In 1967, a TV crew from the state-run network of communist Czechoslovakia dropped in on veteran illustrator and animator Jiří Trnka at his Prague workshop. The resulting ten-minute segment, which you can find on YouTube, forsakes dialogue for a classical music score—like so many of Trnka’s films—and shows the 55-year-old artist creating the sort of exotic settings and evocative puppet characters he’d brought to life onscreen for 20 years. Trnka, who would die of heart disease two years later, puffs on a cigarette as he kneads a palm-size ball of white plastic compound and uses the edge of a shallow-straight gouge to carve out not just the face of an old man but a whole personality. With tweezers he attaches tiny flowers and foliage to little sylvan figures and affixes them to a strip of grungy, clear-plastic sheeting; conferring with his production team, he assembles strange sets that evoke Jean Cocteau in their wild imaginings. There isn’t a camera to be seen, yet this is a filmmaker at work, because Trnka generally left the laborious process of frame-by-frame animation to his trusted crew and focused instead on the actual creation of his little worlds.
“The Puppet Master: The Complete Jiří Trnka”
Sun 6/3-Wed 7/4. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.
Born in western Bohemia, Trnka began sculpting puppets and staging little shows as a child, and when he was 17, a mentor at his vocational school persuaded his working-class parents to let him enroll at the School of Applied Arts in Prague. The young artist graduated in 1935 and got his professional start illustrating children’s books (some of which he would later adapt to the screen), though he also launched a puppet-theater troupe in Prague that lasted until the Nazis invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939. After the war Trnka launched an animation studio with two partners and began making short 2-D animations. The first shorts program at the Film Center collects these efforts, which are pleasant but undistinguished; Trnka didn’t really come into his own until he reconnected with his childhood passion and, in fall 1946, set out to make his first puppet-animation feature, The Czech Year.
State censors shot down Trnka’s plan for a puppet animation of Don Quixote, so he returned to the safe formula of his debut feature for Old Czech Legends (1952), another patriotic story collection. But two years later Trnka ventured outside his comfort zone of fantasy and folklore to adapt a more iconoclastic story: Jaroslav Hašek’s satirical antiwar novel The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War. The title character, a hapless foot soldier in the Austro-Hungarian army, causes havoc wherever he goes, fouling up the plans of his corrupt superiors (Joseph Heller would turn him into Yossarian, the hero of his classic novel Catch-22). Though The Good Soldier Švejk (1955) may lack the exotic visuals of Trnka’s earlier efforts, the characters are more supple than ever, with busy fingers that add to the movie’s droll comedy. Švejk, separated from his regiment, marches around southern Bohemia until he’s taken prisoner as a Russian spy, and Trnka enjoys himself immensely with the stiff-necked military men of the empire: the gendarme sergeant who interrogates Švejk wears a wax mustache so large and shapely it looks like a bird diving earthward.
