The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Krysař) by Jiří Barta · PDF fileHenning M. Lederer | MA...

Henning M. Lederer | MA Digital Arts FT | +44 (0)7551 960 327 | www.led-r-r.net

Collaborative Unit // Research 001 // Jiří Barta

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The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Krysař) by Jiří Barta

“Krysař is Bartas masterpiece... a full-length film made in a very artful style with forced perspectives.” [http://www.darkstrider.net]

The Animation of Jiří Barta [http://notcoming.com/features/Jiříbarta]

There is no doubt that Prague is regarded as a hub of animation in the European film world, primarily due to the genius of Jan Svankmajer. Svankmajer’s talent is complimented with accessibility – it is fortunate that his work has become so widely available, not merely on the festival circuit or in retrospectives, but also through home video and DVDs. This issue of availability has kept a number of Svankmajer’s colleagues out of sight for some time, both his influences and protégés. Jiří Barta is one such study; unlike Svankmajer, Barta’s work is not nearly as encompassing in its scope or output. Working primarily during the 1980s, Barta flourished during communist rule in the former Czechoslovakia, as funding was easily accessed through government grants, allowing students to develop at their own pace and direction. Initially dabbling with cutout shorts, Barta later experimented with stop-motion and puppetry, and within seven years of his first short completed The Pied Piper of Hamelin, still considered a masterpiece of Czech animation.

Like Svankmajer, Barta leans toward the grotesque in his imagery; sound is heavily emphasized, whether it is blood sloshing or a guttural, nonsensical tongue, providing a tactile quality to his characters and their universe.



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We recognize these objects, yet they inhabit a world of their own which often draws on the political issues of the former communist block. Surreal creations, ranging from mannequins to abandoned gloves, are intricately involved in symbolic demonstrations of the Velvet Revolution, or playfully comment on the rapid intrusion of materialism on Eastern Europe. Barta’s work is lighthearted, its overall tone more optimistic than Svankmajer in its criticism of society, despite extreme rigor for its morally inept characters.

Barta’s auteurist work has ceased over the past decade, as the director resorts to more commercial projects unseen on this side of the pond. Barta’s long-term pet project on The Golem, a legendary clay myth often connected to Frankenstein, has been held up since the early 1990’s, as producers frequently back out and artist grants remain scarce within the new Czech Republic. (...)

Krysař: A Short MasterpieceThe centuries old folk tale of The Pied Piper of Hamelin, already sinister in its connections to the bubonic plague and demonic actions, is propelled in a slightly different, but no less effective direction by Barta. With sets echoing German Expressionism, the inhabitants of Barta’s town in The Pied Piper live in a curiously archaic age; this distinctly individual world bears little to no resemblance to any genuine location or time, and yet ties into varying myths and familiar lore, particularly connecting to Barta’s preoccupation with materialism and its consequences.

The vulgarity and greed of Barta’s town is induced through striking images of gluttony; puppets feast on the heads of slaughtered pigs and guzzle their blood, while draping themselves in precious jewelry. Townsmen haggle over market prices, their tempers and blood vessels rising and nearly popping from their forehands with frustration over the loss of just one coin.

Fashioned of rich, oak-toned wood, the puppets are hard, almost Cubist in appearance, modern figures in an ancient world, a sentiment echoed in their attachment to wealth. Their features, resembling awkward, ill-fitting puzzle pieces, directly contrast not only the mysterious Piper, whose angular features and cloak point toward a more Medieval era, but also the requisite moral compass of the town, a pale figure named Agnes whose soft features set her apart from her neighbors as much



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as her beliefs. While the Piper and Agnes are silent, introspective figures, the townsfolk speak in a garbled, nonsensical language whose high pitch is akin to the squealing of the vermin invading their homes.

The contrast of the puppets against the furry, darting, and clearly living bodies of the rats is striking, creating a clear dynamic that sets up the rodents as far more natural and driven (if only by a survival instinct) than their money-mongering counterparts. Refusing to pay the Piper, the town only sinks further into squalor, as Agnes is raped and murdered (in one of the more disturbing scenes in puppetry). Rather than returning to the traditional tale, there are no children led from the town but instead the townspeople themselves, hypnotized by the Piper’s tune and symbolically transformed into half rats as they march to the sea and drown. Barta’s bleak tone is slightly alleviated as a lone, surviving fisherman remains – his discovery of a lone infant in the abandoned city signals a hopeful future.

Jenny Jediny / © 2007 notcoming.com

The morality of horror – Jiří Barta’s Krysař (The Pied Piper, 1985)[http://www.kinoeye.org/02/01/kosulicova01_no2.php]

Barta’s adaption of this old tale is a far cry from those of Disney and many others. Ivana Košuličová explains how Barta uses animation to depict the horror of human society.

Krysař (The Pied Piper / The Rat-catcher), an animated film from 1985, quickly became a phenomenon within Czech cinematography. Inspired by an old German legend, director Jiří Barta created the film as a fascinating metaphor for the decay of a society focused on material demands. The whole Jiří Trnka Studio was involved in what was one of the most ambitious projects in the history of Czech animation.

The film is an adaptation of a medieval German tale about a pied piper from Hameln. Miroslava Humplíková, writing about the film in Film a doba, traces the story back to a cleric named Samuel Erich was the first to publish this tale, which has its origin in Backhaus’s Hameln Chronicle from the end of 16th century. (...)

Most of the animated film adaptations are children’s films. Walt Disney made two films using the theme of the pied piper at the beginning of his career. (...)

Barta’s film creates a striking contrast to the Disney conception of the pied piper legend as a children’s comedy. Barta’s adaption is a challenging and metaphoric morality that continues in the Czech tradition of Pied Piper adaptations begun by Viktor Dyk in literature (Krysař, 1915) and Emil František Burian in theater (Krysař, 1940). Burian staged the story as a metaphor for the Nazi occupation in his theater E41 in 1940. Barta, on the other hand, created a new morality that reflects the decline of socialist society in the mid-1980s.

Towards a happier future?Barta’s conception of the story stresses the analogy between rats and the character of people possessed by the mammon of money. The townsfolk of Hamelin represent the basest human qualities, such as avarice and gluttony. (...)



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Some citizens of Hameln argue about money in the market, others hide their wealth in their mattresses, still others drink and eat more than is healthy. The town is soon full of rats that are an increasing threat, and they finally overpower the citizens. The rats do not only scavenge for food, but steal the wealth of the greedy people.

The townsmen (for Barta’s Hameln is a patriarchal society) offer a reward to a mysterious piper in a hood, the rat-catcher who can rid the town of its vermin infestation. The music of his pipe makes the rats follow him, and he leads them to a cliff from which they plunge into the water and drown. Once the town is clean, the citizens return to their sybaritic lives and refuse to pay the pied piper his fee. The same night, the town’s only innocent young woman is raped and killed by drunken townsmen. The next morning, the pied piper takes his instrument and plays music that makes all the sinful citizens metamorphosize into rats and follow him to the cliff. The only survivors are an old fisherman and a baby. When the old man finds the baby, he abandons the town, walking towards a possibly happier future.

Animated brutalityThe director stages the mythological Hameln as a medieval, gothic town in an expressionist, artistic style with twisted lines in the architecture. Different animation techniques are combined: wooden puppets and moving relief, animation of real food, footage of live rats, and oil painting—everything contributes to an ambitious piece of work. Moreover, the director uses the tools of feature film in his range of expression, such as parallel montage, different angles and camera movements and subjective deformed shots. In his hands, animation becomes creative filming with an interesting usage of cinematic language.

Different kinds of puppet are used for specific characters. The townsmen are made of dark walnut wood with square cubist shapes, while the beautiful and innocent Agnes is a puppet made of light wood in a round elegant form that resembles the style of Jiří Trnka. The character of the mysterious pied piper is made from dark wood, shrouded in a hood with deep-set eyes that we cannot see (until the moment of the imminent apocalypse).

The absence of understandable dialogue—a distinct feature of Barta’s cinematic style—expresses the dehumanization of the townsfolk as well as the universality and continued topicality of the story. The townsfolk “speak” in a “language” that resembles the squeak of rats and foreshadows their future metamorphosis. The innocent characters, such as the piped piper, Agnes, and the old fisherman, remain significantly silent.

The music adds an important semantic element to the film. There are three main musical motifs which are interconnected. The music that dominates the film is composed as a cacophony complementing the atmosphere of the corrupt town. The character of the pied piper is represented by electric guitar music, while the third central character in the film, the innocent Agnes, is accompanied by a soft lyric female voice. Composer Michael Kocáb’s music, played by Michal Pavlíček on electric guitar and Jiří Stivín on the flute, evokes an eerie atmosphere of a town fated to be destroyed, a motif that is present in the film from its beginning. The first sequence of the film shows various clocks, the sound of which fills the sound track. This reflects the regularly repeated activities of the townsmen and point up the inflexibility and inescapable fate of Hameln.



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In depicting the rape of beautiful Agnes, Barta stretches the boundaries of animated cinematography. The director combines three different scenes in parallel montage to intensify the suspense. This brilliantly constructed sequence comes immediately after the scene in which the townsmen refuse to pay the pied piper his fee. In the next shot, we see Agnes praying in front of the cross in her house. When Agnes goes to bed, drunken townsmen try to get into her room. The pied piper approaches. Agnes tries to fight them off but finally falls to the floor. The cruel townsmen take her to her bed and prepare to rape her. The drama of the sequence is emphasized by electric guitar music. When the pied piper arrives at Agnes’s home, he finds her lying on the floor and gently closes her eyes. The apocalypse is near.

Barta also uses a series of “bloody” naturalistic scenes which show the brutal clubbing of a rat by the townsmen of the film and a butcher killing a bull with an axe, at the beginning. (...)

In these films, Barta creates mysterious horror worlds full of sinful, grasping humans who reflect the decay of human society. Apocalypse for humankind comes from the uncanny beings from the “other side.” Yet, there always remains some hope: in elderly wisdom, in innocent childhood and in the morning that comes after a vampires’ night.

Ivana Košuličová

The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Krysař) by Jiří Barta · PDF fileHenning M. Lederer | MA...

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