Director – Jiří Trnka – 1965 – Czechoslovakia – Cert. PG – 18m
*****
A potter’s quiet life is interrupted by a giant hand which wants him to remake his pots in its image – on the Blu-ray Jiří Trnka: Puppet Master, released in the UK on Monday, August 10th
He sleeps peacefully on his simple bed in his room. We hear footsteps as we move around the room – is someone watching him? If so, he’s blissfully unaware of the fact. In the centre of the room is a potter’s wheel. On either side of the door are numerous pots. In the corner, a mirror; below it, a watering can on a little table. Moving towards his bed, we pass a window with a flower in a pot on the window’s interior sill.
He gets up, does some basic exercises, checks his tongue in the mirror, waters the plant on the window sill. Birds can be heard singing. The he gets down to the business of the day: making pots on his wheel. He is absorbed. But, an interruption. A knock at the door. Nothing there.
Eventually, a giant hand pushes its way through the shuttered window, the impact knocking the plant to the floor and shattering its pot. He nevertheless treats his visitor with respect, pulling his huge, Napoleonic-style hat from beneath his bed so he can bow to it properly.
It takes his pot and, in three deft movements, turns it into an image of the hand itself: flatten, pull (producing a raised palm shape), fold (so that one finger points upwards. The potter shakes his head, remakes the pot into a pot. But the hand isn’t having it.
Thus begins a struggle between man and giant hand. He is resourceful, but he will lose. He will be turned from free (stop-motion) puppet to hand-controlled marionette: existence with strings attached. He will escape, attempt to flee, and ultimately be captured and killed.
Through it all, every time the flower is thrown to the floor, he will lovingly replace the broken plot. However, he is fighting a losing battle. After his demise, the hand soothingly caresses the flower. But it seems a fake gesture; after all, the first time we saw it, it pushed open the shutter causing the flowerpot to fall and break.
Later, it will attempt to seduce him, the five fingers clad in a net lace glove with no fingertips, turning the hand into a set of feminine legs, one of which fingers / legs points at him suggesting the space in between it and the next finger / leg.
The amiable little puppet is designed like a courtier, with a neck ruff and a distinctive, vertically long nose. Before the appearance of the hand, the puppet moves like a dancer. In many shots, we don’t see the ceiling, so when the hand enters through the window, its arm simply stretches upwards out of shot, and our brain accepts this conceit.
Yet, later, we see the ceiling and notice it looks like it has damp. And the wallpaper by the bed is torn. Curiously, this is the way the room is at the start, but our awakening hero is so carefree that the viewer doesn’t notice these details. He seems to have a vocation as a craftsman, and is happy with his lot. Only when the arrival of the hand changes the status quo to something less pleasant do we notice these details.
His final film, this short is Trnka’s sole critique of totalitarianism. His half dozen features include works based on Czech folk tales and culture, among them The Czech Year (1947) and Old Czech Legends (1953), both on the new Jiří Trnka: Puppet Master Blu-ray release, and adaptations from Hans Christian Andersen and William Shakespeare. His 15 shorts include a parody of the Hollywood Western, Song of the Prairie (1949). But The Hand was a new departure, and the Communist authorities were less than happy with it. It’s not hard to see why: Trnka sides with the honest, hard working individual who finds that that demands of the State go against his most basic instincts as a craftsman. It’s as strong a film as anything else he ever made, and provides a fitting swansong to a remarkable career.
Jiří Trnka: Puppet Master is out on Blu-ray in the UK on Monday, August 10th.
Trailer: