A man struggles to resist his cannibalistic urges.
Tag Archives: Stop motion animation
69*. FLAMING EARS (1992)
Rote Ohren fetzen durch Asche
“In the year 2700, the year of the toads, ‘Asche’ was a burnt-out city.
Too big for its souls who banded together in dark basements.
It was an unrestrained wild animal,
ready to pee in Death’s face at any time.
And its residents were equal to it in every way.
Highly unlikely for a pure heart to survive.”–Flaming Ears introductory narration
DIRECTED BY: Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl, Dietmar Schipek
FEATURING: Susanna Heilmayr, Ursula Pürrer, A. Hans Scheirl
PLOT: The lives of a comic book artist, a serial arsonist, and an extraterrestrial converge when Volley burns down the comix press. The artist, Spy, goes in search of vengeance, only to be beaten up by the bouncers at the club where Volley performs; Nun, Volley’s alien girlfriend, then finds Spy lying unconscious in the gutter and falls in love with her. Meanwhile, Volley develops the hots for her chauffeur, and a young girl graffitis the city with the image of a flower vase.
BACKGROUND:
- Scheirl and Pürrer became lovers in the 1980s and started making “lesbian punk home movies” in Pürrer’s Vienna apartment with a Super 8 camera and homemade props. They would later form the band Sta-Prestto make their own film soundtracks.
- The Catholic symbolism in the film reflects the predominant conservatism of Viennese society at the time, in contrast to its very small punk scene of musicians and artists.
- The soundtrack features the music of local punk bands, sometimes even capturing live performances. None of the music was formally licensed.
- When Scheirl and Pürrer’s films toured women’s and feminist film festivals in the 1990s, the S&M content often proved controversial and sometimes led to walkouts.
- The then-contemporary popularity of Fluxus theater led some viewers to assume Flaming Ears‘ outrageous style was a deliberate mockery of their performance art. This was not the intention of the filmmakers, who were simply expressing their punk aesthetic.
- A. Hans Shceirl (Nun), also credited as Angela Hans Scheirl, is a transgender man who transitioned with testosterone in 1996. He later directed the infamous Dandy Dust (1998) and became a painter and professor at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: There’s a lot of eye-catching and provocative imagery throughout Flaming Ears, with a plethora of unusual proclivities on display. But one of its most mysterious moments occurs when the otherwise unknown Blood suddenly shows up out of the blue to grant Spy’s rotting corpse the kiss of life. It’s confusing, oddly touching yet revolting, and emblematic of Flaming Ears‘ fairy tale combination of enchantment and grotesquerie. It’s also a major pivot point in the splintered narrative.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Erotic arson; the healing power of alien saliva
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: What isn’t weird about this movie? The two items listed above are only the very weirdest elements. There’s also furniture humping (with lighter fluid used as lube), an immortal alien whose severed limbs come back to life, and an oddly suggestive conversation about gardening cacti. With a rough and ready DIY aesthetic, Flaming Ears is art-house done No Wave-style. At any moment the live action can be interrupted by a stop-motion animated sequence, a prop, or a painting. In one memorable scene a cardboard cutout, with a cartoonish line-drawn face, replaces one of the actors. The dialogue is obscurely poetic and the futuristic setting thinly sketched, leaving the viewer on their own to figure out what exactly is going on, like an alien crash-landed on an unknown planet.
Flaming Ears re-release trailer
COMMENTS: Usually, films that take place in a future dystopia explain the reasons behind societal collapse, but Flaming Ears ignores Continue reading 69*. FLAMING EARS (1992)
68*. DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947)
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“Ernst was obviously an astute observer of what qualities go into making an experience oneiric.”—Deirdre Barrett, IASD president
DIRECTED BY: Hans Richter
FEATURING: Jack Bittner
PLOT: Fresh from the bank and owing cash, Joe needs to get some money—fast. A solution hits him for quick green, and soon he’s selling people dreams. Most come to buy (one comes to sell), but the ephemeral business ain’t all swell.
BACKGROUND:
- One loft apartment, $25,000 (partly supplied by Peggy Guggenheim), three years of filming, and the involvement of some of the contemporary art-world’s heaviest hitters is all it took to create Dreams That Money Can Buy.
- The film won of the Venice Film Festival’s special award for “Best Original Contribution to the Progress of Cinematography”.
- At its New York City premiere, Dreams was projected on wall and ceiling of the venue, instead of the screen.
- Stanley Kubrick, aged 19 at the time, shows up as an extra, securing his place amongst the cool kids of cinema five years before his directorial debut.
INDELIBLE IMAGE: In a feature-length showcase from the avant-garde’s best, choosing just one is an odd request. G. Smalley suggests the scene from Max Ernst’s “Desire” where an elderly butler (Ernst himself) pulls first a shirtless man, then a pallid, corpselike woman in a nightgown out from under the sleeper’s red-velvet curtained canopy bed. It helps that the room is filled with smoke (possibly from an incinerated telephone) and that the sound accompaniment is a trancelike looped recording of men and women chanting backwards.
TWO WEIRD THINGS: Bouncy beatnik narrator; escaping out the window with Zeus-bust luggage into death color-drop explosion
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: This dream anthology has pep, humor, surrealism, and cool to spare, all presented in the confines of a brownstone apartment.
Promo trailer for a London screening of Dreams that Money Can Buy (1947)
COMMENTS: It is the intersection of Capitalism and Surrealism. It is Continue reading 68*. DREAMS THAT MONEY CAN BUY (1947)
LOS HUESOS [THE BONES] (2021)
A girl conducts a necromantic ritual in 1901 to re-animate the bodies of Diego Portales and Jaime Guzmán, the architects of Chilean authoritarianism.
APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (2024)
“Perhaps we were misled by skillful advertising when we decided to send Father here. Time put back – it sounded good, but what does it come to in reality?”–Bruno Schulz, Sanatorium pod Klepsydra, 1937
DIRECTED BY: Stephen Quay, Timothy Quay
FEATURING: Tadeusz Janiszewski, Wioletta Kopanska, Allison Bell
PLOT: An auctioneer witnesses the activation of a sepulchrum for a deceased retina while Jozef visits his dead/dying father in the titular sanatorium.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE APOCRYPHA: A film adaptation of the titular surreal short story by Bruno Schulz already earned a place on the List. Is another deserving? This version boasts the Jan Svankmajer-esque animation stylings for which the Quay Brothers are rightfully renowned (with the technique utilized more heavily than in their Certified Weird feature Institute Benjamenta). Wojciech Has‘ Hourglass Sanatorium exploited the dream logic of the story, with events frenetically shifting from scene to scene. The Quays, in contrast, excavate the idea of time held back for an unspecified interval, its “limbos and afterbreezes,”i creating a somnolent Sanatorium of vague and enigmatic impressions.
COMMENTS: Like many films by the Brothers Quay, Sanatorium is difficult to summarize. A seven part structure forms less a coherent story than a series of tableaux nested within each other. The perspective shifts among dutiful son Jozef, an auctioneer, and a mysterious female patient, J. Jozef’s visit to his father, at the sanatorium where the dead still live because time is arrested, serves as a frame narrative within a frame narrative, within which isolated occurrences taken from a selection of Schulz’s collected writings appear.
We first meet an auctioneer on a rooftop, beneath a sky of swirling clouds, soliciting bids for unusual and impossible items like the thirteenth month and exotic birds’ eggs (recalling Father’s ill-fated menagerie in Schulz’s story “Birds”). His audience consists of only two chimney sweeps, and when neither makes a bid, he lets them to get back to work.
In the house below, a maid prepares for the auctioneer’s arrival. As he enters the room, she removes the dust cloth from an object perched on a table : a pyramidal box with oculus windows in its sides and a little drawer which opens to display the glassy retina of an eye. The auctioneer explains the mystery of this rare sepulchrum—at a propitious moment the eye will liquify and shed seven tears, and the preserved sights contained within will become Jozef’s dreams as he succumbs to the sanatorium’s will to sleep.
The auctioneer’s frame is live-action, filmed in the gauzy black and white style of Institute Benjamenta, as is J.’s (and a few scenes where an actor, and not a puppet, portrays Jozef). When the scene cuts to Jozef’s ominous train trip (he’s uncertain whether or not his father lives, and this uncertainty will persist), we enter the Quays’ puppet theater. Their minutely detailed miniature sets, to use Schulz’s words, “exude an air of strange and frightening neglect.” The sanatorium setting, its vaguely nineteenth century atmosphere with faintly Continue reading APOCRYPHA CANDIDATE: SANATORIUM UNDER THE SIGN OF THE HOURGLASS (2024)