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osprey_archerWhile I was in Boston I forced skygiants and genarti to watch the first episode of Cheburashka, which led to a discussion of Soviet animation, which led to an admission that I’ve been meaning to read more about the topic for years and never have… which ended in putting a hold on Maya Balakirsky Katz’s Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation, as it’s the only Soviet animation book my library owns.
The prose is very readable (not always a given in film or literary criticism), although when I was familiar with the animation in question I often had doubts about Katz’s interpretations. For instance, in discussing the Cheburashka series (produced by a mostly Jewish creative team), Katz suggests that Cheburashka’s best friend Crocodile Gena “is a sell-out: an old Party Jew who walks around with a pipe dangling from his mouth but without a pair of pants to show for all his compromises.”
I mean, sure, MAYBE Gena’s red coat is a sign that he’s an old Bolshevik, and MAYBE “Crocodile Gena’s African roots speak to his status as a member of the ancient Hebrew race,” and MAYBE when Gena offers to make of list of all the lonely people who want to make friends this is a reference to KGB references making up lists of all the people who visit Jewish gathering places…
Or MAYBE Crocodile Gena is simply Cheburashka’s best friend, a kind-hearted crocodile who works at a zoo! Just perhaps.
However, the book did furnish an excellent list of films to watch, many of which are available on Youtube. I watched:
Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys, the first Soviet animated film, from 1924. (Vertov is best known for the documentary Man with a Movie Camera.) It really feels like a Soviet political cartoon brought to life: a worker and a farmer meld together into one terrifying Janus-faced creature and defeat a bourgeois capitalist who looks like the Monopoly man!
Ivan Ivanov-Vano’s Black and White, a 1932 animated short that was the only remnant of a larger project to make a film about American race relations. There were so few Black actors in the Soviet Union that a delegation of twenty-two Harlem Renaissance intellectuals crossed the sea to star in the film, including Langston Hughes, who cried when he read the script, because “the writer meant well, but knew so little about his subject, and the result was a pathetic hodgepodge of good intentions and faulty facts…”
Hughes informed the Soviets they would need to start over and write a new script, which scuppered the project, except for this animated short. Most of Hughes’ criticisms of the full-length film script seem to apply to the short, too.
Boris Stepantsev’s The Pioneer’s Violin, a wordless seven-minute short in which a grinning Nazi tank driver demands that a Young Pioneer play a German folksong on his violin… and the Young Pioneer responds by playing the Internationale, for which he is gunned down. The film is inspired by a true story of a Jewish boy, Avram “Musya” Pinkenzon, who really was a Pioneer and whose defiance was celebrated as a Pioneer story. (Pioneer Heroes were a whole Soviet genre.) The screenwriter was Jewish, and Katz argues that Stepantsev (although probably not Jewish) directed the short in ways that suggest the nameless Pioneer’s Jewish identity. This is a stronger argument than Crocodile Gena, Old Bolshevik, although it may be one of those things that you only see if you are looking for it?
The film is stunning: an incredible depiction of the shift from abject terror to enraged defiance. I’ve included a link in case anyone wants to watch it.
skygiants and genarti to watch the first episode of Cheburashka, which led to a discussion of Soviet animation, which led to an admission that I’ve been meaning to read more about the topic for years and never have… which ended in putting a hold on Maya Balakirsky Katz’s Drawing the Iron Curtain: Jews and the Golden Age of Soviet Animation, as it’s the only Soviet animation book my library owns.The prose is very readable (not always a given in film or literary criticism), although when I was familiar with the animation in question I often had doubts about Katz’s interpretations. For instance, in discussing the Cheburashka series (produced by a mostly Jewish creative team), Katz suggests that Cheburashka’s best friend Crocodile Gena “is a sell-out: an old Party Jew who walks around with a pipe dangling from his mouth but without a pair of pants to show for all his compromises.”
I mean, sure, MAYBE Gena’s red coat is a sign that he’s an old Bolshevik, and MAYBE “Crocodile Gena’s African roots speak to his status as a member of the ancient Hebrew race,” and MAYBE when Gena offers to make of list of all the lonely people who want to make friends this is a reference to KGB references making up lists of all the people who visit Jewish gathering places…
Or MAYBE Crocodile Gena is simply Cheburashka’s best friend, a kind-hearted crocodile who works at a zoo! Just perhaps.
However, the book did furnish an excellent list of films to watch, many of which are available on Youtube. I watched:
Dziga Vertov’s Soviet Toys, the first Soviet animated film, from 1924. (Vertov is best known for the documentary Man with a Movie Camera.) It really feels like a Soviet political cartoon brought to life: a worker and a farmer meld together into one terrifying Janus-faced creature and defeat a bourgeois capitalist who looks like the Monopoly man!
Ivan Ivanov-Vano’s Black and White, a 1932 animated short that was the only remnant of a larger project to make a film about American race relations. There were so few Black actors in the Soviet Union that a delegation of twenty-two Harlem Renaissance intellectuals crossed the sea to star in the film, including Langston Hughes, who cried when he read the script, because “the writer meant well, but knew so little about his subject, and the result was a pathetic hodgepodge of good intentions and faulty facts…”
Hughes informed the Soviets they would need to start over and write a new script, which scuppered the project, except for this animated short. Most of Hughes’ criticisms of the full-length film script seem to apply to the short, too.
Boris Stepantsev’s The Pioneer’s Violin, a wordless seven-minute short in which a grinning Nazi tank driver demands that a Young Pioneer play a German folksong on his violin… and the Young Pioneer responds by playing the Internationale, for which he is gunned down. The film is inspired by a true story of a Jewish boy, Avram “Musya” Pinkenzon, who really was a Pioneer and whose defiance was celebrated as a Pioneer story. (Pioneer Heroes were a whole Soviet genre.) The screenwriter was Jewish, and Katz argues that Stepantsev (although probably not Jewish) directed the short in ways that suggest the nameless Pioneer’s Jewish identity. This is a stronger argument than Crocodile Gena, Old Bolshevik, although it may be one of those things that you only see if you are looking for it?
The film is stunning: an incredible depiction of the shift from abject terror to enraged defiance. I’ve included a link in case anyone wants to watch it.
