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Game With DVD: |
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Fantasies are the least personal thing in the world. They are collective. And dreams only become troubling when they are retold, as in Buñuel. When you retell your dream, you are no longer yourself. A dream is only a montage of coded elements, obeying precise, impersonal rules.
And yet, by the same token, animation absolutely depends – again, more than live-action film – on the unit of the individual frame (photogram) for its existence. It is at the level of each individual frame that the work of animation is performed and achieved. To freeze an animated film – whether at an editing table or on a DVD player – is to study the precise difference between one frame and its successor, and thus to begin to break open its constitutive secrets – secrets of art as much as technique. And nowhere is this is truer than in relation to the prodigious work of Jan Švankmajer, which mixes all the techniques, and plunges us into the deepest mysteries of animated art. DVD may be the natural enemy of Švankmajer’s animation genius, but it is also, in our 21st Century, its natural home. It offers the place and the space, the tools and the means, whereby we can best come to grips with this work’s intricate magic – not to tame or dispel it, but unleash it once more back into our unconscious imaginations, with an even more ferocious power. Is a theory of animation the true centrepiece of a theory of film itself? Since around 1990, we have seen the explosion of new ideas concerning a definition of cinema as an animatic apparatus in the writings of Philip Brophy, Alan Cholodenko, William Routt and others. (2) Among keen observers of the digital revolution, Thomas Elsaesser argued, at the beginning of this period, that contemporary cinema in the present age tends ever more (as Raymond Durgnat first intuited) towards the surface manipulation of a graphic image on a computer screen – and each new Hollywood blockbuster confirms this prediction. (3) Daniel Frampton’s briefly influential manifesto Filmosophy forms its account of cinema on the basis of the constitutive artifice of the medium – the idea that everything can be created and manipulated within an image-bank, rather than (or subsequent to having been) “captured” by the camera. (4) Theory is, in short, pulling away from the primacy of the camera and moving toward the importance of painting and drawing as a basis for the cinematic image. For much of its existence, animated cinema has in fact existed in a nebulous realm between the purely drawn and the photographed-onto-celluloid: a camera was needed to register each frame, but no viewer (however naïve or sophisticated) of animation is ever aware of this camera, reduced to its purest recording function. Animators such as Chuck Jones, in his classic Duck Amuck (1955), played reflexively with this unusual – in fact, ridiculous – “presence of the camera” in front of drawn carton images. So, how strange it is today that, in commercial animation (Pixar, Dreamworks, George Miller’s Happy Feet franchise [2006 & 2011], etc.), animated styles try so strenuously to mimic the mise en scène of live-action photography! Although film theorists en masse have been slow to take up the evident challenge, what is at stake here is a complete revolution in the way we consider and define cinema. The most basic semiotic question of the medium is on the line: is the cinema essentially tied to the indexical – the trace of the real that can be gathered-in through the camera (whether chemical or digital); or is its very support, its constitutive material, something altogether more plastic, pliable, even ghostly in its ever-shifting materiality? Švankmajer figures – alongside Walerian Borowczyk in his animations of the 1950s and ‘60s, and later Caroline Leaf, the Brothers Quay, Paul Fletcher, and others around the world – as the veritable prophet of this conceptual revolution in the way we think about cinema. Film theory, in its conventional, retrospectively classical forms (deriving from André Bazin, Siegfried Kracauer, Rudolf Arnheim, etc.) tends to begin at basic levels of the cinematic apparatus that are already several removes away from the individual celluloid frame. Working on the basis of the stream of the photographic index as captured in and by the camera, they ascend to the level of the theatrical scene, the performing body, the physical gesture, the real-time landscape, and so on. All of these very canny theorists were inescapably aware of the multiple levels of artifice in film production, and none of were the naïve realists they were sometimes taken (and dismissed) as. Bazin, for example, states clearly in his unfinished book on Jean Renoir (whose early comedy Charleston [1926] is, in its own delirious way, another manifesto about artifice and animation in cinema): “Realism does not at all mean a renunciation of style”. (5) However, Bazin made his aesthetic and philosophical bias perfectly clear: for him, “cinematic expression must be dialectically fused with reality and not with artifice”. (6) And the vast majority of film theory and criticism, from Éric Rohmer in the ‘50s to Laura Mulvey, Stanley Cavell or Gilberto Perez, has more or less followed Bazin’s passionately argued-for premise. This is why – despite the occasional detours to acknowledge and praise Norman McLaren, Len Lye, Chuck Jones or Yuri Norstein – animation has always ended up in a low, secondary place in almost every canon of cinema. Even documentary, today, has fought its way to a higher ranking than animation. But that is because documentary is “dialectically fused with reality”, whereas animation is dialectically fused with artifice. And perhaps also because, in so many respects, animated cinema is more truthfully aligned with the experiments of the frequently despised and outcast filmic avant-garde – which also work on a frame-to-frame basis – than with conventionally humanist, populist, storytelling movies. However, another view of film history – and of film theory – is possible. Let us not forget that some of the most visionary narrative filmmakers, from Orson Welles to Tsui Hark, without omitting George Miller (channelling and updating Eisenstein’s montage theories in his Mad Max series), have been compelled to work at the intricate level of single frames for their most remarkable kinetic effects. (7) Today we tend to overlook the fact that – long before the rise of Tim Burton and Harry Selick, Quentin Tarantino’s special insertion of an anime into Kill Bill (2003-2004), or (horror of horrors!) the inclusion of a surreal dream sequence by the Quays into Selma Hayek’s dreary biopic Frida (2002) – Chris Marker in Letter from Siberia (1957), like Welles in The Trial (1962), had unselfconsciously inserted animated sequences into otherwise live-action works. And I can only mention here the rich case of Alain Resnais, whose style, in many of its variations, was always so influenced by trends in comics and animation, culminating in the Roger Rabbit-style live/animated hybrid of his sadly underrated I Want to Go Home (1989), and in the graphic/visual play with sets (filmed, drawn, projected) in his two final movies, You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet (2012) and Life of Riley (2014). Nor should we forget that one of the founding texts of semiotic film theory in the early 1970s, Thierry Kuntzel’s “Le défilement”, is very precisely a study of the erotically uncanny frame-to-frame transformations in a classic Canadian animated film, Peter Foldes’ Appétit d’oiseau (Appetite of a Bird, 1964) – transformations of a profoundly buried, maybe-you-didn’t-really-see-it, psychoanalytic nature. (8) (Two decades later, the visionary art critic Edward Colless would track similarly complex erotic associations in the smallest animated motions “between the legs of the mermaid” in an ostensibly innocent Disney production.) (9) In fact, a theory of the photogram as the most basic unit of cinema is able to reach in many directions, in the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s 1940 essay “On the Concept of History”: to give back, to each near-forgotten moment of the past, its unrealised future. (10) An astonishing example: Isidore Isou’s extraordinarily prescient Lettrist manifesto, “Aesthetics of Cinema”, was already calling, in 1952 (!), for a post-photographic understanding of the film medium, based (in the manner of the entire Lettrist system or approach) on the isolating and breaking-down (or chiseling) of frame-units. (In Isou’s precocious and absolutist view, most arts had long passed their amplic, expansive, growing phase.) (11) Since, in works like Isou’s experimental classic Treatise on Slime and Eternity (1951), this involved drawing and scratching on the celluloid strip (before Stan Brakhage – who was deeply impressed and influenced by Isou – and others made this a familiar aesthetic gesture), we are already knee-deep in both the theory and practice of the photogram, and thus also of animation itself. And we have all along assumed – quite wrongly – that post-war Parisian film culture was entirely Bazinian! (Let us not forget that, in another contemporaneous sector of French film culture, Cahiers’ rival publication Positif was drawn to celebrating the artifice of animation in both its popular and artistic forms – and that magazine’s positivist champions of the medium have ranged from early animation historian Robert Benayoun [1926-1996] to Švankmajer’s Czech Surrealist neighbour Petr Král[1941-2020] and, more recently, Bernard Génin.) (12) In a powerful revisitation and reconsideration of the legacy of film semiotics, Kuntzel’s close compatriot Raymond Bellour (in his magnum opus Le Corps du cinéma) has refined his close analysis from the level of the shot to the unit of the photogram – taking, as his supreme example of the second-by-second “mapping of emotion” in cinema, the animated credits sequence of flapping avian wings (against a bed of no less artificial synthesised noises) in Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963). (13) And as it goes in advanced theory and criticism, so it goes in film practice, especially in the realm of the experimental or avant-garde: thus, from the prodigious contemporary Austrian scene, the case of Peter Tscherkassky’s masterpieces Outer Space (1999) and Dream Work (2001), which are generated from a meticulous, manual light-pencil process trained on single frames from Sidney J. Furie’s horror film The Entity (1983), images or scraps of images which are decomposed and layered many times over, but all in-camera, on a photographic celluloid strip … (14) It may be true today, as Mulvey has argued, that the digital era – with its genuine potentiality to draw, create and animate absolutely anything – paradoxically “allows a cinephilic meditation on the cinema’s relation to reality … to continually rediscover the beauty, that Bazin compared to the flower or snowflake, of the indexical sign”. (15) But the cinema of Švankmajer invites us – even demands of us – that we sidestep such vertiginous theoretical nostalgia for the photographed real impressed onto the celluloid, at one time and in one place only. His work, as we can now see it within history, has always straddled the idealised conceptual realms of the analogical and the digital. (16) And the widespread existence of his work today on the delivery system of DVD makes it abundantly clear that his vibrant manifesto of animation comes to us from deep within a buried genealogy of cinema, extending far beyond us into the future of all audiovisual media. II.
Introduction to the Game The game, like the dream for Daney, “is only a montage of coded elements, obeying precise, impersonal rules”. And the peculiarly savage or violent side of Švankmajer’s art – the side that intersects with the wildest cartoons of Tex Avery from the 1930s to the ‘50s, or of Terry Gilliam in the Monty Python’s Flying Circus era of the ‘70s – arises from the fact that, increasingly as his career continues, games can so easily tip over into personal combat or full-scale war … In this sense, it is but a small step from his first film, The Last Trick in 1964, to Dimensions of Dialogue in 1982, and all the way to Surviving Life (2010) and Insects (2018). Apart from Game with Stones itself, the pool for our game includes The Last Trick (1964) and J. S. Bach – Fantasy in G Minor (1965) – all available on the formidable British Film Institute box-set Jan Švankmajer: The Complete Short Films (2007). It is to this DVD that my time-code numberings relate; most other versions available online are derived from this source, give or take a few frames. The game is simple. It arises from the attempt to deal with a century-old question of aesthetic criticism: how to describe, analyse, account for the work of animation in cinema, this work which proceeds deftly from frame-to-frame, and cannot be generalised into higher-levels of abstraction (of a literary inspiration) like narrative, character, theme or atmosphere? Indeed, the more closely we look at animation in its frame-to-frame articulations, the more we realise that all these so-called higher-level unities are themselves completely imaginary structures of coherence, revealed to be self-deconstructing at every moment that they are examined, questioned and attacked. Švankmajer’s cinema is the art of disintegration and dispersal, an atomic art. So: in the spirit of automatism (a feature which looms large in his work), the game I am playing is to randomly freeze my DVD at whim as I watch these three films: not looking for anything, not trying to catch anything. Indeed, given the tiny but decisive split-second delays between the eye noticing, the finger pressing, and the machine stopping, I never get what I think I might get when I perform this exercise. The film trips me up, surprises me – and I trick my own brain off its usual linear, rational track. In animation – as Kuntzel intuited and demonstrated – stopping the flow of the film has the potential to unearth something which is unconscious or latent in the film-strip – even repressed, although it is hard to imagine Jan Švankmajer as a repressed individual! – because we see connective or bridging moments, always in the midst of the flux of multiple movements, that were not initially designed to ever be noted or contemplated in this way. Once the film is frozen, then the writing work of free association begins. The critic must let themself go: it is only via this path that we will ever uncover the true, underlying, profound unities of Švankmajer’s work. Here lies the paradox of his cinema: clearly so intuitive and free, itself so associative; yet it is also necessarily what Philippe Garrel called (in another context) “manual work with the unconscious”, (17) work that is completely concrete and material. III.
The Game Played
1.40. Wide shot of two figures on a stage – men wearing large masks or headpieces. Already Švankmajer, during the inventively busy opening credits, has tipped his hat as to the kind of representational game he is setting in motion: we see his actors put on their costumes. But already there has been a note of ambiguity, caught in the rigid stillness of the performers. What creates this stillness exactly: the human body, or the animatic apparatus? Is it a figure in repose, or a frozen and multiply-registered photogram? Now, with our two figures on stage about to play their tricks, the ambiguity grows much larger: the actors are further away from our eye now, so we cannot check their giveaway vital signs, such as breathing or trembling. We can never precisely tell whether it is they or the film itself that has stilled (and recall the significance which Bellour attributes to those moments when an otherwise moving film becomes still) (18) – or, more profoundly, at what exact mark or moment the organic-human has given way to the mechanical-animated. (Throughout The Last Trick, there is an intermediate term that marks this constant passage back-and-forth between extreme poles: that black bug obliviously wandering across every surface.) As
in Japanese anime, every freeze of this sort in Švankmajer is, in
fact, a major moment of tension, suspension: we wonder, will things
ever unfreeze to move again? There is a subtle anguish at play here,
preyed upon with masterly sadism: if a freeze jams for good, it means
that the entire cinematic apparatus has, for all intents and
purposes, broken down. And in Švankmajer (as in Borowczyk and the Quays) there is an abiding
obsession – long before the cyberpunk or steampunk movements –
with all kinds of wheezing, broken-down, patched-together apparatuses
…
2.28. The insert of a fish (a typical Švankmajerian crafted-sculpted object) being pulled by Mr Edgar from his hat. With a perfect mimicry of classical, live-action-photography editing technique: there is a match-cut between the hand lifting up the fish in mid-shot, and this close-up insert, continuing the movement (and a glimpse of the white-gloved hand). But wait! Stranger things are happening here in this cut, as they will happen for the entirety of the filmmaker’s career. This fish-object is now abstracted in complete blackness: there is no background detail of the set with which it visually matches – not even the hat which is meant to be right below it. The physical space has itself been redrawn, banished, reconjured: a constant principle of découpage in Švankmajer, affecting the smallest articulations of the montage. And why not? Animators have this freedom, there is no real space or scenography that they must respect or reconstitute from one image to the next. Soon we will observe this same fish flying, falling, tumbling through the dark air interminably, like Tex Avery’s plummeting animals or Leni Riefenstahl’s high-board Olympic divers. Henceforth, every aspect of an image – if we call it a shot, that designation, too, becomes ambiguous in this shadowy realm between live-action photography and animation – becomes enigmatic, doubled. Is this fish-in-darkness being pulled up out of a static frame, or is the camera panning down? (The effect of motion is the same, either way.) And, at the end of this small but decisive spectacle, there is a camera movement – it could be an actual, hand-manipulated movement of the lens, or an animated movement, who knows? – which takes us out to a wider view of this disquieting fish. A point-of-view effect: but whose POV? The
look or gaze (in French, the regard)
is always a mysterious, wandering, floating entity in Švankmajer,
passing between the maker, his quasi-human subjects, we the
spectators, and something else that is more disturbing, a kind of
Fourth Eye that belongs to something large and impersonal, like the
State Apparatus itself, or God (or Satan) himself.
3.00. An extreme close-up view inside the head, the skull of Mr Edgar – mechanical gears, assembled according to some unknowably functional, mechanical plan or logic. A true Duchampian bachelor-machine. And another impossible match-cut – from the actor with his mask, to the constructed interior of his head. This particular film is entirely built upon that impossible transition between two different kinds of visible reality; but, indeed, many Švankmajer works are constructed on a notion we can call a phantasmagoria of the interior. This
is also true of many obsessive avant-garde filmmakers – Britain’s
Jeff Keen offers a remarkable example from the same ‘60s era. What
is phantasmagoric here is precisely the sense (palpable at every
micro-movement, every photogrammic split-second) of something
bottomless, backless, endless: an infinite world opens up inside even
the smallest particle of being or object-ness. The possibility of a
kind of infinite zoom explodes in our minds: little wonder that Švankmajer, like Mario
Bava, is so fond of these invasive, quite sexual zoom-motions!
4.07. There is a problem with DVD analysis of animation: we cannot freeze a unit of the soundtrack in the same way we halt the image. The sound disappears when we push the freeze button: it truly partakes of what Bellour once called the unattainable text. (19) We cannot experience a sound that has been suspended. But at this moment of The Last Trick, I mark a change, which is once again something powerfully consistent in Švankmajer: the abrupt cutting-off of one track of sound, music in this case (was he influenced by Godard’s aural montages of the early ‘60s?) as the scene-with-figures is snatched from our view – no fade-out of music, no clean or smooth sonic transition – and its replacement, at the same grating volume, of a fragment of percussion, somewhere between musique concrète and Foley noises (i.e., the footsteps, slammed doors, shaking leaves, etc., which are ingeniously simulated). Earlier,
during the credits, we have had a riot of such disjunctive
sound-cuts: two years before Robert Bresson continually interrupted a
Schubert piano piece, during the opening credits of Au
hasard Balthazar (1966), with the harsh
braying of a donkey, Švankmajer keeps breaking up the pleasant
folk-popular tune with every imaginable kind of sound-performance:
poured water, typewriters, tapping, ticking, ringing bells …
finally giving way to the plucked strings of Zdenek Sikola’s score,
itself a sound in-between noise and music. J.S. Bach – Fantasy in G Minor
0.33. What is this – a conventional, character-based prologue in a Švankmajer film? It is surely a ruse. A mysterious man wearing coat and hat enters a building, looks around, climbs the stairs; POV movements projected from his body or eyes sweep us up, up, up … It could be the start of a genre film, a thriller (are we travelling up a tower like James Stewart in Vertigo [1958]?); and, as such, this oddly extended prologue (fifteen shots, in two minutes and ten seconds, while the credits appear) may remind us of many sequences to come in cinema history (Švankmajer prefigures so much), by Roman Polanski in Repulsion (1965), or the protracted scene of Asia Argento’s descent down into a building in her father Dario’s horror epic The Third Mother (2007)… and all in pristine CinemaScope. But,
of course, once this perfectly normal live-action figure sits down to
play a pipe organ, thus triggering the mechanism of the animation, we
will never see or return to him (at least not directly, in visual
representation) again …
2.16. The bolted lock on an old door – one of literally hundreds we will see in the coming minutes (Švankmajer loves manic accumulation of static, inert objects, as with the skulls and bones in The Ossuary, 1970) – in a photogram that looks like one of a million art photographs, teetering between documentary and surrealism, that litter today’s Documentas and Biennales. The content of this black-and-white film is beguiling. Edited in strict – deliberately too-strict – relationship to Bach’s music, we see a montage of objects, inserts, all of them completely depopulated: walls, doors, windows, locks; patches of brickwork or concrete. (Some of these details were, in retrospect, glimpsable in the normal-seeming prologue.) Perhaps Švankmajer had experienced the ambiguity of scale in Michelangelo Antonioni’s early-‘60s filming of some similar objects, weaving in and out of his fictions of the glamorous bourgeoisie: how big, exactly, is a crack, a patch of wall, an indefinable broken-off piece of something-or-other, when it is filmed flat, straight-on, sundered from any relation to any nearby familiar object or body? Instead of a phantasmagoria of the interior, here we encounter another essential pole of the Švankmajerian aesthetic: a phantasmagoria of the surface, taunting us not with its potentially infinite expanse, but the exact opposite: the effect of a barring or blocking of our vision, a refusal of depth, a concentration of the universe into some banal microcosm of detritus and waste. A fixation on texture, with obviously fetishistic – but also severely depersonalised – overtones. (Béla Tarr will later take this fetishism of texture back to an Antonioniesque but proletarian fiction.) So
much lattice work, so many accidental or planned patterns, so much
geometry to be found for the gaze that goes in ever closer to the
wall or the floor or the void … And all exacerbated by the sudden
switch out of any natural CinemaScopic aspect ratio: now everything
is stretched tight, right out of natural, given dimensions, to fit
the screen-image.
2.37. Things pile up in this film. At the same time, as in all his work, it is evidently and clearly structured, in clusters or blocks of imagery, with very few repetitions or reprises inside the block structure. Here, at this moment, we hit a change in the structure, a gear-shift so characteristic of how Švankmajer moves from block to block in a piece: we witness a long tracking shot, 45 seconds (which, in context, seems extremely stretched-out), along some kind of white line marked onto (or erupted from) a wall, tracing its wayward path up and down like a sine wave. The image is a species of gag: at this juncture, the up-and-down line, as it is discovered by the moving camera, seems to illustrate the noodling of the music, which moves around and around a few notes until issuing onto a mighty chord. But, once more, fundamental ambiguity intrudes: is the image really illustrating the music, or is the wall itself, with its strange markings, the score that triggers the music? (I am reminded of several live, expanded-cinema concert events in which musicians improvised to the continuous, unbroken, abstract lines and swirls of projected animation.) Here,
Švankmajer opens up the mysterious and ever-reversible relations
between image and sound in cinema: which one drives the other, which
is the Master and which is the Slave? A fundamental question in
cinema, all too often decided in the most conventional direction, in
favour of image and against sound. But literally, from the first
sounds of his first film, Švankmajer attacks, inverts, questions and
complicates this assumption. In this, he is a close cousin to another
radically experimental animator: Robert Breer.
3.44.
The phantasmagoric surfaces are now multiplying in a new way: not
piling up one after the other, but opening or closing, to
engulf/absorb or reveal another. The very word animation,
at such moments, becomes opaque and strange to us: what is animating
these spreading voids, these instantaneous erosions or corruptions of
matter; what force could possibly be at work to hasten such natural
destruction? Likewise, we can never quite fathom what animates the
camera either, whether technically or spiritually: why does it dart
now left or right, now up or down, now in or out (the zoom, always
the zoom)? This Fantasy in G Minor,
by taking David Bordwell’s idea (formulated two decades later) of a parametric narration to an extreme – linking things by pure patterns of form, rather
than content – also reduces the theory to rubble, to a kind of
blabbering, hysterical nonsense. (20) For there exists nothing
but formal parameters in this film; yet
the parameters are inherent, given in the simplest, weirdest things
of a broken-down, everyday world. Švankmajer, the director of doors
and floors, pots and pans, hammers and nails …
4.27. Have you ever heard anyone say – watching, for instance, the slow-motion vistas in a Wong Kar-wai film, or a frenetic Scorsese Steadicam tracking shot – that “the image is in the same rhythm as the music”? Švankmajer’s fantasia on Bach reveals the ludicrousness and inadequacy of all such statements. Music is (usually, traditionally) rhythmic, while a camera movement occurs in an arrhythmic stream or flow; in truth, any music of any rhythm whatsoever can be married with any camera movement at any speed – and clever filmmakers (from Lang and Murnau to Godard, Ruiz and Kwan) have long researched the mysterious alchemy of these apparently exact connections. What Švankmajer does – as in the photogram, at this point, of round holes in a built structure – is to outrageously multiply the possible analogies of form that might conceivably link music to image; there are literally hundreds of such analogies across the film, analogies based on intrinsic properties of shape, size, speed, shade, structure; and then patterns imposed by montage, camera angle, chemical development and grading of the film-stock … So much so that the effect is finally, liberatingly funny, a riot of analogy. A semiotic comedy! (And many of the finest Eastern European theorists of language and media have found fertile ground for study in Švankmajer.) (21) As
always, the filmmaker taunts us by evoking a phantasmatic content to
this piece where there really is none; this sly taunting reaches its
semiotic height when a series of linked movements upwards – a
staggered pan, in sections with slight pauses in-between –
immediately conjures a movie-style Hitchcockian dread, even suspense
in us. What is to be revealed at the end of these insistent
movements? Nothing …
6.04.
A light goes off (the first of two times this will happen, to start
and end a particular cluster). Again, the mystery of what narrative
theorists call motivation,
the reason in a story for anything to happen as it does and when it
does: does the light turn itself off? Do (as soon will occur) doors
simply fling themselves open to our (the camera’s) gaze, always
revealing a deep-black darkness? There is no discernible human agent
to perform such actions. Is it some other kind of life-force (or
death-force) within objects themselves, or within networks such as
the electrical system? Entropy, chaos, self-intelligent machines: no
wonder Švankmajer speaks so directly to the digital, computerised
imagination of our world today.
7.37.
A dramatic tracking-forward shot (surely influenced by Resnais’
sinuous tracking movements, in his early shorts and features,
frequently without characters on hand to see or guide them) leads to
what seems and feels like a euphoric flight outdoors, away from
Gothic interiors and into sunlight … But where is that organist
fellow as our screen-delegate to perform this escape route? He has
well and truly vanished from the imaginary space of the film by now.
But if we can still project him into this flight – suddenly the
walls are viewed a little more normally, from a bit further away,
side-on as the camera sweeps past them – we also see where this
Sisyphean effort ends, in the manner of Absurdist theatre and cinema:
just at another endlessly textured and metamorphosing flat wall.
8.45.
There is something you see in motion here in this dead-end
montage-cluster – a disturbance of vision, a superimposition of the
same image of brick or concrete texture in two different positions
(this could be a David Lynch film) – that you cannot catch in a
freeze-frame: you can only see one position or the other, not both
registering simultaneously, thanks to the persistence of vision in
your eye and brain. Švankmajer’s animation finally defeats the DVD
assassin.
9.14.
The film ends with a montage of double windows: paired window-frames
(of many different styles and qualities) which sit beside each other
symmetrically. Something tugs at us emotionally here, as the organ
music churns to its fortissimo conclusion: twin windows as the friends, the lovers, the siblings who
never entirely fuse, or (to the contrary) will always be stuck
together, forever? Two divided film frames that will never be one on
the celluloid strip, except in the fleeting illusion of movement?
But, once more and finally, Švankmajer mocks (while creating) the
symbolic and anthropomorphic interpretation: if we learn anything
from his art, it is that what is insistent, even obsessive, is not
necessarily meaningful in the sense of closing down (as Roland
Barthes put it) on an utterable, bland signified. Švankmajer, or the
merry flight of the signifier. Game with Stones
1.37. A door opens, cracks of uncertain size and scale are traced along by the camera, until we reach a strange mechanism, revealed to us (and simultaneously hidden from us) in a lightning montage of parts and gears. Up to this point, Game with Stones seems to recapitulate everything Švankmajer had explored in the two previous films. But then, when the clock strikes, the game starts – again, a game without human agency – with a tap opening and depositing two stones (one white, one black) in a bucket, and Švankmajer’s art suddenly is set to leap to a new level. As in films of Busby Berkeley, (22) the moment that the stones (whatever their size, shape, colour or number) hit their allotted spot, the film takes off into pure choreographic abstraction, like a musical sequence (with tinkly-toy automated music as accompaniment): the stones dance, dissolve, rub and run along each other, always in relation to the parameters announced, visually, in the bucket. Finally,
the bucket turns and tips out its occupants: end of round. It is the
kind of weird, macabre game we might find in Raymond Roussel, a
writer whose literary avant-gardism was compared (by Jean-Louis
Comolli) precisely to Busby Berkeley, for the way in which the
Hollywood filmmaker demonstrated “how images are born and take form, allowing their constitution element by
element, until the image is complete and complex – then, he takes
the image apart just at the moment when anyone else would be tempted
to freeze it, decomposing it an element at a time, until it is
returned to its original forms.” (23) Švankmajer also works this
way.
3.35. What tender anthropomorphism is this? Stones in love, caressing, tickling, enticing each other? Like with the final twin windows in the Bach fantasia, the human meaning is both evoked and mocked – but more mocked than seriously evoked. Švankmajer begins at a point beyond such humanistic symbolism, but he is always careful to destroy its last remnants, to make the gesture of emptying out this traditional temptation of reading. So
let us not, either, call these games with stones Kafkaesque, although
the feeling of that is always lurking; that would be to put the human
(or at least, absurdly bureaucratic) figure back into the picture.
What we witness here is the mystery – and the inspired spark – of
all narrative plotting, of any generation of story events. Objects in
movement, differentiated in some stark way, suddenly create pure
fiction: attraction and repulsion, seduction and murder, shyness and
abandon.
3.48. Was Švankmajer thinking here of a famous Robert McKimson cartoon, Early to Bet made for Warner Bros. in 1951, a black comedy about the endless repetition of a card game in which, when one player loses, a spinning wheel prescribes elaborate punishments? What that cartoon teaches us, by exaggeration, is that the more you repeat a narrative set-up or dispositif (as we would say today), the faster and more abbreviated you can run it through, until it is almost a blur. (Ernst Lubitsch too, in the cartoonish extreme of his live-action comedy, also knew this, as did ex-cartoonist Frank Tashlin.) This
is what Švankmajer does here: each time the clock-apparatus readies
itself to begin the game, then the sound of ticking, the swinging of
the pendulum, the glimpse of the inner gears and the turning of the
tap get sped up and stylised even more. At one point, he even feels
bold enough to suppress the clock sound altogether.
4.07. Suddenly, the birth of the anthropomorphic. Formed from stones and their broken-off pieces, primitive figurines assemble and disassemble themselves: absurd anatomy lessons, child-like games of magic and savage representation … Švankmajer will pursue this idea, intermittently, throughout the rest of the piece: faces that kiss, corporeal masses that break up and swallow or incorporate each other … It resembles a Georges Bataille-like vision of erotic energy, the unformed matter of the World and Being. But Švankmajer is always careful to take us back, abruptly, to the purely mechanical, the brute objecthood of stones – stones, the least Romantic of all possible substances. It
is as if he dared himself to be able to make some poetry from these
ugly, misshapen lumps of material. Švankmajer has always worked
between, and across, the standard poles of the grotesque/monstrous
and the beautiful/lyrical – and regularly inverted their
conventional, dualistic relationship with enormous flair.
8.12. The game of stones starts and restarts – it could go on forever. The clock will always tick and chime, the music will always play, the tap will always open. But one element gives out – the bottom of the bucket rips open – and everything ceases. When the dispositif breaks, the fiction, and the fancy, are no more. No more possibility of form, or its parametric play. To conclude the film, Švankmajer fashions a quasi-funereal epilogue, which is as surprising and as extended as the human prologue to Fantasy in G Minor. The music plays on, and the shots of now inert, broken or seemingly waiting objects hang suspended, going around and around in the montage for a full 50 seconds – 50 seconds of nothingness. Except for this precise, single photogram: a strange flare of light, some kind of filming error, which produces, as if from an inner agitation of the film-text, a ghostly doubling of the overexposed image of a portion of the now-useless bucket. An error easily edited out (nothing is in motion, after all), but decidedly left inside the défilement, as perhaps a last, libidinal flicker of life or desire … These
strangely sad stones, doomed never to be re-animated. In a Švankmajer
film, the movement given to an object-being may be delirious or
nightmarish, it may be graceful or disgusting – but to have no
chance of moving at all, that is surely tragic. The post-human
tragedy of Jan Švankmajer! 1. Serge Daney and Philippe Garrel, “Dialogue”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 443/444 (May 1991), p. 60. back 2. Philip Brophy, 100 Anime (London: British Film Institute, 2005); Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life: Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 1991); William D. Routt, “Anime Listening Drawing”, LOLA, no. 5 (February 2015). 2024 Postscript: Since the second version of this text that I prepared in 2015 for Vlak magazine (no. 5) in Prague, there has been a veritable explosion of new historical and theoretical work around animation. I will mention here only the important book by Hannah Frank (1984-2017), Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons (University of California Press, 2019); the ongoing work of Alla Gadassik and Mihaela Mihailova; and of Ryan Pierson, such as Figure and Force in Animation Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2019). back 3. Thomas Elsaesser, “Film Studies in Search of the Object”, Film Criticism, Vol. 17 No. 2/3 (1993), pp. 40-47; Raymond Durgnat, Films and Feelings (London: Faber and Faber, 1967). back 4. Daniel Frampton, Filmosophy (London: Wallflower Press, 2006). Frampton subsequently dropped writing and turned to making “social issue and cultural films”. back 5. André Bazin, Jean Renoir (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986), p. 106. back 6. Ibid. back 7. See my The Mad Max Movies – the copyright of this 2003 book has now been returned to me, and I am open to any lucrative offers to update it in 2025! back 8. Thierry Kuntzel, “Le défilement: A View in Close-Up”, Camera Obscura, no. 2 (Autumn 1977), pp. 51-65. Note that Appétit d’oiseau can be viewed here. back 9. Edward Colless, “Between the Legs of the Mermaid”, in Alan Cholodenko (ed.), The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 2007), pp. 229-242. back 10. Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History”, in Selected Writings Volume 4 – 1938-1940 (Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 389-400. back 11. Jean-Isidore Isou, “Esthétique du cinéma”, Ion, no. 1 (Avril 1952), pp. 7-153. For a longer commentary on this remarkable text, see my introduction to Isou, Treatise on Venom and Eternity (Annex Press, bilingual edition, 2019). back 12. See Positif’s most recent animation dossier in no. 765 (November 2024). back 13. Raymond Bellour, Le corps du cinema. Hypnoses, émotions, animalités (Paris: P.O.L, 2009). back 14. For detailed discussion of Outer Space and The Entity, see my Mysteries of Cinema (University of Western Australia Publishing, 2020). back 15. Laura Mulvey, “Some Reflections on the Cinephilia Question”, Framework, Vol. 50 No. 1 & 2 (Spring & Fall 2009), p. 193. back 16. This point has been strikingly crystallised by the appearance of what Švankmajer declared, at the age of 88, to be his final film: Kunstkamera (2022). Here is the catalogue entry I devoted to it for the Rotterdam Film Festival of January 2023. An astonishing array of paintings, drawings, sculptures, prints, objects and materials, small and large, filling room after room … but this is not a museum open to the general public. It is the home of the celebrated artist couple, Eva (who died in 2005) and Jan Švankmajer, situated in the Czech Republic’s Horní Staňkov Castle. Like Guillermo del Toro with his similarly private and self-curated “Bleak House” in Los Angeles, the Švankmajers took their inspiration from the wunderkabinet (cabinet of curiosities) lovingly assembled by Rudolf II in the early 17th century. The film’s title is a pun on the Emperor’s Kunstkammer – for here Svankmajer has wittily converted a stroll by an unseen figure through his home into a film that seems infinite. For this creator who has been rightly described by Anton Dolin as an “animator-warlock and cinematographer-alchemist”, there is no transparent, rational order to the arrangement of items in his vast collection – only free association and poetic profusion. Edited to the music of Vivaldi (note for the ears: it sounds just as good when played backwards!). More than any of his previous works, I believe that Švankmajer shot and arranged Kunstkamera in such a way as to visually preserve an archive that can only truly be savoured and appreciated with the help of the digital pause. Hence my description of it as an infinite film – and not really a film designed for standard, theatrical projection. back 17. Daney & Garrel, “Dialogue”, p. 59. back 18. Raymond Bellour, ‘The Film Stilled”, Camera Obscura, no. 24 (September 1990), pp. 98-123. back 19. Bellour, “The Unattainable Text”, in The Analysis of Film (Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 21-28. For an extended commentary on this 1975 text in a 21st century context, see Cristina Álvarez López’s and my “To Attain the Text. But Which Text?”, in Julia Vassilieva & Deane Williams (eds), Beyond the Essay Film: Subjectivity, Textuality, Technology (Amsterdam University Press, 2020), pp. 49-73. This same book contains my translation of Bellour’s own retrospective reflection on this topic, “35 Years On. Is the ‘Text’, Once Again, Unattainable?”, pp. 33-48. back 20. David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). back 21. See the essays and interviews collected in the special Švankmajer issue of Afterimage (UK), no. 13 (Autumn 1987). Some of this material has been reprinted in Mark Webber (ed.), The Afterimage Reader (The Visible Press, 2022). See also, for further Švankmajer studies, the Spanish anthology edited by Gregorio Martín López, Jan Švankmajer: La magia de la subversión (2010), for which the initial version of the present essay (published without its accompanying screenshots) was commissioned. back 22. See my “Busby Berkeley, Ken Jacobs: A Precarious, Extravagant, Populist, and Constructivist Cinema”, in Michele Pierson, Paul Arthur & David E. James (eds), Optic Antics: The Cinema of Ken Jacobs (Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 216-229. back 23. Jean-Louis Comolli, “La danse des images: kaleidoscope de Busby Berkeley”, Cahiers du cinéma, no. 174 (January 1966), p. 24. English translation: “Dancing Images”, Cahiers du cinéma in English, no. 2 (1966), pp. 22-26. back
© Adrian Martin January 2010 / February 2015 + Notes updated November 2024 |
