which had a magnetic stripe soundtrack, but
had a print made, which was then systematically mutilated. The film is silent
despite the importance of the voice to convey the original meaning. Like the
partial erasure of the image, sound has been totally muted. This film’s
duration and silence imposes a different way of looking on the viewer.
Martin enlists a Zen saying to make his point: ‘If something is boring for
2 minutes, try it for 4, if still boring after 4 try it for 8 and if still boring try
it for 16 and so on. Soon one discovers it is not really boring at all’ (Martin
1973: 15).
Once this boredom subsides another way of looking opens up. As we
watch Inter-View our interest in deciphering what faces say falls away. We
search for other clues. Instead we focus on gestures, eye movements and
pauses. Incidental features such as the microphone, a hand or a mouth
become our focus as increasing amounts of the image are erased by razor
blade. The dance of this erased texture and its abstracted terrain become the
subject. This image removal as an angry response to the Vietnam War.
Martin understands his incisions are an attack on the manipulative nature
of the originating newsreel material.
For Martin’s generation, the Vietnam War left a lifetime impact. Eighteen-
year-old friends were conscripted and sent to war. You were conscripted
by chance, by a roll of the dice, announced on the radio like a macabre
TattsLotto result. How do you respond to this possibility from inside the
safe suburban sprawl that has cocooned your childhood? Martin’s response
both enlists and creates a critical visual language that talked to this
situation’s visceral impact on his body and senses. Although abstracted such
experimentation is implicitly political but of a different register from that
provided by any explicit documentary form. Such a language’s syntax and
address stand in contrast to the master’s house, the language of the dominant
culture.
There are four versions of Inter-View in existence. The first version is the
16mm original with its degenerating magnetic soundtrack containing the
conversations that are denied the viewer. This version has never been
available for public viewing and sits undisturbed in Martin’s shed. Second,
there is the systematically mutilated and fragile copy, with its grooves,
residue and uneven surface with no soundtrack. Third, there is the projection
copy, which has been printed from this second mutilated roll of film. Its
surface is smooth and clean. The earlier incisions are now only a photographic
record. The fourth copy is a digital transfer from this projection copy, now
eternally reproducible with no progressive decay. Further, the digital is prone
to instant decay. Any degeneration would render this file unplayable. It is
one or the other with nothing in between.
Leading Ladies (1975–1979, five minutes)

Collingwood Technical School was considering setting up a 16mm
projectionists’ licence training facility in opposition to RMIT, and
procured a large box of discarded film leaders from the State Film Centre.
When the school decided to scrap the idea of running the course, the
leaders were to be thrown out. Having made films using ‘found’ footage, I
recognised the leaders as having the potential to become a film and asked
if I could have them. Thus, Leading Ladies was born.
MARTIN 2015b
Leading Ladies assembles those images placed at a film’s head and tail by
laboratory technicians for quality control. It also uses countdown leader
and other physical marks made by technicians to quality control the
projected film. Images of women’s faces, countdown leader, other laboratory
reference strips, lettering and printer sync marks. The countdown numbers
enabled projectionists to focus the film before the real action began. The
women’s faces, referred to as ‘Kodak Ladies’ or ‘China Girls’ are colour
images spliced into the films to check the colour balance and exposure
of the prints, to ensure that the film processing is operating within industry
standards. These are not the leading ladies chosen by the casting
department or hired on the director’s couch, but nameless women
accessible to the production line’s proletariat. This hidden material becomes
the film’s subject.
These strips are designed to be inspected over a light table and so only
need to span a handful of frames. Their speed produces a subliminal trace
when screened. These ‘China Girls’ regularly held a colour bar, to further aid
in colour grading. These faces are consistently easy on the eye, likely the
residue of male dominated workplaces. The women’s white skin can remind
us that exposure and colour in cinema has been calibrated for white skin,
not black or brown. Such hidden consequences of racism can be the most
FIGURE 14.2 Filmstrip: Leading Ladies (1975–79) by Lynsey Martin.

LYNSEY MARTIN 247
coercive, as they are woven seamlessly into the fabric of daily life and
consequently ‘forgotten’.
The soundtrack is similarly compiled from the clicks and buzz sounds of
the laboratory’s printing and processing operations. The soundtrack was
constructed with the assistance of Tony Paterson using an EMS synthesizer
and other studio equipment. Martin had been able to use Tony Paterson’s
flat-bed editing table to assemble Leading Ladies. In the title Martin
dedicates the film to Bruce Conner’s Cosmic Ray (1961), although he had
only seen that film after he had nearly finished Leading Ladies. Placed at the
start of the film Martin’s text states: ‘I have dedicated Leading Ladies to
Bruce Connors [sic] Cosmic Ray (b & w 1961), the two films are similar in
some respects, although I had not seen Cosmic Ray until 1976, when my
film was nearly finished’ (Martin 1979: 32).
This is an ambiguous and equivocal gesture. Clearly Martin recognized
an affinity with Conner’s work but he had undoubtedly come to it through
his own creativity. This dedication turns Martin’s film into an even more
denied practice than Conner’s. Through this dedication Martin erases his
own originality and reasserts a subsidiary role for Australian experimental
film in the 1970s.
Automatic Single Continuous (1982, nine minutes)

A film largely misunderstood although its aims are quite straight forward.
An understated materialistic depiction of the same scene that emphasizes
the role of the camera, the element of chance and the lyricism of the
constantly moving camera.
MARTIN 2015
Automatic Single Continuous records the traffic and crowd movement at

Melbourne’s busy Flinders and Swanson Streets intersection from the
elevated square opposite Flinders Street Railway Station. The title refers to
the automatic exposure function of the Super 8 camera on which the film
was shot, the three single takes from which the film is constructed and the
continuous recording this entails. Two takes were shot in daylight and one
was shot at night. The sounds of traffic, co-edited with Tony Paterson, make
up the soundtrack.
It is a summer’s day with even and clear light. The camera moves
effortlessly over moving bodies, faces and the intersection’s architecture,
tram lines, light poles and cars and wiring, all abstracted elements connected
through movement and space. The section ends with the camera panning
upwards to the sky. Although not strictly animation, the quick camera
movements, particularly in the night scene, approach the kind of visual
artifacts normally provided by single frame transitions and movement. At
night, the moving camera paints with the lights of the moving cars and the
traffic lights. This effect is reminiscent of the kind of hand-drawn gestures
and visual artifacts Martin constructs in Whitewash and Approximately
Water.
This material was originally shot on Super 8 and blown up to 16mm on
the Melbourne State College JK Optical Printer, where Arthur Cantrill
taught film. Because of its age the film has acquired a red tint. This is due to
the breakdown of dyes in the film’s emulsion. Dyes fail over time,
decomposing through temperature and light fluctuations and through
chemical reactions to materials within the dyes themselves. In the 1980s
cyan dye has proved to be particularly unstable.
The viewer’s scanning eye becomes the subject of the film. We are mapping
public space subjectively from the perspective of the performing body.
Martin’s camera movement suggests the same saccadic rhythms, scans and
double takes that the eye performs effortlessly in negotiating three-
dimensional space. This film documents a fragmented mode of looking that
has evolved through the requirements of inner city living. In this post-
industrial space movement in and out of crowds, taxis, cars and public
transport creates a complex layering of faces, movement, reflected light and
screens. This is the perceptual impact of city life that Martin’s Automatic
Single Continuous constructs into a cohesive whole.
Light and Dark (2006, twelve minutes)

An ambitious film that pushes photochemical representation to its limits, is
almost a complete summary of what the hand made film can do (and all in
black and white) and is my first film in which ‘the music and sound’ is
completely of my own doing.
MARTIN 2015
The black and white Light and Dark was started in 1973 and completed in
2006. Martin emerged out of a deep depression to complete Light and Dark,
decades after it was shot. The film was started when Martin moved out of
his parents’ home to house-sit the Cantrill’s Brunswick residence while they
lived in Oklahoma. Light and Dark was shot on inexpensive black and
white film but printed onto colour print stock, giving the screening copy a
brownish tinge, approaching sepia. It examines the intimate recesses of a
private living space. Light and Dark is a dark and foreboding work that
appears largely shot at night.
It was shot towards and out of the window of the room from which
Martin was house-minding the Cantrill’s home. A scratch film reminiscent
of Whitewash is projected onto the wall and onto the window’s blinds.
Scratches on the film mimic, are in dialogue with, similar incisions on the
LYNSEY MARTIN 249
projected film inside the film. Similarly, there are layers of design on the
film’s surface and inside the photographed image. It is as if Martin has
transformed this living space into a large Camera Obscura.
The window onto which these moving images are projected faces west.
There are three takes of the window and in the last the blinds roll up and the
film projects through into the darkness onto the brick wall next door. These
shots are framed like a still life, with ferns visible, a book about Dada and
an image from a Robert Crumb cartoon.
Light and Dark showcases a library of effects. It is a mixture of stanzas
of animation mixed with real-time imagery. These effects include sections
of countdown leader, flicker and pieces of Letratone attached to the
film. Slowly scrolling through these sections the hand drawn fades and
strips of Letratone are visible as balanced stanzas of graphic design.
Inspection over a light table reveals their intricate, detailed and considered
patterns. Clearly the film was assembled in consideration of this dormant
sculptural state.
Martin’s sequences of dormant design codes have a precise and determined
function in relation to cinema yet deliver a very different language when
viewed as scrolls. These are artifacts from, and traces of, Martin’s design
teaching. As a visual communication and design teacher Martin delivered an
emphasis on technical drawings, finely crafted and accurate design, the clear
and uncluttered presentation of information. The found image, so much
part of Inter-View and Leading Ladies was also part of the curriculum he
communicated to his students through Duchamp’s ready-mades or Warhol’s
pop images. This is all locatable here in Light and Dark as a scrolled-through
musical score. In Martin’s visual communication teaching practice such
imagery is not only about aesthetics and form. As my analysis argues about
Martin’s own films, it is also about content and the message that each
particular form delivers.
A belated historic bridging

That Light and Dark was initiated in 1973 and completed twenty-five
years later defines and overwhelms this film. This timespan transforms
its content into a forgotten memory, as time itself transforms the film’s
meaning. All forgetting that has taken place over previous decades becomes
unwittingly incorporated as content. The film folds in on itself, embracing
all that frustration and darkness resident in the lost open-ended incomplete
works.
During these three decades, there was a shift from analogue to digital
moving image practices. The opportunities to screen film as film have
diminished and the accessibility of digital cameras and editing software has
brought about a marked increase in short film production. Consequently,
the way 16mm films are now received by an audience has changed, moving
from participation in an underground artist community to the slippery
realm of the unique inaccessible artifact or performative event.
Martin’s filmic language is grounded in the technical and the micro level
of the frame and its image clusters rather than the filmed sequence of
photographable events and its inherent truths. When the photographed
image is available in his work it is acted upon, de-stabilized, mutilated
and blurred. Having familiarized himself with this abstract language’s
rhythms and effects in Approximately Water and Whitewash Martin has
indexed these rhythms in relation to the impact of mass media (Inter-View)
to the architecture of public space (Automatic Single Continuous) and then
personal space and memory (Light and Dark).
Martin’s project fits neatly into a disappeared community of Australian
abstract experimental filmmaking activity from the 1970s in Melbourne.
Despite its documentation within Cantrills Filmnotes these films are largely
unknown and inaccessible internationally. Where Corinne and Arthur
Cantrill achieved and retain an international profile for their experiments,
which included animation, artists such as Martin did not. Framed by its
appearance in Cantrills Filmnotes this community of animation activity
included the work of Jonas Balsaitis, Bill Anderson, Hugh McSpedden,
Michael Lee and the Cantrills themselves. These film artists although clearly
concerned with form retained a commitment to content. This shared project
partially took on the formalisms that emerged internationally in the 1960s
and 1970s in film art under the banner of structuralist film. The closer
reading of Martin’s work undertaken here suggests that its distinction and
difference from a purely formalist abstract cinema is apparent in a continued
engagement with the personal and political impact of daily life and lived
experience.
References
Anderson, B. (1978). ‘Cross-Sections’, Cantrills Filmnotes, 27/28 (March): 64–68.
Balsaitis, J. (1976). ‘Processed Process: Script of the Film by Jonas Balsaitis’,
Cantrills Filmnotes, 23/24 (July): 44–50.
Bendazzi, G. (2016). Animation: A World History. Volumes I, II, III. Boca Raton:
CRC Press.
Cantrill, A. (2008). ‘Right Back to the Billabong (1970)’, in S. MacDonald (ed.)
Canyon Cinema: The Life and Times of an Independent Film Distributor, 140.
Oakland: UC Press.
Cantrill, C. and A. Cantrill (1971). ‘New American Cinema in the National Library
of Australia Film Collection’, Cantrills Filmnotes, 2 (April): 17–19.
Cantrill, C. and A. Cantrill (1971a). ‘The Hand Made Film: A Survey of Work by
Len Lye, Albie Thoms, Aggy Read, Harry Smith, Stan Brakhage, Terry Turney,
Andrew Pike, Fred Harden’, Cantrills Filmnotes, 2 (April): 4–10.
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Cantrill, C. and A. Cantrill (1972). ‘How Do You Arrange a 14 Day Film

Workshop’, Cantrills Filmnotes, 9 (August): 4.
Cantrill, C. and A. Cantrill (1988). ‘San Francisco Cinematheque Program Notes’.
San Francisco Cinematheque.
Clayden, J. (1971). ‘Interview with James Clayden’, Cantrills Filmnotes,
6 (October): 15–20.
Cox, D. (2010). Sign Wars: The Culture Jammers Strike Back! San Francisco:
Ledatape.
Goldsmith, B. and G. Lealand (2015). Directory of World Cinema Australia and
New Zealand. Bristol: Intellect Books.
Klonsky, D. E. (2007). ‘Non-Suicidal Self-Injury: An Introduction’, Journal of
Clinical Psychology: In Session, 63 (11): 1039–1043.
Knox, J. (2008). ‘On, Off, Into and Across the Record’, RealTime Arts, 83 (Feb/
Mar): 49. Available online: http://www.realtimearts.net/article/issue83/8908
(accessed 1 September 2017).
Lee, M. (1972). ‘An Interview with Michael Lee on his film National Geographic
Magazine’, Cantrills Filmnotes, 6 (December): 6–7.
Martin, L. (1972). ‘Short Films’, Cantrills Filmnotes, 9 (August): 6.
Martin, L. (1972a). ‘Violence and the Destruction of the Anaemic Cinema’,
Cantrills Filmnotes, 12 (December): 1.
Martin, L. (1973). ‘Notes and Notations’, Cantrills Filmnotes, 16 (December):
13–22.
Martin, L. (1976). ‘Letters from Lynsey Martin and Jeff Keen’, Cantrills Filmnotes,
23/24 (July): 9, 13, 33.
Martin, L. (1979). ‘Leading Ladies’, Cantrills Filmnotes, 29/30 (February): 32.
Martin, L. (2013). ‘Program Notes provided for Screening Belgrade’, Serbia
(Melbourne, Self-Published Notes 2013) (accessed 1 September 2017).
Martin, L. (2014). Frames: The Casual and The Considered and Beyond,
Melbourne: Self-Published Notebook: 1–49.
Martin, L. (2015). Email Correspondence Monday, 13 April 2015, 7.32 pm.
Martin, L. (2015a). Email Correspondence Sunday, 12 April 2015, 5.06 pm.
Martin, L. (2015b). ‘Notes for Abstract Cinema Screening’. Handout Melbourne
International Animation Festival.
Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Available online: https://www.merriam-webster.com/
dictionary/whitewash (accessed 1 September 2017).
McIntyre, I. (2006). Tomorrow Is Today: Australia in the Psychedelic Era 1966–
1970. Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press.
McSpedden, H. (1971). ‘Alternative Cinema: Interview with Hugh McSpedden’,
Cantrills Filmnotes, 4 (July): 10–15.
Mudie, P. (1997). Ubu Films: Sydney Underground Movies 1965–1970. Sydney:
UNSW Press.
Riley, V. (1985). ‘The Film Work of A. & C. Cantrill’, Scratch #6, Paris. Available
online: http://www.arthurandcorinnecantrill.com/Vikki%20Riley.doc.htm
(accessed 1 September 2017).
Rohdie, S. (1980). ‘Avant-garde’, in S. Murray (ed.), The New Australian Cinema,
183–199. Melbourne: Nelson.
CONTRIBUTORS
Midhat Ajanović-Ajan is a writer, film scholar, cartoonist and filmmaker

born in Sarajevo in 1959. He studied journalism in Sarajevo and practised
animation in Zagreb Film Studio of Animation. Since 1994 he has lived in
Gothenburg where he obtained a PhD in Film Studies. He teaches theories
of visual communications as well as film and animation history at University
West in Trollhättan and has published a number of literary and scholarly
books. Some of his most prominent books on animation are The Man & the
Line (2014, Croatian and English), Life in a Cartoon (2010; Croatian and
English), Den rörliga skämtteckningen (2009; Swedish), Caricature and
Movement (2008, Croatian) and Animation and Realism (2004, Croatian
and English). He worked as the organizer and artistic director on several
festivals, and was a member of a number of international juries. At the 20th
World Festival of Animated Film, Animafest Zagreb 2010, he received the
Award for Outstanding Contribution to Animation Studies.
Giannalberto Bendazzi, currently an independent scholar, is a former

Visiting Professor of History of Animation at the Nanyang Technological
University in Singapore and a former professor at the Università degli Studi
di Milano. Bendazzi started his career as a journalist and an independent,
self-funded scholar. He turned to full-time academic teaching in the late
1990s and has lectured extensively in all continents. An Italian by birth,
Bendazzi’s best efforts are devoted to international projects. An acclaimed
author in his sphere, his best-known book is Cartoons: 100 Years of Cinema
Animation, a world history of the medium published in Italian, English,
French, Spanish and Persian. In 2016, he continued this research with the
three-volume work Animation: A World History. He was the recipient of the
Animafest Zagreb Award for Outstanding Contribution to Animation
Studies in 2002.
Olga Bobrowska (1987) is a PhD candidate in Film Studies at Jagiellonian

University, Kraków and an author of academic articles on the subjects of
Polish and Chinese animation. She is the director and co-founder of StopTrik
International Film Festival (Maribor, Slovenia; Łódź, Poland), a festival
dedicated to stop motion animation. She frequently collaborates with other
festivals, among them Animateka (Ljubljana), Etiuda&Anima (Kraków)
254 Contributors
and Krakow Film Festival. Film programmes she curated have been presented
at various festivals and events in Poland, Slovenia, Croatia, The Netherlands,
Finland and China. Her reviews and critiques have been published in the
Polish magazine Kino and international animation magazine Zippy Frames.
In 2016, she co-edited the monograph Obsession. Perversion. Rebellion.
Twisted Dreams of Central European Animation.
Michał Bobrowski (1981). In 2010, he obtained a PhD in Film Studies at the

Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He is the author of the book, Akira
Kurosawa: The Artist of the Borderlands. Currently he teaches in the Faculty
of Philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Kraków. He is the Programme
Director of the StopTrik International Film Festival, an event dedicated to
stop motion animation, held in Slovenia and Poland. He is a curator, a
cultural activist and an author of over thirty articles devoted to classic
Japanese and American cinema as well as animation. In 2016, he co-edited
a monograph Obsession. Perversion. Rebellion. Twisted Dreams of Central
European Animation.
Franziska Bruckner (1981, Salzburg, Austria) studied theatre, film and

media studies at the University of Vienna as well as painting and animation
at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. From 2009 to 2013 she was a
university assistant at the department of Theater, Film and Media Studies in
Vienna and on the editorial board of the e-journal rezens.tfm. From 2013 to
2017 she worked as a lecturer for animation theory and practice at the
University of Vienna, University of Tübingen and University of Applied
Sciences Upper Austria. Since 2017 she has been Head of the Research
Group Media Creation at the St. Poelten University of Applied Sciences. She
is co-coordinator of the AG Animation within the German-speaking Society
of Media Studies and board member of ASIFA-Austria.
Dirk de Bruyn is Associate Professor of Screen and Design at Deakin

University, Melbourne, Australia. As well as sustaining his own creative
experimental animation and multi-screen performance practice for over 40
years he has written about this area in Cantrills Filmnotes and Senses of
Cinema. His book The Performance of Trauma in Moving Image Art was
published in 2014. He is committed to documenting, promoting and
presenting Australian animation in his teaching practice and at national and
international forums.
Edwin Carels is a teacher and researcher in the arts at the School of Arts
KASK/HoGent. He holds a PhD in the arts, for which he wrote the
dissertation Animation beyond Animation – a Media-archeological
Approach to the Use of Animation in Contemporary Art. He is currently
working on a post-doctoral project under the title ‘Counter-archives’. Edwin
CONTRIBUTORS 255
Carels is also active as a film programmer and curator for the International
Film Festival of Rotterdam. As a writer, he publishes essays on media-
archeology, visual arts, film and animation. His most recent publication is a
monography on the Quay Brothers (The Black Drawings, Ludion publishers,
2018). Recent exhibitions have involved collaborations with Chris Marker,
The Quay Brothers, Robert Breer, Jan Švankmajer, Zoe Beloff and Ken
Jacobs, among many others.
Nikica Gilić (1973, Split, Croatia) Film theorist (PhD) and historian, works
as associate professor and Chair of Film Studies at the Department for
Comparative Literature, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in
Zagreb. He also teaches at the Academy of Drama Art in Zagreb. Member
of the Council of Animafest Zagreb, he is also an Associate Research Fellow
at Graduate School for East and Southeast European Studies in Regensburg
and Münich. Editor-in-chief of the film journal Hrvatski filmski
ljetopis/Croatian Cinema Chronicle, he is a member of editorial board of
Germany-based online journal Apparatus. He has published three books in
cinema studies and numerous articles in journals and books. He was editor
of Filmski leksikon (Film Lexicon, 2003, with Bruno Kragić), which also
deals with animation.
Marcin Giżycki is an art and film historian, critic and filmmaker. Professor
at Polish-Japanese Academy of Information Technology in Warsaw, Poland.
Artistic Director of ‘Animator’ International Animated Film Festival in
Poznan, Poland. Senior Lecturer at Rhode Island School of Design, former
Editor-in-Chief of Animafilm magazine (1979–81). He is the author of seven
books and over 300 articles on film and art, including Avant-Garde and
Cinema: Film in Polish Avant-Garde Circles Between the Wars (1996),
Disney Was Not the Only One (2000), The End and What Next? Essays on
Postmodernism, Contemporary Art, and the End of the Century (2001) and
Wenders Go Home! (2006). His interests range from history of Avant-Garde
movements in the twentieth century to history of animated, experimental
and documentary film to the theory of Postmodernism. He has made a
number of documentary, experimental and animated films, among them The
Island of Jan Lenica (1998), Travels of Daniel Szczechura (2005), Panta
Rhei (2008), Aquatura (2010), A Magic-Lantern Life (2014) and Monument
(2016). He received the Animafest Zagreb Award for Outstanding
Contribution to Animation Studies in 2016.
Chunning Guo (Maggie) teaches at Art School at Renmin University of

China. She was a visiting artist at Central Saint Martins of UAL and she was
also a resident artist at Centre Intermondes in France. Recently she gained
her PhD with a paper about Independent Animation. She has presented
papers at Animafest Scanner II and III in Zagreb, Twisted Dreams of History
256 Contributors
Forum I and II in Poland, and 2015 BFX Conference and APES 2015 in the
UK. She worked as a visiting scholar at the Vancouver Film School. She
received a Jury Award at the 11th Chinese Independent Film Festival, the
NETPAC Award at the Busan Short Film Festival. Her collaborative work
Ketchup was selected by the Stuttgart Animation Festival, FANTOCHE
Animation Festival, Animafest Zagreb etc. Recently she has worked as a
visiting scholar in Radboud University in the Netherlands for a year.
Mikhail Gurevich, independent scholar and critic, was born in Moscow,

Russia. He writes on literature, theatre and film, with special interest in
animation, puppetry and experimental theatre and cinema. From the late
1970s he was contributing to major cultural publications in Russia and later
edited independent periodicals. He worked as a consultant for professional
associations in theatre and cinema and served as a board member and an
adviser at Soiuzmultfilm and Pilot animation studios. From 1992 he has
lived in the USA. He has written on animation for ASIFA magazine, and
festival and academic publications. He has recently contributed extensively
to the history of world animation by Giannalberto Bendazzi. He was a guest
lecturer in a number of universities internationally and participated in many
festivals as curator, juror and discussant. Lately, he has been in charge of
animation selection and the jury at the Blow-up Film Festival (Chicago). He
is also a documentary filmmaker, interpreter and translator.
Fatemeh Hosseini-Shakib is currently Head of Animation Department and a

lecturer of animation theory/aesthetics as well as cinema/media theory in the
departments of Animation and Cinema of the Faculty of Cinema and
Theatre, Tehran Art University, Iran. She has formerly been a lecturer/
research student in animation studies in the UK (UCA, Farnham) until
2009. Her current research interests include the question of representation
and realism and its hybrid nature in traditional 3D/puppet animation (as
well as in CGI and digital animation), Iranian Animation and its emerging
forms and discourses, and finally animation as a tangible element of
modernity in the non-western countries.
Holger Lang (1964, Nürnberg, Germany) is an Austrian artist, filmmaker

and producer, living and working in Vienna. Since 2007 he has worked as a
researcher in media arts at Webster University in Vienna, where he has also
taught – both in the United States and Austria – since 1995. In addition to
his academic and artistic practice, he runs an art gallery in Vienna, curating
exhibitions and also programmes of selected European and Austrian
animation and experimental films for various international venues. For
several years he has been a board member of ASIFA Austria. Currently he
also serves as an ambassador for Austria at the European Animation Award.
In collaboration with various associations and institutions, he is organizing
CONTRIBUTORS 257
and/or participateing in the coordination of academic, artistic and media-

based projects and events.
Irena Paulus (1970, Zagreb, Croatia) graduated in Musicology at the Music

Academy of the University of Zagreb; specialized in Film Music at the
European Film College, Denmark; and earned her MA and PhD degrees in
film studies at University of Zagreb. Paulus is a tenured teacher at the Franjo
Lučić Art School in Velika Gorica, Croatia. She also teaches film music at
the Academy of Dramatic Art and the Faculty of Humanities and Social
Sciences and, occasionally, at the Music academy in Zagreb. She is a long-
time collaborator of the Croatian National Radio (Hrvatski radio). Paulus
has written four books on film music in Croatian: Music from the Screen:
Croatian Film Music Between 1942 and 1990, Brainstorming: Notes on
Film Music, Kubrick’s Musical Odyssey and Theory of Film Music through
Theory of Film Sound.
Andrijana Ružić (Belgrade, 1972) graduated in History and Criticism of Art

at the Università degli Studi in Milan, Italy. She specialized in History of
animated film under professor Giannalberto Bendazzi. The subject of her
thesis was the opus of John and Faith Hubley. For the last six years, she has
been a curator of programmes dedicated to independent animated film on
the International Comics Festival in Belgrade. Based in Milan, Italy she
continues to write articles and essays regarding the independent authors of
animated film.
Mareike Sera studied ‘Visual Theories’ (BA Hons.) and ‘Film History and
Criticism’ (MA) at the University of East London and recently completed
her doctoral degree on the grotesque in the work of Jan Švankmajer at
Humboldt University Berlin. Her research focuses on intermediality: where
do different media intersect and how are they experienced and understood
in this interrelation? The approach that she pursues is inspired by thinkers
such as Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Gilles Deleuze and Paul Ricoeur. Ms Sera
publishes in international book collaborations and journals, such as
Intermediality in Contemporary Eastern European and Russian Cinema
(Ágnes Pethő, ed.), Critical Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal and Im
Wandel: Metamorphosen der Animation (Julia Eckel, Erwin Feyersinger
und Meike Uhrig, eds).
Daniel Šuljić (1971, Zagreb, Croatia) is a filmmaker and musician. He

graduated at the University of Applied Arts Vienna in 1997. In his film
making he employs different animation techniques, from oil on glass, sand
animation to cutouts and pencil drawings. His awarded films include:
Transparency (2015), Evening Star (1993), Leckdonalds (1995), The Cake
(1997), Sun, Salt and Sea (1997), Film with a Girl (2000), Short Life (2007),
258 Contributors
I Can Imagine It Very Well (2004) among others. He was an associate

lecturer at the Department of Animation and New Media at the Academy of
Fine Arts in Zagreb and at the Art University in Linz. Since 2011 he has been
artistic director of the World Festival of Animated Film, Animafest Zagreb.
Hrvoje Turković (1943, Zagreb, Croatia). Film theorist and critic, he worked
at the Academy of Drama Art, University of Zagreb, lecturing mostly film
theory (theory of film editing and film discourse) from 1977 until retirement
in 2009 as a full professor; he is still teaching as an external professor. He
was the editor-in-chief and is now a member of the editorial board of the
film journal Hrvatski filmski ljetopis/Croatian Cinema Chronicle, and the
chief editor of the Filmski enciklopedijski rjecnik/Film Encyclopedic
Dictionary (in progress, LZ Miroslav Krleža). He has published numerous
articles and fourteen books on film and TV, one of them on animation
(Život izmišljotina/Life of Fabrications, 2012). He received major Croatian
life-achievement awards for outstanding contribution to cinema scholarship
and cinema cultures.
Paul Wells is Director of the Animation Academy, Loughborough University,

UK, and has published widely in Animation Studies, including Understanding
Animation, Re-Imagining Animation, The Animated Bestiary and the
forthcoming Animation, Sport and Culture. Paul is also an established
writer and director for film, TV, radio and theatre, and conducts workshops
and consultancies worldwide based on his book, Scriptwriting. His latest
documentary is Mackinnon & Saunders: A Model Studio, featuring Tim
Burton, and recent scripts include ‘The Oil Kid’, ‘Trios’ and a feature
animation currently in development. Paul is also the Chair of the Association.
He is the recipient of Animafest Zagreb Award for Outstanding Contribution
to Animation Studies in 2018.
INDEX
A Da 71, 75–80 technology-art or soul of an

AARON computer program 7 instrument 223–6
Abductees (Vester) 104 Anwar, Roshihan 70
Academy Leaders Variations 78–9 Apollinaire, Guillaume 138
‘Adventures in Success’ (Allen) 60 Approved for Adoption (Jung) 102
advertising/commercials 89, 106 Approximately Water (Martin) 241–2,
Åhlin, Per 107 250
Albala, Hans 89, 90 Arnulf Rainer (Kubelka) 90
Alice (Švankmajer) 30, 38, 40, 42–5 ART I computer program 57
Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) 42–3, Asian-African Film Festival 70
45–6 ASIFA 3–4, 24, 95, 96, 97, 163–4
Allen, Rebecca 60 aspiration, phenomenology of 42–4
analogy 29–31, 46–7 Association of the Austrian Cinematic
Czech Surrealism 32–5, 45 Industries 87
and dialectics 32–5 Australian experimental animation see
examples 35–46 Martin, Lynsey
missing premise 31–2 Austria: small production environment
Anderson, Bill 240 83–5, 97–8
Animafest see World Festival of opening world – exponential
Animated Film/Animafest, expansion 94–7
Zagreb origins and backgrounds 85–7
Animafilm 3, 4 slow ascent to progressive thinking
animasophy 61–2, 63 87–91
animation, ASIFA definition 3–4 women artists 91–4, 96
animation festivals 3–5 Austriaco, Padiglione 14
‘Animation Spectrum’ 14–18, 20–1 Automatic Single Continuous (Martin)
‘animification’ 19–22, 23, 24, 25, 26 247–8, 250
Anstey, E. and Elton, A. 103
Antonisz: Technology for Me Is a Form Bachelard, Gaston 43–4
of Art 217 Bakhtin, Mikhail 217, 218
Antonisz, J. and Zaremba, B. 222 Balsaitis, John 240
Antonisz, Julian: DIY method 213–15 Barthes, Roland 36–7
art, politics, laughter 229–30 Basgier, Thomas 197, 201, 202, 203
Bakhtinian inspirations 215–18 Bataille, George: Story of the Eye
biology-technology or DIY 35–7, 40
organisms 226–8 Bendazzi, Giannalberto ix–x, 66, 143–4,
original copy or curse of the 178, 181, 204, 217, 233–4
reproduction 218–23 Benjamin, Walter 138, 221
260 Index
Berardi, Franco ‘Bifo’ 31, 40–2, 45 The City Through My Eyes

Bergdahl, Victor 105–6 (Kovásznai) 25
Billeter, Fritz 93 Clarke, Joan 53
biographies, visual 102–3 clay animation 202–3
biology-technology 226–8 Clayden, James 236
Blossoming No 3369 (Kovásznai) 24–5 Cohen, Harold 7
Blu-Karma-Tiger (Hulterstan and Cold war era 14, 19, 20, 21–6, 228,
Actis) 111 229
Bluto (Thoms) 234–5, 238, 239 commercials/advertising 89, 106
Borysiewicz, Ewa 217 Communism see Chinese animation;
Breer, Robert: flipbooks 117–18 Czech Surrealism; Hungarian
animated archives 130–1 Cold War; Poland; Soviet
back and forth 139–40 Russia; Tale of Tales
doodle or spaghetti 122–4 (Norstein)
frame by frame 120–2 computers see feminism and digital art;
hand and eyeglasses 125–6 digital technology
loops and mutations 126–30 A Conversation with Haris (Sofian)
multiple firsts 135–7 104
pivotal moments 118–20 Cooke, M. 192–3
semantic cinema 133–5 Copy Shop (Widrich) 96
subverting the aura 137–9 Crafton, Donald 16, 201
synaptic cinema 131–3 Creature Comforts (Park) 104
Broken – The Women’s Prison at critical documentaries 108–10
Hohemeck (Schlecht and critical perspective see Munitic, Ranko:
Lahl) 102 Zagreb School of Animation
Bruckner, Franziska 93 Cross-Sections (Anderson) 240
Bubble Bath: A Musical Special Effects Crulic: The Path to Beyond (Damian)
Film to the Rhythm of a 102
Heartbeat (Kovásznai) 25–6 cultural nationalism, China 62–9
Burford, Jennifer 122, 128, 132 Cummings, P. 129, 131, 138
Burson, Nancy 59 Czech Surrealism 32–5, 45
Ça-ira: Song of the French Revolution Damian, Anca 102

(Kovásznai) 25 Dassnovsky, Robert von 89–90
Cantrill, A. and Cantrill, C./Cantrills de Valck, M. and Loist, S. 69–70
Filmnotes 234, 235, 237, 238, Deleuze, Gilles 42–3, 45
239, 240, 241, 242, 243, Denise René gallery (Le Mouvement
248–9, 250 exhibition), Paris 118,
Carroll, Lewis: Alice in Wonderland 119–20, 121, 122, 123–4,
42–3, 45–6 135, 136–7, 140
Castoriadis, Cornelius 30 dialectics and analogy 32–5
censorship 229, 244 Diary (Dragić) 171–2, 180–3, 194
Chinese animation 61–2, 79–81 digital technology 5–8
and cultural nationalism: origin of Australia 234, 249–50
minzu style 62–9 Austria 96, 97
how the canon was tempered Sweden 110, 111, 113
69–79 see also feminism and digital art;
Chisaan, Choirotun 70 3D
INDEX 261
Disney studio 12–13, 14, 26, 87 computer development and Father

Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs Power 52–3
198, 200 images of Father Power and voices
DIY method see Antonisz, Julian of women artists 51–2
documentaries ‘Manifesto’ of women artists 56–8
interviews 103–5 Ferlinger, Paul 102
non-photographic 100–2 A Few Practical Ways to Prolong One’s
visual biographies 102–3 Life (Antonisz) 228
see also Sweden: animated Fijalkowski, K. and Richardson, M. 32
documentaries Film Festival Studies 62, 69–79
Dragić, Nedeljko 171–2, 180–3, 187, flipbooks see Breer, Robert: flipbooks
194 Floterian - Hand Printing from a Film
‘drawings for projection’ 18 History (Cantrill and
Drawn from Memory (Ferlinger) 102 Cantrill) 242
Dreyfuss, Lawrence 13, 14, 20–1 folioscopes and mutoscopes 126–8
Dryje, František 46 Folman, Ari 105
Duan Xiaoxuan 68 Form Phases (Breer) 118, 122, 125
Duchamp, Marcel 136–8 formalism 239–41
48 Heads from the Szondi-Test (Kren)
Edera, Bruno 6, 71, 74 91
Edison Light Show, Australia 236–7 The Fox and the Hunter (Hu
educational films 101, 221 Xionghua) 74
sex 111 Frierson, Michael 202
Effenberger, Vratislav: ‘The Platform of
Prague Twenty Years On’ ‘gamification’ 17
32–3, 34 Gandini, Erik 109
Ehrlich, David 75, 77, 79 The Gang of Lidingo (Lindström) 111
and Jin Tianyi 66, 72n gestalt
‘Eighth Art’: ‘Twelve Principles’ ‘Animation Spectrum’ 14–18, 20–1
12–13 ‘animification’ 19–22, 23, 24, 25,
Eisenstein, Sergei 60 26
Embryo (Thorsander) 111 Giesen, Rolf 72–3
Esping, Ingrid 110 Ginzberg, Lidiya 148, 149
Etkind, Alexander 156 Gizycki, Marcin 3–9
European and American animation Glad, Teresa 111
13–14 Goddard, Michael 45–6
experimental and popular animation Goldmark, D. and Taylor, Y. 177
13–14 The Great Adventure (Sucksdorf) 109
Export, Valie 92, 93
Halas, John 23–4, 74–5, 170–1
‘Face Codes’ (Müller-Pohle) 59–60 Hamlet (Kovásznai) 24
Fast Film (Widrich) 96 Hand, David 200
Fejkiel, J. 225 Havoc in Heaven 71, 72
feminism and digital art Heilborn, H. and Aronowitsch, D. 111
chorus of ‘The Second Wave’ 58–60 Helman, Alicja 73
computer as artistic medium: Herzog, Werner 79–80
absence of women artists Hidden (Heilborn and Aronowitsch)
54–5 111
262 Index
historical bridging 249–50 Kabuki theatre 208–10

historical events, reconstructed 101–2 Kael, Frederick 21
historiography see Chinese animation; Kentridge, William 11–12, 14, 17–19,
Munitić, Ranko: Zagreb 23
School of Animation Khoo, Eric 102
Holiday Home (Jansson) 107–8 Kitson, Clare 144–5, 146, 155
Holman, Bruce 203 Klahr, Lewis 12, 16
Honess Roe, Annabelle 100 Klüver, Billy 121, 122, 129
Housing Problems (Anstey and Elton) Kordjak-Piotrowska, Joanna 216, 217,
103 218, 223, 226
How a Sausage Dog Works (Antonisz) Kostelac, Nikola 167–8
216, 221, 226–7 Kovásznai, György 11–12, 14, 17,
Hu Jinqing 76 18–26
Hu Xionghua 74 Kovásznai Research Centre
Hultén, Pontus 119–20, 122 Foundation 18–19, 20
Hulterstan, M. and Actis, C. 111 Kracauer, Siegfried 200
Humanic Varese (Albala) 89 Krakow 215, 216, 219–20, 229
Hungarian Cold War: Kovásznai Krauss, R. 12, 18, 19
11–12, 14, 17, 18–26 Kren, Kurt 90–1
hyper-realism 199, 200 Kubelka, Peter 89, 90, 120, 135
Kuo, M. 131, 134
I Was a Winner (Odell) 113
Ideal Filmmaking 86 Landreth, Chris 104–5
Image par Images/Image by Images Lassnig, Maria 92–4, 95, 96
(Breer) 121, 122–3, 125–6, Leading Ladies (Martin) 246–7
136, 140 Lee, Michael 240–1
imagination and remembering, Legrand, Gérard 32
phenomenology of 36, 37–40 Lent, J.A. and Xu Ying 66, 71
Imitation of Life (Poledna) 14 ‘Leo/Lisa’ (Schwartz) 58–9
The Imitation Game 53, 54 Li Dazhao 65
In the Grips of Sex (Antonisz) 221–2, Libertson, J. 35
229 Lies (Odell) 112
In the Head of an Old Man (Åhlin) Light and Dark (Martin) 248–9, 250
107 A Light at the End of the Tunnel
index cards 130–3, 138–9, 140 (Antonisz) 225–6
Inter-View (Martin) 244–5, 250 light shows 236–7
interviews 103–5 Lindström, Maja 111
Iran 102–3 London
‘inverse imagination’ see analogy exhibitions 13, 17–18, 21–2
Irzykowski, Karol 8 film festivals 71, 72
Iványi-Bitter, B. 11, 20–1, 24 Lopes, Dominic McIver 7
The Lunar Eclipse of the Krona
Jabberwocky (Švankmajer) 37–40 (Olsson) 106
Jansson, Birgitta 107–8
Jarl, Stefan 109–10 M5 gun director 55
Jasmine (Ughetto) 102–3 McCay, Winsor 101, 105
Jin Xi 67, 72, 74, 75 Macdonald, Sean 63, 66, 67, 71–2,
Jung, Henin 102 121, 129
INDEX 263
McSpedden, Hugh 236–7 Nash, Katherine 52, 55, 56, 57, 58, 60
Maestro Koko 183–7 National Geographic (Lee) 240–1
The Magic Brush (Jin Xi) 67, 72 Never Like the First Time! (Odell) 111,
The Magic Mountain (Damian) 102 112
Magister Kiziołł’s Additional New York 93, 118–19, 127, 135, 137
Digestive Goitre (Antonisz) Nezha Conquers the Dragon the King
227–8 71–2
A Man and his Dog out for Air (Breer) Nights in the Boulevard (Kovásznai) 25
139 Non-Camera Chronicles (Antonisz)
The Man Who Had to Sing 187–8 214–15, 217–18, 227–8, 229
Marey, Étienne-Jules 134 Non-Camera Manifesto (Antonisz)
Martin, Lynsey: Australian 218–19, 223
experimental animation non-camera projects 213–14, 224–6,
233–5 230
background 235–6 non-photographic documentaries 100–2
expanded cinema 236–7 Norstein, Yuri see Tale of Tales
films 241–9 (Norstein)
formalism 239–41
historical bridging 249–50 Odell, Jonas 111–13
influences 237–9 Olsson, Arvid 106
Memory of the Summer of ’74 One Night in an Art Gallery 71–2
(Kovásznai) 25 original copy and reproduction 218–23
Metamorphosis (Kovásznai) 23–4
A Midsummer’s Night Dream (Trnka) pantograph animation 223–4
205 Paris
minzu style, origin of 62–9 Le Mouvement exhibition (Denise
Modernism 14, 21, 22, 23 René gallery) 118, 119–20,
China 73 121, 122, 123–4, 135, 136–7,
New York and Paris 118–19 140
visual and musical 177–83 and New York 118–19
Molnár, Vera 57 Park, Nick 104, 146
Monologue (Kovásznai) 22–3 Paterson, Tony 239, 247
morphing faces 59–60 Paulus, 180, 183
morphological approach 168–70 People Wither Away Like Leaves
Moritz, William 154 (Antonisz) 225–6
Le Mouvement exhibition (Denise People’s Home and critical
René gallery), Paris 118, documentaries, Sweden
119–20, 121, 122, 123–4, 108–10
135, 136–7, 140 Persepolis (Strapi and Paronnaud) 102
Müller-Pohle, Andreas 59–60 phenomenology 40–2
Munitić, Ranko: Zagreb School of of aspiration 42–4
Animation 163–5, 172–4 of imagination and remembering
critical reviews and theory of critics 36, 37–40
170–2 Phobia (Antonisz) 220–1
genesis of an almanac 166–8 Pikkov, Ülo 61–2, 222–3
theory and aesthetics 168–70 Poland 3, 4–5
music see Simović, Tomislav Julian Antonisz: DIY method
mutoscopes and folioscopes 126–8 213–32
264 Index
Poledna, Mathias 14 Schwechater (Kubelka) 89

The Polish Film Chronicles 213–15, 218 Screen Play (Purves) 198, 199, 207,
political animation 8–9 208–11
Australia 238–9, 243–5 ‘self-figurative’ animation 16
Hungary (Kovásznai) and South semantic cinema 133–5
Africa (Kentridge) 11–26 Seuphor, Michel 131–2
Iran 102–3 Sex on the Map (Glad) 111
Poland 229–30 Shanghai Animation Film Studio
Sweden 108–10 (SAFS) 62–3, 67–8, 71, 74–6
see also Chinese animation; Czech Sharp Engaged Film (Antonisz) 229
Surrealism; Soviet Russia; Siegert, Michael 91
Tale of Tales (Norstein) Sielecki, Hubert 95
Processed Process (Balsaitis) 240 Simović, Tomislav: music and Zagreb
Professor Balthazar 183–7, 189–90, School of Animation
194 Diary 180–3
propaganda films 8 diversity 192–5
Purves, Barry: puppet animation 197–9 The Man Who Had to Sing 187–8
cataloguing puppets 205–7 Professor Balthazar and Maestro
a problem with realism 199–205 Koko 183–7
puppet as human being in theatrical The Substitute 188–92
performance 207–8 visual modernism 177–80
cinematic ending 210–11 The Sinking of the Lusitania (McCay)
Kabuki theatre 208–10 101
Pushkin, Alexander 155, 159–60 Sito, Tom 5–6
Slaves (Heilborn and Aronowitsch)
Radio Alice 44–6 111
Rainer, Arnulf 90, 92–3 Snipe-Clam Grapple (Hu Jinqing) 76
Recreation (Breer) 125, 126, 133, 136, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
137, 138 (Disney) 198, 200
remembering and imagination, Sofian, Sheila M. 104
phenomenology of 36, 37–40 South African apartheid 19
reproduction and original copy Soviet Russia 9, 19, 70, 100
218–23 see also Czech Surrealism;
Revolver (Odell) 112 Hungarian Cold War; Tale of
Reynoldner, Thomas 85–6, 87, 88, 89, Tales (Norstein)
96 Stampfer, Simon von 85–6
Riley, Vikki 241 Story of the Eye (Bataille) 35–7, 40
Rotary Demisphere (Duchamp) 136–7 Strapi, M. and Paronnaud, V. 102
Rotating Broom Stick (Breer) 129 Strukov, Vald 9
Rushton, Richard 29–30 ‘Studio for Experimental Animation’,
Russett, R. and Starr, C. 135 Vienna 93–4
Ryan (Landreth) 104–5 The Substitute 188–92
Sucksdorf, Arne 109
Scheugl, Hans 91 Sudović, Zlatko 166, 167, 171, 172
Schlecht, V. and Lahl, A. 102 The Sun (Antonisz) 223
Schmidt Jr., Ernst 94 Švankmajer, Jan 35
Schwartz, Lillian 52, 55, 56–7, 58–9, Alice 42–5
60 Jabberwocky 37–40
INDEX 265
Sweden: animated documentaries 99 Ugly Feelings (Glad) 111

developments 110–13 Urbański, Kazimietz 219–20, 222
fact-based animation 105–8
People’s Home and critical Venice Biennale 14, 93
documentaries 108–10 Venice International Film Festival 67
The Swedish Theory of Love (Gandini) Vertigo 54–5
109 Vester, Paul 104
Sweet Rhythms (Urbański) 222 Vienna 85, 86, 87
Symphony of the City (Sucksdorf) film festivals 72, 96, 97
109 University of Applied Arts 93,
synaptic cinema 131–3 94–5, 97
University of Applied Sciences 96
Tale of Tales (Norstein) 143–4 Viennese Actionism 90–1, 92
of dreams and visions 149–51 visual biographies 102–3
of eras and escapes 154–5 Vinton, Will 123, 218, 220
of expectations and frustrations Vukotić, Dušan 167, 169, 179, 188–9
144–6
of gaps and subtexts 156–7 Waltz with Bashir (Folman) 105
of the plane and the amalgamated Wan brothers 62–3
157–8 Waterfall (Cantrill and Cantrill) 242
of plot and verse 146–9 Weitzenfeld, Julian S. 31
of times and spaces 151–4 Wells, Paul 12, 21, 199, 200, 201
of wolves and incarnations Where Is Mama? (Te Wei) 66–7, 68–9
158–60 Whitewash (Martin) 243–4, 250
Tatsumi (Khoo) 102 Whitney, John 54–5
Te Wei 63–4, 66–7, 69n Why Is the Crow Black? 67, 72
technology-art see Antonisz, Julian: Widrich, Virgil 96
DIY method Williams, Richard H. 57
Teige, K. 35 Wolf, Dave 6
theoretical perspective see Munitić, women animators 91–4, 96, 102, 107,
Ranko: Zagreb School of 111
Animation see also feminism and digital art
They Call Us Misfits (Jarl) 110 World Festival of Animated Film/
36 Characters (A Da) 76, 78 Animafest, Zagreb 3–4, 163–4
Thoms, Albi 234–5, 238, 239 Austria 83, 96
Thorsander, Emma 111 China 71, 75–9, 80
Three Monkeys (A Da) 75, 76 Tale of Tales 144–5
3D Wu Weihua 66, 67, 80
and 2D forms 200–3
CGI 101–2, 111, 113 Young Man Playing the Old Masters’
Trnka, Jiří 67, 154, 203–5, 207 Gallery (Kovásznai) 23
Tscherkassky, Peter 89, 90
Turing machine 53, 54 Zagreb see Munitić, Ranko: Zagreb
Tusilago (Odell) 112 School of Animation;
Simović, Tomislav: music and
Ubu Collective, Melbourne 234–5, Zagreb School of Animation;
238–9 World Festival of Animated
Ughetto, Alain 102–3 Film/Animafest, Zagreb

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Global Animation

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of

First published in the United States of America 2019

Cover image © Zlatka Salopek

This work is published subject to a Creative Commons Attribution

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-3713-0

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Section 1 Historical and Theoretical Approaches

2 Animation in the Gallery and the Gestalt: György

3 On Analogical Thinking: Jan Švankmajer’s Jabberwocky

4 The Successful Chorus of ‘The Second Wave’:

5 Seeking Truth in Facts: Historicizing Chinese

6 Austria Unlimited – Chances, Spirits and Limitations

7 Beyond Self-­images: The Context and Development of

Section 2 Case Studies from Around the World

9 ‘. . . The Film Is Not About That’: Notes on (Re)Reading

10 The Importance of Ranko Munitić’s Work on the Zagreb

11 Animation Experienced through Music: Tomislav Simović

12 The Puppet as Not-Puppet: The Notion of Puppet

13 Subversive Machinery: DIY Method in the Work of

14 Lynsey Martin: A Case Study of 1970s Australian

List of Contributors 253

You know, these animated drawings, still so barren, so stiff, so meagre,

Franziska Bruckner, Nikica Gilić,

What is Global Animation Theory? In the Foreword, Giannalberto Bendazzi

more reflective and thoughtful review of the presentations that support a

Historical and theoretical approaches from

Case studies from around the world

perception. Through the (re-)discovery of the flipbook, he found his initial

In the final chapter of Global Animation Theory, Dirk de Bruyn focuses

In 1980, I participated in the World Festival of Animated Film in Zagreb as

of animation was produced. Let me quote it now, although I do not doubt

channels – three networks, CBS, NBC, and ABC; three Metromedia or

tools anymore. This situation has created a challenge to artists whose

György Kovásznai and

The practice of drawing – professional knowledge – can be derived from

Contemporary art is constantly generating new mediums, the study of

This observation both recovers the significance of ‘drawing’ within

crucially, within an intellectual framework that properly and unselfconsciously

Imitation of Life appropriates and reassembles this language as it revisits

Beyond its engagement with animation, Imitation of Life incorporates

These comments serve to remind contemporary audiences of the place

technical and aesthetic innovation, prompted by varying sources, speaks to

FIGURE 2.1 The Animation Spectrum by Paul Wells.

music videos, etc.). Thereafter, as it becomes an applied tool, it becomes less

expression, as well as refine the means by which to express compelling and

takes place, and ultimately generates new knowledge. In works as varied as

The automatism he has discovered – ‘drawings for projection’ – works

Kentridge’s technique seeks to use the interval between frames as a space

Kentridge presents the edifice of apartheid ideology as insurmountable in

instance, simply existed as a ‘body of work’, and as such demanded

There is a pertinent confluence in the idea of the ‘Animation Spectrum’,

women’ – and operates as a direct reference to the Emperor of Austria and

as the most vibrant embodiment of feeling and experience. Unknowingly,

the sociographic nature of the matter, within a subjective, artistic sphere’

Though little known, Kovásznai later made an animated feature called

Jan Švankmajer’s Jabberwocky

devoid of being, a being which is reserved solely for natural or physical

7 Beyond Self-images: The Context and Development of

However, strategies to escape this semiotic and productive over-agility

John von Neumann 1903–1957 Stored-program computer

http://dam.org/artists/phase-one/vera-molnar/artist-s-statement (accessed 31 October 2017).

procedures applied in shuimo donghua (水墨动画, wash-and-ink painting