5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Three excellent examples of late-period Svankmajer., March 6, 2002
This review is from: Scenes From the Surreal [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Jan Svankmajer is most famous for his idiosyncratic burrowing of classic Gothic and fairy tales and children's stories, but this collection atttests to the diversity of the animator's oeuvre. 'Darkness/Light/Darkness' is typical of more sculptured works like 'Dimensions Of Dialogue', in which human forms are dismantled, scattered, merged and weirdly reconstructed; the physical and tactile becomes abstract in the process, and vice versa.
'The Death Of Stalinism In Bohemia' has been called Svankmajer's most political film. This is to miss the subversion and protest underlying all his work: nevertheless, the piece is ironically subtitled 'A Work Of Agitprop' (the term used by Bolsheviks in the early days of the Russian Revolution for propagandist artworks intended to ideologically galvanise the recipient). Made in the year after the Velvet Revolution, the film is best appreciated by Czech audiences who will understand the references, although it still reveals continuity with his previous work, to which it makes playful allusion. Against a berserk collage of Soviet iconography, a photomontage of Czech communists, and a soundtrack of Socialist choral works, a plastercast of Stalin goes through a variety of mutations - giving birth in a gruesome autopsy to a Czech stooge (apparently the communist who bloodily purged the party, and instituted Stalinism in the country); being painted over
in the Czech flag; lumbering Frankenstein-like in the new Czechoslovakia, after we've seen a Golem-like assembly line of heroic clay workers. The energy and iconoclastic fury of the piece recalls the Dada satires of John Heartfield, and the fierce humour rescues the more didactic moments. The 'art' used to bolster this regime is exposed, but the connection made between the animator as moulder and creator of moving figures, and Stalin as godlike totalitarian puppetmaster, is disturbingly honest.
The masterpiece in the collection is 'Virile Games', which is very reminiscent of Terry Gilliam's 'Monty Python' animations in its use of puppetry and photo-manipulation. A man sits down with a supply of beer and shortbread to watch a football match on TV - these fragmentary domestic scenes are intercut with documentary footage of a crowd assembling at a stadium - this disparity between the individual and the mass, the private and the public, the fantastically disruptive and the violently conformist, will break down as the short continues. The soccer match itself might have been reimagined by Magritte - the cut-out players and referee are all images of the viewer. In this game, the object is not to score goals, but to physically destroy the head of your opponent, eg by gouging out his eyes with a plunger; or inflating it with a syringe until it bursts; or running a toy train through his mouth. The resulting corpses are collected by speedily efficient medics who carry them to undertakers - the sealed coffins are painted in team colours, and rejoin the match. All this against delicious Eastern bloc elevator music. When the viewer runs out of snacks, his projecting desire goes haywire: the football pitch transfers to his messy living room. The results are exhilerating, sinister, inventive, unexpected, disgusting and hilarious.
These works come from the end of the Communist era, when censorship problems no longer dogged the surrealist's work, and he could deal with his themes more openly (to the detriment, some say, of his work) - watching them after some of Svankmajer's oppressively murky earlier work is like coming up for air.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Scenes From The Surreal By Jan Svankmajer, July 12, 2001
This review is from: Scenes From the Surreal [VHS] (VHS Tape)
For anyone out there interested in stop-motion claymation and in film art in general, this is the movie for you, it is filled with an essence of visceral dark humor, with political undertones. This movie among others of Jan Svankmajer is pure Genius!!!!!
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8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Beautiful like a heart full of sharks, October 26, 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Scenes From the Surreal [VHS] (VHS Tape)
Scenes From the Surreal questions the drama of the body, tha absurdity of human kind customs and the terrorific atmosphere of governments and society. Svankmajer let us now that life is a dream we never reach, that we survive within a society full of living dead. The poetry of Svankmajer showed in this 3 videos is violent, just a like a bird eating his own wings.
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