This essay was occasioned by Issue 7 of Notebook magazine as part of a broader exploration of the unfilmable. The magazine is available via direct subscription or in select stores around the world.
Poster for Item One (Boyan Danovski, 1956).
When the selection for the 1956 Cannes Film Festival was announced, among names like Akira Kurosawa, Vittorio De Sica, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Satyajit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, and Michel Cacoyannis appeared Boyan Danovski, whose festival debut, Item One, was the first Bulgarian film to be shot in color. Set in the capital, Sofia, the story revolves around young Veska, who sneaks out to play with the neighborhood kids but decides to take a long walk through the city instead. While her startled mother mobilizes everyone to look for the missing child, Veska’s adventure transforms into a guided tour of the young socialist society. Her stroll is marked by poetic encounters with overused ideologemes: a chimney sweep, surveyors, football players, construction builders, and even a film crew. By the evening, Veska is back in her mother’s arms, a happy ending.
At the time, children’s cinema was still a relatively novel concept. For decades after the inception of the seventh art, children and adolescents were welcome to attend screenings of films ostensibly made for adults. The rise of The Walt Disney Studios in the 1920s, however, indicated that family entertainment was a marketing niche worthy of serious consideration. In response, Soyuzmultfilm was launched in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and began producing an impressive number of animation shorts—first focusing on fantasy subjects and gradually taking on more realistic subject matter and political themes as the Second World War loomed on the horizon. In 1955, Karel Zeman’s Journey to the Beginning of Time astonished the world with its mix of scientific accuracy, classic paleoart aesthetics, Czech puppetry mastery, and complex mystimation special effects in the Mélièsian tradition. Not only was Journey to the Beginning of Time an international commercial success, it also showcased the educational potential of cinema for young people (Lenin and Lucharsky had envisioned it as “the most important art” after the Bolshevik Revolution). Zeman had studied advertising in France and worked as an assistant of the animation pioneer Hermína Týrlová at her legendary studio in Zlín, at a time when most socialist countries do not have such industry resources. Stalin’s political reset in the Eastern Bloc in the aftermath of the Second World War led to a major purge in the arts: The closer the country was to Moscow the more austere the outcome.
Journey to the Beginning of Time (Karel Zeman, 1955).
As one of the smallest and most USSR-dependent satellites, Bulgaria had to rebuild its film industry from scratch. The few talents with professional experience and contacts in the West prior to 1945 had been replaced with novices loyal to the Party. The first state-produced features left their audiences lukewarm, and imported titles remained in much higher demand. Still, this void opened the door to many newcomers, and one of them was Valeri Petrov, the screenwriter of Item One. Having been a teenage literary prodigy, with several books of poetry already to his name, Petrov graduated university with a degree in medicine and practiced for a couple of months during the Second World War. His true vocation was the written word, but his poems proved too lyrical, too formalist, and too personal for the Stalinist era, so he tried to pursue his passion as a journalist and editor, at one point even serving as a cultural attaché in Italy. As he recounts in the documentary About the Possibility of a Life (a.k.a. The Opportunity to Live, 2005), he had an idea for a novel that he proposed as a short film treatment, which was then turned into the 77-minute Item One.
Having met hostility within literary circles, Petrov’s work was once again subjected to scrutiny when Rangel Vulchanov directed his next feature-length script, On a Small Island (1958). The film is based on actual events, detailing the fate of antifascist prisoners in the 1920s, but some members of the arts council found the characters insufficiently communist and criticized its abstract humanism. Like Binka Zhelyazkova and Hristo Ganev, whose debut, Life Flows Slowly By... (1957), was banned for decades, and their subsequent projects painstakingly examined by the censors, Vulchanov and Petrov had to carefully atone for their mistake with more circumscribed work until the early 1960s, when the overall political climate in the socialist bloc permitted a less dogmatic approach. With Knight without Armour (1966), directed by Borislav Sharaliev, Petrov finally cracked the code of Bulgaria’s state cinema, finding a more welcoming environment for his humanistic concerns in films seemingly directed to children. (At the Venice Film Festival, the film won the Lion of San Marco for Best Film about Adolescence.)
In this comedy with and, at first glance, for children, Petrov parenthesizes his view on the discrepancy between the New Soviet Man and the nascent petite bourgeoisie. While the regime had been extolling selfless collectivism, carried out by healthy, learned, sincere individuals working toward International Communist Revolution, Knight without Armour renders the ideal as a picaresque. This portrait of the typical nuclear family and their new Wartburg automobile reveals symptoms of social corruption, yet the humorous treatment of the subject, as perceived through the eyes of nine-year-old Vanyo, hoodwinks the censor board. Shot in black and white, Knight without Armour exhibits the rather gray life of socialist adults, implying that it is up to young people to romanticize reality with the power of their imaginations, making playful references to literature, theater, and cinema. Children had often appeared as the protagonists of propagandistic films of Eastern and Central Europe in the 1940s and ’50s, intended for adults, but Petrov’s innovation was to render his social and political misgivings in a seemingly innocent idiom. With his excellent ear for poetry, calembours, and the melody of language, Petrov’s dialogue is endlessly quotable, contributing to the progressive memeification of socialist realism. The same tactic was taken up by other films and television shows in which charismatic children vocalize bittersweet truths about the society into which they have been born and to which they are bound, and the form proved very popular with Bulgarian audiences.
Knight without Armour (Borislov Sharaliev, 1966).
Meanwhile, the so-called Mormarevi Brothers, famous for their satirical prose and sketches, also found refuge in children’s cinema. Moritz Yomtov and Marko Stoychev were not siblings, but wrote under a joint pen name. The former was a polyglot biochemist and the latter a prospective journalist when they met at the Bulgarian National Radio and began collaborating in the 1950s. After more than a decade of writing for the leading comedians of the day, whose sold-out shows were also broadcast live on the radio, Stoychev landed in hot water for taking the wrong side in the aftermath of the Prague Spring in 1968. The Mormarevis find their element with Hedgehogs Are Born without Spines (1971), a film that successfully follows the model of Knight without Armour with one notable difference: While Valeri Petrov’s scripts focus on a single child protagonist, the Brothers explore a group of young people as a miniature society with its own rules, ethos, and dynamics. The film comprises three shorts (Disturbing Phenomenon, Hooligans, and The Gift) with the same characters, and every episode adds nuances to the family background and the psychology of the characters.
The Mormarevi Brothers’ work for children is a hit, equally enjoyed by adults, and they come to enjoy the comfort of regular collaborations with likeminded filmmakers. Dimitar Petrov directs Hedgehogs Are Born without Spines and Vacation with Kids (1972) as well as the television series Vasco da Gama from Rupcha Village (1986), all based on the anthology comedy format. By casting the same young actors for both features, Petrov crafts an expanded universe of sorts, in which we see these emblematic youngsters grow up over time, changing both physically and morally. Due to its ideological prominence in the national myth, and its proximity to the national studio, Sofia was the typical shooting location for Bulgarian films, but socialist kids dream of the seaside, and the Mormarevis add the the Black Sea coast as a fantasy ground for endless peripeteia. The onscreen adventures grow bolder and more costly to produce, in tune with the most beloved children’s book authors in Bulgaria at the time: the German Erich Kästner, the Swede Astrid Lindgren, and the Italian Gianni Rodari. Vignettes about school mischief and lost balls mature into intricate plots about espionage, treasure hunting, and mystery solving, always with a wink at the corresponding genre literature and cinema for adults.
Exams at Any Odd Time (Ivanka Grybcheva, 1974).
It is thanks to Mormarevi Brothers’ scripts that Ivanka Grybcheva, too, became a household name in Bulgaria. Daughter of celebrity partisans turned party functionaries, she graduated the film university in Babelsberg, Germany. Her direction of Exams at Any Odd Time (1974), the series The Hedgehog's War (1979), and the space opera The Thirteenth Bride of the Prince (1987) established her as an artist with range who could navigate from somber subjects such as the partisan movement to lighthearted takes on everyday life under socialism, and even to sci-fi parody. In the 1960s and the ’70s, artists behind the Iron Curtain had to resort to “Aesopian language,” concealing their meaning in metaphors and symbolism in order to pass the scrutiny of censors. Grybcheva’s family background, but also her previous work—which had engaged with the partisan past with both doctrinal allegiance and psychological depth—gave her enough credibility that her young characters were allowed to doubt the Party creed as well as the adults who espouse it, albeit in the form of comedy. Many women directors came into the scene in the 1980s, not only in Bulgaria but all over Eastern and Central Europe. Though their cinema was automatically labeled “feminist,” and though it offered complex critiques of late-socialist society, it tended to be less iconoclastic than their male counterparts. At that time, artists such as Kira Muratova, Agnieszka Holland, Márta Mészáros, Věra Chytilová were making small-budget films often focusing on women. Under the form of absurdist comedy or social drama, these works unravel everything that is wrong with state socialism, as these authors experienced it, focusing on the fundamental unit of society—the family—and its underclass. In between the ideological fatigue of the epoch and the Party celebration of women’s rights, the harsh actuality in these “feminist” films was somehow easier to swallow.
The 1980s in Bulgaria are associated with Lyudmila Zhivkova’s international Banner of Peace initiative. The First Daughter of the republic had been appointed president of the Committee for Art and Culture under her father Todor Zhikov’s leadership of the Bulgarian Communist Party. Supported by the United Nations, UNESCO, and UNICEF, the Children's Assembly gathered hundreds of children from all over the world under the motto “Unity, Creativity, and Beauty.” While the state media and art institutions mass manufactured visuals of children of all colors holding hands and singing for peace, the Bulgarian family cinema was paradoxically dominated by young Veselin Prahov’s clumsy haircut and sad eyes. The boy appears in more or less the same role in three memorable and very different comedies: A Dog in a Drawer (1982), directed by Dimitar Petrov and written by Rada Moskova; Up in the Cherry Tree (1984), directed by Mariana Evstatieva-Biolcheva and written by Rada Moskova; and A Husband for Mum (1985), directed by Evstatieva-Biolcheva and written by Kalina Kovacheva. Far from the joyous carnivalization of socialist society in the Mormarevis’ work, this child is all alone, living with a single parent and often at the mercy of neighbors and strangers. In contrast to the official rhetoric, what we see in these films is the de facto disintegration of the family as the basic unit of society, if not the disintegration of society itself.
A Husband for Mum (Mariana Evstatieva-Biolcheva, 1985).
Valeri Petrov, the man with whom our tale began, was ostracized by the Party for refusing to sign a declaration against the dissident author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1971. The preproduction of his script Heads Up, Commander!, involving the same director and actors as in Knight without Armour, was halted. In the seclusion of his home, Petrov translated the entire oeuvre of William Shakespeare from English, as well as many texts by Gianni Rodari from Italian. He began publishing exclusively for children—short stories, poetry, theatrical plays—many of which became instant classics, until he had become cautiously rehabilitated by 1980. Zako Heskija took over the direction of Petrov’s old script, and Yo ho ho premiered in 1981. Heskija’s reputation as an auteur commands a relatively lavish budget for the film’s stunts on land and water, but—as Tarsem’s remake, The Fall (2006), testifies—this is not really a story for children.
Leonid, a ten-year-old boy with a broken arm, spends his days in a hospital in Sofia, where he accidentally enters the room of a magnetic young actor with a spinal injury. Their unusual friendship opens up the walls of the underwhelming building and transforms the painful everyday into a thrilling adventure—or at least it appears so from Leonid’s point of view. Yo ho ho shares much with the Bulgarian children’s films that preceded it, particularly in its depiction of adults: the obsession with trivialities, the missing father, the dubious situations and cynical jokes, the jarring psychological and sometimes even physical violence. Where these elements had previously been played for comedy, here they come across as oddly alarming. Petrov trojan-horses a collective, but also autobiographical, portrait of a boy facing a morally corrupt world, betrayed by his naïve belief in higher principles. The kid evokes Chaplin’s cinema, stripped of the comic and left with the existentialist, even tragic overtones. Despite this grim subtext, the final frames contain a glimmer of hope, as if the authors themselves were caught unawares by a sudden influx of optimism.
“One meter below our gaze, exists, lives, rejoices and suffers the world of children with its own problems and laws,” said Petrov of Knight without Armour in 2015, marking the 50th anniversary of the film’s production. “Do we, the adults, look often at this world with the necessary love? Are you and I good educators?” In light of the historical events after the Eastern Bloc's dissolution after 1989 and Bulgaria's poor record as a democracy ever since, socialist cinema for children may have succeeded in producing better cinephiles than citizens, which is still something.
Continue reading selections from Issue 7’s exploration of the unfilmable.