The Zagreb School of Animation and the Unperfect Paul W. Morton A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Washington 2018 Reading Committee Gordana Crnković, Chair José Alaniz Jennifer Bean Program Authorized to Offer Degree: Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media 1 ©Copyright 2018 Paul W. Morton 2 University of Washington Abstract The Zagreb School of Animation and the Unperfect Paul W. Morton Chair of Supervisory Committee Gordana Crnković Department of Comparative Literature, Cinema and Media From 1956 until 1991, a group of animators based at the Zagreb Film studio, in the Croatian capital, produced approximately 500 shorts, including avant-garde experiments, children’s cartoons, gag shorts, and sex comedies. Like Yugoslavia itself, the Zagreb School of Animation (as the animators collectively came to be called) challenged utopian ideologies and the East-West binaries of the Cold War. Their work transformed the cartoon from a cinema of attractions, which celebrated the technology which gave it birth, into a cinema of the laborer, which celebrated the humble artisan behind the technology. Animation, historically, has been described as a seamless marriage between mankind’s lost childhood, embodied by anthropomorphized animals, and techno-modernity. The Zagreb School, however, emphasized human fallibility and accepted technical mistakes, such as a stray line in a frame, or an imperfectly synchronized connection between sound and movement. Rather than the confident Soviet new man, the defining character type of the Zagreb School was the “small man.” This dissertation uses the “small man” to understand how the Zagreb School 3 struggled with the major preoccupations of post-World War II Yugoslavia: fears of nuclear annihilation, environmental collapse, and the disorientations of urbanization. It explores how the Zagreb School re-imagined the animator as a figure who intentionally reveals the make-do nature of his working methods and the flaws of his finished project – hence the use of the term “unperfect” instead of “imperfect.” This dissertation involves a close formalist study of approximately twenty Zagreb School films, most of which are not currently in distribution. It draws on personal interviews conducted with surviving members of the studio as well as interviews conducted by other scholars, original Croatian-language scholarship, contemporary accounts of the studio and studio documents collected in a four-volume set published between 1978 and 1986. It draws on recent scholarship on the culture of the former Yugoslavia, as well as foundational texts in animation studies, particularly work focused on films from the US, the Soviet Union, and Canada. This dissertation begins with a capsule history of the Zagreb School, from its pre-history in 1922 and reaching forward into the 1960s and ’70s. It situates the Zagreb School within the culture of workers’ self-management, the policy of the former Yugoslavia which hoped to provide labor autonomy. It then argues that the small man is a self-portrait of the laborers in the Zagreb Film studio and explores how the small man attempts to achieve the ideal of unperfection. It explores how the Zagreb School situates the small man as a citizen of the polis at a time when Yugoslavia was rapidly urbanizing. It then turns towards the Zagreb School’s examination of war, and argues that the animators employ so-called “limited animation” to reinvent violence in the animation medium. It will argue that its conception of violence is part of a broader project to remember the traumas of World War II and warn of future conflicts and the specter of nuclear annihilation. 4 A humanist socialism defined the philosophies of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia. Accordingly, the animators of the Zagreb School sought not to technologize the human, but rather to humanize technology. 5 Acknowledgements I would first like to thank my friends and colleagues at the University of Washington. Gordana Crnković, the chair of my dissertation committee, was an invaluable resource and meticulous reader. No sheep could have asked for a better shepherd. José Alaniz and Jennifer Bean served as my official advisors and pushed me down paths I never knew existed. I also benefited from informal hallway chats and emails with Eric Ames, Yomi Braester, Jane Brown, Marshall Brown, Stephen Groening, Sudhir Mahadevan, Raimonda Modiano, James Tweedie, and Shawn Wong. My fellow graduate students provided an amazing support system: Douglas Anderson, Ellen Chang, Bronson Dowd, Bob Hodges, Matthew Howard, Sam Hushagen, Yuta Kaminshi, Ungsan Kim, Rachel Kunert-Graf, Belinda Le, Alex McCauley, Katherine Morrow, Sarah Ross, Kristin Seifert, Slaven Svetinović, Zach Tavlin, and Milan Vidaković. I spent two extended periods in Zagreb, first in the summer of 2014 and then in the winter of 2017, during which I benefited from the generosity of Croatia’s great artists and scholars. First and foremost, I must thank Sanja Borčić of Zagreb Film, who arranged interviews with the Zagreb School’s living auteurs and arranged for me to receive for free several hundred Zagreb School films which are not currently in distribution. I also thank Vinko Brešan, Tomislav Gregl, Ibrahim Hromalić, and Julia Martinović, also of Zagreb Film. I thank film scholars and researchers Nikica Gilić, Darko Masnec, Daniel Rafaelić, Leon Rizmaul, and Hrvoje Turković. Daria Blažević and Nikolina Bogdanović assisted me in interviews. I also thank Margit Atenauer, Igor Bezinović, Tomislav Domes, Vesna Dovniković, Žeyka Kolveshi, Bojan Krištofić, Veljko Krulčić, Kristina Nosković, Luka Ostojić, Ivana Pipal, Marijana Rimanić, and Daniel Šuljić. I especially thank the surviving members of the Zagreb School who agreed to sit 6 for interviews: Zlatko Bourek, Borivoj Dovnković, a.k.a. Bordo, Joško Marušić, Vatroslav Mimica, Pavao Štalter, and Krešimir Zimonić. My fellow animation scholars have guided me through this process, either by email or in person at conferences: Suzanne Buchan, Scott Bukatman, Nea Ehrlich, Eric Herhuth, Misha Mihailova, Nicholas Miller, Ryan Pierson, Shira Segal, and Kirsten Moana Thompson. I would like to take this moment to acknowledge the late Hannah Frank whose work serves as the theoretical grounding for this dissertation. That she was one of the great minds of her generation, not only in animation studies, but in film studies, and not only in film studies, but in the humanities, makes one forget that she was also a loving teacher and a dear friend to all. My fellow scholars of the former Yugoslavia reoriented my perspective when I least expected it: Kevin Kenjar, Vladimir Kulić, Brigitte Le Normand, and Andrew Wachtel. In 2007-2008, I enjoyed a Fulbright fellowship in Hungary, where I researched Pannonia Film. Some of that research appears in this dissertation. While in Budapest, I received invaluable help from Tamás Böhm, Huba Brückner, Szilvia Fináli, Anna Ida Orosz, Márton Orosz, and Katalin Szlaukó. I thank everyone who patiently taught me BCMS (Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian), particularly Biljana Novković Adžaip, Nikolina Bogdanović, Ljiljana Durašković, Nataša Gačević, Mirela Hrnic, Frane Karabatić, Mirzana Pašić Kodrić, and Sanjin Kodrić. I thank my family, my fan base: Allen Small, Trudi Small, Michael Small, Kimberly Small, Steve Markovitz, Karen McAninch, Emily Markovitz, and Amanda Markovitz. I thank my best friend and brother David Morton, a wonderful interlocutor and the finest advisor anyone 7 could have. And most of all, I thank my mother Joan Morton, the grandest woman I have ever known. 8 Table of Contents Introduction: Reading the Zagreb School of Animation…………………………………..10 Chapter 1: A Short History of the Zagreb School of Animation………………………….26 Chapter 2: UnPerfecting the Body…………………………..………………………………58 Chapter 3: Inventing the City, Inventing “City”………………………………………….104 Chapter 4: Inventing Violence, Iventing Death, Inventing War…………………………141 Conclusion: Limited Animation, the Jump Cut, and the Zagreb School...……………...181 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………...188 9 Introduction Reading the Zagreb School of Animation From the 1950s to the early 1990s, a group of animators in Zagreb, the capital of Croatia and the second largest city in Yugoslavia, produced approximately five hundred films. They made children’s cartoons, gag films, avant-garde experiments, and sex comedies. They mostly worked with cel animation. Some experimented with cut-outs, linocut, and puppetry. The eighteen “auteurs” in the studio — all men — included trained architects, comics creators, fine artists, live-action feature film directors, and documentarians. In 1959, the French critic Georges Sadoul dubbed the group the Zagreb School of Animation, either as a nod to the name of the studio where they worked — Zagreb Film — or to the city where they lived. The Zagreb School does not have a uniform house style but rather a shared approach. Their subjects are universal: hyper-industrialization, technology, nuclear annihilation, urban alienation, and mass mobilization, as well as cosmopolitanism, the thin line between elite and mass culture, childhood, friendship, blue humor, gender, and sex. Like several independent animators and experimental filmmakers in the U.S. in the 1960s and ’70s, the Zagreb School animators reveal the process of production in their films, primarily by embracing a lack of perfection. The hand of the animator is often apparent.