Surviving Life (Theory and Practice)

2010 psychoanalyticka komedie

Rating: 16/20

Plot: A bearded gentlemen meets a beautiful woman in a dream and tries to discover a way to dream more so that he can be with her.

I've waited and waited for this to be available for me to watch and finally gave up and watched it on Youtube. Worth the wait? Absolutely! New Svankmajer should 1) be more of a regular thing and 2) should be celebrated as a holiday. This one seems very cheaply done. There's stop-motion, a lot more than in the last feature film, and a lot of the animation is cut-out stuff similar to the hilarious soccer short called "Manly Games" in this collection. This is very funny, too, and although I reckon the imagery and surrealistic asides would befuddle a lot of people, I couldn't keep the smile off my face while watching this. Half of this takes place in the main character's subconscious, the perfect setting for a surrealist like Svankmajer, but the conscious world isn't without the surreal touches. The main character spends a lot of his waking hours being psychoanalyzed, again perfect fodder for Svankmajer. The inside of the noggin is, after all, where all of his movies take place, isn't it? The odd visuals--chicken-headed folk, animated meat, a gigantic tongue, rolling apples, eggs, bananas, extracted teeth, antlered men, faucet-headed people, watermelons, flowers sprouting from women's heads--are easier to digest in this, like Svankmajer is picking and choosing from The Rudimentary Guide to Interpreting Dream Symbols or something. The psychological issue at the heart of the whole thing's been used enough to become a cinematic cliché, but none of that makes this any less fun. If you like your avant-garde animated movies on the playful side, this is definitely for you.

Alice

1988 animated classic

Rating: 17/20

Plot: See Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

My favorite retelling of Carroll's book, Svankmajer's Alice is, in my opinion, represents the master animator at the peak of his grotesque powers. The story's essentially the same, and most of the characters from the novel find their way into Svankmajer's Wonderland. Svankmajer's vision and leftfield creativity breathes unique life into them, making the White Rabbit a sawdust-leaking stuffed buck-toothed thing, the March Hare a wind-up toy, the Mad Hatter a wooden marionnette, the Caterpillar a sock puppet, and, most disturbingly, Bill and the White Rabbit's other pals a perverse menagerie of skeletal reptilian things. The pace is quick, and there's plenty to see, especially for lovers of quirky nightmares. The narration kind of annoys me, probably more so because of some terrible dubbing, but I can put up with that because it's such a treat visually. I definitely could have done without half the lip close-ups though. Nevertheless, bitchin'!

Little Otik

2000 horror comedy

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Bozena and Karel want a child more than anything else in the world. They receive some upsetting news when a doctor tells them they'll never have a child. To cheer his wife up, Bozena unearths a tree root that's kind of in the shape of a human baby and presents it to his wife. They pretend it's real and play parent at their weekend house, and nine months later, with the aid of some faux stomachs, fool their neighbors and friends into thinking they have had a child. Problems arise when the wooden baby develops an impossible appetite.

This doesn't have as much animation as Jan Svankmajer's Alice or Faust. When you finally get to see the root baby come to life, it's truly horrifying and very realistic. The breast-feeding and temper tantrum scenes manage to be even more terrifying than watching a real-life baby. Otik is based on a Czech folk tale, a story learned when a neighbor girl reads from a picture book, and like the best folk tales, this has its share of gruesome moments. It's particularly gruesome when the titular child eats, of course, but watching the other characters eat isn't much better. And they certainly enjoy an interesting array of soups. But Otik isn't all horror. It's also very humorous. A scene where a guy on the street fishes babies out of a tub with a net and wraps them in newspaper is very funny, and as disturbing as it is, a scene featuring a pedophile's crotch hand made me laugh. That pedophile's crotch is the first animation you see in this movie, by the way. The funniest bit is when the husband brings the root to his wife and says, "Guess what I've got for you." It just seems like such a cruel thing to do to a woman who can't have a child, but I laughed and laughed anyway. I really enjoy this movie, but I wonder if Svankmajer had trouble with funding. There are parts of the movie that seem incomplete, especially the ending, and I really wish there could have been more animation, even if was just surreal vignettes that had nothing to do with the main conflicts. Like crotch hand! I imagine the film's theme has to do with human greed, especially since an alternate title is Greedy Guts.

The Ossuary and Other Tales

Svankmajer shorts from 1964-1988

Rating: n/r

This collection has some great stuff but might not be as consistently great as the other collection. "The Last Trick" features a pair of dueling wooden-headed magicians and their surreal acts. "Don Juan" is marionettes, sometimes sans strings, in elaborate stage settings. "The Garden" has no animation at all; it's an absurdest gag about a fence made out of people. "Historia Naturae" is visually interesting with its rapid shots of the kibbles and bits of eight different species, but after a while, I was glad it was a short short. "Johann Sebastian Bach" is rock music. Well, it's Bach set to images of animated stones. Oft-beautiful, but not exactly memorable. The one in the title ("The Ossuary") isn't a tale at all but a commissioned glimpse at an ossuary in the Czech Republic, a church/mass-grave with art and architecture constructed from tens of thousands skeletons of Black Plague victims. That one is exactly memorable, not because of anything Svank's doing but because it just might be the most beautifully depressing place I've ever seen. Svank doesn't animate (some of those rapid fire shots and weird camera movements are there though), but this place is as Svankmajer as a place can be. I might have liked it more if the female tour guide voice wasn't in it. She's entertaining as she repeatedly begs field-tripping children not to touch the bones and eventually threatens them, but it kind of takes away from the experience a little. "The Otrants Castle" was a dull pseudo-documentary. There's some cut-out animation that isn't very interesting. "Darkness Light Darkness" is an extra on Alice. It's creative, risque, and bizarre fun with clay and is great from a technical standpoint (watching clay hands mold with clay is just cool) and for anybody looking for some avant-garde slapstick. Finally, "Manly Games" is a hilarious look at soccer. You can't accuse Svank of being pretentious after watching that one, a mish-mash of animation styles (some cut-out stuff, some clay) that looks at the sport in a grotesquely humorous way.

I'd say three-and-a-half of these are vital. For fans, the others are worth checking out once.

Phantom Museums: The Short Films of the Quay Brothers

Animated shorts from '84-'03

Rating: 17/20

Plot: Animated realizations of the nightmares of Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam.

These macabre, surreal miniature epics creep and crawl through the shadows of Joe the Plumber's dank subconscious. Busted puppets are employed to dust off bric-a-brac and twitching baubles, uncovering perversity, fears, obsessions, and things Joe the Plumber will never ever understand. Moody musics (Stockhausen the most known name; some guy named Lech Jankowski does the music for 2/3 of the shorts though) accompany grotesqueries. Strings waver, eggs vibrate, antiquated instruments flutter, and feathers dance. The Quays are brilliant with set design, mostly artistically-designed miniatures in black and white, but the camera work is stunning as it maneuvers delicately through secret places, loses focus, becomes engulfed in shadows, etc. Less comedic (more uneasy) than Svankmajer, seemingly an influence since one of these pieces is named after him, these surreal shorts are abstract spectacles, the works of visionary auteurs. My favorites: "Street of Crocodiles" and "Rehearsals for Extinct Anatomies" but also, for sentimental reasons, the videos for rock-and-rollers His Name Is Alive which was my introduction to the Quay world. Recommended for Eraserhead fans.

People my age may recognize this MTV-commissioned short:

The Quay Brothers are likely Youtubable. Check it.

Faust

1994 Svankmajer flick

Rating: 17/20

Plot: See Marlow, Christopher.

This version of the Faust story is a lot funnier than 1920-something silent Murnau version. It's even, arguably, more visually imaginative and fantastically stylized. Arguably. Svankmajer's mix of live action, marionettes (sometimes sans strings), and stop animation creates an off-kilter universe of twitching cobwebs, junk-drawer chicken bones, and closet ash and shadows. And a dude has sex with a seven-foot tall wooden puppet. I know what folks'll say. Folks'll complain that this is too much of an onslaught of the random, too much of that weird-for-the-sake-of-weird type stuff. But I disagree completely and think that this grows with multiple viewings. Surrealist funk that hits you right in the loins! This isn't my favorite Svankmajer movie, but it is my brother's and is probably one of the easier ones to locate.

The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer

1965-1992 animated shorts

Rating: 18/20

Plot: A collection of Czech stop-motion surrealist Jan Svankmajer with images yanked from twisted dreams and perverse memories. "A Game of Stones" is about rocks. "A Quiet Week in the House" is about an intruder drilling holes. "Meat Love" is about meat engaged in coitus. "Food" is about breakfast, lunch, and dinner. There are two Edgar Allan Poe stories. "A Trip to the Cellar" is about a little girl trying to get a basket of potatoes. "The Death of Stalinism in Bohemia" details the autopsy of a statue of Stalin. Etc.

Surrealism doesn't get more fun than this. Unforgettable imagery ranging from the hilarious to the grotesque and occasionally managing to be hilariously grotesque or grotesquely hilarious. Lots of "What the hell?" moments countered by amazing "How'd he do that?" moments. I love how in the later shorts, Svankmajer begins using people, stop-animating them just like he would his puppets or clay sculptures although I probably like the earlier shorts best. Likely unlike anything you've seen unless strange late-night dietary habits somehow fuel funky nightmares. Or you've got some wires crossed in your head. Recommended if you do have wires crossed in your head or if you've ever wanted to watch furniture have sex or enjoy voyeuristically watching vegetables rot.

Lunacy

2005 comedic "horror"

Rating: 16/20

Plot: Jean is returning from a journey in which he has buried his mother, a woman who spent the last few years of her life in an asylum. Jean himself is haunted by nightmares of being institutionalized by bulbous bald men who grunt and approach him with a straightjacket. He befriends a marquis after destroying his room at an inn and is taken to the marquis' extravagant home. There, he eavesdrops on some kind of blasphemous orgy and is the butt of many practical jokes executed by the marquis and his tongue-less henchman. Following another nightmare, he agrees to stay at an asylum run by a friend of the marquis because he has hopes of saving a woman he believes is in trouble. Chickens abound, and Jean has to make choices about who can be trusted.

Ostensibly, this is a story Jan Svankmajer adapted from stories by De Sade and Poe. There's a lack of animation in the actual storytelling--only a shirt and a cupboard, I believe, both in dream sequences. There are stop motion animated scenes, all involving meat and/or chickens (which, I guess, are also meat) that work as interludes between scenes. Those, accompanied by this insane carnivalesque music, are brilliant as always. The live action stuff is just as brilliant, at times threatening to unravel into nonsensical surrealism but always retaining a central story line. The anachronistic scenery outside a carriage ride with the marquis, the marquis' "prayer" while he hammers nails into a plaster Christ, the "art therapy" at the sanotarium, the tarred-and-feathered doctors gathering up patients after their escape, the marquis and his friend positioning the inmates to make a tableau of Delacroix's "liberty" painting, the marquis' friend's collection of faux facial hair. . .great, memorable splashes of chaos. And of course all that animated meat. Really, can a movie with animated meat be bad? More grotesque than the director's promised horrific, and really more comical than anything else. Atmosphere + humor = the absurd = insane brilliance. Not as consistently great as Faust or Alice or, my personal favorite Conspirators of Pleasure, but great nonetheless. Long live Svankmajer!

Note: Svankmajer isn't dead yet. He has, however, announced that his next film will be his last. I did read that his son is now making movies though.

I'm made of meat: