Jan Svankmejar
The Collected Shorts - Volume 1
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Distributed by KimStim and Image Entertainment
The KimStim website
Other Jan Svankmajer DVDs
A Game with Stones
Looks to be the earliest film of the bunch, completed in 1965. Excellent surreal piece involving a clock with a faucet attached to a bucket painted half white and half black. At 12:00, the faucet turns on and two rocks squirt out—one black , one white. They dance to a music box, then the bucket tips the rocks onto the floor of the deserted and weathered room. At 3:00 (and 6:00 and 9:00), the process repeats, each time with more rocks performing more and more elaborate dances, interacting, getting crushed and finally ending up in gravel versions of his Dialog heads eating each other. Eventually the bucket breaks, spilling all the stones to the floor. The faucet keeps periodically spewing stones, but with nothing to catch them, they end up in a big chaotic heap on the floor.
According to the notes, it’s supposed to represent the birth, life, and death of the universe. That seems a bit far-reaching, but it’s a wonderfully surreal piece—whatever it might mean.
Punch and Judy
Punch and Judy acting out their famous dynamic as rivals over the ownership of a gerbil. Maybe. Like the Brothers Quay, Svankmajer seems to have a fascination with elaborate and old mechanical systems and puppets. Opening utilizes an elaborate paneled pieces—almost like chipped and worn metal pop-up books. He also likes the texture of distressed and antique typography. Music is gaudy carnival merry-go-round and the whole thing is unfortunately, but characteristically, garishly lit. Maybe the hardness of the image is intentional—no romance—but it makes for a fairly ugly and ultimately hard to read frame.
Et Cetera
A series of infinite loop vignettes featuring flat figures on distressed backgrounds—like figures from an old technical manual. In fact, many of the figures are annotated as though they were instructions. In each vignette, human figures (a little like Balinese shadow puppets) get caught in loops of deceptive “progress” - using bigger sets of wings, building houses and tearing them down again, training animals who then train you, and so on. Et cetera, even. The breaks between vignettes are flashed with the words “et cetera”, and then closer and closer into the letters until they’re just abstract flashes of black and white. The futility of progress, or something like that.
Picnic with Weissmann
An idyllic and typically overwrought Victorian picnic, complete with furniture, chess, cards, and a wind-up Victrola. No people though. Inanimate objects and bodyless clothes relax in sophisticated elegance to the sweet strains of early bib band music records playing themselves on the Victrola. While the pastoral scene unfolds, a trowel digs a trench in front of a large white armoire. After fun and games—including chair soccer—the record ends, everything gets covered with dead leaves, and a bound and gagged man falls—dead—out of the armoire into the grave, which starts to refill. Boring and creepy—interesting combination.
The Flat
Black and white existential black comedy of a man trapped in a room, being thwarted from escaping or eating by the briefly animate objects or changing physical properties (egg turns into a rock, chair legs melt, etc). After being tortured a while, he finally realizes—with a burst of theatrical facial expressions running the gamut of all emotions—that he is but one of a long line of inhabitants to this room. Very Beckett meets Kafka. Set to the same interesting chamber music used by the Brothers Quay for their tribute to Svankmajer. Dark and funny, in a really uncomfortable way. Nice rendition of Escher’s mirror.
A Quiet Week in the House
Police state paranoia surveillance fantasia involving a “terrorist” who moves into the antechamber of a deserted country house. Each day for a week he drills a hole into a different door and watches the odd and inexplicable dance of inanimate objects through the knothole. I’m sure the activities in the room mean something to somebody, but they are beyond me. When peering through the keyhole, the soundtrack is completely silent and the objects move in a stuttery overlapping stroboscopic manner—rather unpleasant, methinks. There’s also the odd choice of adding a white frame to every edit in the antechamber, emphasizing the editing. Odd. After a week, he puts a stick of dynamite into each of the holes he’s drilled and sets them all to a
timer and runs off—after going back in to mark off the last day he was there. Claustrophobic and undoubtedly subversive. Sepia-toned and strange.
The Fall of the House of Usher
Nice interpretation of the Poe’s gothic classic. Svankmajer’s preferred style—deserted house of untold age, worn and weathered by unseen hands that seems to symbolize the Eastern European sense of life—works well with Poe’s melancholic gloominess and florrid verbosity. In fact, that’s the biggest problem—too many words to read in the subtitled translation. There’s a long illustrative raw clay section, later refined and exploited in Dialogues. Dark and foreboding, layered with endless years of oppressive history and decay, but hard to appreciate the imagery because you’re trying to read all the words.
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copyright 2008 Christopher Earl