The Animated Esperanto: The Globalist Vision in the Films of Sándor Reisenbüchler

Introduction

In his 1924 book Visible Man (in Balázs, 2010), Béla Balázs noted the rise of a cinematic Esperanto: ‘The art of film seems to hold out the promise of redemption from the curse of Babel. The screens of the entire world are now starting to project the first international language, the language of gestures and facial expressions.’ Balázs, a Marxist, argued that capitalism served as the catalyst for this Esperanto’s development: ‘The laws of the film market had room for only one universal language of gesture, which had to be comprehensible in all of its nuances from San Francisco to Smyrna and to princesses and working girls alike’ (p. 14). Six years later, in The Spirit of Film (1930, in Balázs, 2010), Balázs addressed the problem of dialogue in sound synchronization, lamenting that a loss of ‘visual nuance’ accompanied the new technological advances. He missed the ‘mute dialogues [which] seemed to convey the profoundest human revelations, even when the overall storyline was nothing but the most tedious kitsch’ (p. 203). And yet, even as he lamented the lost art of silent film performance, he did not mention the lost promise of the ‘first international language’ (emphasis in original).

In Visible Man, Balázs ignored animation, but in The Spirit of Film (in Balázs, 170) he wrote at length about the medium in terms that parallel his earlier ideas of silent film performance. He claimed the stories in Die Abenteuer des Prinzen Achmed (The Adventures of Prince Achmed) (Lotte Reiniger, 1926) and Le petite parade (The Little Parade) (Ladislas Starevich, 1928) arose from ‘form’ and were distinctly ‘non-literary’. In other words, the most important aspects of the dance of Reininger’s silhouette cut-outs and Starevich’s puppets did not concern plot, content and spoken language, but the primal experience of watching bodies express themselves. His observations laid the groundwork for what could have been a new argument, that the animation medium could birth its own Esperanto. And yet, Balázs did not explore such a possibility. His omission is curious, as the animated Esperanto is almost as old as the animation medium.

The history of the animated Esperanto, like the history of the original Esperanto language, is a history of politics and economics. Studio heads initially feared that Mickey Mouse’s English dialogue would become a barrier to international success. These fears proved baseless and the mouse gained fans in France and Germany (Klein, 1993: 9). The language the mouse spoke was less important than the technological feat of his ability to speak at all, and the unity of his voice and body. The flat graphic animation of Yugoslavia’s Zagreb Film used the universality of geometric shapes to communicate essential human emotions and body types, and the victory of Surogat (Ersatz) (Dušan Vukotić, 1961) at the Academy Awards legitimated a model for transnational success. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union’s Soyuzmultfilm claimed that their workers ‘create their universe like gods, where man, beasts, animals, water, and grasses all speak in the same language … Here everybody lives according to the remarkable, kind laws of the Land of Animation’ (Gudok, 1986, quoted by MacFadyen, 2005: 168). The history of the animated Esperanto does not contain a clear trajectory. The actual Esperanto language was codified, and its originator had to contend with issues concerning beauty, accessibility, logic and ideology (Forster, 1982: 54). Such concerns also lie underneath the animated Esperanto, but no one has codified it. The animated Esperanto is a tendency born of various circumstances that has evolved into a naturalized philosophy towards the animation medium.

The ‘actors’ in these animated films are the focal points for the animated Esperanto’s vocabulary and grammar. The viewer literate in the animated Esperanto can understand Mickey Mouse’s swaying hips in Steamboat Willie (Ub Iwerks, 1928), the simplified circular breasts on the female object in Ersatz and the hedgehog’s melancholic face in Yozhik v tumane (Hedgehog in the Fog) (Yuri Norstein, 1975). The backgrounds may contain national–cultural markers. Mickey Mouse dances on the American vaudeville stage. Hedgehog in the Fog takes place in a Russian folkloristic universe. ‘Special ethnographic features, national characteristics, may be introduced from time to time as local colour, as the ornamental aspects of a stylized milieu’, Balázs (2010: 14) writes, ‘but they are never more than psychological motifs’ (emphasis in original). Balázs’s claim may describe the role of background in Steamboat Willie, but Norstein’s hedgehog is imbricated within an organic background that acts upon his internality. Still, in both cases, the primary source for language lies in the body, and that language crosses political borders.

Sándor Reisenbüchler, the Hungarian collage animator, developed his own animated Esperanto, one not contained in bodies. Reisenbüchler’s career lasted from the mid-1960s through the end of Hungary’s communist system in 1989 and continued through the post-communist era until his death in 2004. Some of his films were abstract plot-less exercises. The most memorable were tightly constructed narratives. These films were about as long as early, one-reel mini-spectacles like The Battle (DW Griffith, 1911) and their plots followed similar three-act trajectories. The first act depicts peace, the second act depicts war, and the third act depicts a new uneasy peace. More generally, first there is stasis; then there is chaos; and finally, there is a new impermanent stasis. A Nap és a Hold elrablása (Sun and Moon Carried Off) (1968), based on a poem by Ferenc Juhász, depicts a village suffering a supernatural calamity. Az 1812 – es év (The Year 1812) (1972) is a Tolstoyan retelling of the French invasion of Russia set to Tchaikovsky’s overture. Békéltető expedíció a Mars bolygóra 2895-ben ahogy az öreg Jules Verne képzelte (Expedition Sent to Pacify the Planet Mars in 2895 as Imagined by the Good Old Jules Verne) (1983) is a comic homage to the science fiction of the past. (Expedition is a little different from the previous two films. The first act depicts war, the second act depicts peace, and the third act suggests the coming of a new chaos.) In each film, the drama acts upon the landscape and not individual bodies and accordingly the grammar and vocabulary of the animated Esperanto is located within that landscape.

Reisenbüchler was a world man, in his beliefs and in his aesthetic tastes. He saw capitalism and communism as twin evils, preferring instead an undefined third way. He was an environmentalist. He was also a UFO enthusiast. He read widely, in Russian, French and English literature, particularly Tolstoy and Verne. He mostly watched early film (George Méliès, Sergei Eisenstein and Alexander Dovzhenko) (Tóth, 2008), but he also enjoyed George Lucas’s world constructions in Star Wars (1977) (Vajda, 2008). He discovered affinities with Terry Gilliam’s cut-out animation for Monty Python and, in the last decade of his life in the 1990s, after he gained access to more American television via satellite, he became a fan of Beavis and Butthead (1993–1997) (Tóth, 2008). Besides National Geographic, he also found materials in a popular Polish graphics magazine (Vajda, 2008).

Accordingly, each of the three films adopts specific art historical stylizations. Sun and Moon Carried Off marries Hungarian folk and aboriginal art traditions. The Year 1812 uses Russian Orthodox. Expedition riffs on Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (George Méliès, 1902) and Terry Gilliam’s Monty Python cut-outs. Yet despite the specificities of these stylizations, the landscapes are atavistic. Reisenbüchler has absorbed various world cultural traditions and transformed them into something primal and essential in his landscapes. The landscapes return viewers to their infanthood, to the moment they first contemplated their surroundings, to the birth of a semiotic tradition. Reisenbüchler invents a global language, a language that transcends political borders and the modern nation state. Disney, Soyuzmultfilm and Zagreb Film employ an international language, a language that accepts modern political borders and communicates across them. ¹

Globalism, animation and the sublime

Reisenbüchler’s films do not negotiate with state power for his rights to the territory in which he lives, nor do they concern themselves with specific, contemporary political events. As such, through the medium of animation, Reisenbüchler imagines enormous worlds unmoored from the temporal and spatial moment from which they are birthed. They transcend their origins in search of the sublime. ²

The sublime is of particular interest in animation studies, and Scott Bukatman (2012: 137), in particular, applies the term to his study of animated bodies. He differentiates between the sublime and the uncanny, suggesting that the sublime ‘figures the unknown as excess’ whereas the uncanny ‘presents the familiar in terms of estrangement’. The sublime, for Bukatman ‘appears and is resolved as an epistemological crisis around the limits of human knowledge’. Such excess in its relation to the body, an excess born of the phenomenon of god-like invention inherent in the animation medium, can be found in Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1911) and Gertie (1914). Steamboat Willie, Hedgehog in the Fog and Ersatz can be added to this list. Little Nemo, Gertie, Mickey Mouse, Norstein’s hedgehog and the fat happy hero of Ersatz reach towards the unexplained, but don’t upset the viewer’s ability to distinguish between the familiar and unfamiliar. The excess emerges from the bodies, but this excess does not discomfit the viewer. Balázs (2010: 35) describes a similar form of the sublime in live-action performance, noting Lillian Gish’s facial expressions in Way Down East (DW Griffith, 1920). ‘The description of a feeling always lasts longer than the time taken by the feeling itself’, he writes, ‘the rhythm of our inner turbulence will inevitably be lost in every literary narrative.’ The sublime of these bodies returns man to a lost pre-lingual past.

Reisenbüchler’s landscapes contain a different form of the sublime. Reisenbüchler imagines layered universes that the screens of his films can’t contain, and that his source authors can’t describe. In Sun and Moon Carried Off, his aborigine-inspired figures face the demon forces of nature. A giant still cut-out of an amorphous demon descends on the village, his body merging with the atmosphere, engulfing the purples, blues and reds of the landscape in darkness. The riot of battle in The Year 1812 animates the landscape through blurring smoke and the giant presences of Napoleon and Russian Orthodox iconography upon the horizon. In Expedition, the Martian landscape is an enormous playground. These landscapes frustrate human perception and conception.

A global language inherent in landscape will carry within it different connotations from an international language inherent in the body. Those differences, in the case of Reisenbüchler’s films, lie in the animation medium’s approach to stasis. Kristin Thompson (1980: 117) describes stasis as a part of continuous movement in classical Hollywood cel animation, part of, not separate from, the lengthening and shortening of temporal flow. Reisenbüchler’s films are condensed epics, and their use of montage feeds on kinetic energy, and yet paradoxically, many of the shots within them are either completely still or contain only slight suggestions of movement. These moments of stasis are not mere signposts in an uninterrupted temporal flow; they are one half of a dialectical relationship between stillness and movement. These moments of stasis allow the viewer, if only for a few seconds of screen time, an opportunity to study a landscape in its static state and thus locate its atavistic character. Chaos, in the form of movement, threatens this stasis and this atavism.

As a means of understanding the nature of this dialectical relationship between stasis and movement and the language which it invents, I offer close readings of The Year 1812 and Expedition. The Year 1812 shows how this dialectic relates to Reisenbüchler’s conception of the past. Expedition shows how this dialectic relates to his conception of the future.

The Year 1812

Summary

The Year 1812 opens with the depiction of the Russian landscape, decorated with images of Orthodox iconography, giant saints that loom over the horizon and white churches in small villages. Sailors pull a ship in to shore (Figure 1). Russian Orthodox icons sprout organically from the landscape. Meanwhile, war drums beat in France. Napoleon appears at his court, the fountains erupt at Versailles, an Arcimboldo decorates a drawing room. In the second act, the French invade Russia. A riot of fire consumes the icons of the Orthodox Church. A skeleton dressed in French uniform looms over the horizon, a near mirror in shape and size of the Orthodox Jesus who appears earlier in the film (Figure 2). Bodies break apart. The shapes of dead humans, dead animals and the ruins of fine art pun on one another. In the third act, a silhouette of Napoleon studies the landscape as winter comes. Fallen bodies morph into skeletons, which are in turn engulfed in the snow. Spring comes and the Orthodox churches, now rebuilt, regrown like plant life, toll their bells.

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Figure 1.

Peacetime in The Year 1812 (1972). © Sándor Reisenbüchler. © Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute. Reproduced with permission of the Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute.

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Figure 2.

Death and Chaos in The Year 1812 (1972). © Sándor Reisenbüchler. © Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute. Reproduced with permission of the Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute.

Analysis

I will describe four different forms of stillness in the film, employing terms from live-action film to describe them. Some of what I describe here has parallels to Eisenstein’s taxonomy of montage in ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’ (1977). Eisenstein’s descriptions, however, focus on the constant flow of movement through montage. Following Reisenbüchler’s lead, I focus on the lack of movement within montage.

Absolute stillness of mise-en-scène and absolute stillness of cinematography.

The material in front of the camera remains completely still and Reisenbüchler’s camera does not move, neither panning, zooming nor tracking. In the fourth shot of the film, the silhouettes of sailors pull a ship to shore. Although the shot refers to the movement of the sailors, it presents no actual movement on the screen. It is a still photograph of a drawn image.

Absolute stillness of mise-en-scène accompanied by movement of cinematography in the form of panning, zooming or tracking movements.

In the first shot of the film, Reisenbüchler’s camera centers on the image of a purple field surrounded by churches and houses. His camera zooms out to reveal a wider landscape, with trees and more houses. Historical documentaries, like Ken Burns’s The Civil War (1990), employ a similar technique in their use of still photographs.

Absolute stillness of cinematography, majority stillness of mise-en-scène, accompanied by minor movements within mise-en-scène.

Most of the frame of the film remains completely still and only a few objects within the frame move. This category may, at first glance, seem no different from early Hollywood animation shorts. In Steamboat Willie, for instance, the steamboat upon which Mickey Mouse performs remains mostly still, while Mickey, who makes up a very small portion of the screen, sways his hips and whistles. In Steamboat Willie, the border between Mickey Mouse and the stage background on which he performs is pronounced. In The Year 1812, however, the objects that move on screen and the objects that don’t move are far more integrated. As an example, we can consider the series of Orthodox icons accompanied by flapping flags in the 20th, 21st, and 22nd shots of the film. The absolute stillness of the staffs is preternatural in relation to flags that flap in what are presumably very strong winds.

Complete stillness of backgrounds blanketed with moving layers.

As an example, we can consider the shot of an Orthodox Church in complete stillness, that lies underneath drifting gun-smoke.

The Year 1812 is a meditation on the threat of history and the desire to arrest its passing, and each of these four montage techniques defines this meditation. The film’s first 11 shots each follow the first and second categories – presenting at various points, the landscape complete with Orthodox iconography, sailors, trees and houses – before a 12th shot that demonstrates the third. The appearance of that 12th shot, which depicts a bellwether motioning in the wind, after a full minute of screen time that presents absolute stillness of mise-en-scène, increases the tempo and signals the chaos that will come. It threatens the peaceful order of stillness.

The use of stillness in The Year 1812 not only complicates Eisenstein’s philosophy of montage, but also recalls the pre-montage cinephilic experience of looking. These moments of stasis at the beginning of The Year 1812 demand that the viewer study the landscapes and locate their essential, atavistic and universal characteristics. The precise, distinct movements within the scene describe the frame’s excesses, the wind through the trees.

Let us pause in our discussion on Reisenbüchler and consider Eisenstein’s arguments on montage in relation to his arguments on animation. In ‘A Dialectic Approach to Film Form’ (1977), Eisenstein explains that montage is far closer to language, which must constantly form ‘words and word-complexes’ – as in the pairing of shots – than to painting. At first, this may suggest that Eisenstein’s own fascination with animation, particularly Disney animation, may be irreconcilable with his montage theories. And yet, within his essay, Eisenstein offers a key to understanding how his various theories coalesce: ‘in painting the form arises from abstract elements of line and color, while in cinema the material concreteness of the image within the frame presents – as an element – the greatest difficulty of manipulation’ (p. 60, emphases in original). For Eisenstein, the perfect photographed image, the ur-image, eludes the live-action filmmaker. His theory of montage is not entirely predicated on this fact. This point is little more than an aside in his essay. Still, this claim can be paired with his notes on animation from later in his career. In 1940, he celebrated the ‘plasmaticity’ of Disney animation, which he describes as

‘represented’ in a drawing, a being of a given form, a being that has achieved a particular appearance, behaves itself like primordial protoplasm, not yet having a stable form, but capable of taking on any and all forms of animal life on the ladder of evolution. (Eisenstein, 2012: 15)

The material within a live-action film, with all its imperfections, its inability to move in the exactly prescribed manner required the development of montage to create a dialectic, and thus a more complex meaning between shots. The morphing in animation, by contrast, could create a satisfying and dramatic dialectic between forms within cel animation’s version of a single shot. The animator who works with drawn images, images that he creates with his own brush, has god-like control over every element of the image he places in front of the camera. The live-action filmmaker must contend with material objects that he can manipulate to only a limited degree.

Eisenstein cannot capture an ur-image in Alexander Nevsky (1937), a film in which he attempts to compensate for sound’s disruption of silent-era montage. The film contains no absolute moment of stasis, no combinations of freeze frames like the roaring-of-the-lions sequence in Bronocets Potemkin (Battleship Potemkin) (1925). Nevsky contains instead poised shots in which the movements of figures and landscapes are subtle, similar to the third category of Reisenbüchler’s montage noted above. Nevsky’s troops stand in silhouette while their spears, as elongated vertical lines, sway gently, full of anticipation, while awaiting the coming of German troops. Earlier, Alexander Nevsky stands poised on the mountain edge, at times in silhouette, at times his head lit with halo-light, with only a light wind rustling his clothes. Eisenstein tries to make these images icons, representations of ideas greater than themselves. And yet, the inability to achieve the ur-image upsets Eisenstein’s task. Eisenstein may want the spears to move as they await the coming of German troops, but he can never control their exact sway in the wind, and thus he can never obtain the ur-image of ‘spears-swaying-in-the-wind.’

The icons of The Year 1812, by contrast, can achieve something closer to the ideal of what they are meant to represent. Reisenbüchler’s precise cut-out of Napoleon becomes the ur-image of a universally recognized historical figure, and his Orthodox Jesus becomes the ur-image of a universally recognized religious symbol (Figure 3). The moments of absolute stillness throughout his film allow the viewer to discover the eternality, the universal, the essential in his icons and the atavistic in his landscapes. Montage is configured here as history, as a force that upsets the purity of this stillness and all that it can reveal.

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Figure 3.

Icon in The Year 1812 (1972). © Sándor Reisenbüchler. © Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute. Reproduced with permission of the Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute.

Expedition Sent to Pacify the Planet Mars in 2895 as Imagined by the Good Old Jules Verne

Summary

Expedition describes a world that modern technology once might have promised, but which will never exist. The film opens with a depiction of deepest space and after several dissolves, focuses on a war on the planet Mars between blue and red Martians. They ride one-footed alien animals and space dinosaurs. The governments of Earth agree to send a spaceship to pacify the conflict. The film indulges in a fin-de-siècle mise-en-scène. The French ride flying unicycles. The Russians practice sword fighting and ride a steam-powered giant horse. The Americans ride horses attached to parachutes. The English train with barbells alongside their cats. The Germans fly through flaming rings. They all meet at the American Cosmopolis, which contains flying machines that look like giant torpedoes or 18th-century seafaring vessels (Figure 4). They enjoy a final tearful night with their lovers. Onboard their ship, men dance to the accordion, read 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea do their laundry, drink and play. When they locate the Martians in question, they discover that the war previously depicted as a violent conflict with swords and flying elephants has now devolved into a childish food fight. The humans descend and pacify the aliens by spraying them with laughing gas. Once peace has been restored, they take pictures to commemorate their success. In the final scene, the men return home on their ship, passing a space balloon on its way to Venus. A stowaway Martian appears ready to start another food fight with a giant cake.

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Figure 4.

American Cosmopolis in Expedition Sent to Pacify the Planet Mars in 2895 as Imagined by the Good Old Jules Verne (1983). © Sándor Reisenbüchler. © Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute. Reproduced with permission of the Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute.

Analysis

Expedition invites an exploration of the mise-en-scène and it does so by integrating the bodies of its actors into its backgrounds (Figures 5 and 6). In the party scene, various figures stand absolutely stock-still, while tears fall from their eyes. The majority of the German bodies are fixed and only their legs move during their exercises. A Martian face turns its head and stares at the camera, its blue body still against the pink background (Figure 7). (In each case, Reisenbüchler employs the third form of montage described in the previous section of The Year 1812.) The Martians and Mars become one, as do the Earthlings and Earth. Reisenbüchler again invites the viewer to indulge in cinephilia, as does George Méliès in A Trip to the Moon. There are too many details for the viewer to absorb within the film’s rapid montage, the phallic ships, the curl of moustaches and the crags on Mars. And thus, Reisenbüchler invents a series of landscapes that absorb bodies and everything else, that can’t be fully perceived but can be enjoyed.

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Figure 5.

Spaceships and the Martian landscape in Expedition Sent to Pacify the Planet Mars in 2895 as Imagined by the Good Old Jules Verne (1983). © Sándor Reisenbüchler. © Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute. Reproduced with permission of the Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute.

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Figure 6.

French can-can in Expedition Sent to Pacify the Planet Mars in 2895 as Imagined by the Good Old Jules Verne (1983). © Sándor Reisenbüchler. © Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute. Reproduced with permission of the Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute.

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Figure 7.

A Martian in Expedition Sent to Pacify the Planet Mars in 2895 as Imagined by the Good Old Jules Verne (1983). © Sándor Reisenbüchler. © Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute. Reproduced with permission of the Hungarian National Digital Archive and Film Institute.

Expedition is set in the science fiction of the past and as such it stands outside of history. The film is as much a fantasy of what film could have become 1000 years after 1895, as much as it is a fantasy of a future in which diplomacy worked and avoided World War I and the horrors of the 20th century. As in The Year 1812, Reisenbüchler’s images attain the status of icons, representing ideas of American-ness, Russian-ness, French-ness, British-ness, German-ness and Martian-ness. Reisenbüchler’s montage and Méliès-an sensibilities allow these icons to escape the political world that birthed them, to become sublime, part of a globalist fantasy, a globalist future.

Reisenbüchler and Pannonia

This article has noted Reisenbüchler’s relationship to early live-action cinema, and noted how his animated Esperanto differs from the animated Esperanto in well-known animation traditions. It has not placed his work in the context of Pannonia, Hungary’s major animation studio in Budapest, with which he remained affiliated throughout his career. Pannonia’s animators participated in and were part of many of the anti-Disney animation trends of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. They designed their dialogue-less shorts for distribution on the festival circuit in Eastern Europe, Western Europe and North America (Orosz and Keresztes, 2008). They developed their own Esperantos, but their languages emerged from different political philosophies than Reisenbüchler’s.

Pannonia is not identifiable with any specific political movement. The studio employed anti-communists, socialist reformers, and those who eschewed politics altogether. The studio’s auteurs were not immune to censorship. Marcell Jankovics, the most famous of the studio’s animators, could not produce a short film called The Statue, which was to be a satire of collectivization and the centralization of authority (Jankovics, 2008). Censorship also appeared at the pre-pre-production level. István Orosz wanted to make a film about the wave of Hungarian migrants to the US following the 1956 Revolution but knew he could not, and therefore he didn’t plan the film (Orosz and Keresztes, 2008). For the most part, however, David MacFadyen’s (2005: 31) description of Soviet animation, that it ‘went about its business in a way that suggests a type of selfhood confounding our expectations of dictatorial cultures’ can be said too about the history of Hungarian animation. The studio neither condemned nor encouraged Reisenbüchler’s transcendental political philosophy (Tóth, 2008).

Pannonia’s films, despite the political differences in the studio, or arguably because of them, emerged from ‘goulash communism’, the term for the negotiations and re-negotiations between democratic desires and dictatorial power that developed in Hungary in the three decades following the 1956 Revolution. ³ In József Gemés’s Koncertisszimó (Koncertissimo) (1968) concertgoers watch an orchestra handle artillery as if they were handling musical instruments. (Gemés, 2008, claimed the film had no direct bearing on the contemporary situation in Hungary, but was more a general statement on the willingness of the masses to submit to authority.) In Gustav and Alienation (In Gusztáv elidegenedik (Gustavus and Alienation) (Marcell Jankovics and Ildikó Sz. Szilágyi, 1976, part of a long series of shorts about a low-level bureaucrat, the hero navigates a lonely Budapest and tries and fails to commit suicide.

These films study the thin line between civilization and barbarism. They suggest that obedience and disobedience to authority involve similar dangers. They study the individual and his continuing struggle with the state, with societal norms and with himself. Reisenbüchler’s films do not participate in the same stream of negotiations. They concern themselves with human masses at their most primal. They concern themselves with uncontainable natural forces.

The studio celebrated its auteurs, but placed them in a collaborative environment (Gémes, 2008). It developed a rotation system whereby they would work on each other’s films, often as designers, colorists or writers. József Nepp kept a large file of scenarios that he wrote and Ferenc Rofusz’s first film was based on a story he took from the pile (Rofusz, 2008). Many of the major auteurs contributed to the Gusztáv (Gustavus) series (1964–1977). Although it is possible to locate certain auteurist signatures and techniques in specific Pannonia films, the studio’s films, no matter the director, present affinities with each other in terms of stylizations, mood and themes.

Reisenbüchler was an exception to this system. He was affiliated with the studio, but did not work within its strictures due to personal temperament, artistic inclination and circumstance. As a young child, Reisenbüchler contracted a lung infection that affected his health throughout his life and eventually killed him in early old age. Initially, he had ambitions to become an epic live-action filmmaker, an Eisenstein, but his physical limitations confined him to spending most of his time indoors and prohibited him from any rigorous exercise outside. He joined Pannonia, knowing very little about animation and having watched relatively few cartoons. He became a collage animator, constructing his work at home, coming into the studio at most once a month either to collect supplies or to work with a cameraman to shoot his films (Tóth, 2008). He was friendly when he came to the studio but, even then, he remained a unique presence. He sat close to the cameraman throughout the shooting process, directing the camera movements and lighting in particular detail, a practice the studio’s other auteurs did not follow (Bacsó, 2008). Reisenbüchler surrounded himself in his apartment with classical music LPs and he called himself a ‘kitchen-table animator’: ‘first came the music’, usually one of his LPs, and ‘then came the scissors.’ During the time he was not at his table, he was reading or watching films, activities which he considered integral parts of his working day (Tóth, 2008).

Reisenbüchler was not indifferent to the work that was produced in the studio. He closely studied the films of György Kovásznai, whose career began roughly 10 years before Reisenbüchler’s, who was far more prolific than Reisenbüchler, far more of a studio man, and whose work was far less tightly constructed (Tóth, 2008). In mid-career, Reisenbüchler collaborated with other animators at the studio, particularly Dóra Keresztes, who shared with Reisenbüchler an interest in animating abstract shapes from folk traditions (see Orosz and Keresztes, 2008). Still, he never made his deadlines, and eventually a tacit agreement developed between him and the studio. He would make his own films on his own time and he would earn significantly less than his colleagues (Vajda, 2008). The working days of the majority of the animators at Pannonia followed a socialist riff on the traditional Taylorist model of animation production married, as has been noted, to auteurist tendencies. Reisenbüchler was an independent craftsman, in the tradition of Winsor McCay and Yuri Norstein.

Marcell Jankovics and the animated Esperanto

Marcell Jankovics, the studio’s most famous animator, was a Catholic and anti-communist. His father, a banker in Budapest, was jailed in the early years of the communist takeover. Jankovics wanted to study architecture but was unable to do so due to his family’s political background and so, in 1959, he took and passed a drawing test and joined Pannonia (Jankovics, 2008). He oversaw Pannonia’s in-house animation school and experimented with various anti-Disney movements. For his subjects, he looked to his particular historical moment, as well as Hungarian cultural traditions.

Jankovics, like most of Reisenbüchler’s colleagues, spent the majority of his working days in the studio, and thus had to handle the politics of studio management. Reisenbüchler avoided the day-to-day business of a government-supported animation studio, which is another way of saying that he avoided the day-to-day business of politics. The politics of Jankovics’s and Reisenbüchler’s lives may seem to stand in opposition to each another, and accordingly the politics of their films. Yet, the political grounding for Jankovics’s own animated Esperanto has many elements in common with Reisenbüchler’s. Many of Jankovics’s films communicate a form of Hungarian-ness across political borders, but there’s also a hint of globalism within his internationalist language.

Hídavatás (Inauguration) (Marcell Jankovics, 1969) begins as a futurist film. The camera runs along the railings of a new iron bridge, lovingly articulating its contours. The short then transitions, jarringly, into a flat-graphic gag film about an official who dynamites the bridge after he is unable to cut the ribbon at the bridge’s opening ceremony. It was, according to its director, about the continuing divide between East and West (Jankovics, 2008).

Jankovics also directed the country’s first animated feature film, János vitéz (Johnny Corncob) (1972), an adaptation of Sándor Petöfi’s 1845 poem, which merged the stylizations of Yellow Submarine (George Dunning, 1968) with Hungarian folk art traditions. The film now stands as an artifact of the particular brand of nationalism which served as a form of resistance in 1970s Hungary. Like the original poem, the film invents an alternative globe, upon which its Magyar hero travels through the Hungarian countryside into the Himalayas and the land of the Tatars, to find himself in the Kingdom of France where he rescues the monarch from Turkish occupation. The film both celebrates and satirizes its own nationalism. It ends with its hero’s ascension into heaven, escaping the misery of human politics. The Yellow Submarine pastels describe a symphony of yellow and white before morphing into a bouquet of flowers set against a black background.

This article has argued that Reisenbüchler’s language rests on a dialectic between stillness and movement. Johnny Corncob and Inauguration suggest that an opposition that has appeared as a binary throughout this article – body/landscape – is also a possible dialectic, and the source for another animated Esperanto. Jankovics endows Johnny Corncob with large feet in order to accentuate his heroic status (Jankovics, 2008). His face is a mask and he wears a rustic Hungarian costume. The bureaucrat at the heart of Inauguration is a flat-graphic buffoon. In each example, the body represents a form of human politics, a nationalist ideal in the case of Johnny Corncob, the idiocy of government structures in the case of the bureaucrat. The surroundings, respectively the bright-hued landscape and the majestic bridge, like the landscapes in Reisenbüchler’s films, contain the sublime. This article has claimed that internationalism lies in the body whereas globalism lies in the landscape. Accordingly, we can see in Jankovics’s body/landscape dialectic another dialectic between internationalism and globalism.

Jankovics’s Sisyphus (1974) is a significant break from the previous films this article has discussed in that it locates a globalist language, not in landscapes but entirely in the body. Sisyphus is drawn in charcoal against a white background. As he pushes a boulder up a mountain, his body morphs and remorphs, pulsating with his heavy breaths. Sisyphus disintegrates into the lines of a painter’s brush and then becomes a realized human body. He is a small stick figure. He is a muscular Michelangelo outline. The camera’s angle is impermanent and places the viewer’s own transforming perspective in tension with the transformation of Sisyphus’s body. Sisyphus finally reaches the top, places the boulder and then journeys back down the mountain.

There is no clear cultural marker in the short, nothing to suggest that Sisyphus is a product of 1970s Hungary. The background is a blank white and the Sisyphus figure, a character from ancient mythology, is reduced at various points to total abstraction. The themes of the film and its emotive essence, a continuing struggle of the individual with himself, is an eternal one. Politics do not define Sisyphus’s body.

The globalism of the body within Jankovics’s animated Esperanto, unlike Reisenbüchler’s globalism of the landscape, is not defined by a dialectical relationship between movement and stillness. His Sisyphus is defined by an inability to remain fixed from one frame to the next. If there is any stillness in the film, it exists within the unchanging whiteness of the background, a canvas upon which the Sisyphus figure struggles to enunciate himself.

This article has located several strands of the animated Esperanto and I would like to delineate them here. The internationalist language, which communicates across political borders, and the globalist language, which transcends them, define and are defined by several dialectics. In the body/landscape dialectic, the body represents internationalism and landscape represents globalism. The globalist language of the landscape is driven in turn by a dialectic between stillness and movement. In Jankovics’s animated Esperanto, internationalism and globalism do not exist as a binary but as another dialectic. This article has searched for a globalist sublime in Reisenbüchler’s landscapes. In Sisyphus, it has discovered a globalist sublime in a moving body.

The animated Esperanto is an unstable language.

Summary and conclusion

The animated Esperanto may be unstable, but this study suggests four rules:

Peter G Foster (1982) has noted debates within the history of the original Esperanto language that parallel this fourth rule: ‘Esperantists have tended traditionally to have a lukewarm, even hostile, attitude to governments as sources of support (though this has not invariably been the case)’ (p. 9). Many of the dominant forces for Esperanto have argued for political neutrality, leading the movement, at one point, to accommodate itself to fascism, an ideology that abhorred the language. After World War II, Esperantists experienced internal division as to whether or not to align themselves with the United Nations (p. 254). Esperanto organizations had existed throughout Europe almost since its inception in the late 19th century. After World War II, such societies gained governmental support in communist countries and, at times, this support was practical. Cubans, for instance, used Esperanto to communicate with Bulgarian and Czechoslovakian technical advisors (p. 257). Speakers of Esperanto, like the practitioners of the animated Esperanto, included both globalists and internationalists, both in the East as well as in the West. In other words, a globalist/internationalist dialectic drives the history of the original Esperanto language. That dialectic leads its practitioners to adopt diverse ideologies. And, as we have seen, such a history can be found in the animated Esperanto in particular. It can also be seen in the cinematic Esperanto in general.

The globalist/internationalist dialectic is present even in Balázs’s (2010) conception of the cinematic Esperanto. In the introduction to this article, I briefly noted Balázs’s dismissal of the ‘special ethnographic features, national characteristics [and] local colour, as the ornamental aspects of a stylized milieu’, as ‘mere psychological motifs’ (p. 14, emphasis in original). As we have seen, these ‘psychological motifs’ are more important than Balázs recognizes, for they help define the internationalist aspect in the cinematic Esperanto. Balázs follows this nod to internationalism with a globalist vision. The cinematic Esperanto, Balázs (2010: 14–15) writes,

… contains the first living seeds of the standard white man who will one day emerge as the synthesis of the mix of different races and peoples. The cinematograph is a machine that in its own way will create a living, concrete internationalism: the unique, shared psyche of the white man. We can go further. By suggesting a uniform ideal of beauty as the universal goal of selective breeding the film will help produce a uniform type of the white race. The variety of facial expressions and bodily gestures has drawn sharper frontiers between peoples than has any customs barrier, but these will gradually be eroded by film. (emphasis in original)

This article has argued that the primary source for a globalist language in animation, with the exception of Sisyphus, lies in the landscape. Balázs locates a globalist language within the body, a position that leads him, within the context of interwar eugenics, to white supremacy. Balázs ends by imagining a cinematic future whereby ‘man finally becomes visible … able to recognize himself, despite the gulf between widely differing languages’ (p. 15).

The internationalist/globalist dialectic and the landscape/body dialectic, by contrast, has no such fixed goal. Animation and the animated Esperanto is concerned with morphing and re-morphing, constant transformation, and as such it avoids the homogenization of the human body. The animated Esperanto resists the rigidity of any political philosophy. The animated Esperanto is an unfinished and unfinishable project. The animated Esperanto is an evolving language, a living language.