Politics of the Imagination: Animations of the Eastern Bloc at Samizdat
One of the real treats of this year's Samizdat Eastern European Film Festival is Politics of the Imagination: Animations of the Eastern Bloc, a programme gathering shorts made between 1958 and 1992, from the far side of the Iron Curtain. It is a title that tells you exactly what these films are up to. Under regimes where saying a thing plainly could be dangerous, animation became a place to say it sideways: through allegory, folklore, surrealism and pure formal invention. Watching six of these pieces back to back, what strikes you first is the sheer craft, and second is how much these artists managed to smuggle past the censor inside a talking fish or a drawn-on frame.
The peak of the programme, for me, is Jan Švankmajer's Jabberwocky (1971). I have seen a few of the great Czech surrealist's stop-motion pieces now, and this is the most accomplished of them, arguably the most impressive stop-motion I have ever seen. It is demanding and deliberately obscure, but as a piece of pure craft it is close to untouchable. You can read my full review of Jabberwocky here.
Close behind it sit three lovely things. Péter Szoboszlay's Hey, You (1976) is a vibrant, folkloric Hungarian short that plays like playing cards coming to life, every frame worth framing, carried along by a perfect score. Golden Bird (1987), from Dóra Keresztes and István Orosz, is a quietly brilliant study of confinement, mostly monochrome until colour bursts through a window onto a lake, and blessed with a final flourish where the frame itself seems to crumble. And Hardi Volmer's Incipit Vita Nova (1992) is a gloriously strange Estonian curio, half live-action oddity, half Alice in Wonderland stop-motion, and about as MTV as anything made in 1992 could be. My reviews of Hey, You, Golden Bird and Incipit Vita Nova go into each in more detail.
Not everything lands as fully. Zofia Oraczewska's If You Want Peace, Prepare for War (1975) is a charming Polish paper-art miniature about war machines being reclaimed by nature, but at six minutes it makes its anti-war point and then simply stops, too slight to leave a mark. And Robert Sahakyants' Wow, A Talking Fish! (1983) is a characterful, well-voiced Soviet oddity that I sadly could not judge fully, my screener froze and cut off partway through, so I would love to revisit it in a clean copy. Full thoughts on If You Want Peace, Prepare for War and Wow, A Talking Fish! are up now.
Taken together, the programme is a wonderful argument for exactly the kind of curation Samizdat does so well. These are films that would be almost impossible to see otherwise, made by artists working with tiny resources and enormous imagination, often under real constraint. Some are masterpieces, some are minor, but all of them use animation to do what the medium does best: to make the impossible visible, and to slip a difficult idea past the guard while everyone is busy watching the pictures move. If you can catch Politics of the Imagination at the festival, do. It is a rare window onto a whole hidden tradition, and a reminder that the imagination, in the end, tends to outlast the politics.
