The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia

 

This short sequence says more about early 90s Eastern Europe than entire forests of books.

I'm reading a book on the history of censorship in animation. The book covers many well known examples and also documents some lesser known ones. It also covers the filmography of Jan Švankmajer, a Czech director and animator who serves as an example of what it was like to work in the film industry in the Warsaw Pact. To get a film or program funded, scripts had to be approved by the responsible bureaucrats, Jan Švankmajer had some success for a time getting projects off the ground, but it eventually he got a reputation for making films that were pessimistic and individualistic, in short, bad art in the opinion of the Communist Party.

Jan Švankmajer is a committed Surrealist. In the popular parlance, surrealism is just an adjective to describe work that's odd. A painting that doesn't look much like something or a play that plays with the fourth wall or a film that has a sequence that breaks the rules of conventional cinema will be described as surrealist. However, the original Surrealists were a group of political radicals closely associated with Anarchism and libertarian socialism. It's this political Surrealism that Švankmajer was inspired by.

The opposition force Švankmajer to find new work as a puppet maker and painter. Fortunately for Jan Švankmajer he was noticed by the West German film industry who introduced his work to the rest of Western Europe. Several financiers including the UK's Channel Four and the BBC made overtures to fund some of his projects, which meant the Czechoslovak film authorities reluctantly allow him to return, though opposition continued. Jan Švankmajer's film Alice, an adaption of Alice in Wonderland, was made while he was supposed to be working on a different film and was only allowed to be completed after a bitter dispute in which the foreign funders threatened to withdraw if Alice wasn't completed. 

So, with all those headaches, it's not surprising that once the regime collapsed in 1989 that Švankmajer would take the opportunity to comment on its demise. In 1990, with assistance from the BBC, he released a ten-minute animated short titled The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia. I've wanted to see this film for some time after seeing clips of his Alice. And now thanks to a YouTube channel I got my chance. It's simply excellent, the imagery is striking, the claymation animation is not only interesting to watch on its own, but it makes many of the film's points in itself. There's a sequence where clay workers in flat caps and overalls, the men who populated every Soviet poster from 1918-91 created via moulds, going through an assembly line and then hanged, after which their bodies fall into a bucket and turn back into clay which is then moulded back into workers which go back on the line and so on and so on, meanwhile the film juxtaposes imagery from Czechoslovakia's Five-Year plans with the production targets getting higher and higher. 

Practically every sequence is like this, the imagery and transitions and movements work together to make the point crystal clear even if you can't read Czech. I could describe the entire ten-minute run time, the crumpling up of posters of old Czechoslovak/Soviet leaders followed by uncrumpling those posters to reveal their replacements, meet the new boss, mostly the same as the old, as a quick example. But I'll restrain myself and just discuss what for me is the most important sequence, the film has a bookend sequence, it starts with a creaky old Stalin bust having surgery, his skull is cut open to reveal his brain, the surgeon plunges both hands into the gory matter and pulls out a smaller bust of Klement Gottwald, ardent Czech Stalinist and leader of the 1948 coup that established the Communist party dictatorship. After cleaning up the blood and tying off the umbilical cord, the Gottwald bust comes to life, the birth of Stalinism in Bohemia. At the end of the film the chronology has entered the late 80s and the soundtrack is full of jubilant crowds and photographs of mass demonstrations in the streets. While this is going on, the hands that have been controlling everything throughout the film start painting everything with the Czech national flag. A new coat of paint on rusty equipment, including an old and dirty Stalin bust. This Czech national flag Stalin bust undergoes the same surgery and those hands plunge back into the brain matter, but the film ends before we can see what emerges from it. 

The film is open about its existence as a form of Agitprop, agitational propaganda and Švankmajer has stated that he thought the film would age very quickly because it's a direct commentary upon current events  "Despite the fact that this film emerged along the same path of imagination as all my other films, I never pretended that it was anything more than propaganda. Therefore, I think it is a film which will age more quickly than any of the others." To call a film Agitprop or propaganda is to insult in conventional circles. Art is supposed to rise above petty political statements, this film is the best rebuttal to that assumption I've come across so far. Removing the politics from this film is to leave it an empty husk, its politics is its art.

Most political film animated or otherwise are frankly quite blunt and simplistic, there's a bad guy who demonstrates all the qualities the makers criticize, the good people eventually triumph etc. Here the villain is a system, it isn't the death of Stalin in Bohemia, it's the Death of Stalinism in Bohemia with a question mark. Stalin died in 1953 just days before Klement Gottwald died oddly enough. And even Stalin is manipulated by the hands of the unseen operator of the system, who is still around in 1990 and working hard to mutate into a more politically acceptable Czechoslovak national form to continue its work.

The scepticism wasn't some paranoia from an artist who thinks too much, either. The book I'm reading that reminded me to look up Švankmajer's work was published in the middle of the 1990s several years after The Death of Stalinism, was released. It includes comments by Czech filmmakers that things haven't changed completely, many of the old Communist party bureaucrats were still in positions of power in the industry and not all of them had adapted to the changing times. Which is what the Stalin bust with the flag paint was about, the collapse of the old regimes removed some of the most high profile and infamous personalities, but left thousands of lower level authorities in place, and it was an open question just how far these authorities would be willing to change. 

And of course, the reason much of the imagery is obvious despite cultural distance is that much of what is odious about the Stalinist regimes of Eastern Europe can be found in Western European capitalism. I've worked in factories with grimy walls covered in propaganda posters while sweating and aching to fill ridiculous quotas. The secret police are gone, but the regular police are quite capable of repression, the governing institutions are just as invested in keeping the population passive through a combination of restrictions and distractions.

 I've been to Czechia and Slovakia, so I'm under no illusion that these two things are the same, there are differences, just not as much as the propagandists of both systems would like us to believe.