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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 81.149.182.62
Posted on Tuesday, May 14, 2013 - 10:25 pm:   

Just about to watch the earliest film of Jan Svankmajer. An early (1958) primitive version of 'Faust' that he went on to bring to terrifying life in his 1990s feature version. I'm as excited as I am nervous to view this as the first of a chrono view of all his cinematic nightmares. Wish me luck, people. I may well have horned devils leaping through my dreams tonight and I don't know if that's a good thing or not... but still I love him.
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Mick Curtis (Mick)
Username: Mick

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.171.221.224
Posted on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - 09:33 am:   

He's wonderful. Although I'd heard of him before, I only really started watching his films once I'd got hooked on the work of the Brothers Quay, back in the 'eighties.
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Tony (Tony)
Username: Tony

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 81.158.253.196
Posted on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - 10:58 am:   

I saw a few of his films at college. Yes, he's excellent. We don't see stuff like this much these days.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - 01:02 pm:   

I watched the first two shorts in the box set last night and it was about all I could take in one sitting.

'Doktor Johannes Faust' (1958) was Svankmajer's first film credit, providing the puppet effects for this beautifully filmed and sumptuously colourful 20 minute mini-epic, that comes across like one of Gerry Anderson's nightmares. I hate ugly puppets and the hideous creations here are truly horrific, with the camera lingering over every infernal detail. I shudder to think what a child would make of this!

'The Last Trick' (1964) was Svankmajer's directorial debut and for 12 horrible minutes I was plunged into a dark claustrophobic world of horribly animated papier mache dolls, brilliantly intercut with real actors in papier mache masks, to the point where one couldn't tell which was which, making the impossible imagery all the more disturbing. The plot involved an onstage battle of magic between two grotesque magicians, Mr Edgar & Mr Schwarzwald, who each try to outdo each other in front of an invisible clapping audience. The whole thing quickly degenerates into a Laurel & Hardy tit-for-tat routine from Hell and ends with the pair pulling each other to pieces and the separate parts continuing to attack each other all over the stage. I was forcibly reminded of some of Clive Barker's horror imagery and was genuinely relieved when the film came to an end. My heart was thumping and I staggered off to bed to lie wracked with the shudders for ages after. Even now I can't get those awful figures out of my head. The man is a bloody genius but, by Christ, I wouldn't like to be inside his mind!!
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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 92.8.27.82
Posted on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - 02:44 pm:   

I know how you feel, Stevie!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Wednesday, May 15, 2013 - 04:51 pm:   

I'm not exaggerating. I genuinely find his films incredibly uncomfortable to watch but hypnotically fascinating at the same time. No other film director has tapped into the stuff of pure nightmare like him.

I can imagine a personal vision of Hell as being strapped in a chair, eyelids pinned open, like Alex in 'A Clockwork Orange', and being forced to watch all these in an endless loop, on one's own, with no other outside stimulus. Gibbering insanity would be one's only escape... shudder.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Thursday, May 16, 2013 - 12:23 pm:   

I braved one more Svankmajer short before bed last night and was astonished to see a completely different side to the man's talent.

'J.S. Bach's Fantasy In G Minor' was a 4 minute thing of beauty to behold. It opens with a mysterious black garbed figure entering a house and going up a series of stairs before sitting down in front of a grand old organ and, as soon as his fingers hit the keys, we are launched into a series of abstract animations and fluid camera movements through a series of opening doors and down long corridors that uncannily match the flow and mood of Bach's hauntingly beautiful music. He could have had a marvellous visionary career making videos for classical pieces on this evidence! I didn't dare risk spoiling the mood by putting on the next film and went to bed in a lovely relaxed frame of mind, where I drifted off to sleep listening to all 4 discs of Bach's 'The Well Tempered Clavier'. From the nightmarish to the sulbime. Sigh...
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 86.24.62.55
Posted on Sunday, May 19, 2013 - 01:29 pm:   

Bit of a mixed bag from Jan last night that was by turns beguiling and upsetting:

'A Game With Stones' was a lovely little abstract animation to gorgeous tinkly music that involved a clock and a variety of different coloured pebbles performing impossible tricks. I needn't have worried about it following the Bach film as it was equally enchanting and oddly soothing to watch.

Then one of my worst nightmares was visualised with a ridiculously violent animated rendition of the classic 'Punch And Judy' hand puppet show, including a live guinea pig on stage, that I could barely watch and left me sweating and shivering and knowing I'd be hearing that awful cackle in my dreams. In one scene the hideous Mr Punch is nailed down inside a miniature coffin from which his squirming resurrection represented the very essence of horror to me. I can still see him jerking about with that absurd mallet in his horrible little wooden hands. Get out of my head you big nosed bastard!!

Then the half hour it took to watch these films ended, thank God, on another soothingly abstract little drawn animation of various fantastical figures dancing about to beautiful music called simply 'Et Cetera'.

It felt like having my innermost psyche stroked then repeatedly punched before being lulled back to calmness again by some mad genius able to read my thoughts. Miraculous filmmaking like nothing I've ever experienced before!!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 86.24.62.55
Posted on Tuesday, June 04, 2013 - 12:44 am:   

I've plucked up the courage to watch the next two shorts in this box set; "Historia Naturae" (1967) and "The Garden" (1968). God knows what awaits me...
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Tuesday, June 04, 2013 - 12:38 pm:   

'Historia Naturae' (1967) was a creepy as feck 10 minute stop motion animation involving all manner of stuffed and skeleton animals, taking us on a mesmeric dance through the natural history of life on Earth, from worms through insects to fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals - all ending up being cooked and eaten by a hideous close-up of a masticating human mouth. The final shot of a bleached white skull chewing on human flesh is as nightmarish as it is witty. Death always wins in the end...

That shuddersome delight was followed by a brilliant 16 minute short horror film called 'The Garden' (1968). Unusually, for Svankmajer, this involved no animation at all but was all scripted live action with real flesh and blood actors. But that didin't make it any less unsettling. A creepily jovial fat-faced farmer picks up an old acquaintance, out for a visit from the city, and drives him to his remote farmhouse to meet his equally merry fat wife. The visitor is disturbed to see a line of well dressed but dead-eyed men and women standing holding hands to form a single file perimeter fence that surrounds the house while the farmer and his wife go about their business as if this was perfectly ordinary. Even the gate is made of people who walk out to open and backwards to close, once the two individuals in the centre have been unpadlocked. The farmer takes great pride in showing his dumbstruck guest his field of prize lettuces, grown from the best compost (but where does the manure come from?), that feed his colony of the most bizarre looking rabbits I have ever seen. The tension in this affable tour around the grounds is palpable, with the guest growing ever more uncomfortable, sweating uncontrollably, until he can hold it in no longer and asks his host, "Who are these people? Why do they stand there like that?" The denouement, after this fateful question and the farmer's Lucifer-like reaction, is one of the most chilling things I have seen in a long time.

I didn't sleep too well last night and still wonder about those godawful rabbits...
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 86.24.62.55
Posted on Wednesday, June 05, 2013 - 01:58 am:   

Just watched the next two short horror films and they were like nothing I've ever seen before and are utterly terrifying.

'The Flat' (1968) begins with a man being thrust into a well furnished room with a fine meal laid out on the table. He settles down to eat and then everything in the flat begins to wage war on him and when he attempts to escape he finds himself locked in an inescapable Hell. The mixture of increasingly frenzied live action and brilliant stop motion animation of everyday objects is the closest thing I have ever seen to a visualised nightmare. Chairs, table, bed, wardrobe, mirror, oven, taps, cups, plates, knives, forks, spoons, food, light bulbs, nails and even the very walls themselves become demonic tormentors of the poor bastard trapped inside with them. The ending, when he eventually manages to batter his way through the door, is one of the most frightening things I've ever witnessed. A masterpiece of pure unrelenting terror with heightened sound effects and nerve jangling music to match. I don't think I could watch this again for a very, very long time but I know it will forever haunt the darker recesses of my mind. Shit scary!!

'A Picnic With Weissmann' (1968) isn't quite as mercilessly terrifying but is a more subtly frightening tale of the revolt of inanimate objects against man. The film opens with beautiful music, birds chirping and an idyllic scene of a picnic set up in a lovely meadow. There is a table, chairs, bowls of food, a gramophone, an old tripod camera, a football, a chessboard set up to play, a deck of cards, a disconcertingly out of place wardrobe with old time photos of picnicking revellers stuck on it and an ominous looking spade leant against it while, draped on a sun lounger, lies an empty suit... but no people. Then these items begin to move, the chairs playing football while the chess game and cards play by themselves, and the suit begins to eat as the spade proceeds to dig what looks very much like a grave and the camera takes pictures of the fun. I won't spoil the ending but it's a classic of shock horror after the accumulation of disquieting details about what may have become of the people in the photos. These films are sublime works of nightmarish genius and it'll be a while before I pluck up the courage to watch the next one!
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Weber (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 86.134.105.107
Posted on Wednesday, June 05, 2013 - 02:13 am:   

I may need to track down this DVD...
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Wednesday, June 05, 2013 - 11:25 am:   

I can't recommend the works of Jan Svankmajer enough, Weber, for those with strong psyches!

However, I remember you saying you didn't like the films of David Lynch - 'Eraserhead' (1977) in particular - so you may find the more extreme and uncompromising surrealism of these films a bit hard to take. I can only watch them in small doses to avoid nightmares.

I was haunted all night - still am - by the image of that poor sod being humiliated, battered about and stripped of his clothes in 'The Flat'. It and 'The Garden' (see above) were filmed in the same harsh, grainy black and white style as 'Eraserhead' making them all the more nightmarish.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Wednesday, June 12, 2013 - 04:48 pm:   

I watched the longest film on this box set so far (at 30 minutes) the other night and have been puzzling over it ever since.

This bafflingly weird and nightmarishly disturbing masterpiece completes a trilogy of live action and stop motion animated short films by Jan Svankmajer that feature human protagonists under threat from frighteningly animated everyday objects. The three films; 'The Flat' (1968), 'A Picnic With Weissmann' (1968) & 'A Quiet Week In The House' (1969) could indeed be shown together as an hour long feature film [perhaps titled 'Night Of The Inanimate' (1969)] that would even outdo David Lynch's 'Eraserhead' (1977) in the creepy "What the fuck was that!" stakes.

In this conclusion to the trilogy humanity has clearly got wise to the threat and started to fight back. We follow some sort of binocular wielding, ridiculously camouflaged (as a bush) and heavily equipped secret agent as he sneaks through the undergrowth toward an isolated and abandoned looking farmhouse in the coutryside. Once inside he drops his disguise and proceeds to creep along the dank eerie corridors drilling a small peep-hole in each closed door he comes to and peering inside. What is revealed in each of the rooms is a scene of nightmarish activity as all manner of inanimate objects shuffle about attempting to integrate a variety of dismembered limbs and internal organs of animals and people into their own form. We see a chair festoon itself with blood and feathers and attempt to fly. We see a horribly fleshy severed tongue, penetrated by metal screws, squirming over a pile of dirty dishes licking off the food residue (I could barely watch this sequence!). We see an array of pigs trotters strung together and made to dance by twisting loops of metal wire. And so it goes on as a horribly silent and purposeful barrage of impossibly grisly imagery buffets the mind of the viewer and the note-taking peeping tom, who one fears for dreadfully and admires for his steely professionalism in the face of what would drive any normal person insane. Having finished his sweating reconnaisance of all the rooms the agent then proceeds to plant sticks of dynamite around the house and unroll fuse wire to a detonator outside... does he succeed in his mission or do the inanimate things rule the day?! Watch it and find out.

Interestingly the live action sequences with the human protagonist are filmed in grainy black and white with music and heightened sound effects but the animated contents of each room are in hideously lurid colour and completely without sound. The effect is indescribably disturbing to the senses.

A bit like Ramsey Campbell, this director likes to claim his films are intended as dark comedies, and there is a certain wit always in evidence, but, beware potential viewers, the only laughter they are ever likely to elicit is of the demented cackling variety just before you're carted off to the madhouse!! Shudder...
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Tuesday, June 18, 2013 - 01:48 pm:   

Watched another 30 minute epic by the great man last night.

'Don Juan' (1969) is a straight retelling of the Don Juan legend using a combination of stop motion animation, hideous life sized wooden marionettes and actors dressed as the same (as in 'The Last Trick' above) with the three integrated so seamlessly as to make it near impossible to see the joins or know what to expect next... on a visual level. The effect is, as ever, nightmarishly unsettling and builds to the director's most bravura sequence of supernatural horror yet as the vengeful spirit of a former lover's father, murdered by our libertine anti-hero, rises as a faceless spectre from the grave and drags the unrepentant bastard down to Hell. During the story, when these marionettes are beheaded, delimbed or run through by DJ's merciless sword, the blood doesn't just flow but jets in ridiculous cherry red fountains that may very well have influenced the infamous Monty Python "Salad Days" sketch. I wonder had Svankmajer just watched 'The Wild Bunch' (1969) too?!

Whatever, this isn't just cinema but is visionary filmmaking as the purest form of Art to stand alongside any of the great works of the 20th Century irrespective of medium, imho.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Thursday, June 20, 2013 - 01:12 pm:   

Experienced another half hour of visual delirium last night:

'The Ossuary' (1970) is a hauntingly beautiful and forensically detailed up-close examination of the famous Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic. This macabre gothic masterpiece is a Catholic chapel constructed entirely of the bones and skulls of medieval victims of the Black Death. Svankmajer's camera glides lovingly over every grotesque detail accompanied by a suitably creepy musical soundtrack that mixes weird electronic warbles with eerie folk violin. Hypnotically wonderful filmmaking! I'd love to visit this place for real.

Then 'Jabberwocky' (1971) plunges us into the darkest realms of stop motion nightmare again. As a well mannered little girl's voice recites, in English, Lewis Carroll's famous poem the viewer is bombarded with a hellish storm of impossible imagery involving the toys and furniture in a Victorian child's playroom. In their frenzied cavortings they seem to be trying to bring the Jabberwock to life as some unholy inversion of childhood fun and innocence. Over all broods a portrait of a solemn bearded man while a real non-animated black cat fights a losing battle in its attempts to topple the toys before they can coalesce. I found this 15 minute film to be one of the most disturbingly irrational things I have ever watched and it haunts me yet. The nightmarishly catchy Morricone-on-acid music that plays throughout is every bit as brilliant as the mad imagery it so perfectly accompanies. I must find out who composed it! This mini-masterpiece could very easily be included in a screening of Svankmajer's first feature film, 'Alice' (1988), as the perfect intro to his insane visualisation of the Carrollian universe. Staggeringly impressive!!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 86.24.62.55
Posted on Friday, June 21, 2013 - 03:41 am:   

Just watched the next two films that form a bridge between two distinct periods in Svankmajer's evolution as a filmmaker of genius:

'Leonardo's Diary' (1972) is a beautiful 11 minute short that takes us through the famous pages of Da Vinci's intricately drawn notebooks, brought to stunningly animated life, and expertly intercuts the resulting impossible imagery with documentary found footage of contemporary Czechoslovakia. The film was condemned at the time by the authorities for political subversion - even though it is completely free of dialogue - and the director was blacklisted and unable to work for the next 7 years!!!! The gorgeous animation and accompanying music integrate with the random black and white footage of daily life with great wit and charm and appear, to my eyes, completely free of controversy. What a tragically idiotic thing to have happened!

'The Castle Of Otranto' (1979) marked Svankmajer's triumphant return to filmmaking and showcases a new found maturity of style and narrative cohesion. It is a brilliant 20 minute mini-epic of pure gothic horror that plays with the central conceit of Horace Walpole's famous spoof with wonderfully satisfying multi-layered ingenuity. Starting as a mock contemporary documentary the film introduces us, via a microphone wielding Pythonesque TV interviewer, to an eccentric old archaeologist who is convinced he has discovered the actual ruins of the real life Castle of Otranto from the story - that he insists was based on fact! His presentation of the evidence is intercut with an animated retelling of the story using beautifully colourful cut-outs, in the style of Oliver Postgate's 'Noggin The Nog' or Terry Gilliam's famous animations for 'Monty Python's Flying Circus'. Finally when pressed, with a wry chuckle, on whether he believes the supernatural elements of the story actually happened the scientist presents some artefacts that seem to be from a giant suit of armour but they are met with ridicule. And then comes the big twist in a brilliantly nightmarish and witty moment of stark terror that brings both worlds - live action and animated - together in a finale of apocalyptic splendour that recalls the climax to last year's wonderful 'The Cabin In The Woods'. Sheer genius from start to finish!!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Friday, June 21, 2013 - 12:23 pm:   

The composer responsible for the brilliantly weird music that accompanies these films was Zdeněk Liška (16 March 1922 – 13 August 1983) - a Czech composer who was incredibly prolific and famous in his homeland for his groundbreaking juxtaposition of electronic music with organic folk melodies. What I wouldn't do for a CD of this man's wondrous soundtracks.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Tuesday, June 25, 2013 - 04:38 pm:   

Watched the next three short films over the weekend, my astonishment growing all the time:

'The Fall Of The House Of Usher' (1980) adapts Poe's gothic horror story in the same way the director approached 'Jabberwocky' (1971). As a suitably solemn male voiceover reads the prose aloud the camera explores the rotting ruins of some vast stone house, surrounded by steaming unhealthy looking swampland, and, gradually, the bricks, woodwork and shattered furniture of the place come to insidiously animated life, while weird faces bloom fleetingly from the patterns of lichen, moss and cobwebs that cover everything. The only living thing we see in the film is an austere looking raven perched atop the highest pile but soon it too succumbs to the creeping decay that engulfs and destroys all. As brilliant an evocation of the pure essence of Poe as I have ever seen on film!

'Dimensions Of Dialogue' (1982) came as an instant recall shock to the system as, I believe, it was the first film I ever saw of this mad genius, late one night on Channel 4 back in the 80s, and was the single most disturbing thing I had seen on film up to that time. This is a fifteen minute stop motion animated portmanteau nightmare made up of three short films each tackling the subject of human communication as only Svankmajer could ever have visualised it. The first, "Factual Conversation", depicts a series of confrontations between weird animated effigies. A man made out of vegetables encounters a man made out of cooking implements and is engulfed and mashed to a pulp. The metal man then vomits out the remains which reform into a weird vegetable soup man that encounters a man made of books and magazines which it engulfs and turns to vomited out mulch that becomes a paper pulp man that encounters the metal man... and so it goes on until we are left with two perfect human figures made of flesh coloured clay. Then "Passionate Discourse" has these clay figures sit facing each other at a table and their feautures and bodies take on a male and a female's physical attributes. They flirt, they have eye-popping impossible sex (again, like something out of a Clive Barker story), they separate and discover an amorphous lump of animate clay has been left over that vainly attempts to reattach itself to each of them in turn causing the two to quarrel, toss the squealing thing back and forth and finally attack and claw each other to pieces with mind-numbing violence. Finally in "Exhaustive Discussion" two severed clay heads face each other on the table and grow horribly real eyes and tongues - no doubt from a butcher's leftovers - and produce various household objects from their yawning mouths in a weird game of paper-scissors-stone that results in an increasingly frenzied storm of nightmare collisions. I've tried to describe what my eyes witnessed but the effect of watching the film is like having the inside of your skull scraped out while your jaw hangs open in mute shock.

But the worst was yet to come... 'Down To The Cellar' (1983) is, frankly, the most terrifying and cohesive short narrative in the box set since 'The Flat' (1968). [***** SPOILERS *****] This 20 odd minute epic of Campbellian horror is filmed in identical style (live action mixed with subtle stop motion animation) to his 2000 horror masterpiece, 'Little Otik', and features another little pig-tailed girl living in a grotty old apartment building as the protagonist/victim. She is sent down to the cellar with a basket to fetch potatoes, clutching a pitiful little child's torch, and must traverse a network of dank, dripping subterranean passages where she encounters a scary old man who lives under a pile of coal and tries to entice her into his salivating clutches with a huge pot of multi-coloured sweets that glitter in the light of her torch like untold precious jewels. She evades him to be cornered by a hideous cackling old crone who is making rock cakes out of eggs and shovelfuls of soot rolled into dough and narrowly avoids ending up in her oven. Other nightmares follow on the quest for those bloody spuds; the girl is chased by a pack of ravenous old shoes, their soles flapping like mouths, her own murderous doppelganger attacks from a web strewn antique mirror, chairs, doors and trash cans spring to threatening life and even the very potatoes, once found, fight against being put in the basket. The little girl becomes an admirable figure of unconquerable courage and resourcefulness as she uses her wits to overcome each of these obstacles and finally has to make a mad sprint back for the doorway up to light and freedom while chased by a monstrously huge black cat, sent by the old witch, in a scene straight out of 'Cat People', but she makes it and flees up the stairs... only, bathed in the sanctity of the light from the hallway, to trip on the very top step and lose her grip on the basket, from which the potatoes leap and bounce giggling one after another back down into the stark rectangle of darkness. She stands, lifts the basket, trembles and wipes away a tear before descending once more into the black maw from which we know, this time, there can be no escape.

Yes, I didn't sleep too well this past few nights and had all six cats and kittens in bed beside me for comfort. Just writing the above has my heart thumping all over again.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Friday, June 28, 2013 - 12:25 pm:   

It happened again!

'The Pendulum, The Pit And Hope' (1983) was Svankmajer's second Poe adaptation and one of the scariest straight horror stories he's ever done. As with Robert Montgomery's version of Chandler's 'Lady In The Lake' (1947) the action is all filmed from the viewpoint of the central character and all we see and hear is what he sees and hears. This makes for the most intensely frightening adaptation of the famous story I have ever seen and fully translates the desperate panic of the protagonist to the viewer. The director goes one further, however, in showing us the hapless prisoner of the black cowled and faceless Inquisitors actually escape from the room having avoided death by slicing in half and falling to his doom (though not without gruesome injury) and there follows an impossibly tense sequence of him traversing dark underground tunnels and peering in on other less fortunate victims of barbaric torture before seeing the sunlight and making a break for freedom... hence the "Hope" of the title. Does he make it? Watch the film to find out. It is a masterpiece of gothic terror at its absolute finest and easily the best Poe adaptation I have seen.

But when I said "it happened again" I wasn't referring to being scared witless. The authorities, in their paranoid wisdom, deemed the film as a veiled attack against their own harsh regime and Svankmajer was once again blacklisted and unable to work for the next 5 years... Jesus wept!!

'Virile Games' (1988) was his second triumphant return to the directorial helm and one of those Channel 4 films, back in the 80s, that forever stamped his nightmare visions on my consciousness. This film has everything that makes the man great. Incisively satirical, laugh out loud hilarious, nightmarishly violent and scary as feck this incendiary bomb of radical filmmaking is like nothing he had made before and, yet, is the culmination of his entire short film career, imho. This is the one with the guy arriving in from work with his carry out of beers and settling down to watch the football on the box. The game itself, between a Red team and a Blue team, is pure Monty Python, and every bit as pant wettingly hilarious, as the animated players pirouette and mince around each other to soft classical music while performing outrageously camp tricks with the ball and not even attempting to score. But then the real purpose of the game becomes apparent as, one-by-one, they start killing each other in the most graphically ridiculous and imaginatively violent Tom & Jerry/Itchy & Scratchy-esque ways that have ever been committed to film. All manner of implements are utilised by the players to butcher each other and, as each corpse falls, play is suspended while stretcher-bearers cart off the remains to be hammered into red and blue coffins by the side of the pitch. I can't even begin to describe some of the death sequences but they are as vomit inducingly ultra-violent as they are tear provokingly hilarious. When the action explodes out of the TV set and takes over the viewer's flat in the second half, while he sits quaffing his beers and enjoying the bloody mayhem around him, the full nightmare intensity of Svankmajer's vision is at its most apocalyptically inspired and enfused with true visionary genius!! One of the most startling cinematic masterpieces it was ever my pleasure to watch. Nuff said.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 86.24.62.55
Posted on Thursday, July 04, 2013 - 12:20 am:   

Svankmajer's next short film, 'Another Kind Of Love' (1988), came as something of a shock of a different kind and a pleasant surprise for me. The effect of spreading liberalisation in the Eastern Bloc, that led to the fall of The Berlin Wall and the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, produced the director's first, and so far only, commercial project - in the form of a pop video!! What was my astonishment and pleasure to discover it was by one of my favourite musical artists, Hugh Cornwell, lead singer/guitarist/songwriter of punk/rock/pop legends The Stranglers!!!! I can't believe I just typed that... but, yes, this 5 minute video, to an irresistibly catchy song that is just typical of the man, is very much in the style of the famous animated videos to Peter Gabriel's "Sledgehammer" and Talking Heads' "Road To Nowhere", that was all the rage at the time. Where Svankmajer's film differs is in the shock horror potency of its sexually and violently explicit images that would never have led to it being shown on Top Of The Pops, nevermind MTV. Cornwell's unashamedly catchy toe-tapping pop song is accompanied by a story of him being trapped in a room where he is tormented and eventually consumed by an animated clay representation of sexually dominant womanhood at its most demonic, while all the objects he is surrounded by dance along to the music. It is nothing short of genius but way too extreme to have ever helped the song sell. I wonder if it was a hit? Must check.

That was followed by an oddly sweet little film called 'Meat Love' (1988) that tells the story of two raw slabs of steak meeting on a kitchen worktop and falling hopelessly in love. They coyly make eyes at each other, flirt, kiss, chase each other, go on a date and have passionate sex before being unceremoniously skewered and flung into a frying pan! Their sizzling demise is as poignant as it is funny.

Next up is the director's feature film debut, 'Alice' (1988), which I intend to watch this weekend as part of a triple bill, along with Ingmar Bergman's 'The Magician' (1958) and David Lynch's 'Mulholland Drive' (2001) - both for the first time. Don't know how the Lynch film kept avoiding me up to now but it did. It's gonna be some marathon of weirdness!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 86.24.62.55
Posted on Thursday, July 04, 2013 - 12:36 am:   

Just checked... "Another Kind Of Love" was Hugh Cornwell's debut solo single, taken from the album 'Wolf' (1988). It reached #11 on the US Alternative Chart in September '88. Apparently the album is highly regarded and was re-released in 1999. As I have every Stranglers album I must try and track down a copy. Thanks, Jan!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Thursday, July 04, 2013 - 11:11 am:   

On waking this morning I had to check whether I really had seen Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers sucked inside a hideous clay woman during sex or if it hadn't been some Tubby Thackeray inspired mad dream. It really happened.

What was that Joel said about reality?
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Wednesday, August 07, 2013 - 04:30 pm:   

How do I even begin to describe the nightmarish joys of 'Alice' (1988) by Jan Svankmajer?

I'm only glad I re-read the Alice books before watching it as they acted as some kind of whimsical antidote in my subconscious to Jan's utter trashing of the laugh-out-loud cosiness of Lewis Carroll's most famous tales. Watch this film and you won't be laughing... squirming in spellbound fascination and horror more like!

The film begins with a bored little girl idly tossing pebbles into a stream in an idyllic conutryside setting. Then she dozes off - and all bets are off. When she "reawakens" she finds herself in a dusty old room full of cobwebbed antiques and stuffed animals, one of which, a white rabbit, proceeds to rip the nails from its mountings and come to terrifying life. From there she follows the sawdust leaking monstrosity through a bleak muddy wilderness and into a desk drawer to Get-Me-The-Fuck-Out-Of-Here Land!!!!

All the scenes from Carroll's odyssey are present and correct but inhabited by the most monstrous collection of stop motion animated creatures I ever laid eyes upon - or ever want to again. The girl stumbles through it all in a mixture of baffled childhood innocence (it does exist, Joel) and utter terror that communicates itself to the shell-shocked viewer in the most indescribably unsettling terms just about imaginable.

Surrealism and nightmare logic are the order of the day in this stunning fantasmagoria of all our worst and earliest fears. As just one example of how the director utterly subverts Carroll's vision; when the Queen of Hearts cries "Off with their heads" in this version the white rabbit himself is only to willing to oblige with a wicked looking pair of rusty scissors that make the final trial sequence one of the most nightmarishly terrifying things I or Alice has ever experienced. No spoilers... but don't show this one to the kids lightly and if you are an adult of a particularly nervous or impressionable disposition the AVOID AT ALL COUNTS!!!!

This is Svankmajer's masterpiece and, in my opinion, the greatest part-animated movie that has ever been made. Just wait till you see real life Alice turn into a moving Victorian doll from all our worst nightmares... nuff said!

Best watched with the short film 'Jabberwocky' (1971) as the perfectly nightmarish intro - as I did.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Wednesday, August 07, 2013 - 04:43 pm:   

Now I can get back to the post-1988 shorts!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 86.24.62.55
Posted on Thursday, August 08, 2013 - 01:56 am:   

Just watched the next two shorts, both from 1989:

"Darkness, Light, Darkness" is one of the funniest films the director ever made while remaining as gruesomely disturbing as any of his other works. All the action takes place in a bare room with two doors, a window and a solitary light bulb. Into this space enter various dismembered parts of a human body - hideously animated in life-like clay. Two hands, two eyeballs, two ears, a nose, a head, a disgustingly fleshy tongue, clacking teeth, a horribly bloody brain, two feet, a cock and balls that has to be dowsed in cold water to get rid of its embarrassing erection and finally a huge amorphous lump that is worked into torso, arms and legs. These parts proceed to try and reassemble themselves into a single person with hilariously mixed up results, until... the man is complete and realises he's too bloody big to leave the room. Then the light goes out and we are left with a haunting scream that had me shuddering after all the belly laughs. Awesome animation!!

"Flora" was a nightmarishly brief pole-axing punch to the guts in which a human figure made from a vast assortment of colourful fruit and vegetables is seen tied to a bed with rope and writhing in agony as the time lapse photography shows us the body rotting into a nauseating mound of putrefying vegetable matter. The most haunting element of the film is the hand uselessly stretching for a glass of water someone has placed on the bedside table just out of reach. All this is accompanied by the thunderous sound of trains passing outside. A vision oh hell to one starting out of sleep in a cold sweat in the middle of the night. Shudder...
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 86.24.62.55
Posted on Thursday, August 08, 2013 - 09:10 am:   

I wonder had David Fincher seen "Flora"? It's nightmarish vision of rotting captivity could very well have influenced the terrifying Sloth murder in 'Seven' (1995)!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Thursday, August 08, 2013 - 11:42 am:   

There are only two shorts left in the box set and that's all the short films Svankmajer has made to date. After that I'll be psyching myself up for the terrors (and I'm not kidding!) of his second horror feature, 'Faust' (1994), as part of my next triple bill.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 86.24.62.55
Posted on Tuesday, August 13, 2013 - 07:33 am:   

Watched the final two Svankmajer shorts:

"The Death Of Stalinism In Bohemia" (1990) is when the director finally got to say what he wanted about the Communist/Soviet regime, following the Velvet Revolution, under which he and his countrymen had suffered so much. It is a terrifying and extremely bloody historical recap of past leaders, from Stalin on, depicted as horrifically animated stone statues that are dismembered in a nightmarish operating theatre to reveal the stinking innards within - each leader bloodily giving birth to a squealing smaller statue of his replacement until we react good old Gorbachev and the violence comes to an end in a carnival of public celebration. Sweet artistic revenge for the years when he was unable to work for making much less pointed, if they were at all, critiques of the regime. So a happy ending but a truly unsettling film!

But that was as nothing compared to the insane nightmare visuals of the mini-epic "Food" (1992)! A portmanteau horror short comprising three segments: "Breakfast" is almost impossible to describe but sees a queue of ordinary people waiting to be served in a grimy cafeteria. When they get to the end of the queue each one is presented with a horribly animated human vending machine that provides a meal and coffee from its stomach before walking off and the person who has just eaten is then transformed into a vending machine for the next in line. Bizarre and extremely disturbing imagery that makes me wonder where he gets his ideas from! "Lunch" was even more frightening, in an absurd way, as it depicts two men sitting facing each other in a middle class restaurant who are unable to attract the attention of a waiter. As they wait their hunger gets the better of them and they proceed to consume everything in front of them - plates, cutlery, serviettes, table cloth, table and chairs. Still having no luck with the waiters they then eat the clothes off themselves, in a weird echo of Charlie Chaplin's 'The Gold Rush', until, both sitting on the floor bollock naked the bigger of the two falls upon the other one in a blood freezing moment of surreal cannibalism that had me petrified watching it! And "Dinner" was even worse!! We watch various well dressed toffs in a high class restaurant being served a carefully prepared piece of their own body marinaded in all kinds of fancy sauces with all the trimmings. A man eats his wn hand, another a foot, a woman is served her breasts as a blancmange-like dessert and so on, until the final nightmarish vision of a man feasting on his own severed penis - until he becomes aware of us watching and covers his meal in embarrassment while shooing us away with the other hand. After that I staggered off to bed to be plagued by visions of sausages and meatballs - something I may well never be able to eat again ffs!!

That's this monumental box set finished, but for some interviews and documentaries, and I can honestly say it is the single most horrific item in my entire DVD collection. Svankmajer may well be completely insane but his mad genius is unquestionable. Absolutely magnificent filmmaking from the Seventh Circle of Hell. Awesome stuff!!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Tuesday, August 13, 2013 - 04:20 pm:   

I was thinking about the uncompromisingly violent and sexual films of Jan Svankmajer at lunchtime, while I was tucking into my sandwiches, and trying to think of a comparable non-cinematic work that he would be a natural to direct.

The only narrative I could come up with that can match Jan's unholy vision, in a lifetime's experience of seeking out the weird and unusual, and that would actually challenge his skill as an animator, is a certain graphic novel called 'Ed The Happy Clown' (1983-85) by avant-garde Canadian cartoonist, Chester Brown. It is my single favourite work in the entire comicbook field and Svankmajer would have a ball filming it. In Stevieworld that would be a surrealistic horror match made in heaven!

You heard it here first, people.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Thursday, August 15, 2013 - 11:53 am:   

Got my next long planned triple bill lined up for this weekend:

'The Phantom Of The Opera' (1925) by Rupert Julian - which I've only ever seen clips of before and this is the fully restored and remastered version.

'Macbeth' (1971) by Roman Polanski - a film I've longed to see ever since my teenage years due its extreme bloody horror reputation and the fact it's the only film from Polanski's glory days that I could never get to see.

'Faust' (1994) by Jan Švankmajer - I saw this once before, late one night on Film 4 back in the 90s, and it disturbed the living hell out of me. A dark satanic part-animated rendering of Goethe's immortal 'Faust' (1808-31) that I'm crapping myself at the thought of watching again. He takes the legend and breathes unholy life into it like never before...
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Monday, September 23, 2013 - 03:06 pm:   

Time to write up 'Faust' (1994):

The film is set in contemporary Prague and follows the insidious induction of an unremarkable everyman character into a Satanic pact by the subtlest of means. While walking home from work one day he is handed a flyer by a pair of weirdly enthusiastic ordinary looking blokes. On getting home he absent-mindedly looks at the leaflet and discovers it is a map with a certain backstreet location highlighted. He then finds an egg (symbol of the soul) hidden inside a loaf he is slicing up for his tea and is disturbed by an errant chicken appearing from nowhere! That night his sleep is plagued by nightmares (or are they?) in which he sees the two strange gentlemen gazing up at him from the street below - their eyes hideously glazed like zombies while they clutch the aforesaid chicken. Next day he is compelled to follow the map to the derelict location it marks and from there all bets are off...

Note that this man, like Macbeth, did not ask the Devil into his life but was approached and seduced from outside. What he discovers in that rundown building defies belief.

Svankmajer throws all the demonically surreal imagery he has in his arsenal at the viewer as "Mr Everyman" turns into Dr Faustus and pits his wits against Mephistopheles himself in an attempt to learn the secrets of the universe and attain what every human being craves - reassurance and happiness.

The two previous films that most pointed the way to this surreal horror masterpiece are Emil Radok's seminal 1958 film, 'Doktor Johannes Faust', for which Jan supplied the nightmarish puppet effects, and the director's own early gothic horror masterpiece, 'Don Juan' (1969), with the return of those hideously clacking life-sized wooden mannequins.

Visual highlights include; Faust's first frenzied creation of a horribly animated clay homonculus that grows from embryo to monster before his terrified eyes (thus proving the efficacy of magic before his Soul has been given up), the summoning of a bollock shrivelling horned demon from Hell - that keeps morphing into an image of Faust himself, the mysterious old man with his newspaper wrapped pound of bloody human flesh being chased by a very determined dog, a graphic sex scene with a tittering wooden figure into which a vagina has been drilled, the Devil appearing on the streets of Prague swathed in body-length overcoat, slouched hat and scarf - to all but one unfortunate woman who cathes a glimpse of what lies under the brim, Faust forcibly encased in wood to become a living effigy himself (echoing Alice's transformation into a rosy cheeked Victorian doll) and so many other memorably diabolical scenes that seer their way into the stunned viewer's consciousness that I can't possibly describe or wish to recall them all.

This is a graphically explicit surrealist horror masterpiece that beats David Lynch & David Cronenberg hands down at their own game. And if I do ever watch it again it will be in many years time!!

For all the stream of consciousness madness, however, the film, like von Trier's 'Antichrist' (2009), is surprisingly faithful to the accepted horror movie template of an innocent individual digging ever deeper into things better left well alone... and the ending is a thing of petrifying perfection!!

Not one for the even slightly easily disturbed... or those who demand any kind of making sense.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Monday, September 23, 2013 - 03:23 pm:   

Next up is 'Conspirators Of Pleasure' (1996) - the most sexually explicit film Svankmajer ever made but in no way pornographic. It is perhaps the finest, funniest and most disturbing critique of Freudianism ever put on film. I saw it once before, on the big screen, and staggered out afterward not knowing whether to laugh, cry or scream!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Monday, September 23, 2013 - 03:31 pm:   

One sequence in particular still haunts my dreams. A chained up and frighteningly animated straw man effigy being whipped and sexually abused by one very horny woman! Then there was that cockerel-headed thing perched on the wall ffs!! And the horribly lifelike oiled-up wanking machine!!! Jesus, can I even bring myself to watch this nightmare again?!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 212.183.128.104
Posted on Saturday, April 19, 2014 - 12:22 pm:   

'Conspirators Of Pleasure' (1996) written and directed by Jan Švankmajer - I'm sat here trying to put words to this film and it isn't easy. As always I'll just say what it was about and what I thought of it. This was Jan's third full length feature and shows all the painstaking perfectionism of any of his films while being the most devoid of narrative and closest to the stream of consciousness image mongering of his short works. His first two features were outlandishly skewed and disturbing adaptations of other's works. 'Alice' (1988) subverted Lewis Carroll's playful surrealism into the stuff of childhood nightmares while 'Faust' (1994) turned Marlowe & Goethe's existential fable into a modern day satanic horror story of terrifying power. Everything here, however, came entirely from the imagination of Švankmajer himself and the subject is forbidden sex in all its myriad forms. The film takes us on a pointedly Freudian exploration of the secret desires, private kinks and unspoken urges that haunt every one of us. It may be the most shockingly pornographic film not to actually feature any real sex or graphic nudity. Everything here is unashamedly symbolic - often hilariously so - but the mad genius's inspired juxtaposition of stark imagery, amplified sound, contrasting colours and textures, live action and stop motion animation comes together in a shocking display of taboo imagery that burrows its way relentlessly into the psyche of the viewer and leaves one feeling indescribably shaken. What is even more remarkable is that this is a Tatiesque "silent movie" with sound but absolutely no dialogue. And one could watch the whole thing without ever being conscious of the fact!

There are characters - six of them - and the bare bones of a story but they are merely ciphers for the director's psychological polemic against the psychic harm done by society's strait-jacketing abhorrence of sexual freedom. Aleister Crowley would have loved this film for his "Do what thou wilt!" edict is writ large all over it. The first thing we see is a symbol that also, coincidentally, featured large in Alejandro Jodorowsky's epic, 'El Topo' (1970) - the old eye in the pyramid surrounded by a snake eating its own tail (the very thing that was being graphically branded into the skin of those slaves). Only in this case the pyramid is a whiskey still, again highlighting both the seriousness of purpose and the mischievous black humour of the work. We are then introduced to two ordinary plebs who live alone in apartments across the hall from each other, without ever verbally communicating, yet we know from their furtive glances when passing that they secretly lust after each other. There is shy mild mannered Mr Pivonka, who keeps a black cockerel in his closet, and his imposingly buxom all woman neighbour, Mrs Loubalová, with her errant pussy, that we see licking the blood from carelessly discarded menstrual pads.

Then we meet Mr Kula, the sleazy local newsagent and purveyor of pornography to Pivonka, that does nothing for him as he is too busy wanking over the pretty newsreader on the telly, Beltinska, who has trouble controlling her onscreen orgasms while having her toes sucked under the desk by two huge carp in a tin bath of water! On following her home we discover she is unhappily married to the local hard nosed police captain, Beltinsky, whose secret fetish is to lock himself in the garden shed and writhe naked upon a stitched together collection of everyday objects, pilfered from strangers in the course of his work, that he has covered in contrasting hard and soft, smooth and sharp textures. We watch, half disgusted and half amused, as these home-made sex toys spring to life and caress his body the more frenzied his pleasure becomes. I never thought I'd live to see a man sexually serviced by an animated rolling pin covered in drawing pins but it happens here!! Yet worse is to come...

The final character is the local post woman, Malková, who delivers each of the character's mail with a knowing smirk and conspiratorially raised eyebrow - what the hell is going on in this town, we think - and who breaks into a fevered sweat every time she passes a bakery or catches sight of someone eating a sandwich! Yes, this woman gets off on bread behind closed doors. We witness her shiftily smuggling a huge crusty loaf home and taking it to her bedroom where she breaks it into pieces and rolls them into perfect little balls before inserting the whole lot into every orifice, bar her mouth, and collapsing on the bed in a state of private ecstasy. Meanwhile Mr Kula, frustrated with his own ministrations, has taken up electronics as a hobby, and eagerly awaits her delivery of each new packaged component that he assembles in his room above the shop into a huge many armed robot with a television for its head and videotaped close-ups of Beltinska breathily reading the news as its adored "face". Watching the clock with his remote primed and ready this horrible little man awaits the live 6 o'clock news with inhuman impatience and, yes, you guessed it, sex between man and horribly animated machine ensues in a scene that outdoes anything in Cronenberg's 'Videodrome' (1983) and had me not knowing whether to laugh out loud or squirm in embarrassed discomfort. Unknown to Kula, at the moment he comes all over his hideous invention, his imaginary lover is also climaxing onscreen to those horribly sucking carp... how's that for multi-layered voyeurism ffs?!?! Hitchcock never imagined filmmaking like this!!!!

All these insane antics are ingeniously intercut with each other throughout the film while we follow the main story of the secret affair between Pivonka and Loubalová. Each scene, or Pythonesque sketch, flows naturally into the next by the innocuous encounter of one character with another, and the quickly exchanged meaningful glances, half nods and lascivious grins that pass between them grow ever more disturbing as we wonder what the hell is going to be unleashed on us next. We realise there is a conspiracy of silence going on here and where it may ultimately lead is as profoundly disturbing as it is hypnotically fascinating. Make no mistake, this is great filmmaking!

The meat of the film, and its most nightmarish imagery, involves the unspoken frustrated love between the two leads. They steal clothes from each other and each constructs a horrible life-sized effigy, stuffed with straw, that they take, unbeknownst to each other, to a secret location and... do things to. Horrible, filthy things they could never dream of enacting on the real person. The man is transformed into a ridiculous yet indescribably unsettling cock-headed, bat winged monstrosity that performs an absurd courtship dance, while the restrained effigy comes to struggling life. And across town at the same time the real woman emerges from a wardrobe a masked whip-cracking dominatrix she-devil who proceeds to strip, humiliate and mercilessly flay the chained male effigy that reacts with screaming agony and all too obvious sexual arousal. We're talking the most disturbing use of stop motion animation I have ever watched. Those awful abused figures fighting to escape their tormentors haunt me yet. Both animated effigies end up reduced to bloody, yes bloody, pulps from the demented sexual attentions and unbridled savagery of their "lovers", at last divested of all need for decency or self control. It really is powerful stuff that had me clenching my teeth, gripping my knees and squinting in horrified fascination as it unfolded.

The final scene, when Pivonka returns home, sated, and finds that an awful fate has befallen the object of his unspeakable lust, and realises what awaits him in his apartment, is a horror tour-de-force that closes the film with a pair of opening closet doors and something about to emerge... before we mercifully fade to black and I staggered off to bed, heart thumping, to a night of tossing, turning, and truly indescribable dreams. I felt so disturbed and strangely energised in the days that followed that I couldn't stop thinking about the film and trying to come up with some sort of explanation or closure.

This is my reading of the film and of Švankmajer's uncompromising vision. Human beings are governed by two opposite but equal forces, the pleasure principle and the reality principle, so said Freud, and I completely agree with him. If either principle outweighs the other then sickness of the psyche is the inevitable result. At one extreme the hedonistic psychopath is entirely ruled by the pleasure principle. At the other the rigid conservative layer down of the Law bows only to the reality principle. For the individual to know true happiness, fulfilment and harmony with the universe they have to attain a perfect balance between what gives them pleasure and what their body requires to survive. Mind and flesh must compliment each other instead of battling for mastery of the soul. The conspirators in this film realised this and each, in their own way, attempted to reach Nirvana while obeying the laws of the jungle. The unspoken (or voiceless) cooperation and refusal to judge that went on between the six is a vision of how to attain personal balance while living in a repressive regime. It was only when their deviance from the norm became known to the State, as represented here by the police, the civil service and the media, that their world came crashing down in that terrifying ending (watch the film). The final message is that Society and its demand for Conformity is the enemy of the pleasure principle and creates terrible imbalance and sickness among all those who exist within its constraints. This sickness transforms pleasure into criminality and ultimate self-destructive violence. Having been brought up an Irish Catholic I know all too well the truth of this tragic equation. We need Laws to cope with reality but we equally need Freedom to cope with pleasure.

I'm not surprised Frank Zappa was such an underground hero in Cezhoslovakia under the Communist regime. I wonder did he ever get to meet Jan Švankmajer? If ever there were two soul brothers it was those guys. And Václav Havel agreed. Nuff said.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 85.255.235.82
Posted on Friday, May 16, 2014 - 02:04 am:   

It may take me a while to get round to a third viewing of Švankmajer's next film, his straight horror masterpiece 'Little Otik' (2000), as it is ridiculously expensive on DVD and will take some tracking down at an affordable price. But track it down I shall...
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 90.214.168.17
Posted on Wednesday, June 22, 2016 - 06:31 pm:   

Finally managed to get hold of an affordable copy of 'Little Otik' (2000) so I can get back to my chrono watch of the complete works of Jan Švankmajer. This film is the closest he came to a straight supernatural horror narrative and it may well be his masterpiece. It certainly disturbed the bejesus out of me when I first saw it. Here goes...

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