By Jamie Jungyoon Tak
Jiří Trnka’s The Czech Year (Špalíček, 1947) and Old Czech Legends (Staré pověsti české, 1952) are perhaps two films of his ‘peasant poet’[1] oeuvre most preoccupied with rituals, as human acts of connection to the land and one another. Ostensibly, the two animations occupy distinct narrative territories. The Czech Year, an episodic adaptation of Mikoláš Aleš’ eponymous poetry collection, traces one year in a Czech village through the turn of the seasons, chronicling its calendar of traditional rites and customs. Old Czech Legends dramatises ancient origin myths of wars, prophecies, boar fights and revolutions, drawing upon the folkloric tales of Alois Jirásek’s Legends of Old Bohemia. While The Czech Year details ritual in the minutiae of quotidian repetition, Old Czech Legends renders it a moulding of collective memory and consciousness.
Is there a disappearance of rituals? Byung-Chul Han speaks of such as a malady of the present day—rituals bring forth a ‘community without communication’, representing and passing on the values and orders on which a community is based.[2] Without it, we are adrift in the pitchy abyss of ‘communication without community’.[3] The digital age beholds a flattening of community; a distancing from the textured warmth of physical togetherness, and an increasing inclination toward the cold and sleek company of screens. While rituals might seek to stabilise life through cyclic endurance, digital rituals often result in a kind of destabilisation – we find ourselves caught in the gyre of haptic compulsion: swipe, click, zoom-in, double-tap. Stop-motion animation is ritualistic in process and product: born of manual gestures of repetition and bearing images enduring, for ongoing revisitation.
Told entirely through movement and song, The Czech Year presents a theatre of pastoral life played to the rhythms of ritual. In the village, the passing of time is marked by ceremonial acts aligned with the agricultural clock. The coming of spring is indicated by small swells of white flowers and the villagers’ raising of the maypole (májka), an ancient symbol of fertility and renewal. Wide-eyed puppets totter about with oversized wooden feet, scrambling to adorn their maypoles with hats, feathers and bows. The end of harvest is likewise signified by a village feast (posvícení), and the frenzied baking of rows and rows of koláče—round Czech pastries filled with fruit, poppyseed or curd cheese. Trnka emphasises community through synchronised, collective movement of the puppets; rarely is a character isolated for long in the frame. Jaunty, kinetic editing works to sweep the viewer into this sense of rustic togetherness. The opening scene finds a group of children dancing in a circle, scuttling as crabs as they sing-song: “We will buy a dulcimer (cimbál)!” Rapid cuts between perspectival close-ups evoke a delirious enwreathing by the puppets, a spectatorial spinning into their communal body of practices. I felt of wood and armature, I danced.
Postcard by ODEON, using a publicity still for The Czech Year. Courtesy of filmstarpostcards.blogspot.com.
Old Czech Legends illustrates the emergence of Czech ritualistic practices through six vignettes of ancient fables, loosely sewn together into a chronological arc. The film opens with the founding story of Bohemia by forefather Čech, as he leads his followers on a gruelling expedition for a new place to call home. Upon reaching a cliff, Čech surveys a vast, verdant drape of trees and hills below; he drives his staff into the ground and lowers his face to the soil, claiming the land. We cut to the crowd following suit; only their staffs and spears remain in the frame, standing parallel with the trees against the open sky—an augury of their life to come. Much like The Czech Year, the film’s images of ritual are rooted in this interdependence between human life and land. An early scene sees villagers cowering beneath blackened clouds, as though facing their first thunderstorm. They clamber up a mountain to hold sacrificial offerings up to Perun, Slavic god of the sky. Blood is poured from an unwitting rooster for the deity, but they are to learn he demands more. An insulted Perun repays them in fistfuls of lightning, setting the village on fire.
Trnka’s process of stop-motion animation was as ritualistic as his peasants’ cultivation of land—cycles of communal work toward a harvest. Sets and puppets were painstakingly carved and constructed entirely by hand, using a medley of materials such as cardboard, wood, gravel, paint and various dried plants. They were then manipulated frame by frame to create the illusion of movement, a process requiring a dedicated crew of puppeteers, lighting technicians and camera operators. Formerly a children’s book illustrator, Trnka often elected to focus on the design and art direction of his films, entrusting his team with the physical labour of animation. As described by Břetislav Pojar, Trnka’s foremost animator:
The work atmosphere was very friendly and homely. When making a puppet film, you’re really there all the time. And the number of those people is limited, and you have to live with them practically all day, every day, sometimes even into the night… It’s such a familial environment.[4]
Jiří Trnka (centre) and his crew working on the set for Old Czech Legends. Courtesy of Apparatus Journal.
With such close-knit collaboration comes a certain insularity, a sense of enclosure within the order of the world created. Participators of this ritual find themselves encircled by their creation. The Czech Year and Old Czech Legends extend a spectatorial invitation into this private process by their rhythmic images, the jerky pulse of puppets in motion serving to remind us of these inner (hand)workings.
Some thanks must be shown for digital rituals of consumption—self-same gestures of taps and scrolls to which the reading of these very words is owing…
[1] Giannalberto Bendazzi, Cartoons: One Hundred Years of Cinema Animation (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), p. 170.
[2] Byung-Chul Han, The disappearance of rituals: a topology of the present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), p. 1.
[3] Han, p. 1.
[4] Břetislav Pojar, interview by Marek Eben, Na plovárně, Česká televize, 2004.
Jamie Jungyoon Tak is a Naarm-based researcher, writer and production designer. Her current Masters research performs a phenomenological inquiry into Czechoslovak Golden Age animation as paidic haptic play. She is Partnerships Coordinator of the Melbourne Women in Film Festival and committee member of the Czech and Slovak Film Festival of Australia.