Columbia College Chicago
624 S. Wabash Building
6th floor, room 602
This event has passed.
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Still from Jirí Trnka's The Hand
- When
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Thursday Feb 18, 2010 (6:15pm)
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It's difficult to overstate Jirí Trinka's impact on stop-motion puppet animation, from the Brothers Quay to fellow Czech Jan Svankmajer. Today, MoCP screens some of Trnka's surreal animated shorts, including his final masterpiece, The Hand (1965). An unassuming sculptor is attempting to craft a simple pot when a giant hand intrudes upon his modest home, reshaping the artist's clay into its own image. What initially feels like proto-Mr. Bill dark slapstick quickly becomes something more political. The hand eventually takes control of the artist's television and newspaper, attaches marionette strings to his body, tosses him in a cage, and directly manipulates his work. The anti-Stalinist subtext wasn't lost on the government: this magical, 18-minute polemic was banned for nearly 20 years.
