five shorts
by jan švankmajer
by Douglas Messerli
Jan Švankmajer (director) Spiel mit Steinen (A Game with Stones) /
1965 [animation]
Jan Švankmajer (director) Rakvičkárna (Punch and Judy) / 1966
[animation]
Jan Švankmajer (director) Et Cetera / 1966 [animation]
Jan Švankmajer (director) Picknick mit Weissmann (Picnic
with Weissmann) / 1968
[animation]
Jan Švankmajer (director) Tichý týden v domé (A Quiet Week in the House)
/ 1969 [animation]
Prague-born filmmaker Jan
vankmajer, who describes himself as
a Surrealist, has been a major influence on animators as varied as Terry
Gilliam, the Brothers Quay, and Tim Burton. Although in more recent years,
Švankmajer has made primarily full-length feature films, his earliest works,
and some of his most innovative work, was done as shorts, five of which I write
about below.
1965's A Game with Stones features
a strange clock, underneath which sits a kind of bucket into which, when the
clock strikes at the quarter hours, various amounts of stones plop out of an
attached faucet-like tube and into the bucket. While in the bucket the stones
take on various patterns, sometimes abstract, at other times positioning
themselves in anthropomorphic images; the stones break into small pebbles or
fracturing, swallowing each other up. After each "game" or what I
might describe as a "dance of stones," the bucket dutifully pours the
contents unto the floor below, but by the last series of outpouring rocks, the
very weight of the stones has caused the bucket to give way, forcing the final
stones through its ruptured bottom to fall directly onto the floor. In this
early work, we see images that will appear again and again in Švankmajer's
shorts, as natural images turn into human-like figures or themselves become
forces which are threatening. There is something menacing about these stones
throughout, a fear of their very animation and ability to move into abstract
and identifiable images.
One of the very best of Švankamjer's early films in Punch and Judy which combines puppetry with automatons filled with
mechanical gears and a live hamster. The effect is quite surreal as the camera
shifts from the robotized motions of the automaton to the repetitive strokings
of the hamster and on to the jackhammer attacks of hammers upon the Punch and
Judy figures. Combining these with small sets, houses whose inside walls are
covered with intriguing collages, and through the very decaying and peeling
paint of the puppets, the director evokes an eerie sense of the inevitable
death of both characters (they bury one another several times) as, finally,
they slip from the puppeteers hands at the end of this moving cinema. By
combining these stylized figures with a real, living, breathing animals, Švankmajer
creates an even deeper sense of the divisions between life and death, play and
reality, and violence and love. It is a beautiful short film, worth viewing
again and again.
Et Cetera, just as its titles
suggests, is almost an afterthought, a short piece that breaks into two equal
parts connected with images of embroidered letters, much in the style of
Gilliam's later Monty Python
interludes. The first concerns an Icarus-like figure who is determined to fly,
using larger and larger wings each time as he moves from a chair to floor, the
next time a bit further, and, finally, flying away and back again. The second
half of this short involves an animal trainer, whipping his beast into complex
movements, with a sudden switch of the beast obtaining the whip to which the
animal trainer jumps and leaps. Another switch completes their saga.
In both of these parts, animal and man become interchangeable or, at
least, interconnected. As in Game with
Stones nature overtakes the human even as the human attempts to use nature
for his own purposes.
My favorite of these early shorts is the ghoulish Picnic with Weissmann. In a lovely meadow we observe several
chairs, a closed cabinet, a chaise lounge upon which lay a male costume—shirt
and pants—a phonograph playing romantic German songs, and other objects, all
which seem to have a life of their own. As the afternoon wears down, the chairs
move together, tumbling down a long, rock-strewn hill, the records roll away
from the phonograph to be replaced by others, and the pants and shirt eat
olives, carefully dropping their pits through the sleeve of the shirt into a
nearby bowl stationed on a small side table. All of these inanimate objects
come so thoroughly to life are quite disconcerting, but the most menacing image
of the film is a small trowel that emerges from the nearby cabinet, which
throughout the pleasantly playful afternoon digs what appears to be a grave.
The songs continue, a breeze comes up, the trees shiver, their leaves falling
into large piles covering over several of the objects. The trowel completes
digging out the grave. Suddenly the doors of the white cabinet open, where,
within, we see a man dressed only in his underwear, bound. His body falls from
the cabinet directly into the grave.
If in the earlier Švankmajer films inanimate objects and nature seemed
only slightly threatening, here they become deadly, having overtaken their
human counterpart, now freed to celebrate, they take the afternoon in the sun
that Weissmann, so it appears, had planned for himself.
Following in that vein, A Quiet
Week in the House (also called The Flat) concerns a young man
literally directed by arrows to a room where he is tortured by all sorts of
inanimate objects, including a typewriter, various dishes of food, and other
household standards. All his attempts at human activity, in short, are foiled as
he endeavors to create, eat, and, finally, sleep—the bed itself dissolving into
the down of its pillows and coverlet and shavings of wood. Even an attempt to
peer through a window ends up with a seemingly divine punch in the face.
An older man appears with a chicken and hatchet, clearly expecting the
young man to decapitate the fowl. When the young man refuses, he hands him the
hatchet which the young man uses to break down what appears to be a door.
Behind it is only a wall where numerous others, obviously trapped in the same
situation as our young hero, have created a graffiti of names and dates.
Bending down with a provided pencil, the young man adds his name to the others
that came before him.
Los Angeles, March 28, 2012
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (March 2012) and Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los
Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).
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