• Cybernetic Grandma

  • Archangel Gabriel and Mistress Goose



Trnka’s Sixties Masterworks



BAMPFA Student Committee Pick

  • Headshot of middle-aged man wearing glasses in blue shirt, animator Jan Pinkava
    Introduction
    Jan Pinkava

    Jan Pinkava is creative director of Google Spotlight Stories and an Academy Award–winning director; his career in animation spans a quarter century, including thirteen years at Pixar, where he wrote and directed the short film Geri’s Game and was the original creator of Ratatouille.

By the 1960s, at the height of his powers, Trnka turned his attention away from fables and fairy tales and toward more pointed allegories and satires. Playfully probing works like Passion and Cybernetic Grandma (a surrealist look at a space-age future) are arguably the short-form, animated precursors to the Czech New Wave features that would follow a few years later. But Trnka’s 1965 masterwork The Hand stands on its own, a devastatingly bleak (and hilarious) look at an artist always shadowed and controlled by the hand of power, one that never lets go. It was to be his last film.

—Jason Sanders

Films in this Screening

Passion
(Vášeň)
(Obsession)

Jiří Trnka, Czechoslovakia, 1962

FILM DETAILS 
Language
  • No linguistic content
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 9 mins
source
  • Czech National Film Archive

Cybernetic Grandma
(Kybernetická babička)

Jiří Trnka, Czechoslovakia, 1962

FILM DETAILS 
Language
  • Czech
  • with English subtitles
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 28 mins
source
  • Czech National Film Archive

Archangel Gabriel and Mistress Goose
(Archanděl Gabriel a paní Husa)

Jiří Trnka, Czechoslovakia, 1964

FILM DETAILS 
Language
  • No dialogue
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 29 mins

The Hand
(Ruka)

Jiří Trnka, Czechoslovakia, 1965

FILM DETAILS 
Language
  • No dialogue
Print Info
  • Color
  • DCP
  • 18 mins
source
  • Czech National Film Archive