by ·Comments Off on Jan Svankmajer shorts

J.S. Bach Fantasy in G Minor (1965)

Organist wedges an apple in his mouth and gets to work. The rest is a Bach music video, focused on decaying walls, locks and grates, with stop-motion interludes of gashes and holes appearing in pulsating rows. Finally all the doors are thrown open and the camera rushes into the streets, confronted with a whole new world of decaying walls and locks.

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Et Cetera (1966)

Exuberant little movie with better music than the Bach (sorry). Three parts in seven minutes, each piece an action that reaches a loop point then fullscreen letters exclaim ETC, ETC, ETC. Of course the film begins with FINE so when it reaches the end, the entire piece is a loop, ETC ETC, until the film material melts in lovely stop-motion.

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Punch and Judy (1966)

Incredible, two puppets fight over the price or possession of a live guinea pig, burying and mutilating each other in turn. Jan’s editing and close-ups have never been better.

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Historia Nature Suite (1967)

Different families of animals in rapid montage (birds obvs. the best segment), combining artistic/scientific drawings, taxidermy, and live creatures into an edited whirl, each part ending with an extreme closeup of a guy eating creature-meat.

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The Garden (1968)

Gardener takes his guest Fred home, tries to show off his prize rabbits but Fred is too distracted by the garden’s living fence (a chain of humans around the property holding hands). The gardener tells some secrets about the fencemen, unheard by us, and the guest immediately joins the fence. Live actors and the vaguely folk-horror scenario set this one apart.

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Don Juan (1970)

Juan’s dad won’t lend him money, so the Don smashes his dad’s head in. Juan’s chosen girl’s dad disapproves, so the Don cuts the old man’s face off. Juan’s brother Felipe, beloved of the girl, seeks Juan in the forest to take revenge, so the Don stabs his brother full of holes. Then the girl’s dad returns as a vengeful ghost who sends Don Juan to hell. Some of the usual delights, and the effect of actors wearing giant eyeless marionette-suits is fun, but much of this is the people/puppets standing around and announcing their dialogue.

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The Castle of Otranto (1977)

Documentary interview with a researcher who discovered that a Czech castle was the setting for an old Italian novel, with nearby caves and secret passages and armor fragments matching those in the book. Svank and the viewer grow tired of this at about the same time, and he switches focus to animating the book’s illustrations, retelling the story of a young woman being chased around by all the castle’s men until the castle is destroyed by a giant, who also interrupts the (fake) interview.

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Another Kind of Love (1988)

Music video for a bland-looking British singer (Hugh Cornwell of The Stranglers) who seems to have been patient with the stop-motion process and allowed his clay doppelganger to be hilariously mutilated. Snappy editing.

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Virile Games (1988)

Viewer watches a soccer game on TV but it’s a harlem-globetrottin’ version of soccer where points are scored by attacking the opposing players’ faces with foreign objects until their clay heads implode. The ball gets kicked through the viewer’s apartment window and the game is relocated to his cramped living room, not that he notices. Also: the viewer, the ref, and all the players are the same actor.

by ·Comments Off on The Silence Before Bach (2007, Pere Portabella)

Instead of playing The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach alongside another movie from Vogel’s chapter on editing, I followed it with another Bach movie. This one places delicious performance footage within little conceptual scenes, cutting between scenes and eras like it’s no big deal (“juxtaposing past and present as if they were attractions in a theme park” per Rosenbaum).

Player piano rolls and spins slowly around a gallery.

Blind piano tuner goes to work

European trucker tells his story to a rider at a roadside cafe, rider impossibly plays a Bach piece on harmonica.

Wigged pipe organist alone in St. Thomas church, where Bach is buried

Close-up on hands during a harpsichord performance, first-person camera.

Tour guide goes to work performing as Bach – no music in this one.

Another tour – a boat, then a subway car full of cellists.

Mendelsson’s man goes to the market in 1829, the apocryphal backstory of how some of Bach’s compositions were discovered being used as wrapping paper.

Evoking the Holocaust, “music hurts,” a piano silently falls into the sea.

Connections start getting pieced together: a cellist goes on a trip to St. Thomas and speaks with a female descendant of Bach, while her husband is calling the trucker to set up a difficult crane delivery of an antique piano.

Manohla Dargis:

The film demands engagement and a kind of surrender, a willingness to enter into a work shaped by correlation, metaphor and metonymy, by beautiful images and fragments of ideas, a work that locates the music in the twitching of a dog’s ears, in the curve of a woman’s belly, a child’s song and an adult’s reverie. Like the music it celebrates, this is a film made in glory of the world.

by ·Comments Off on The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach (1968, Straub & Huillet)

A Bach concert film, solo and small/large ensembles performing his works chronologically, with narration from wife Anna’s diaries for context. As with all concert films (see my dislike for the Bowie movie) enjoyment is largely dependent on whether you like listening to Bach, and I’m getting from the reviews that the critics who love this are big Bach fans. I’m mixed here, but would freak out over a film called Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Zorn – either way it’s a vital entry in the biopic and concert film genres.

Difficult to understand Anna’s English narration as she rapidly, mechanically rattles off the words. Compositions are mostly static but they’re not afraid of a subtle or grand camera move. Scenes step on each other’s heels, the editor anxious to move on the moment a music piece has ended. Besides the musical performances we get great churches and lovely instruments – pre-piano keyboards such as harpsichords, clavichords and pipe organs – and closeups on (real?) historical documents. It’s an example film in Vogel’s “Assault on Montage” chapter, where he helpfully lays out the rules of “the received canon of editing” in order to show how some films break them. In this movie, “the refusal to move the camera or render the image more interesting and an insistence on real time… represents a frontal assault on the cinematic value system of the spectator.” In other words, anti-art people would call the movie boring.

Neil Bahadur:

Here we see the art go from the mind, to the page, to the finger, to the performer, and finally to the audience. In every performance Straub makes it so the hands are always totally visible, so we see the complexity that Bach/Gustav Leonhardt must transfer from the mind to the hands in full force.