Břetislav Pojar

Biography

Pojar’s first film job was with Jiří Trnka: in the late 1940s he took part in the making of “The Story of the Bass Cello”, after a story by Anton Chekhov (1949). Trnka became his mentor, and Pojar worked for him as a puppeteer and animator.

He was born on 7 October 1923 in Sušice. Later Pojar taught at FAMU, the Prague film school.

Among Trnka’s films of that period on which Pojar worked as an animator were “Old Czech Legends”, “The Good Soldier Švejk” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”. As an independent director he made his debut in 1951 with the films “Josef Mánes” and “The Gingerbread Cottage”. Next came “The Merry Carousel”, “One Glass Too Many” (1954), “Spejbl on the Trail” and other shorts. “The Lion and the Song” (1959) brought him the Grand Prix at the Annecy festival in 1960. “One Glass Too Many” is a sad story about a motorcyclist who stops at a café on the way and drinks plum brandy until he speeds up too far. A Russian animator who saw the film in Prague recalled that the movement of the puppets in it is exceptionally pure, and that Pojar was, in his words, perhaps the most talented of Trnka’s pupils. From the mid-1960s Pojar worked with the National Film Board of Canada and regularly travelled there for long working stays, including in years when this was not easy. His best-known films were made there: “To See or Not to See” (“Psychocratie”, 1969) won the Canadian Film Award for film of the year and a prize for a short film at the Berlin festival. “Balablok” (1972) is about small beings shaped like circles and squares who wage war on one another until they are all turned into indistinguishable figures. At Cannes in 1972 he won the prize for best short film for it. There is little or no spoken dialogue in such films. In 1979 the Cannes jury recognised his film “Bum”.

At the same time he worked in Czechoslovakia. With the screenwriter Ivan Urban and the artist Miroslav Štěpánek, Pojar created the series “Let’s Play, Gentlemen” (1965–1973), about two teddy bears who want to play over and over again and transform themselves with bright inventions. It seems to me that he made his best work with Štěpánek, and many Czech writers think so too. For the bears Pojar used a half-relief puppet technique: a convex figure was laid on a flat sheet of glass and filmed from above. In 1974–1977 he made a series about five boys, based on Trnka’s children’s book “The Garden”.

In the 1980s and 1990s he went on making films at the Canadian studio: “E” (1981, with Francine Desbiens), “Nightangel” (1986, with Jacques Drouin), for which he received the Los Angeles Film Critics Award in 1987, and the series “Rights from the Heart” (1995–1997).

In the mid-2000s Pojar returned to Czech film and became one of the directors of the animated feature “Fimfárum 2”, based on stories by Jan Werich (2006). The film won the prize for best feature-length film at the AniFest festival. Its segment “Tom Thumb” (“Paleček”) was named best TV special in Hungary in 2007. In 2003 Pojar took part as an animator in Kihachirō Kawamoto’s film “Winter Days”. In 2011 “Autopohádky” appeared, in which he is listed in the director’s filmography.

Honours at home: the title of Merited Artist, the Order of Labour (1988), the Golden Slipper prize at the Zlín festival (2003), honorary citizen of the Prague 2 district (8 October 2007) and the Medal of Merit, second class (2008). Pojar died in Prague on 12 October 2012, five days after his eighty-ninth birthday.