Hands-down indie film

Photos by Brandon Swanson/The Prague Post

Balej's most recent film, Jedné noci v jednom městě, took six years to realize. Sketches of his characters line the walls of his office, which has the atmosphere of a sanctuary.

The room is stuffed with sculptures, sketches and drawings, all from the extremely expressive mind of this man. But Balej, 48, is shy, and coaxing words out of him is surprisingly difficult.

Guest director Michal Žabka manipulates a figure, above, and checks the lighting on a monitor in Hafan Film's studio in Žižkov, below.

Split personality

Balej acknowledges the seemingly incongruous shift between projects, but he says that children's stories have allowed him to be able to make this intensely personal work.

"It is funny, but, in this line of work, I have to have a kind of split personality," he says. "Right now, I am still adding final touches to this film for adults and then my next project is preparing short animated films for public Czech Television, this time for children."

Balej's work also appears on Večerníček (Bedtime Story), a children's show that has run on Czech Television for nearly 50 years.

Balej followed a fairly straight path to stop-motion animation. Talented at drawing as a child, he studied film techniques while attending an artist's high school and practiced sculpture in his free time.

"It all merged with stop-motion cinema, to be precise, with puppetry," he recalls.

He put all his energy into stop-motion animation after graduation and founded his Hafan Film production company in 1990, which was behind Balej's writing and directorial debut, Tom Paleček in 1994. The studio has not brought him wealth, but he's been able to walk that line between art and commerce to do what he loves.

His work has put him into what Balej would characterize as a "community" of Czech stop-motion filmmakers, including Aurel Klimt and Vlasta Pospíšílová, whose names carry weight abroad.

Thanks in part to internationally renowned Czechs animators such as Jan Švankmajer and Jiří Trnka, the Czech Republic has become a sort of Alexandria of stop-motion animation, the last repository of knowledge about a fading craft. In fact, only one man in the world, a Prague native, knows how to fabricate puppet hands that can be manipulated.

"The man is close to retirement age," Balej says. "Sadly, there is not much work to do in this field, and he has nobody to hand over his knowledge to. The way I see it, there will be someone new, one day, learning the trade, but he'll have to start all over again from nothing."

But, while Czech productions have become few and far between, the rest of the world seems keen on carrying the torch. Indeed, as Balej spoke, both of Hafan's two studios were being used: one by a Portuguese director learning techniques from a Czech director, and the other by a Japanese television host who is making his own short film for his show, in which he travels the world learning about unique professions.

A number of stop-motion Web sites have also sprung up, where fans of the medium exchange tips and techniques on making their own films using digital cameras and computer editing software. The members of these sites often mention the Czech tradition in their discussions.

"We see positive reaction coming from other countries, and we are often surprised to receive praise from people in places where we had no idea someone was monitoring our work," Balej says. "It gives one a very good feeling."

Stop and go

Stop-motion animation is only for those with patience. Even the shortest film takes years to realize.

Balej has a chart on a wall in his office, a shot-by-shot schedule of one of the stories in Jedné noci, that illustrates how painstaking the process is.

"The story is only about 16 minutes long, and we made it in 140–150 takes," he says. "The animator does about two takes per day, which means that it took us six to seven months to finish this 16-minute story."

And, because stop-motion films are so labor intensive, funding can be just as difficult.

"Take Fimfárum 2, for example," says Balej's producer Martin Vandas. "We decided to produce it as soon as the first Fimfárum premiered, which was in 2002. But, despite being able to use the good reviews from the first one, it still took four years to produce the sequel."

It follows, then, that funding a dark movie about amoral subjects proved even more difficult. Balej and Vandas decided to produce Jedné noci without the help of their traditional backers, such as Czech Television. Still, the pair was able to work piecemeal, securing nearly 15 million Kč ($696,000) to make the film. Vandas says the only other Czech film he knows of without any outside backing is Jan Svěrák's 1994 road movie Jízda, which was shot for nearly 1 million Kč.

For Balej, the financial headaches and the protracted process of filming are worth it.

"I will take this work, with all the problems it brings again and again, just to discover the reward," he says. "The satisfaction is much higher."

Petr Kašpar contributed to this report.

Other articles in Tempo (24/01/2007):

• Organic mechanics
• A continent of celluloid
• Around Town

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