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ABSTRACT
This article investigates three animated science fiction shorts by Avo Paistik – Sunday (Pühapäev, 1977), Vacuum Cleaner (Tolmuimeja, 1978) and Klaabu in Space (Klaabu kosmoses, 1981), focusing on their political (under)currents and aesthetic overtones. Examining their texts as well as contexts, I suggest that Paistik took advantage of the revision of generic hierarchies in the Soviet Union of the 1970s, mobilised several central tropes of the genre and seized opportunities offered by the vague status of animation's supposed spectatorship in order to produce ideologically subversive and aesthetically nonconformist films. His films, as well as critiques, however, were born and ultimately remained within the limits of late-Soviet socio-political and film industrial frameworks, betraying thus not only patterns of ‘resistance’ but perhaps even more importantly those of ‘adaptation’.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. By 1980, 89% of the Soviet population had access to television (Golovskoy Citation1992, 265).
2. During the Stalinist era, Soviet animation was officially forced to address exclusively young audiences, while the relaxation of such constraints under Khrushchev's rule resulted in a considerable wave of innovative animated films the thematic and aesthetic scope of which was clearly targeted at a mature spectatorship (see, e.g. Pontieri Citation2012). In due course, Gosfilm apparently set up quotas for animated films designated to various age groups, in an attempt to provide both a ‘carrot’ and a ‘stick’ to talented but disobedient animation artists (see, for instance, Kiik Citation2006), ‘carrot’ being the permission to make intellectually more complex films for grown-ups, while ‘stick’ stood for restraining them to producing simplistic animations for ‘the youngest spectators’.
3. As Trossek (Citation2009, 94) points out, Pink Floyd's music was used due to an ‘industrial accident’. Namely, the melodies of this ‘flagship of British progressive rock’ were chosen after the initial score by Tarmo Lepik, utilizing parts of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata (1801), was rejected as ‘substandard and improper’ by the film's producer (Joonisfilmi ‘Pühapäev’ põhidokumentatsioon. National Archives of Estonia, ERA.R-1707.1.1632, p. 36). As time allocated for the production was running out, Toivo Elme, the sound designer of Sunday, came up with the idea of replacing the rejected score with Pink Floyd's tracks, the rhythm of which was a perfect match with the pulse of the visuals that were built on a module of six frames (see Teinemaa Citation1992, 9). This unauthorized ‘sampling’ occurred despite the fact that the Soviet Union had joined the Universal Copyright Convention (or, the so-called Geneva Convention of 1952) in 1973. Interestingly, as Trossek notes, the poster of Sunday also repeated the central rainbow motif of the album's cover design (Trossek Citation2009, 94). In his contribution on music to The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, Ken McLeod highlights the importance of progressive rock in general and Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon in particular as a product of an era of ‘impressive technological displays’ ‘analogous to the advanced technology of the actual NASA space program’ (McLeod Citation2009, 398). Hence, in addition to chiming with the pictorial rhythms of Sunday, Pink Floyd's music also complemented the film's central technofuturistic concerns.
4. Joonisfilmi ‘Pühapäev’ toimik. National Archives of Estonia, ERA.R-1707.1.1631, pp. 1–12, 42–58.
5. While not realised in the film, the final version of the script describes the sequence as follows: ‘A wall in front of the man [sitting in an armchair in the middle of the room] turns into a TV-screen, on which a text KEY&CO appears. The letters morph into a figure of a corporate capitalist. Zooming closer, the next image concentrates on his widely smiling mouth with the text KEY&CO instead of teeth. The text transforms into a cigar, which is instantly offered a light. The puffs of smoke take the shape of letters, forming the names of various narcotics. The last one of them, LSD, converts into cancan girls that begin to merge until only one girl is left on the screen. The girl starts to undress but then transforms into a syringe filled with morphine that is emptied into an arm. The hand raises a revolver that shoots straight at the screen. The screen is first filled with a flash of light and then with a cloud of smoke, out of which the name of the company KEY&CO emerges. All of the above is repeated in an increasingly rapid pace, only the text KEY&CO is replaced with the word MONEY’. (Joonisfilmi ‘Pühapäev’ toimik. National Archives of Estonia, ERA.R-1707.1.1631, pp. 48–9)
6. This, by the way, also secured a hefty bonus for not only Paistik but also the entire studio.
7. The fact that the topic and the film were personally important to Paistik is also supported by his persistance in forcing the film's production despite numerous setbacks. Namely, he completed the first draft of the screenplay as early as in 1972 (that is, from the beginning of his involvement with Tallinnfilm's animation unit) and was relentlessly pitching it to Silvia Kiik, a script editor at Tallinnfilm responsible for seeking Gosfilmofond's approval for production plans of the animation department (Kiik Citation2006 II, 100–101; Teinemaa Citation1992, 5).
8. Somewhat symbolically, the release of Sunday coincided with the adoption of the new Soviet Constitution declaring that ‘a developed socialist society had been built’ in the USSR (Constitution Citation1977).
9. The same could be said of the mechanical Garden of Eden that could be interpreted as indirectly mocking the ‘make-believe’ nature of Soviet society where an immense gap existed between the official rhetoric that filled the mass media and the everyday, ‘street-level’ realities.
10. Talking about Sunday in his interview to Silvia Kiik, Paistik specifically highlighted that one of the concerns he meant to address with this film was the ‘loss of spirituality in our world’ (Kiik Citation2006 II, 107).
11. Joonisfilmi ‘Tolmuimeja’ toimik, National Archives of Estonia, ERA.R-1707.1.1701, p. 85.
12. Joonisfilmi ‘Tolmuimeja’ toimik, National Archives of Estonia, ERA.R-1707.1.1701, p. 89.
13. A concept coined by Leonhard Lapin, one of the central figures of this movement (Lapin Citation2003, 182).
14. A term also introduced by Leonhard Lapin in 1979 (Lapin Citation1979).
15. In addition to Klaabu in Space, the trilogy includes Klaabu (1978) and Klaabu, Nipi and the Angry Fish (Klaabu, Nipi ja tige kala, 1979). Notably, Paistik himself hesitated in defining the trilogy as a series, arguing that the ‘design and technique [of the three instalments] did not overlap’ (Teinemaa Citation1992, 10).
16. The reference to Napoleon was intentional (Kiik Citation2006 III, 93).
17. The fact that Klaabu in Space was sent to Madrid Sci-Fi Fest in 1981 where the film was awarded the first prize testifies that the Soviet cinema bureaucracy considered it ideologically ‘safe’.
18. See National Archives of Estonia, ERA.R-1707.1.1977, pp. 1–31.
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Eva Näripea
Eva Näripea is Director of Film Archives of the National Archives of Estonia and senior researcher at Estonian Academy of Arts. She is also co-editor of Baltic Screen Media Review published by Tallinn University. She has contributed book chapters to a number of internationally published volumes, and co-edited special issues on Eastern European cinemas for KinoKultura: New Russian Cinema, Kunstiteaduslikke Uurimusi/Studies on Art and Architecture and Studies in Eastern European Cinema, as well as an anthology Via Transversa: Lost Cinema of the Former Eastern Bloc (2008, with Andreas Trossek). Her most recent cooperation is an edited volume Postcolonial Approaches to Eastern European Cinema: Portraying Neighbours on Screen with Ewa Mazierska and Lars Kristensen (2014). Her research interests include spatial representations in Estonian cinema, histories of Eastern European science fiction film and reflections of neoliberalism in recent Estonian cinema.