For obvious reasons, most art produced under oppressive regimes comes off as painstakingly inoffensive. For equally obvious reasons, the rare works that criticize the regime tend to do so rather obliquely. This wasn’t so much the case with The Hand, the most famous short by Czech artist and stop-motion animator Jiří Trnka, “the Walt Disney of Eastern Europe.” In its central conflict between a humble harlequin who just wants to sculpt flower pots and a giant, invasive gloved hand that forces him to make representations of itself, one senses a certain allegory to do with the dynamic between the artist and the state.
“Trnka’s personal experience of totalitarianism under the communist regime is projected and rearticulated in the meaning and knowledge he transmits through his short,” writes Renée-Marie Pizzardi in an essay at Fantasy Animation. “The state-run studios had the power to approve or censor certain topics and control funding accordingly. Trnka was thus dependent on their funding, yet resistant to their politics, and this ambiguity limited the freedom of expression in his work.”
In the harlequin, “Trnka crafts a character through which he not only portrays himself as the artist, but any free-thinking individual who gets robbed of their agency and induced into following and acting according to an ideology and regime.”
Completed in 1965, The Hand would turn out to be Trnka’s final film before his death four years later, by which time the rulers in power were hardly eager to have his animated indictment in circulation. 1968 had brought the “Prague Spring” under Alexander Dubček, a period of liberalization that turned out to be brief: about a year later, Dubček was replaced, his reforms reversed, and the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic “normalized” back to the ways of the bad old days. Banned after Trnka died in 1969, The Hand would remain not legally viewable in his homeland for two decades. But today, it’s appreciated by animation enthusiasts the world over, and its expression of yearning for creative freedom still resonates. In the late sixties or here in the twenty-first century, fear the government that fears your puppets.
Related content:
Watch The Idea, the First Animated Film to Deal with Big, Philosophical Ideas (1932)
The Hobbit: The First Animation & Film Adaptation of Tolkien’s Classic (1966)
4 Franz Kafka Animations: Watch Creative Animated Shorts from Poland, Japan, Russia & Canada
An Archive of 20,000 Movie Posters from Czechoslovakia (1930–1989)
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.