The Puppet Master: The Films of Jiří Trnka
Screening Dates
  • July 26, 2018 8:35
  • July 28, 2018 6:30

Richard Burton narrates this bewitching adaptation of Shakespeare’s romantic fairytale, in which the love lives of mortals and forest sprites mingle during one magical moonlit evening. In his final feature—also the first CinemaScope film made in Czechoslovakia—Trnka deploys the full force of his imagination and technical wizardry to evoke the story’s enchanted-woodlands setting, a garlanded, pastel dreamscape awash in starry-night atmosphere, colorful festoons of flowers, and exquisitely wrought fantasy creatures. The graceful puppetry combined with the Václav Trojan score and voiceover work by Burton and members of the Royal Shakespeare Company yields a masterpiece of surpassing, balletic beauty.

English version.

preceded by

Merry Circus
(Veselý cirkus)
Czechoslovakia 1951
Jiří Trnka
12 min. 35mm

Trnka brings to life a surrealist circus of tightrope-walking fish, musical monkeys, balancing bears, and high-flying acrobatics in this whimsical feat of cut-out animation made in collaboration with leading Czech painters of the era.

Media