The Art of Czech Animation: A History of Political Dissent and Allegory

Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Prologue
	The self-immolation of Jan Palach
Introduction
	Political encoding of objects and things
	Objective definition
	A distinction between objects and things
	Methodologies
		Thing theory
		Actor-network-theory
		Rhythmanalysis
		Materialist methodologies
	A brief history of Czech animation
		Pre-Second World War Czech animation
		Post-Second World War Czech animation
		Seko, Pojar and Mergl
		Slovak animation
	Czech animators focused upon
		Jiří Trnka
		Jan Švankmajer
		Jiří Barta
		Other animators
	Recovering forgotten material
1 ‘It’s the simple things’: Animated allegories against Nazi and Soviet oppression
	Overcoming the poverty of object analysis
	Introduction to allegory
	Ambiguity and plurality in allegories
	Allegory communicated through real objects
	Objects of resistance in Revolution in Toyland
	The springiness of the Springman’s springs
	Importance of objects to tradition in The Czech Year
	The Emperor’s Nightingale as a critique of artifice
	Material history in Old Czech Legends
	Oppressive gestures of ‘a hand of state’
	Reading The Hand
	Allegory’s limits
	Visual simile in Passion
	Technological abstraction in The Cybernetic Grandma
	Simple objects and anti-political politics in Týrlová and Trnka
	Politically non-political objects
2 Jan Švankmajer and the network of things
	Introduction to Švankmajer
	Švankmajer and censorship
	Švankmajer’s relationship with Surrealism
	How psychoanalysis is at once a useful tool for reading the objects of Švankmajer while also completely missing the point of the thing
	An alternative in ANT
	The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia: The most explicitly political of Švankmajer’s films
	Death to anthropocentrism
	A Picnic with Weissmann and non-human actants
	A civilization of stones
	The political pessimism of Dimensions of Dialogue
	Let the networks be as they are – Švankmajer vs. categorization
	The Flat’s network of dissident things
	Not objects but things ~ in defence of indeterminacy
	Concluding remarks: Latour ← → Švankmajer
3 Jiří Barta and the rhythmic difficulties of living in, or with, time and space
	Introduction
	Rational time, charismatic time and natural time
	Jiří Barta: An ambivalent animator
	The loss of Green Wood and the defeat of natural time
	Designing uniformity in The Design
	Repeating uniformity in Disc Jockey
	Twisted spirals and swollen shards: The sickened rhythms of Hameln
	Repeating the past in The Club of the Laid-Off
	A hopeful repetition for the future?
4 Animators reconstructing Prague and Czech identity after the Velvet Revolution
	Portrait of a city
	Methodological multiplicity
	Historicization of the objects of Prague
	Undermining the ‘magic city’ of tourism in Faust
	Networks of desire in Conspirators of Pleasure
	Consumption as a desire older than consumerism
	The Golem is Prague and Prague is the Golem
	Just orbiting bodies in abstract space
	Life among the dead in One Night in One City
	Desiring rhythms in Tram
	Surviving Life as an Insect
	The citizen’s inner life is collective, public and dependent upon myths and stories
	Twenty-first-century Czech animation
	Political messages from past to present
	Communication of political messages
	A materialist turn
	A silent language
Epilogue
	A materialist, not idealist ecocriticism
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index