(Ruka) This is the most frightening puppet film ever made, Jiri Trnka's nightmarish 1965 swan song that has approached legendary status-all the more so because good prints have become rarities. A puppet molds flower pots on a potter's wheel. A Hand enters his cottage, compelling him to reshape the clay into miniature images of the Hand. A deadly, surrealistic struggle begins. The puppet resists, and the cottage becomes a besieged claustrophobic chamber: the site of brainwashing, forced labor, and hapless resistance. As a political parable, Trnka's masterwork runs deep. Among the totalitarian forces it denounces is the tyranny of popular culture, the good natured bawd that masks itself as an instrument of deliverance. Russell Merritt