Surogat and The Hand

On October 14th my animation class had a seminar on the impact of historical events and how it affects certain art types. We watched two films, one in class and one on my own time. The first was called the hand. It was a stop motion animation by Jiri Trnka, which depicted a small puppet like man with a love of growing flowers. A hand repeatedly breaks in and breaks the pots that the flower is in, and when the man tries to sculpt new ones, the hand forms the clay into a depiction of itself. the man tries to keep the hand out of its house but the hand keeps finding new ways of getting in. At one point the hand kidnaps the man and puts it in a cage, where it instructs him to sculpt a hand out of marble. The man escapes and gets back to his home, and becomes paranoid about the hand and ends up dying. The hand then enters the house to find the man dead, and makes a coffin and starts a funeral for the man. We talked about it in class and the teacher told us about how it was a metaphor for the hand of communism, and how it instructed the masses to have nationalism. The next video is a short french animation called Surogat. It shows various shapes getting inflated and when they do they turn into things like a girl, some beach supplies, a car, fishing poles, and a boat. When the man who inflates these things inflates the girl, he starts making advances on her, which are immediately refused. Then she runs off with a muscular surfer guy. Shenanigans ensue and the surfer along with the girl ends up being deflated, the other man leaves and his car gets popped by a nail in the road. End of animation. Both of these animations have a sort of hand of god style approach to them, in which both of the things said "god" is trying to control refuses them. An interesting concept, if anything.
It shows the human condition to rebel against oppression, and how the oppression can fight back. On one hand, you have the Sculptor trying to grow something himself, and the hand trying to make the Sculptor make things for the hand. On the other, you have the girl who refuses the man who created her to run off with someone else. In both instances to have an oppressed rebelling against an opressor. A useful story concept in animation, the underdog complex.