See related story: The Best Auteur You Never Saw
, available on DVD, also has Svankmajer's best meat-animation yet.
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(pictured), when familiar objects reconstitute themselves into human form.
In one scene (pictured), anthropomorphized collections of stuff swallow each other, evolving into whole new collections of anthropomorphized stuff. To create the illusion of motion, Svankmajer had to move each tiny part a fraction of an inch, shoot a new frame of film, and then repeat, nearly ad infinitum.
It's perfectly grotesque material for a Svankmajer movie. "We have touched on one of the basic myths of this civilization: the myth of Adam and Eve, or, if you wish, a myth analogous to that of Faust," Svankmajer wrote in his press notes for the film. "I think that now, after the mapping of the human genome, such myths are becoming increasingly relevant."
. "Encountering one another through the day, these obsessive ritualists exchange the sly, knowing glances of conspirators in a political plot.… Their unquenchable perversity also unites them in a shared resistance to the puritanical conformism of Eastern European culture." In other words, they have the same rebel impulses that Svankmajer does.
Svankmajer's films, though they rarely indicted particular Czech or Soviet leaders, were quickly labeled as subversive. He was banned from the cinema for nearly seven years in the 1970s, with his films suppressed and censored through the 1980s. The psychological cost of totalitarianism remains one of the central themes of his works.
, juicy red cuts of beef play out a story of repression, freedom and insanity. They wrap themselves in gauze, reanimate several cow skulls, slink around an asylum, jump into bed together and (pictured) perform on stage. The use of animal parts in Svankmajer's films reminds us of our own mortality: We are all meat.
in 2004. "The society can continue for another hundred years or so but I completely believe that this utilitarian, devouring way of life signals that civilization is ending. I am not saying that mankind will die out but we are now watching the consequences of the end of the civilization that we have. Terrorism is nothing more than a consequence of the absolute inequality that we have in this cycle of civilization."
(clip above) is a creepy example.
draws on many of Svankmajer's past experiments with materials, using live action, large-scale and smaller puppets and claymation. The film won three awards at the Czech equivalent of the Oscars, and was nominated for four others.
