Customer Reviews

Conspirators of Pleasure [VHS]

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Imagine Ophuls' 'La Ronde' remade by a Czech Surrealist, with 'professional expertise' (as the end credits state) from Sacher-Masoch, de Sade, Freud, Bunuel, Ernst and Brauk. After an opening credits montage of 18th century erotic prints, scored to a lovely, kitschy waltz, 'Conspirators of Pleasure' follows five fetishists whose narratives interlock in bizarre ways. The first is an unshaven young man who enters an adult shop to buy an adult magazine. Examining his purchase in his tenement apartment, he spills beer all over the centrefold, in an early example of the film's outrageous visual punning. He enters his closet for certain private activity (having first checked posters of James Dean and a male bodybuilder, as if he's socially in the closet too), before being interrupted by the doorbell. The registered letter, written in cut-and-paste newspaper print, notifies 'Sunday'. He gets to work - asks his blowsy neighbour to decapitate his rooster, modelled on which he builds a papier-mache mask, glueing the girlie pictures to its surface, and then covering it with the real rooster's feathers.

The shopowner, meanwhile, has built a contraption that enables him to 'enjoy' sexual relations with a TV newsreader. This latter, who finds novel use for fish, peeps at her mad husband, who builds strange gadgets of arousal from items he steals during the day (contraceptives, fur from women's stoles etc.). The postal worker obsessively hollows loaves of break, making little balls she inserts into cranial orifices. The neighbour, who leaves used sanitary towels around the house for her cat, keeps a body in her closet and pilfers straw from dustbins.

The sexual needs underlying these acts undergo increasingly eccentric permutations as the film continues, often of a ritualistic or hermetic nature, taking place in bombed out churches, for instance, or a shed. The film's movement is primarily visual, the patterned images emphasising orifices, phalluses, fluids, hair etc., classic Freudian sybmols pushed to absurd signifying limits. The film's repetitive logic is that of the archetypal dream, proceeding by transference, displacement, condensation and interruption.

But 'Conspirators' is more than a mere illusitration of ideas from Svankmajer's heroes - the Prague setting is characteristically concrete, entering into a dramatic conflict with the surreal events and Svankmajer's style, relentlessly closing in on objects and parts of the body. Although there is very little puppetry in the film - Svankmajer, as if to demonstrate his theme, teases us by providing materials and set-ups for his familiar art, but delaying the animation - all the characters are substitutes for the director, artists-manque who use objects from the everyday world to create new, startling, living arragnements. The film's surreal view of sexual relations and the police is as sharp and funny as Bunuel's 'Un Chien Andoulu', with Svankmajer repeating Bunuel's method of musical leitmotifs for satiric effect.

Jan Svankmajer, whose name is almost always mentioned in the same breath as the Brothers Quay, is an animator with a deeply philosophical, psychological bent whose mode de employ is the infinite variety of the grotesque. If you appreciate Joel-Peter Whitkin's stills, you will love Svankmajers films. Objects animated are people, tubers, taxidermilogical failures, etc. Svankmayer takes a thousand separate, shocking little pieces and combines them into a sublimely shocking whole. The end product is always bafflingly surreal and so over the top as to be beatific. His filmography is made up mostly of shorts, and two other feature length films, Alice (1988) and Faust (1996), all would be worth some footwork to catch a glimpse of his intricately wrought madness.

Conspirators is a cohesive series of vignettes about obsessive-compulsive fetishists whose paths cross, in so doing sparking a series of respective erotic destinies that are fulfilled via a spiraling puzzle like path. The movie itself defines fetishism, turning the everyday object or occurrence into a meaning laden ritual; in these cases lives are compelled by a collection of huge fetish projects: the porno stand engineer who is so in love with images that he constructs a television that can be made to love him back; the mail carrier who maniacally turns loaves of bread into compact little balls that she delivers to the news anchor who feeds them to carp who live in a bucket under her desk and get her off on camera (as part of the engineer's project); her husband who hears symphonies in pursuit of junk he later constructs tools that de Sade would have cried over; and a pair of neighbors who obsess over each other's murders, whose will finds a magical way. This film is a must-see just for the exquisite detail with which the nameless protagonist constructs the piece de triumph of all fetish objects- it cannot be hinted at in less than a volume. These frames speak volumes, a wordless cacophony. Conspirators could be seen as a sort of "The Making Of" a Jan Svankmajer animation- the sympathetic voodoo magic worked by a team of discreet players so intense that genius is sparked and makes vital and gorgeous the previously inert and obscene. I'd give this film one star for each story's achievement, plus one for the opening sequence of *truly* bizarre 17th Century porno woodcuts. A must see.

Master animator Jan Svankmajer delivers another masterpiece with this feature-length effort, following the routines and rituals of a half dozen everyday folks (a man who keeps to himself; a woman across the hall from him; a newscaster and her husband; a mailwoman; and a magazine storekeeper). While still incorporating some very impressive stop-motion segments, this film is primarily live action and amazingly uses no spoken dialogue (so there aren't any subtitles or alternate audio tracks on the disc). Each character is represented with their own background music, and their paths cross interestingly as the events unfold. Examining the hidden desires and fetishistic nature of us all, Svankmajer has his subjects walking in and out of closets both literally and metaphorically. The imagery, as always, is equally fascinating and disturbing. His short film, "Food," is also included on this disc. The three segments ("Breakfast,""Lunch" and "Dinner") make some surreal statements about the way we all eat. If you enjoyed his mind-blowing "Alice" and "Faust," you owe it to yourself to experience this DVD.

To try and put into words the visual imagery of this film is an impossible task. Czech animator Svankmayer gives us glimpes into the internal world of some very ordinary people who have some very strange desires. There tales are comically interlinked and illustrated with real (not CGI) stop motion animation. Very good chicken scene.

I make no bones about it, I love Jan Svankmajer. _Conspiritors of Pleasure_ was a delightful film; it dragged in places, and some segments worked better than others (hence only 4 stars), but it was poingiant, sensitive, and sometimes hysterically funny.

Svankmajer's storytelling does for cinema what Czech writers like Hrbal, Hasek and Kundera have done for traditional print literature. The Brothers Quay are grimmer, grittier and lack the subtle humor, warmth and humanism of Svankmajer...a side of the filmmaker that shines thru especially in THIS film.

Conspirators was spectacular in weaving its characters and their strangeness together. I couldn't wait to see what happened next. American film keeps us sadly stuck in the 1980s, bullied into accepting only computer animation because it is easy, unsupportably expensive and you can do it with a pull-down menu. Jan Svankmajer's animation is hands-on, time-intensive studio work and palpably realistic. It challenges the limitations of that generation whose imaginations were teethed on music video. Svankmajer is comical, insightful and grotesque as a children's folk tale. He is a singularly visual storyteller. If you want a taste of Svankmajer and aren't ready for an adult theme, start with Alice.

This movie is so weird that I don't even know what to think of it. I question whether it is a truly Surrealist film - it's certainly a very _strange_ film, but "surreal" does not mean "strange", and it's time we buried that misconception once and for all - but it will likely appeal to fans of Surrealism and other avant-garde art.

The film follows about half a dozen characters through the machinations of their utterly bizarre fetishes - a woman who gets off by stuffing bread balls up her nose, a man who delights in the texture of live fish, and - well, I'm not even going to try to describe the chicken guy. Though the characters don't always realize it, their secret pursuits are linked by a web of tangents and coincidence.

Though the characters are ostensibly pursuing _sexual_ fetishes, there is very little about this movie that seems sexual. Real fetishes usually involve playing with power or social roles, but these people just like really specific (and really strange) inanimate objects. Their perversions seem to be more about the ritual than anything else.

Though the movie is mostly live-action, there are some of Svankmajer's trademark stop-motion sequences, such as the chicken man's rampage through the forest. Also, there is zero dialogue throughout the entire film, which actually works quite well, forcing the viewer to engage the unfolding events more directly, and contributing to the overall feeling of "what the [heck]are they doing?!"

Maybe this film is just the product of sheer self-indulgence on the part of Svankmajer, but it will certainly challenge you to think. I'm giving it the median rating of 3 stars not because it's a bad film (or because it's a _good_ film), but because it doesn't even exist on that continuum. It is what it is. You'll have to see it for yourself.

Svankmajer's feature-length film does what Svankmajer does so well. It baffles the viewer with a breakdown of the wall between literal movie making and stop animation. It creates a bizarre language of visual symbol, draws tantalizing visual alliterations between phrases in this language, creates a syntax of actors and actions, then leaves us without a vocabulary in which it all makes sense. It makes the ordinary extraordinary - the quiet man at the corner, the mousy woman delivering mail, or the majestic woman delivering the nightly news. It shows that the creative urge serves more primal urges, no matter how great or small the creativity of the person urged. Then, towards the end, the bizarre creations cross over between creators, as one person's fantasies come to life in another person's world.

This isn't Svankmajer at his most approachable. It takes contradictory empathy and detachment to explore this movie-world's contradictions. The short add-on, "Food," places itself even farther from literal reality, so is easier to take in many ways. But, if you want your mind to simmer in a spicy broth of imagery and imagination, you'll warm it over the flickering images on Svankmajer's screen.

-- wiredweird

Having seen Jan Svankmajer's Alice (1987) and Faust (1994), I was not completely unprepared for this surreal sideshow from the Czech film maker/animator. Still, it defied any expectation with its unexpected turns and creepy absurd scenarios. Six lonely people are united by the unspoken conspiracy of the title. Secret rituals, fetishes, objectification of the mundane. . .Through the use of frequent tight close ups, minimal panning of the camera, sound (no dialogue!) and, of course, Svankmajer's inimitable stop motion animation, the viewer is drawn into the conspiracy as well. Or just weirded out.

Life has its unique peculiarities, as individuals seek privacy and personal satisfaction when societal situations usher them into intimate seclusion. Jan Svankmajer illustrates these peculiarities through six different city residents that in their own privacy fulfill personal void through their most intimate and personal desires. Expressed in the most bizarre, surreal, and peculiar manner, the audience secretively gets to experience these desires, as the six characters close the doors while entering a very personal place where only they are aware of what they are doing.

Much of the film plays with social symbolism and human interaction reflected through the character's intimate and personal moments, which are highlighted through clever editing and figurative camerawork. Nothing is said, only images present the mannerisms of the characters, as the interaction between the characters such as looks and assumptions drive them further into their own sexual obsessions. These obsessions are all surreal and bizarre. Some examples are a man building some form of robot that can connect with an attractive news anchor, a man constructing a bird-like head for some personal erotic revenge, and a woman who brings home live fish as a substitute to her absent husband.

The opening credits accompany a number of erotic prints that remove the allusions and directly display what is to come in the film, as the film depicts the unusual fetishes. These fetishes display bizarrely amusing moments that seem inflated into absurd proportion, yet the human behaviors appear authentic in the moment. Underneath the surrealism, the audience can reach a repressed and personal side of the characters, as they act out their fantasies in the most outlandish manners.

Jan Svankmajer is known for his often bizarre imagery while using puppetry, stop-motion animation, and other creative visualizations. Conspirators of Pleasure follows the same trend with the use of strange and outlandish creations through the intimate personal life of six city tenants. Stop-motion, editing, puppetry, and efficient camerawork brings the audience a truly harrowing surreal study of human interaction found in the subconscious, as elements resembling voodoo, fetishes, and chickens concoct an unpleasant atmosphere. Svankmajer's cinematic mixture eventually blends into an intelligent philosophical and psychological study of people and their peculiarities.