Film Screening: 'New Gulliver' (1935)

One of the first feature films to extensively utilize stop-motion puppet animation, "New Gulliver" is a Communist re-telling of Jonathan Swift. Petya, a pioneer from Artek, falls asleep while reading "Gulliver’s Travels" and finds himself in a dreamscape where Swift’s Lilliputia has been rendered as a capitalist-military state. Petya becomes involved in a worker’s strike, where his notebook from the Soviet Union informs the laborers of Lilliputia of the international solidarity of the proletariat.

The film, which was highly admired by Charlie Chaplin and additionally the founders of Czech animation, represents a highly productive Soviet translation of the Western fantasy genre. What is aimed for in the translation is not a one-to-one mapping between different cultural contexts, but a poetic inscription of difference at the moment of transposition.

Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies | View More Events
Co-hosted with: Princeton Institute for International & Regional Studies, Program in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies (OWNER)

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