Czech animation – Czech Film Review

Old Czech Legends (Staré pověsti české) – Jiří Trnka, 1953

After a lean and troubled wartime era, Walt Disney started the 50s with a trio of the studio’s most beloved films – Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan. This was the Silver Age of Disney, and it lasted until Uncle Walt passed away during the production of The Jungle Book in 1966.

Around the same time across the Iron Curtain, Jiří Trnka, a Czech film maker referred to as the “Walt Disney of the East” was creating a stunning series of hand-crafted animated features. After an early career illustrating children’s books and learning puppetry, he made his own animated shorts at the end of WWII. His first film with stop motion puppet animation was The Czech Year (Špalíček), which detailed the rites and customs of a small Czech village. It was well-received internationally, picking up prizes in Paris and Venice.

After two more features, The Emperor’s Nightingale and Prince Bayaya, his next major work was Old Czech Legends, based on Alois Jirásek’s novel. Divided into seven parts, it takes us way back to the mythological foundation of the Czech nation. It opens with a dramatic note of despair as a tribe is mourning the death of their kind and noble leader, Forefather Čech. In a flashback, we see how they came to the Vltava after a long and arduous journey and rested near Říp mountain. Čech scaled the mountain alone and saw the bounteous and beautiful land all around him, and declared that this was the place for his people. In gratitude, they insist on naming the country after him…

Indie Profiles: Nora Štrbová, director of S P A C E S (M E Z E R Y)

Nora Strbova

Of all the terrific entries on display recently at the 61st BRNO16 International Short Film Festival, Nora Štrbová’s S P A C E S was perhaps the most moving. In just seven minutes, the animated documentary explores memory from the perspective of her brother, who suffered a rare neurological disorder before his untimely death in his twenties. With a minimalist, hand-crafted style that evokes the glitching memory of its central character, S P A C E S is a poignant blend of artistic medium and heartfelt subject matter.

I spoke to Nora about S P A C E S and her experiences as a filmmaker with my friend Tomáš Hůsek, who helped translate the conversation…

…

LA & TH: This is clearly a labour of love about a very personal subject, as you directed, wrote, animated and created the art design for the film. What made you choose this style to tell the story?

NS: Well, at the beginning when I was thinking about what the movie is going to be, the idea about the subject matter came to me. The entire style of the film is derived from that original concept. It is a very personal story about my brother who lost his memory because of the brain tumour that eventually caused his death. I wanted to try… after I was no longer able to ask him about it… try to imagine how he might perceive the world without memory, what does it mean to live without memory, and also think about what memory actually is.

I started reading articles, books, stories – both fiction and non-fiction – poetry, everything. From this, I put together a sort of mosaic and the style of the film, which is mosaic-like, actually reflects that. It felt fitting to choose a kaleidoscopic form to show how the human mind and memory works. The more I analysed how memory behaves, the more I found out that it is mostly fragments, even in healthy individuals. It is just fragments saved into memory. Sometimes just emotions or sensations that we once felt during situations rather than the situations themselves – colours, smells, textures etc. So I wanted to create that feeling for the viewer… Continue reading “Indie Profiles: Nora Štrbová, director of S P A C E S (M E Z E R Y)”

Conspirators of Pleasure (Spiklenci Slasti) – Jan Švankmajer, 1996

When I first watched Jan Švankmajer’s Conspirators of Pleasure I didn’t even notice there was no dialogue. It so effectively overwhelms your senses, there isn’t much to be said anyway.

The film follows a group of individuals in Prague, each engrossed in a tedious process of creating the conditions for their erotic desire.

One man begins the process of creating an elaborate chicken costume. Another, engineers a machine with fake hands. A mailwoman uses her saliva to furtively mold bread balls in a stairwell. And that’s just the beginning.

Švankmajer knows that arousal (meaning in simple terms, heightened stimulation) comes from a combination of touch and imagination. When he was blacklisted as a filmmaker during Communist rule in Prague, he wrote a book about it, Touching and Imagining: An Introduction to Tactile Art.

Buy your copy of Conspirators of Pleasure from Amazon HERE

Švankmajer makes use of both touch and imagination to build context and storytelling around objects and characters without the support of dialogue.

In cinema we can technically only experience two senses, sound and sight. But Švankmajer uses extreme close-ups and heightened sound editing to bring a sense of tactility to objects…

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Dimensions of Dialogue (Možnosti dialogu) – Jan Švankmajer, 1983

Dimensions of Dialogue Eternal Conversation

Reader, I screwed up. It was deadline day for my latest review and I was up against it, having just moved into an old house in the countryside. The place doesn’t have a working kitchen, bathroom or heating system. As I type this, I’m pressed against an oil radiator wearing four layers of clothing and a blanket wrapped around me. In desperation, I reached for a movie to review on Netflix. Only when I got to the end did I realise that it was a Slovak film.

Perhaps the cold has got to my senses. While I don’t speak Czech, I have lived in the country long enough to tell the difference between the Czech language and Slovak. But not on this occasion…

Luckily my good friend and former writing partner sent me a short film some time ago which I’ve been meaning to watch. It is Dimensions of Dialogue by legendary surrealist filmmaker Jan Švankmajer. It is only 14 minutes long so you can watch it in your lunchbreak and it will give you far more food for thought than the 90 minutes of romantic comedy dross I sat through earlier…

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Invention for Destruction (Vynález zkázy) – Karel Zeman, 1958

Sometimes when digging back through the decades to find “new” movies to review, a film will stand out as something so bright and marvellous that it feels like an antidote to our cynical times, with tentpole Hollywood blockbusters and cinematic universes dominating the box office.

One such film is Karel Zeman’s wondrous Invention for Destruction, a delightful flight of fancy that continually staggers the viewer with its imagination and sense of old school adventure…

Taking ideas from several of Jules Verne’s works but based primarily on his novel Facing the Flag, it’s the story of gentlemanly megalomaniac Count Artigas (Miloslav Holub) who rules the sea thanks to his steam-powered submarine and band of pirates. The lethal craft has enabled him to amass vast wealth, plundering treasure from old shipwrecks. When there’s not a shipwreck around to plunder, he can make one, using his sub to sink merchant’s vessels.

Invention for Destruction Blu Ray

Buy Invention for Destruction from Amazon HERE

Now the Count wants to conquer the land and the air. To this end, he kidnaps Professor Roch (Arnošt Navrátil) and his dapper young assistant, Hart (Lubor Tokoš). The professor is working on futuristic technology, not unlike the atom bomb. While he intends the new tech for the benefit of mankind, Artigas wants to use it for a superweapon. He takes the captives to his secret lair in a dormant volcano to work on his fiendish plan, picking up a pretty survivor from a shipwreck, Jana (Jana Zatloukalová), along the way…

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Food (Jídlo) – Jan Švankmajer, 1992

Introducing Jan Švankmajer (Alice) to anyone always nets you a reputation for being a weirdo. From the word go, Food’s style is absurd and choppy, often very naturalistic, and more than a little risqué. But I think it’s well worth anyone’s time – so please indulge this weirdo as I talk about Švankmajer’s 1992 film Food and why it’s a lesser-known gem of Czech cinema.

Food contains three shorts films – breakfast, lunch, and dinner – that are thematically connected. They all contain some sort of food consumption (surprisingly) but there is often a twist that turns the simple daily rituals to downright bizarre affairs. In sixteen minutes, Food shows people who turn into machines, hungry diners devouring their clothes, and various kinds of gourmands digging into their own body-parts. So yeah, there’s a lot going on…

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Jan Werich’s Fimfárum (Fimfárum Jana Wericha) – Vlasta Pospíšilová and Aurel Klimt, 2002

Fimfárum is one of those strange collections of stories that don’t like simple answers in life. The original book, written and later recorded on tape by Jan Werich in the 1960s, included 21 fairy tales, most of which are absurd or downright bizarre. The 2002 film adaptation didn’t have an easy task translating the light humour, ambiguous moral messages, and beautiful use of the Czech language to the big screen, but they nailed it!

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Alice (Něco z Alenky) – Jan Švankmajer, 1988

Alice 1

Once upon a time, I was so little that I could stand on the back of my nan’s sofa and survey the kingdom all around me. That summit seemed very high, and I was still small enough for her living room to be divided into several distinct regions. In the hazy distance opposite me (and it was hazy because my nan was a sixty-a-day woman) was the cliff edge of the mantlepiece. There lived regal ladies and gentlemen dressed in the fashions of the French court, and each of them bore the scars of terrible tumbles into the precipice below. My nan was not a fussy person, and each time one of them got knocked off and broken on the hearth, she would carelessly stick them back together with her trusty tube of Uhu. The figurines looked like Frankenstein creations, with arms, legs and heads reattached with bobbly contusions of sinister yellow glue.

Alice Blu Ray

Buy Alice from Amazon HERE

Away to the far left, through the chasm between a sagging armchair and my nan’s monolithic rented telly, was a little-visited glade beneath the large bay window, where a wooden table contained the remnants of a long-defunct record player. On the far right of the room was my nan’s armchair, where she smoked, watched TV, read Mills and Boon paperbacks and idled away the hours doing word search puzzles. Between her armchair and the mantlepiece was a dark cabinet where she kept her most prized ornaments, glassware and keepsakes. Then, far below me, was the plateau of her coffee table. I was so tiny that I could make a den of it by propping mail-order catalogues against the shelf underneath and crawling inside.

The interior of a house is as big or as small as a child’s imagination needs it to be. A coffee table can be a tiny piece of driftwood afloat in the sea, all that’s protecting them from circling sharks. Or it can be a vast battlefield for their toys to wage war against each other. A wardrobe can be a deep cave to hide in and a tall mountain to conquer…

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The Oddsockeaters (Lichožrouti) – Galina Miklínová, 2016

Oddsockeaters 1

Entertaining two young kids during lockdown for eight weeks has sometimes involved a lot of Netflix. Now, I’m a snob and I like my five-year-old daughter to watch as many live-action movies as possible, and it’s crazy how many family films these days are CGI.

That said, I don’t have anything against computer-generated features as such, because studios like Pixar and Laika have produced some of the best family films of the past quarter of a century, balancing rollicking adventure and unforgettable characters with meaningful themes.

Buy The Oddsockeaters from Amazon HERE

However, for every Toy Story or Kubo and the Two Strings there are tons of poorly animated dross like The Dancing Pumpkin and the Ogre’s Plot, something that looks like it was put together by an algorithm rather than thinking, feeling human beings.

Somewhere in between – and thankfully more towards the Kubo end of the spectrum than The Dancing Pumpkin end – is The Oddsockeaters, a quirky fantasy adventure based on the book of the same name by Pavel Šrut. Directed by the book’s illustrator Galina Miklínová, it’s a playful tale about small magical creatures that love eating socks, but always leave one half of a pair for the owner, thus creating the age-old laundry mystery…

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