by ·Comments Off on The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1988, Philip Kaufman)

Lot of recent references to spa town in films: Road to Wellville, Cure for Wellness, Days, now this. In the late 1960s DDL meets Juliette Binoche on a business trip but he’s already with hat girl Lena Olin, wants to keep both girls and for everyone to be friends. He’s a professional surgeon and casual writer, Juliette’s getting into photography, and when the Soviets invade Prague, his story gets him in trouble, and her photos of street protests get a hundred protestors in trouble. They escape to Switzerland but Juliette returns and he follows her, arriving smugly principled to a fallen society, where he’s demoted from brain surgeon to general practitioner to window washer, until they decide to live the rest of their (few) days with a friendly pig farmer. Director and actors (esp. Lena) do their best to save the movie from its clunky script, which is somehow by Bunuel’s writer and also got an oscar nomination.

by ·Comments Off on Vogel 17: The Joke and shorts

The Joke (1969, Jaromil Jires)

The joke was a cynical line he wrote to a girl he liked in a piece of intercepted mail which got him sent to a tribunal and kicked out of college – I didn’t mean to program a monthly theme of getting kicked out of school along with Education and Downhill. The flashbacks are wonderful, nobody plays the lead character as a young man, the camera is his stand-in, and his memories overlap the present, so the words of his expulsion tribunal are dubbed into a church ceremony he’s wandered into.

In present day our guy (Josef Somr of Morgiana) meets up with Helena (of the 1984 AI horror-comedy Grandmothers Recharge Well!) with a revenge scheme, meaning to seduce the wife of one of his accusers. All goes smoothly, except that the married couple are separated so the husband is happy that she’s found a new man, and Helena’s assistant is in love with her, and when our guy tries to ditch her she attempts suicide (Canby found this part “very funny”).

when your girl Marketa says she will stand by you:

when your revenge plot has fallen apart:

It was banned for decades, of course… based on a novel from the writer of The Unbearable Lightness of Being… Jires’s followup would be Valeria and Her WOW.

–
Zid / The Wall (1966, Ante Zaninovic)

Decent little animation with hot music. Man in bowler hat sits patiently by a giant wall, until aggrieved naked man comes along and tries everything in his power to get through it, finally headbutting it and himself to death. Bowler man walks calmly through the new hole and waits at the next wall.

–
The Fly (1967, Marks & Jutrisa)

Yugoslavian animation. Impassive guy tries to squish a fly but it escapes and doubles in size every quarter minute until it’s large enough to annihilate the man’s world and send him hurtling through space. Aware of their power over each other, they decide to be friends? Someone had fun with the all-buzzing sound design. Not to be confused with The Fly or The Fly.

–
Be Sure to Behave (1968, Peter Solan)

Girl in prison solitary washes up, pees, paces, watched always by an eye in the door. She imagines scenes suggested by crack patterns in the wall. Then she’s dressed up all nice, blindfolded, escorted to a park and released. She narrates all this too – unsubtitled, whoops, but it’s a soviet psychodrama of some kind. Czech, Vogel had the subtitles:

In this film a woman prisoner, harshly incarcerated, is suddenly released as unpredictably as she had been imprisoned; “Stalin is dead,” she is told, and then, significantly, “Be sure to behave.”

–
Jan 69 (1969, Stanislav Milota)

Czech funeral doc, aka Funeral of Jan Palach. Jan has died young, burning himself in protest of Soviet occupation, and the people are all turning out. Silent, set to doomy choir music.

–
Don Kihot (1961, Vlado Kristl)

Not what I was expecting given the title. Confusing flying machines, a cross between WWII planes and faces with bristly mustaches, bustle about. This tall robot must be the Don, taking on all the mustache pilots at once, going rogue in a police state. Big showdown arrives and the Don pauses to make out with a magazine, then either wins or loses, I couldn’t follow the abstract character design. Some pointedly handdrawn backgrounds (no straight lines) and inventive prop stuff. Unreleased in its native Yugoslavia, Vogel: “Don Quixote has become mechanized and is threatened by a technological society bent on destroying his individuality. He defeats it by exposing it to the power of art and poetry; but the art work is itself ironically distorted, raising a question mark.”

–
Among Men (1960, Wladyslaw Slesicki)

Stray dog draws the attention of some kids playing war and they attack it. It’s sold to a medical research place but escapes. Rounded up and leashed by animal control, rescued and taken to a friendly animal farm, but flees again, hungry on the streets. This city is portrayed as a shithole, with nice photography at least. This predates Balthazar and some other stories of innocent animals in a selfish human world. Vogel: “The most important of the famed Polish Black Series documentaries which dared to touch on negative aspects of socialist society.”

by ·Comments Off on Art Talent Show (2022, Tomás Bojar & Adéla Komrzý)

Not really a talent show, but admissions week at an art academy. A pretty enjoyable True/False doc. Vadim Rizov: “beautifully shot and consistently funny while observing a zone where inspiration and bullshit perpetually dwell side-by-side out of impossible-to-separate necessity.”

by ·Comments Off on Something Different (1963, Vera Chytilová)

In the mood for another 1960’s Czech movie after Loves of a Blonde. Chytilová pre-Daisies doing the hybrid-doc thing before it was invented. The mom having an affair with a light-haired guy isn’t terribly enlightening – I came for the dance segments. Good photography overall, but one particular shot, the camera upside-down then rotating rightside in sync with the dancer’s flip, takes your breath away.

by ·Comments Off on Loves of a Blonde (1965, Milos Forman)

Opens with a catchy pop song about turning into a hooligan. At least half the movie is the party scene (dudes chasing after blondes) and her at the musician’s house with his parents, waiting for him to come home (blonde chasing after dude). Forman must’ve stayed in touch – the blonde cameos in Amadeus.

One love of a blonde, a dodgy musician:

Dave Kehr called it “certainly one of the most sweetly seductive films ever made, an ironic quality in a film whose main theme is the cruelty of seduction and its costly aftermath.”

Harsh party scene, soldiers have a bottle of wine delivered to the wrong table of girls:

by ·Comments Off on Baron Prásil (1962, Karel Zeman)

Zeman’s followup to Invention for Destruction is another absolute wonder. Actors filmed b/w and composited somehow with variously tinted objects and backgrounds. Still don’t know how this was done – saving the making-of doc for after I watch the dinosaur feature.

The story opens with astronaut Tony landing on the moon and discovering the Baron (Munchhausen), who calls him a moonman and takes over the narrative (I don’t think Tony speaks in the first half). Baron returns them to Earth, but a fantasy version, the jet planes in the opening scene replaced by flying monsters.

They rescue a kidnapped princess from a sultan, she falls for Tony, and the Baron spends the rest of the movie trying to convince her that he’s more impressive that boring old Tony (true). Along the way they jump their horses off a cliff, create a tobacco smokescreen to confound the sultan’s fleet, get swallowed by a whale and scooped up by a giant bird, ride a cannonball, escape from prison and return to the moon via rocket-propelled castle tower, all in about half the runtime of the Gilliam version.

by ·Comments Off on Marketa Lazarova (1967, Frantisek Vlacil)

Whoa, big movie… I was hoping for something Tarkovsy-esque, but if anything it was closest to Andrei Rublev. Too plotty, full of unhappy Christians doing desperate things. Choir music, the voices dubbed with a mesmerizing echo effect. Some proto-Hard To Be a God ancient miserablism. The movie is full of birds – generally a good thing, but with a notable bird death.

Catching up on the storyline via wikipedia, and most of this is news to me. I did not realize that Kozlik (the bald guy with a crack in his head) and Lazar (Marketa’s dad) were rival clan leaders, both under assault by the King’s captain. I got the relationship and revenge-killing stuff, with thanks to the descriptive title cards before each chapter, but not that one-armed Adam’s other arm was removed as punishment for sleeping with his sister. The arrows being shot into everyone in the last hour look unnervingly real.

by ·Comments Off on Invention for Destruction (1958, Karel Zeman)

Jiri Menzel had just died, but instead of one of his movies on a Monday night I chose his countryman. I’ve seen some career-bookend works by Zeman, his early Prokouk shorts and late feature The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, but not the heyday works, and this was spectacular. Real people against illustrated backgrounds, the Sin City of its time. Every kind of animation and visual trick seamlessly integrated, the thin striped pattern from the book illustrations appearing everywhere, overall amazing visual design… and to think his Baron Munchausen is supposed to be even better and I’ve been meaning to rent it for twenty years.

Our Narrator is assisting a scientist when the two are kidnapped (along with a pretty lady, of course) by pirates and taken to an evil mastermind inside a volcano who gets the scientist to help him unlock the secrets of the atom and conquer the world. The narrator is alarmed by all this but the scientist is happily distracted with a new lab and new problems to solve, until the very end, when he realizes what he’s doing and nukes the volcano. In the meantime we get submarines, a fighting octopus, parrots and fishes, of course a balloon or two, and a fantasy tour through all the inventions of the era, real and imagined (camels on rollerskates!), an alternate vision of what Tesla could’ve been.

by ·Comments Off on Animated Shorts watched May 2020

The Lion and the Song (1959, Bretislav Pojar)

Accordion player wandering the sand dunes finds an oasis and amuses the desert creatures with a pantomime dance, with his cape representing his lost love. Lion is more hungry than amused, eats our man, then dies of internal accordion-related pains. Czech stop-motion puppetry, obviously very good even in my old SD copy.

–
My Green Crocodile (1967, Vadim Kurchevsky)

A crocodile who adores flowers meets a beautiful cow, and they fall in love based on their shared interests, though the other crocs and hippos scoff at their relationship. When autumn arrives, the cow declares their love is gone with the flowers and leaves, so the croc in desperation climbs a tree and transforms himself into a green leaf. The narrator seems to approve of this action, though it feels like a downer ending. Loved the harpist moon.

–
Film Film Film (1968, Fyodor Khitruk)

Opens with a slideshow/montage music video, then goes into a comic parody of the process of feature filmmaking. After the tormented, sporadically inspired, often suicidal screenwriter creates a perfect script, the valium-popping director takes a hundred meetings, modifying the script each time. And so on – equipment problems, child actors, a tense premiere. 2D animation with a few cool bits and a sixties-rockin’ theme song. I wouldn’t have pegged this as the same guy who started making Winnie the Pooh shorts the next year.

how a cinematographer works:

–
How A Sausage Dog Works (1971, Julian Antonisz)

Some animation techniques using gels and layers and liquids that I don’t think I’ve seen before. Narrator with a high, irritating voice, untranslated. Based on the title, I might’ve assumed the vision of a dachshund full of gears with a heart in the middle, but I didn’t predict the dachshund being squished underfoot by the devil. Without translation, I don’t have a clear idea of what is happening here, but it looks like pure lunacy, and I love it.

–
Apel (The Roll-Call, 1971, Ryszard Czekala)

Shadowy semi-figures – smeary motion-blurs and tops of heads.
Not much of a roll call – the only words are Down/Up/Fire – a military commander or prison guard yells commands at a mass of bald figures. After one refuses to obey and is killed, all the rest refuse to obey and are killed. Not the most uplifting little movie but it has a cool look I guess?

–
Crane’s Feathers (1977, Ideya Garanina)

Convincingly Japanese-looking stop-motion tale of the Crane Wife. I do love cranes, and ten-minute tragedies. Does our lead guy hang his head low at the end? You bet he does.

–
King’s Sandwich (1985, Andrey Khrzhanovskiy)

Weird intro, steampunk imagery over the sound of a workout video. So far, all the stop-motion shorts – the Lion, the Crocodile and the Crane – have featured butterflies. This is 2D animation with a nude man and a sausage dog and a cigar-smoking cat dancing with a busty cow – but no butterflies… oops, I watched this thinking it was Khrzhanovskiy’s Butterfly from 1972. This one’s the story of a fussy king who just wants butter for his bread, despite the gigantic queen and the dairymaid trying to convince him to try marmalade instead, while shadowy security agents lurk absolutely everywhere. Bleepy electronic soundtrack.

–
Repeat (1995, Michaela Pavlatova)

Sketchbook 2D with crosshatch texture. Tight repeating behaviors: a man taking his dog for a walk, a wife feeding her husband, an interrupted tryst, a dramatic breakup, repeating and colliding until the dog brings the whole thing to a halt, wakes everyone up from their motion loops, leading to an orgy, before it all starts again.

–
Adagio (2000, Garri Bardin)

A stop-motion funeral procession through a terrible storm by origami monk crows. All seems hopeless until a white Jesus-crow leads the way. When the white crow displays his magical powers of cleanliness, the others beat the shit out of him, but after his dramatic resurrection, they all worship him with white-crow billboards. Kind of a dour little movie with halfway decent origami.

–
Deputy Droopy (1955, Tex Avery)

The one where two safecrackers have to be quiet, Droopy torments them into making noise, so they keep running out to a nearby mountain to unleash their yells. Droopy’s attacks range from silly (get ’em to sit on a snapping lobster) to quite violent (wailing on ’em with a spiked board while their feet are stuck in glue). Anticlimactic hearing-aid joke at the end.

Don’t know if it counts as a short film, but we watched Spike Lee’s NYC pandemic montage, psyched that he has a new feature out in a couple weeks.