Once I played an old Czech short film.
I watched the introductory few minutes - while a child's voice still sounds off-screen, which reads the text: “It was boiling.
Hlivkie shorki / Staring along the hull, And grunting zelyuki, / Like muzyki in the move ”- only in English.
And such something painfully familiar was imagined.
I turned off the sound and played The Beautiful People Marilyn Manson on the soundtrack.
And everything fell into place: of course, the creator of Manson's video is very familiar both with the Czech film in 1971, and with this director-artist in general.
And Manson was followed by a video of The Cure (The End of the World), David Bowie (Dead Man Walking) and even Page with Plant (Most High) - and it became clear that the director Floria Sigismondi is very familiar with the work of one quiet and very old Czech author.
This film - “Jabberwock” (Žvahlav aneb šatičky slaměného Huberta) - was shot by Jan Schwankmeier in 1971, when the comedy series “Monty Python: Flying Circus” was on air for the second year in English, whose credits were clearly influenced by Schwankmeier.
He started his career much earlier and never deviated much from his basic creative techniques.
So who is he, this Czech with a German surname, who has managed to influence literally everyone for a very long time - from rockers and comedians to Hollywood directors and creators of computer games?
An ordinary Prague child, born in 1934 into a normal artisan family. I don't know how the family lived there eight years later in the already disbanded country, in 1942, but they could afford to give their son a home puppet theater. Actually, playing with this theater is all that the boy Yang will do later in life. This is the feeling of a small apartment with a puppet theater and a hostile world around him - this is his main creative method. Concentration on children's fears, a detailed study of everything material that turned out to be at hand, a love of cracks on the walls, scuffs on dolls, peeling paint on old furniture, ubiquitous cockroaches, rotting fruits (hello, Brian Warner and his image, cleaned up from Monty Python ").
No, it is clear that his view of the world widened and deepened, especially while he studied at the Higher School of Applied Arts (UMPRUM) in Prague with Professor Richard Lander, where he designed and made dolls and decorations. Children's experience in making decorations and puppets for their toy theater found its application.
Here, of course, I must say that after the German fascist regime came to the land of Prague, the terrible Stalinist regime, but then we will have to say that the Czech consciousness is generally formed by the fact that they have an internal struggle with some regime all the time: but before Germans were the Austrian imperialists, and before that there were the Habsburgs, so we get to the damned Romans and decide that the Czechs are Celts, liberated once by Huss, and the second time by the Red Army. I don't even want to dive into the broken mass subconscious of these people. But it produced beautiful, broken-down authors who, living in a claustrophobic place, managed to infect a huge number of people around the world with their products.
A man named Juraj Hertz studied with Schwankmeier.
He will then direct the film Corpse Burner (Cremator, 1968).
He was nominated for an Oscar in the Best Foreign Picture nomination.
Watch it at least on the net - it is called "horror comedy", but of course it is neither horror nor comedy.
It is filmed in such a way that it is difficult to forget it, including visually.
And he will go very well to fans of Schwankmeier.
This couple of authors in general paints such a picture of the Czech inner world that you want to hang yourself.
Which, of course, would have liked Mr. Kopfrkingl - the main character of the "Corpse Burner".
By the way, the play on a literary basis - based on the novel by Ladislav Fuks - was shown in our Saratov Drama Theater.
And in general, take a closer look at Fuchs, especially if you are sure that there was nothing better than Kafka in Prague.
Hertz and Schwankmeier once went on an excursion to fraternal Poland, and there Jan saw reproductions of the German artist Paul Klee. It is rather strange why there were no reproductions of Klee in the Czech Republic, but let's take their word for it. Most likely, he saw something like The Runner, which Paul Klee wrote in 1921. The fact is that Klee is a chameleon author, he has many approaches, a lot of techniques, but what we see later in Schwankmeier's film Et Cetera (1966) are like revived, slightly modernized figures of Paul Klee.
In the meantime, Schwankmeier deals exclusively with the puppet theater. European puppet theater is a bit different from what we know from Soviet puppet theaters. They trace their history and traditions specifically from medieval street shows and therefore are aimed in many respects at an adult audience and quite adult problems. It is no coincidence that Schwankmeier, even at the Higher School of Applied Arts, staged the folk puppet play Don Giovanni in mixed media - dolls and actors in masks. The theater in which he staged - D34 - is very characteristic as an institution: it was created by leftists in 1933 to promote the communist idea, and it is a direct heir, for example, of the traditions of Vsevolod Meyerhold. He finished it until 1941, and then from 1948 he started again to communist propaganda. But he was always distinguished by amazing technical complexity and sophistication.So it's okay - Schwankmeier took a good bar from the very beginning.
And then he was invited to take part in the film "Doctor Johann Faust", and there he met the amazing composer Zdenek Liska, who until his death would become the composer of his films.
So that you understand: Zdenek Liska is one of the pioneers of electronic music in the Czech Republic and the surrounding area.
An academically educated composer, he did not shy away from using rock music, and in general he wrote music for at least eight films a year.
He collaborated with directors of the Czech New Wave.
We know the representatives of this wave well: they are Vera Khitilova, Milos Forman, Jiri Menzel, Ivan Passer - people who often turned to black humor and surrealist method in opposition to the officials from the "socialist realist cinema".
It was a powerful wave that rolled Foreman all the way to Hollywood.
Jan Schwankmeier with his agoraphobic little cinema was close in spirit to them, but he never came up to such budgets and promotion for a cannon shot.
And in terms of influence on modern media around the world, he was ahead of everyone.
Schwankmeier, after serving in the army, began to cooperate with the Semaphore theater, which is known for being owned by the actor and musician Jiri Sukhi (Foreman's Competition, for example), and largely thanks to which the career of the socialist nightingale Karel Gott took place.
Inside his theater, Schwankmeier assembled a Mask Theater and staged several performances.
And once he exhibited his drawings there - and he was noticed by Vlastimil Beneš, a graphic artist, a sculptor, who by that time had already been favored by the Venice Biennale for his work in E. Radok's puppet film "Doctor Johann Faust". Benes, like Klee, is a chameleon artist. So much so that it can hardly be attributed to any part of 20th century art. Together with Zbynek Sekal (sculptor, author of "Small Stone Mauthausen II", 1966), Schwankmeier dragged into the group "May 57". It was such a product of the local thaw, quite anarchic, from among those who did not join the local official association (union) of artists. They are all different. And Schwankmeier got there when half of the original participants fled. But this somehow expanded his creative connections and possibilities.
Jiri Sukhi nevertheless kicked the too avant-garde Schwankmeier theater out of Semaphore, and Jan was helped by the amazing director Emil Radok, who is known as the co-creator of the Laterna Magika multimedia show for the Czechoslovak pavilion at Expo 67.
So Schwankmeier settled in the Laterna Magika theater, and there, together with Radok, he came up with the scripts for several of his films and worked with his troupe, which worked in the "black theater" technique.
Well, yes - when everything is black, and the figures are highlighted only with ultraviolet light.
One of the pioneers of the "black theater", by the way, was Konstantin Stanislavsky, although it was the Czech, Jiri Srnec, who invented both the name and the principle.
Although, of course, nobody canceled the "kook" from the Japanese theater.
No wonder that Schwankmeier's first film, Poslední trik pana Schwarcewalldea a pana Edgara (1964), The Last Trick of Mr. Black Forest and Mr. Edgar, was shot using the principles of black theater. It lasts 11 minutes. This is a stage duel between two magicians, which ends with the complete disintegration of the characters. There is already peeled paint on the masks, close-ups of mechanics, insects - everything that will not go anywhere later. Looks fantastically modern: rhythmic editing, etc. The impression is that this is a clip of some Smashing Pumpkins or Panic! At the Disco.
The film was noticed, especially abroad, which is very important for a number of cultures. I don’t even say “small” or “provincial” cultures: both in Germany and in Russia, “noticed abroad” is also a measure of success. Nothing good, of course, but it is. Here modern France deeply does not care whether "noticed" or not. True, there is nothing special to brag about.
In 1965, on a farm in Austria, he removes something completely different - "Play with stones" (Spiel mit Steinen). The "game" is pure surrealism, since there is nothing here except stones falling from a bucket. But there are five "games" here, and they are all different - from the formation of simple geometric shapes to the emergence of human figures that begin to interact with each other. In the fifth game, decay and aggression begins. On the sixth, everything just collapses. The game, like a dream, is a favorite theme of surrealists, as it allows you to connect the incompatible in ordinary real life, cancel the rules of interaction, and impose a new picture of the world. This film was really appreciated by researchers of surreal art.
But playing with stones is a rather ancient occupation, albeit updated in the form of a kalah game (which later came out on the Nokia 3310 under the name Bantumi), but the human mind, when it is awake, tries to streamline both fantasy and chaos - which is demonstrated all these games of the mancala family.
With regards to the revitalization of the picture. Despite the fact that Ladislav Starevich already used non-drawn animation using the stop motion technique (time-lapse shooting) at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries in Russia, for the general public, the cartoon remained primarily a hand-drawn film - a classic. And even the ingenuous "Plasticine Crow" became a discovery for her. Now the word animation is used - as to animate, animate, in fact, anything can be done. And what Schwankmeier does with this very stop motion is something completely different. For example, an actor does not need to be animated - he is already alive. But with time-lapse photography, it can be turned into exactly the same animated object as a stone. Equalize them both visually and philosophically.
And at this time in Czechoslovakia suddenly began to dream of socialism with a human face.
And Schwankmeier, together with others, signed the manifesto “Two thousand words addressed to workers, peasants, civil servants, scientists, art workers and everyone else”: “We appeal to you at this moment of hope, which, however, is still in danger.
It took several months for many of us to believe that we can speak out, and many still do not.
But we have already said so much and have discovered so much that there is nothing left but to complete our intention to humanize this regime.
Otherwise, the old forces' revenge would be too harsh. "
Well, in general, their native Communist Party has not forgotten anything - and the revenge of the "old forces" turned out to be quite cruel.
All the time after the entry of Soviet and German troops into Czechoslovakia, the Communist Party was engaged in revenge on all signatories.
It's ridiculous: this period, right up to 1989, was called "normalization."
In short, Schwankmeier fled to Austria.
But not for long.
There he shot the surreal Picknick mit Weismann about how things behave when they get rid of people.
(In 1997, the first album of the avant-garde rock band Picknick mit Weismann will be released in Austria.)
A propos of the term "surreal".
If I were my colleagues, I would stop applying it, at least to Schwankmeier's animation.
Because the revived stones are surrealism.
Clay heads, into which clay hands put their brains, is surrealism.
Animated corpses of insects - sur.
Yes, he has everything - surrealism, since in reality this cannot be.
Once, when I was much younger, dumber and a hundred times greyhound, I asked Robert Zemeckis if there were too many computer tricks in his Forrest Gump. At which he looked irritably and said: "Is it okay that cinema is just one big technical trick?" So, exactly the same garbage with Schwankmeier's "surrealism".
Nevertheless, Schwankmeier returned to the country in 1969 and soon joined the local surrealist crowd through the theorist and writer Vratislav Effenberg. The Prague surrealist group began its countdown since 1934, and during this time it absorbed painters, poets, writers, sculptors and animators, and at the same time clashed with all the dominant official movements and parties. The anti-Stalinist position of the surrealists, which led to their break with Vitezslav Nezval (the founder of Czech surrealism), resulted in a public controversy that finally put an end to all hope of an acceptable coexistence with the official "revolutionaries". Well, in general, during the "normalization" after 1968, they went almost underground.
Schwankmeier's surrealism gave quite amazing results many years later - in the gaming industry. So, the creators of the Samorost 3 gameplay emphasize that they drew inspiration from the works of Schwankmeier (and at the same time Norstein). Or, say, the design of the "infected" in the game, which in Russia is called "The Last of Us" and which really shook the foundations of the genre, is generally based on the images of the Czech author. The publicist Stanislav Yakovlev, who studies trends in the gaming industry, points out that both the philosophy and the images of such a game as American McGee's Alice (2000) are based on Schwankmeier's "Alice" rather than on classical developments.
During this period, Schwankmeier shot The Garden (Zahrada, 1968) - a completely conventional black-and-white movie for 16 minutes, where from the surreal there is only a fence of living, but motionless people.
As always, the picture can be understood either way or that way.
If you wish, you can even see this as an attack on the CPC.
But it does show that Schwankmeier is a truly excellent filmmaker who can achieve powerful results with simple classical filmmaking tools.
The Apartment (Byt, 1968) is already returning to the claustrophobic fears of the lyric hero and the author, to the uprising of things, when the house is not a house, but an enemy, the theme of breaking a wall - everything is again ambiguous, albeit briefly.
Immediately after his return, he removes Tichý týden v domě (1969), a film filled with symbolic unpleasant shots that can be interpreted as you like, but it is clear that the author does not like something in Czechoslovakia. Shots with self-tapping screws, which are freed from the candy wrapper and sent to the keys of a typewriter, are interpreted by some as the impossibility of writing the truth in the then Czech Republic, etc. I generally envy people who intelligently interpret other people's symbolic decisions. Well this is how you need to have self-esteem. Thank God that Schwankmeier himself never explains what exactly he means, leaving it to the viewer.
Judging by the film "Ossarium" (Sedletz-Ossarium, 1970) about a collection of skulls and bones in the Church of All Saints in Sedlec near Kutná Hora, Schwankmeier's psychological state is deteriorating and he increasingly does not like what he sees in his homeland.
And even an imitation of a puppet production by the forces of living actors "Don Juan" is again about the manipulation of people.
Then there was the Jabberwock (Žvahlav aneb šatičky slaměného Huberta).
In the meantime, the authorities began to guess about something and banned both "Garden" and "Apartment".
And after the film "Otrantský zámek" (Otrantský zámek, 1977), filming was banned altogether.
It is not very clear why the local communists suddenly got to the bottom of this film.
Although it is caustically dedicated to "all researchers whose research activities are based on hoax", it now looks pretty harmless.
They say that he refused to make edits to the editing.
In fact, this way the picture most of all looks like a sketch from "Monty Python", and it seems that a giant porcupine is about to appear and say: "Dingsdale!"
He had to return to the theater, where he worked until the ban on the profession was lifted.
As an artist, he worked on Lipsky's painting "Adela has not had dinner yet."
It was this picture that all moviegoers of the USSR could see - it was rolled here very widely.
The fact that this is a stylish parody only helped the rental, since the object of the parodies remained unknown to the local viewer.
And, of course, it has echoes of Roger Corman's 1960s Little Horror Shop.
After the ban on working in films was lifted, he filmed the story of Edgar Allan Poe "The Fall of the House of the Eschers" (Zánik domu Usherů, 1980), where objects come to life and die using the stop motion technique and the camera enjoys the physical decay of a building.
Opportunities for Dialogue (Možnosti dialogu, 1983) - three stories created in the clay technique - about communication between people.
Pure symbolism, flawless, shocking performance.
It is no coincidence that Terry Gilliam calls him one of the ten best animated films in the history of the genre.
In 1983, he received the Grand Prix at the Annecy Festival, the most important festival in this genre in Europe, and perhaps the world.
"Golden Bear" of the Berlin Festival in the category "Best Short Film".
In the film Pendulum, Pit and Hope (Kyvadlo, jáma a naděje, 1983), where Schwankmeier combines the plots and feelings of Edgar Poe and the much more occult “cursed poet” Auguste de Villiers de Lisle-Adan.
From a live actor there are only arms and part of the torso.
Everything else is a sophisticated execution mechanic.
If you cut it in half, you get the perfect video for any song by Nine Inch Nails.
And then someone showed the "Opportunities for Dialogue" to the ideological commission of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia - and they again began to press it. It's amazing, of course, how adult uncles were not too lazy to watch and condemn a short animated film that has nothing to do with political struggle at all. He retreated to close positions and moved to Slovakia, which in fact remained part of the unified Czechoslovakia, but there were constant strife within - both ethnic, economic and ideological. And there he made the completely Freudian film Down to the Cellar (Do pivnice, 1983).
But through hardships, he still began to make his way to real budgets from abroad and with this money in Switzerland he shot a full footage of Alenka's Dream (Něco z Alenky, 1987) - aka Alice - a hardcore version of Carroll, if you could do that something crazier than Carroll himself did. A lot of terrible directorial and artistic finds - mainly in the field of combining the incompatible and immersion of a person in a state of obsessive delirium. In which the author, by the way, does not see anything wrong. The film received awards and sounded very strong among the world community.
In 1990, on the wings of the wind of change, he shot his only purely political film, The End of Stalinism in Bohemia (Konec stalinismu v Cechách), which contains everything - from Julius Fucik with his People, Be Vigilant, to all Soviet marshals who liberated the Czech Republic ... He does not like everything, from five-year-olds he shakes, and the Olympic Games remind him of the multi-figure sex orgies of the Marquis de Sade (with corresponding engravings from books). Judging by the fact that at the end of the head of Stalin, painted in the colors of independent Czechoslovakia, something new is born, the author himself is somewhat perplexed - either the Constitution, or sevryuzhin with horseradish. And this seems to be the permanent state of the inhabitants of this territory.
A case directly from the life of Schwankmeier rhymes with this - the house that damned socialism provided him for his film studio, the new free capitalist power returned to its former owner, and the director was thrown out of there.
But Schwankmeier thinks more broadly - this world is generally unpleasant to him.
He logically believes that any state is an instrument of suppression and manipulation, and "freedom and personal integrity can only be preserved by personal rebellion."
Interestingly, what is his attitude to the general vaccination and the abolition of civil rights under the slogan of protecting public health, by the way.
How is he with "personal rebellion"?
Well, just wondering.
In 1994, together with the British, he makes the full-length "The Lesson of Doctor Faust", in which he transforms (or reveals) Prague as a deeply occult place, and at the same time signs some of his mystical passions.
It cannot do without a puppet show - an emphatically medieval - theater.
Hiding Pleasures (Spiklenci slasti, 1996) is a sarcastic comedy with no technical breakthroughs - just a showdown between the director and his contemporaries and their repressed sexuality.
"Log" (Otesánek, 2000) - a two-hour picture about a revived log, which replaces the child's family.
Well, before, for such a number of thoughts, Schwankmeier had five minutes of screen time.
But he received the "Czech Lion" for the best film and for the best artistic achievement, and the Prague Academy of Arts awarded the title of honorary doctor.
Better late than never.
"Sleepwalking" (Šílení) 2005 - a mixture of Edgar Poe and the Marquis de Sade - brings us back to the art of Schwankmeier the animator.
The film was shot with live actors, but all the insane hallucinations of the inhabitants of the insane asylum were made by an unkind old master.
Whatever the Czech master is doing now, in fact, he has a completely separate place in world cinema, which he earned through the work of his whole life.
The most interesting authors in the world are guided by it - from David Lynch to Stephen and Timothy Quayev.
It is the American animators, the Quay brothers who are also the authors of the film "The Cabinet of Dr. Schwankmeier", in which they sign their love for the teacher.
But Americans, no matter how independent filmmakers they are, will never understand how it is possible to focus on creativity all their lives, without any hope of commercial success and without even setting such a task as Schwankmeier did in a small European country where there was no never even five years of quiet life ...
The point of view of the author may not coincide with the position of the editorial board.