Dinosaurs, Moles and Cowboys: Late Communist Youth Media

Aniko Imre Dinosaurs, Moles and Cowboys: Late Communist Youth Media

INTRODUCTION borders; they were certainly not exported to the West. They were enjoyed primarily by national What had been known as the cinema of Eastern audiences—and enjoyed a great deal, much Europe has faded into oblivion along with the more than high cultural opuses. But many, such world of communism. We know the reasons: as East German Westerns or children’s televi- the cinema of dissidence, spearheaded by sion programmes, were produced in regional award-winning films such as Man of Marble or European collaboration and distributed and (Człowiek z marmuru, 1977) and Mephisto viewed in most Soviet satellite countries. A (1981), was produced and framed by the Cold shared television infrastructure, enabled by its War, a period that, to my students on both sides own satellite, and enhanced with the establish- of the Atlantic, appears to be a prehistoric age ment of Intersputnik in 1971,1 greatly contrib- when the world was in black and white. But we uted to this flow of content. In an era of con- are not here to mourn or resurrect the great vergence, the study of the forgotten cinemas of dinosaurs of heroic anti-communist resis- Eastern Europe also needs to include the study tance and existential angst. There is no doubt, of socialist television. Besides issues of aesthet- of course, that we need to resist the double ics and (national) politics, we are also obliged dangers of amnesia and nostalgia, which lurk to extend our inquiry to the role of technology in around ełorts to recover forgotten memories circulating and censoring content, and to issues of the communist period in post-communist of audiences, reception and pleasure. These ar- cultures, buried in globally mediated flows of eas have been as intensely ignored up to now in consumer fantasies and nationalistic campaigns studies of East European film as indigenous art to ‘confiscate’ memories (Ugresic 1996). The films were by national audiences. ełort to recover forgotten socialist cinemas, While relatively much attention has been films and film-makers has to take into account paid to feature films of the arthouse variety and, both the Cold War legacies of categorisation to a lesser extent, documentaries, the work of and selection and the entertainment-centred the unique and productive animation studios of media economy of an accelerating, increasingly socialist Eastern Europe can now be re-discov- imposing present. We need not so much another ered and re-evaluated. This is an especially com- truth-seeking mission but, rather, multiple re- pelling task in an era of increasing digitalisation, framing missions, which take seriously the vari- when animation is becoming indispensable to ous, inevitably nostalgic and amnesiac relations film-making; and the boundaries between the to the films of the past. traditional turfs of live action and animation are The Via Transversa conference gave us blurred. Rediscovering animation goes hand in one of the few important opportunities to engage hand with the need to challenge the hierarchical the forgotten cinemas of Eastern Europe in new relations between children’s and adult’s media ways. These new ways should complement but culture. The post-Wall generations are relent- also challenge the selective Western attention lessly targeted by and the most susceptible to to East European high modernist culture and its the consumerist attractions of global children’s vanguard oppositional film-makers, and should media. For their parents’ generation, the memo- confront local Eurocentric, nationalistic invest- ries of Little Mole (Krtek, 1957Л2000) and ments in preferring and supporting some regis- other popular figures are one of the primary ways ters of culture and ignoring or despising others. of collectively remembering their childhood. Now we can and should refocus on the neglected Rather than allowing it to sink into oblivion or production and consumption of popular films all leaving it to the whims of consumerist nostalgia, through the socialist period: films that appro- priated Hollywood generic formulas with local 1 A satellite communications service organisation among inflections; and that catered to desires much less the USSR and Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, easily contained by Soviet regimes than high- Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Mongolia and Cuba, one of the first on the globe, now boasting about 40 member states cultural dissidence. Many communist com- and a joint venture with Lockheed Martin, with headquarters edies, musicals and melodramas never crossed in London and Moscow.

125 children’s films and television programmes of MOLE VS. DINOSAUR: the socialist era constitute some of the most rel- LATE COMMUNIST evant areas of concern, to be studied in a com- CHILDREN’S MEDIA parative, transnational context. While ethnographic studies of children’s media STUDYING GLOBAL habits in 1970sЛ1980s communist countries CHILDREN’S CULTURE IN are not available, I have yet to talk to an East THE DIGITAL AGE European over five who is not familiar with Krtek, the ‘Little Mole’, created by Czech ani- Most accounts of children’s media culture today mator Zdenňk Miler in 1956, with a continued focus on the United States, Western Europe production of episodes from 1963 to 2000. The and Japan as representatives of a global digital protagonist won himself enormous popularity culture that is increasingly integrated. While in most East European countries, as well as gestures are routinely made towards a digital in Germany, Austria and China. ‘Krtek’ yields divide, a barrier beyond which the rest of the 225 hits on YouTube; and a simple Google world resides, the assumption is that technolog- search turns up fan sites in German, Japanese ically advanced cultures represent the inevitable and most East European languages. Thanks future towards which the rest of the world is to the ancillary marketing of stułed animals, rushing. Descriptions and theories of children’s books, DVDs, posters, toys and T-shirts, one media culture are written from and about a state bumps into Little Mole virtually anywhere in of ałairs that knows no alternatives to a fully the region. A short case study of late communist commercialised children’s media. children’s television centred around this most However, most adult post-Soviet citizens popular series should shed comparative light on have vivid memories of an alternative media the role of children’s media in post-communist ecology, where children’s culture was domi- nostalgia, and the potential importance of both nated by national politics and where commercial for theorising children’s media in a global con- concerns played a negligible role. These memo- text today. ries constitute a crucial component of individual Films made for children during the com- and collective cultural identities and influence munist period showed great aesthetic diversity visions for the future. The nostalgia shared by and innovation. Animation received a potent these cultures has also passed on these memo- boost from the 1960s onwards, when adult ries to post-communist generations. In addi- animation became a site of stylistic and ideo- tion, while digital advancement is seen as key logical experimentation, concentrated around to catching up with Europe and the rest of the major animation studios in Prague, Krakow, world, there is a considerable amount of resis- Budapest and Zagreb (Lendvai 1998; Holloway tance to the technologisation and commerciali- 1983). Most of the short and, later, feature- sation of children’s media culture across the length films produced during communism were educational spectrum and the media. Whereas populated by creatures much smaller than di- many of the smells, tastes and sights of com- nosaurs: small animals from nearby forests and munism are only recoverable through individual waters, such as rabbits, hedgehogs, frogs and corporeal memories, most children’s films and foxes, or creatures from folk tales and national television programmes have been kept in circu- legends. As Svetlana Boym notes: ‘After the lation by the nostalgia wave and also as an al- dictatorship the subversive cultural tendency is ternative to Disney and other global commercial to miniaturize, not aggrandize.’ In the Soviet media for children. Union, after the collapse of Stalinism, children’s monsters were miniature, not gigantic (Boym 2001: 39). W. J. T. Mitchell cites Jurassic Park (1993) to discuss the function of the dinosaur image in terms of scale: it is a film in which

126 ‘mass media, massive animals, mass destruc- production and consumption, imposing this tion, mass consumption, and mass resurrection newly-found wisdom on the newly ‘wasteful’ from the dead... all converge in the ‘anima- Third World. While communist regimes hardly tion’ of the dinosaur.’ (Mitchell 1998: 63.) By proved to be sustainable in an economic sense, contrast, it is hard to imagine a successful ani- the approach to the environment as an essential mated character on American children’s screens resource for survival is a message to be taken as unspectacular as the Little Mole and his to heart by the late-capitalist West as well as by friends, Rabbit and Hedgehog. These cartoons post-communist Eastern Europe, increasingly are characteristically economical, in aesthet- permeated by the imported consumer ideology ics and content alike. Zdenňk wanted his Little that condones and even encourages waste. Mole tales to cross borders with ease. For this Other episodes are even more openly criti- reason, after the first, narrated episode, in sub- cal of Stalinist bureaucratic modernity and mass sequent ones he eclipsed dialogue altogether, consumerism alike, prefiguring the current glo- including only exclamations and other noises. bal worry about the ecological impact of mass The simple stop-motion, hand-drawn cartoons consumerism. The episode ‘Mole in the dream’ call for an old-fashioned spectatorial sensibility (‘Krtek ve snu’, 1984) evokes the dystopia of the and evoke a slower, smaller, more contempla- loss of electricity. A man survives the winter in tive world. The characters’ power does not come his snowed-in house only with the help of the from smart talk, physical abilities, frenzied Pixar unbreakable endurance and spirit of the Mole motion or simple ‘cuteness’. Rather, paradig- and his little friends, the real East Europeans. matically, one roots for them because of their Yet another episode, ‘Mole in the city’ (‘Krtek ability to survive despite the odds. Their little ve mňstň’, 1982), foreshadows environmental lives in the shadows of greater enemies, such as disaster: it begins with an army of machines people and machines, are precarious. But they relentlessly levelling the entire forest to make appreciate the smallest pleasures, taking dis- room for a row of soulless, identical housing appointment with patience and good humour. blocks. All is left is a tree stump, on which They are not troubled by oversized ambitions, Mole, Rabbit and Hedgehog huddle together. the perpetual promise of growing big or making The bureaucrats try to compensate for the ani- it big. Unlike Disney or most other American mals’ loss by assigning them an inflatable for- cartoons, which usually single out a character est in an oеce. The three friends happily settle as the centre of identification and ałord it the even for this until they accidentally puncture it. dominant point of view, Little Mole is more of a They are politically powerless against socialist narrative tool to deliver an allegorical message bureaucracy and make the best of grotesquely about the entire community’s fate. inadequate living conditions. In the first and probably most memorable If, as Theodor W. Adorno argues, dino- episode, ‘How the Mole got his pants’ (‘Jak saurs stand for the monstrous, totalitarian state krtek ke kalhotkám pýiОel’) released in 1957, apparatus and patriarchy (Mitchell 1998: 19), the Little Mole, setting the horizon of the so- the bulldozers, mechanised tools of the mass cialist citizen’s wishes appropriately humble, destruction of the environment, as well as their yearns for overalls with big pockets. The entire operators, embodied by the chief bureaucrat on forest comes to his aid, each animal lending top of the food chain, fulfil the role of dinosaurs. useful skills that turn flax into fabric, which is Unlike the monsters of Jurassic Park, however, then cut and sewn into an attractive pair of over- the menace of bulldozers and bureaucrats is all alls. The satisfaction is immense as the mole too real and thus fails to fascinate. The child- parades around in his home-produced clothes. adult viewer of these fairy-tales is expected The episode provides a characteristic and, in to identify with the displaced and oppressed retrospect, ironic lesson in sustainability, given underground animal’s point of view. The mon- the zeal with which public opinion and, to some sters are represented as purely external, alien, extent, policy in the United States has recently imposed. This is diłerent from the point of view begun to urge a shift to sustainable means of constructed by dinosaur and other monster

127 tales, which actively invite identification with and cognitive state associated with childhood. the dinosaur at the same time as they evoke a Contrasting the culture of the mole with the sense of ecological horror and guilt over caus- culture of the dinosaur allows us to begin to ing extinction, which is inscribed into American address important historical diłerences that in- children’s positions within the global economy form East European media for children. (Willis 1999: 193). However, there are also ways in which Little Mole could be most didactically late communist cultures were not essentially contrasted to a popular dinosaur series for diłerent from capitalist ones when it came to young children, a kind of ‘Jurassic Park Jr.’, phantasmatic engagements with popular media produced by Steven Spielberg: The Land Be- material, defying the sharp and hierarchical dif- fore Time (since 1988). The fluidly animated ferences between children’s and adult’s, as well anthropomorphic vegetarian dinosaur kids of as high and low cultures. While Little Mole and The Land Before Time are in perpetual danger many other animated tales were made specifi- from the elements and the real baddies, the cally for a young audience, American Western meat-eaters. The centre of the youth gang and films, shown on television across the region, the point of identification is the big-eyed orphan constituted a bridge between adults’ and chil- boy sauropod Little Foot. In part VI: The Secret dren’s media cultures under communism. Far of Saurus Rock (dir. Charles Grosvenor, 1998), from being innocent entertainment, however, Little Foot finds a father-substitute role model imported and locally produced Westerns alike in The Lone Dinosaur, a warrior longneck with performed a complicated function for local na- a scar, who comes to the community’s rescue in tional identities, creating avenues to articulate a heroic battle against predators, says little, and and experience the oеcially silenced relations then wonders oł into the sunset. Little Foot’s towards Europe and its imperial others (uncom- and, by implication, the spectator boys’, desire fortably identifying with both), and a similarly is to grow up to be a tough, masculine hero just ambivalent relationship with America and its like him, whose life is unfettered by longings admired-despised national culture—a series and belongings and entirely devoted to fulfilling of identifications that Christian Feest, in the his duty of fighting evil. German context, calls ‘cultural transvestism’ The dinosaur’s intimate connection with (Feest 2002: 31). East European Westerns ap- American national mythology, and the overlap- propriated in ambivalent ways the aesthetic and ping histories of bone and gold rushes in the ideological features of a genre that is at once heroic period of Western expansion on which ‘quintessentially American’, according to André Western narratives draw makes The Secret of Bazin (1971), and well-adaptable to depictions Saurus Rock, a dinosaur Western, a perfectly of grand struggles elsewhere. The Western’s logical combination. Given this convergence in simple narrative and ideological structure also the support of a specifically American kind of makes it rather cartoonish, lending itself to nationalism, a penchant for violence and the as- animation. sertion of tough masculinity, one would logically assume that Westerns were just as unwelcome THE WESTERN AS in communist Eastern Europe as dinosaurs A PARADIGM OF (EAST) EUROPEAN were. Just the opposite is true, however. YOUTH ENTERTAINMENT In the last section of this paper, I would like to highlight some of the outstanding results The fascination with the American West and its of domesticating Westerns in late communist near-mythical inhabitants has a long European cultures. Little Mole, the border-crossing East history. In the Europe of the late 19th and early European animated series for children who are 20th centuries, Western stories and films con- expected to develop a mature political constituted part of a large colonial intertext, along sciousness, is in some ways the opposite of the with imperial adventure tales that depicted ‘big, fierce and extinct’ qualities of the dinosaur, white men’s encounters with the exotic and designed to impress adults into an emotional savage people and animals of Africa, Asia and

128 Latin America. These colonial representations The unexamined Orientalism of much of what were building blocks that allowed imperial Eu- is considered ‘folk’ children’s culture in Hun- rope to constitute itself ‘on the backs of equally gary, for instance—including songs, legends, constructed others’ (Stam, Spence 1976: 636). stories and nursery rhymes, the earliest bits of Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue that the language through which young citizens are in- cinema, and later television, continued the terpellated—is saturated with racist depictions project of nationalism that Benedict Anderson of Turks and, by extension, Muslims, inherited attributes to print capitalism (see Anderson from the Ottoman Empire. Everyday language 1991: 44). ‘The cinema, the world’s storyteller is saturated with racist stereotypes of the Roma. par excellence, was ideally suited to relay pro- One can argue that embracing the West- jected narratives of nations and empires.’ (Sho- ern’s cartoon-level identities is part and parcel hat, Stam 1996: 153.) In addition to securing of such nationalistic and imperialistic identity white supremacist viewing positions, as Shohat games. Jyotsna Kapur claims that Disney’s and Stam argue, the colonial adventure story Pocahontas (1995), along with many other of imperial cinema provided a psychic Lebens- popular representations of Indians in American raum for the enlarged boy subject, ‘for the play (and, by extension, global) children’s culture of the virile spectatorial imagination’ (Shohat, exemplifies the commodification of history with- Stam 1996: 153). in what Fredric Jameson calls the postmodern The Western, a genre within what we can condition. According to Jürgen Habermas, this call imperial cinema, has been a chief, if rarely condition is characterised by a loss of history acknowledged element of European cultural na- and utopian ideals, where the past is conjured tionalisms. This implies that the widespread fas- up as a series of costumes or styles—‘for in- cination with the discoveries in the New World, stance, as a kind of game between cowboys and the expansion to the Wild West, and encounters Indians—with no allusion to the material con- between Europeans and Native Americans flicts that characterize earlier times and ours.’ should also be considered in a cross-cultural (Kapur 2005: 74.) She faults consumer culture European, if not global context. This also means for the ‘cannibalization of history’, for ‘reduc- that East European engagements with these ing [history] to a costume party’. As a result, American adventure stories should not be ex- the dead is erased from memory not because of empted from the same postcolonial, and gen- a totalitarian regime but by the mind-numbing dered critique to which the Western genre has tyranny of the market’s demand that things been subjected in the United States and impe- should not be taken too seriously (Kapur 2005: rial adventure stories in Western Europe. 75). Disney used the concept of children’s play Post-communist intellectuals are rightly in this way to defend itself from accusations of frustrated by the general infantilisation of cul- falsifying history on multiple accounts in its ture—about the ‘cartoon-level narratives and seriously airbrushed and romanticised version identities’ to which Disney, the commercialisa- of the encounter between the Indian maiden tion of television, the use of digital edutainment Pocahontas and the white soldier John Smith. techniques at school and of computer games Play equals entertainment here, which teaches after school have reduced practically all spheres children ‘an early lesson in accepting the tyran- of daily life. Their nostalgia for the abstract nical demand of the entertainment industry that aesthetic and allegorical charge of Little Mole we must enter its halls with our brains turned and other ‘valuable’ kinds of children’s enter- oł’ (Kapur 2005: 82). tainment is understandable. At the same time, there is a general amnesia about an entire reg- To use the concept of children’s play to de- ister of communist and pre-communist popular fend the film is to agree to Disney’s rein- cultures that blatantly and uncritically incor- vention of play as entertainment and thus porates racist and imperialistic ideologies. The reduce it from a site of utopian thinking cultural transvestism facilitated by Westerns to a site of consuming market-produced shows only the tip of the iceberg in this regard. commodities. This is a serious reduction of

129 the symbolic value of childhood. Of course young pioneers to Westerns and perpetuated an seriousness is hardly a desirable quality unchecked fascination with the binary universe in the idealized consumer in late capital- of the Wild West. ism. In an economy run on debt, the adult Another important reason why Westerns consumer too is drawn in the image of could nourish identification with the Ameri- the child—impulsive, seeking immediate can West in the face of the widespread oеcial gratification, and playfully consuming toys rhetoric of anti-capitalism as well as with local such as computers and cars. [---] It thus nationalisms in the face of oеcial rhetoric about makes a pygmy of the adult at the same international communist brotherhood was that time as it empties childhood of its distinc- Westerns were not supposed to be taken as tion as a place from which another world seriously as contemporary adult American film can be imagined. (Kapur 2005: 82.) dramas were. May’s and Cooper’s novels were distributed as children’s or juvenile literature I argue then that while dinosaurs had been com- along with similar boys’ adventure stories by pletely identified with American imperialism and classic national and regional authors (e.g. Fer- commodity culture and thus repudiated, the rac- enc Molnár’s Pál Street Boys (A Pál utcai fiúk, ist fascination with the noble savage that infused 1906)), an international favourite among boy- Westerns through the communist period and bonding stories), adolescent adventure tales remains a crucial register of popular culture has about boys conquering nature, overtly propa- functioned as an unspoken vehicle to emulate gandistic novels and films about heroic boy the white supremacist ideals of European impe- groups, often in wartime contexts (e.g. Arkady rialism. This is the other side of the coin of high Gaidar’s Timur and His Platoon (Тимур и его cultural pessimism about the America-led com- команда, 1940)), war films and partisan films modification of children’s and adults’ culture: (e.g. Walter Defends Sarajevo (Valter brani the high-brow criticism leaves intact the imperi- Sarajevo, 1972)) and historical novels and alist playground, the psychic Lebensraum of the films that evoked selected and glorified histori- masculine and white supremacist imagination, cal events from the national and European past, which East European cultures had preserved. particularly from the Ottoman occupation (e.g. Christian Feest locates a massive minor Géza Gárdonyi’s The Stars of Eger (Egri csil- literature of Indian fascination in Europe. In lagok, 1899)). This loose genre of films about German alone, he counts about a thousand boys and men fighting and conquering, many of titles published between 1875 and 1900. Karl which were literary adaptations, constituted a May’s Indian stories, favourites across East- television edutainment of sorts, in front of which ern and Central Europe, would be unthinkable the entire family could curl up. without this large and unexplored intertext Children’s media, especially animated (Feest 2002). In the Central and Eastern part of films, often drew on the mythical themes of Europe, where modern empires remained rather the Western: in an episode of Bolek and Lolek static and uninterested in imperial ventures (Bolek i Lolek, 1963Л1986), the eponymous outside the continent, Western stories about pair of popular cartoon boys, originally from the frontier played a special role in solidifying Poland, stop on the Wild West between a trip to nationalistic sentiment. During the socialist the Moon, an adventure in Argentina, a hike on period, when the same populations were pushed the cliłs of the Kilimanjaro, time travel to the outside the continent and locked into an ideo- ‘Golden City of the Inca’, and the exploration logical ghetto, Westerns functioned as screens of the North Pole. Since looking from Eastern onto which to project compensatory desires for Europe every location is equally mythical, de- full European-ness, manifest in the images of void of the baggage of the actual histories of untainted whiteness and unquestionable mas- imperialism, they can be cowboys in Texas as culinity that Westerns ołered. James Fenimore much as visitors to an ancient Maya city. At Cooper’s and Karl May’s novels, supported by the beginning of each episode, the boys spin a state book publishing industries, introduced globe, literally holding the world in their hands

130 in the wish-fulfilling, hand-drawn and sanitised It seems that the stripped-down encoun- universe of socialist children’s animation. ter that the Western stages between Man and While Bolek and Lolek was made specifi- Nature lends itself well to a similarly elemental cally for children, and is successfully marketed fascination with movement, the chief feature of as children’s fare to this day, animation itself animation. The victory over wild animals in the was not primarily a children’s medium. As even course of bull fights and horse taming, which re- Little Mole shows, much of the animation pro- cur in the world of Witold Giersz, is mirrored by duced in the Soviet region carried an allegorical the taming of the animator’s material, staging a dimension of anti-communist dissent, especial- chain of self-conscious reflections on man’s in- ly following the failed anti-Soviet uprisings in tellectual struggle with the elements within the 1956 and 1968, when censorship forced many grotesquely reduced and regulated landscape of film-makers into the ‘safer’ fields of animation. socialist cultures. Jiýí Trnka, the founding figure of the Krátkř Stu- The covert discourses of the American dio in Prague, followed a long tradition of politi- Western, hidden just barely under the water, cally charged puppetry, a device of protest and to borrow the pictorial metaphor from The Lit- revolt since the 17th century (Holloway 1983: tle Western, turned the genre upon itself from 228). In 1949, he created his popular puppet the 1960s onwards to generate ironic, comic, satire The Song of the Prairie (Árie prérie, self-reflective, revisionist Westerns such as The 1948) based on Jiýí BrdeČka’s Lemonade Joe Unforgiven (1960), Blazing Saddles (1974), stories. These stories entered a regional circu- Dead Man (1995) or VeggiTales: The Ballad lation, also influencing the Yugoslav cartoon of Little Joe (2003), or Westerns geographically Cowboy Jimmie (1957) and the Polish The distanced from American nationalism such as Little Western (Mały Western, 1961); and were Sergio Leone’s spaghetti Westerns. East Eu- later adapted into a Czechoslovak feature film. ropean re-workings of the genre have typically The Little Western continues to play sustained an element of performativity, manifest with the mythical, archetypal elements of the in playful imaginative transgressions of realism, Western, mixed with those of other kinds of ad- overt parody or allegorical deployment. This is venture genres—most evident in the recurring evident in Trnka’s puppet film The Song of the treasure motif, which marries the Gold Rush Prairie, and even more so in Oldýich Lipskř’s with pirate tales. Transplanting elements of 1964 feature film Lemonade Joe or The Horse the Western into animation in Eastern Europe Opera (Limonádový Joe aneb koňská opera). created something markedly diłerent from the Both films were also scripted by Jiýí BrdeČka main course of both American animation and himself. They both take place among the cacti the Western in America. When the shadow pup- and rocks of the Southwestern desert and pay pet cowboy lifts the water to find the treasure tribute to a number of Western films; but their buried underneath, or when he uses paint from characters also resemble those of European the figure of another puppet to draw a rope, fairy-tales: the lady for whose favours two an- there is no mistaking the intention to demystify tagonists vie; the good and clean cowboy-prince frontier heroism and use the genre simulta- on a white horse, whose entrances are accom- neously to comment on the horizon of possibili- panied by lengthy songs; and the diabolical ma- ties on an East European, communist scale. gician, dressed in black, who commands a gang The very title Mały (‘Little’) Western performs of shifty-looking Mexican bandits. this function. The Western is the genre of the In actual Westerns there is no room for ef- grand: vast open landscapes, untamed wilder- feminacy; whether the cowboy is with or against ness, spectacularly dressed and poised, manly the law, he is expected to be unshaven, sweaty, men with big weapons engaged in fights to leather-covered and laconic, with a strictly con- the death for big ideals. All this takes place in trolled economy of movement and certainly no the name of the budding country’s God-given show of emotion. Lemonade Joe, the blonde manifest destiny, which justifies even genocide protagonist of the 1964 film of the same title, and the destruction of the environment. blindingly white from boots to hat, is made to

131 appear even more puppet-like than the earlier Western hybrid: a cowboy with an artistic vein, puppet film’s exuberant hero. But while the who is master of his gun and is followed around cowboy is so emotion- and expressionless that by pining girls, but for whom ‘honour’ is not he needs to be constantly beaten up and injured contingent on duels to the death; and the cow- to prove he is alive, Lemonade Joe’s appearance boy’s mission to enforce the law of the frontier remains impeccable. It is the camera that takes is perfectly consistent with the job of a travelling on the task of proving that he is made of flesh, in lemonade salesman. what is probably the most out-of-place shot in The Manichean symbolism of the film in- a Western: Joe is introduced by a disrespectful advertently comments on the racist and sexist close-up on the mouth and teeth, which borders structure of the genre. Joe’s total whiteness and on both the pornographic and the medical. Even the Goodmans’ naïve goodness are as extreme more jarring is the cut to the slightly wider shot, as the dark magic and shady intentions of the which creates the appearance of a woman’s Badmans and the whiskey consumption of their bonneted chin. men. To the extent that ‘narrative models in Joe breaks as easily into big smiles as into films are not simply reflective microcosms of song and he is as kind to people as a travelling historical processes; they are also experiential salesman. Indeed, he turns out to be one in grids or templates through which history can be the film, which further feminises his character. written and national identity created’ (Shohat, Since he sells ‘Kolaloka Lemonade’ (hence his Stam 1996: 146), we should read this fore- nickname), he joins forces with the two Good- grounding of binary symbolism as a comedic mans, young Winnifred and her father, who are ełort to demystify and mock the moral frame- on a mission against whisky consumption. Their work of oеcial Soviet ideology in the 1960s. antagonists are—naturally—the Badmans: The mockery of tough masculinity and of the Doug and his brother Horác, aka Hogofogo, the moral superiority of whiteness is most evident dark-complexioned, wicked magician. In one in the ending, where the hero, instead of riding scene, Hogofogo appears in blackface to deceive oł into the sunset alone after killing the crimi- Joe, which both accentuates and mocks the ra- nal, unites with the Badmans, as well as the cial underpinnings of the dialectic between hero bad girl, Tornado Lou, in one big family. They and antihero. turn out to be brothers and sister, who were Joe is played by Karel Fiala, a Czechoslo- raised separately. The deus ex machina fusion vak operetta star. Olga Schoberová, who plays is celebrated with a new, similarly hybrid drink, Winnifred, also appeared in the West German Whiskola, which can be enjoyed by both alco- Westerns Gold-Diggers of Arkansas (Die holics and teetotallers. Goldsucher von Arkansas, 1964) and Black Most East European transplants of the Eagles of Santa Fe (Die Schwarzen Adler von Western genre fall short of the sophisticated Santa Fe, 1965), both filmed in Czechoslova- satire that foregrounds the ugly underbelly of kia (before becoming a Playboy covergirl, see nationalist ideology. Lemonade Joe is an excep- Hames 2002). Peter Hames claims that Limo- tion in this regard, rather than the rule, made nadovy Joe is ‘a tribute to an era of innocence’ specifically for a more high-brow audience, before directors like Anthony Mann, Sergio and regarded as a cult classic today. Most East Leone and Sam Peckinpah ‘turned Westerns Europeans are much more likely to be familiar into something altogether more disturbing’ with the twelve DEFA (Deutsche Film-Aktien- (Hames 2002). But I think the opposite is true: gesellschaft) Westerns produced between 1965 rather than holding on to an era of innocence and 1983 in the Babelsberg studios, as well as lost in the real West, the film is simultaneous on location in Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Ro- with if not prefigures the deconstructive turn in mania, Bulgaria, the Soviet Union and Cuba. the Western’s history, building on a rich history These East German Westerns, or Indianerfilme, of genre subversions in East European anima- were produced, distributed exhibited and en- tion. Fiala’s Joe is more like an East European joyed regionally (Gemünden 2002: 241Л242). intellectual’s wish-fulfilling fantasy, an East- They may also be the oddest Westerns in film

132 history. They were made with the approval and American, displaced Jew and Native American funding of communist states, who set out to hero. Mitių’s Balkan-ness at once ensured a appropriate an inherently capitalist, American desirable distance between Indians and Ger- genre to support the ideological mission of the man national culture (confirmed by the taboo on socialist state and to appease socialist citizens miscegenation in the DEFA narratives) and al- yearning for entertainment. Unlike Hollywood lowed various desires for the other to be articu- Westerns, or West German adaptations of Karl lated. In East German Westerns, Gojko Mitių May’s sensationalist novels made by Harald acts out fantasies of resistance fighter and anti- Reinl during the same period, whose ideological fascist guerrilla; provides a role model for young mission remained unspoken and overwhelmed citizens, and relieves older ones of responsibility by the pleasures of the genre, DEFA Westerns (Gemünden 2002: 250Л251). Mitių himself provided politically correct entertainment: they had worked on West German and Italian West- took a historical-materialist view of history; and erns before moving to East Berlin and choosing shifted the focus to a semi-scientific, anthro- to be an Indian star. He was a great role model pologically-inclined view of the Wild West, and for children, a peaceful man (on and oł-screen), from the cowboy, the universal hero of animated an anti-alcoholic, and a teen girl idol on a trans- films to the Indian (Gemünden 2002: 245). national scale. Even though East German Westerns were East and South European identities, not conceived as a way to distance the socialist pub- quite European, neither colonised nor coloniser lic from Karl May’s uncritical celebration of the but shifting ambivalently between the two, are Wild West and its noble savage, the deep syn- able to inhabit the opposite positions of the ergy among all nationalisms, which conditions Western—cowboy and Indian Л with particular national unity on processes of inter-national flexibility and vigour. The various national ver- and intra-national othering and provides the sions converge in a regional pattern that derives basic representative infrastructure of the West- from the discursive practices of Orientalism and ern genre, asserted itself despite producer Gün- imperialism. During communism, the inherent ter Karl’s belief in creating a more enlightened, nationalism of the Western provided an ‘inno- anti-capitalist Western. Soliciting identification cent’ blueprint for sustaining and confirming with the freedom struggles of humanised noble the validity of ethno-racial hierarchies without savages such as Chingachgook in fact followed having to address or take responsibility for from and fed right into the long-standing exoti- them. The alleged childlike innocence of such cisation of American Indians, whose potential collective identity games has helped to natural- point of view continued to be mediated through ise the restorative nostalgia that culminated in the white sidekicks who joined the Indian strug- violent conflicts in the post-communist region. gle for independence (all related to May’s leg- endary character, Old Shatterhand). A potential, autonomous Native American history was replaced by the film’s allegorical referent, Ger- man national history; and the Indian struggles became building blocks of a rejuvenated desire for autonomous national culture in a divided Germany (Gemünden 2002: 246). Indianerfilme became screens onto which to project a mix of phantasmatic identifications. The central figure of these identifications was the dashing and desirable Gojko Mitių from Yugoslavia, an honorary East German, whose exotic Balkan roots stood in for the exotic Indian as the most authentic substitute possible. His image unites Yugoslav partisan, model German,

133 FILMS REFERENCES S t a m, Robert; S p e n c e, Louise 1976. Colonialism, racism and representation: Black Eagles of Santa Fe (Die A n d e r s o n, Benedict 1991. Imagined An introduction.—Movies and Schwarzen Adler von Santa Fe), Communities: Reflections on the Methods: An Anthology. Ed. Bill dir. Alberto Cardone, Ernst Hofbauer. Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Nichols. Berkeley, London: University West Germany, 1965 2nd ed. London, New York: Verso of California Press, pp. 632Л649 Blazing Saddles, dir. Mel Brooks. B a z i n, André 1971. The evolution U g r e s i c, Dubravka 1996. The USA, 1974 of the Western.—What Is Cinema? confiscation of memory. Trans. Celia Vol. 2. Ed., trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: Bolek and Lolek (Bolek i Lolek), Hawkesworth.—New Left Review, University of California Press, no. 218, pp. 26Л39 written by Wтadysтaw Nehrebecki. pp. 149Л157 Poland, 1963Л1986 W i l l i s, Susan 1999. Imagining B o y m, Svetlana 2001. The Future of dinosaurs.—Girls, Boys, Books, Toys: Cowboy Jimmie, dir. DuОan Vukotių. Nostalgia. New York: Basic Books Yugoslavia, 1957 Gender in Children’s Literature and Fe e s t, Christian 2002. Germany’s Culture. Eds. Beverly Lyon Clark, Dead Man, dir. Jim Jarmusch. USA, Indians in a European perspective.— Margaret R. Higonnet. Baltimore, 1995 Germans and Indians: Fantasies, London: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 183Л195 Gold-Diggers of Arkansas (Die Encounters, Projections. Eds. Colin C. Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, Susanne Goldsucher von Arkansas), dir. Paul Zantop. Lincoln: University Martin. West Germany, 1964 of Nebraska Press, pp. 25Л43 Jurassic Park, dir. Steven Spielberg. G e m ü n d e n, Gerd 2002. Between USA, 1993 Karl May and Karl Marx: The DEFA The Land Before Time. Part VI: The Indianerfilme.—Germans and Secret of Saurus Rock, dir. Charles Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Grosvenor. USA, 1998 Projections. Eds. Colin C. Calloway, Gerd Gemünden, Susanne Zantop. Lemonade Joe or The Horse Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, Opera (Limonádový Joe aneb pp. 243Л256 koňská opera), dir. Oldýich Lipskř. Czechoslovakia, 1964 H a m e s, Peter 2002. Way our West: Oldrich Lipsky’s Limonadovy Joe aneb Little Mole (Krtek), dir. Zdenňk Miler. konska opera.—Kinoeye, Vol. 2 (15) Czechoslovakia (Czech Republic), (http://www.kinoeye.org/) 1957Л2000 H o l l o w a y, Ronald 1983. The short The Little Western (Mały Western), film in Eastern Europe: The art and dir. Witold Giersz. Poland, 1961 politics of cartoons and puppets.— Politics, Art and Commitment in the Man of Marble (Człowiek z marmuru), East European Cinema. Ed. David W. dir. Andrzej Wajda. Poland, 1977 Paul. New York: St. Martin’s Press, Mephisto, dir. István Szabó. West pp. 225Л251 Germany, Hungary, Austria, 1981 K a p u r, Jyotsna 2005. Coining for Pocahontas, dir. Mike Gabriel, Eric Capital: Movies, Marketing, and the Goldberg. USA, 1995 Transformation of Childhood. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press The Song of the Prairie (Árie prérie), dir. Jiýí Trnka. Czechoslovakia, 1948 L e n d v a i, Erzsi 1998. Animated cartoons in Hungary.—Filmkultúra Timur and His Platoon (Тимур и его (http://www.filmkultura.iif.hu:8080/ команда), dir. Aleksandr Razumny. articles/essays/anim.en.html) Russia, 1940 M i t c h e l l, W. J. T. 1998. The Last The Unforgiven, dir. John Huston. Dinosaur Book. Chicago: University USA, 1960 of Chicago Press VeggiTales: The Ballad of Little Joe, S h o h a t, Ella; S t a m, Robert dir. Tim Hodge. USA, 2003 1996. From the imperial family to the transnational imaginary: Walter Defends Sarajevo (Valter Media spectatorship in the age of brani Sarajevo), dir. Hajrudin Krvavac. globalization.—Global/Local: Yugoslavia, 1972 Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary. Eds. Rob Wilson, Wimal Dissanayake. Durham, London: Duke University Press, pp. 145Л170

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