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Tag Archives: Surrealism
SATURDAY SHORT: SMOKE (2008)
Need your dose of surrealism for the week? This week’s short has masquerades, a diminished piano soundtrack, black lipstick, and, as promised, smoke. Extraordinary from start to finish, “Smoke” is seven minutes well spent.
75. ALICE [NECO Z ALENKY] (1988)
“Alice thought to herself, ‘Now you will see a film made for children… perhaps. But—I nearly forgot—you must close your eyes. Otherwise, you won’t see anything.'”–Opening narration to Alice
DIRECTED BY: Jan Svankmajer
FEATURING: Kristýna Kohoutová, voice of Camilla Power (in English dubbed version)
PLOT: A bored young girl sits in a drab room throwing stones into a teacup when she suddenly sees a stuffed white rabbit in a display case come to life, pull a sawdust-covered stopwatch from inside its torso, and disappear into a desk drawer. She follows it and winds up in a strange land full of talking socks, slithering steaks, and menacing skull-headed animals with razor sharp teeth. The girl follows the white rabbit through a series of bizarre rooms until he leads her to a playing card king and queen who order the rabbit to cut off her head with the pair of scissors he carries.
BACKGROUND:
- Alice was Jan Svankmajer’s first feature length film after making award-winning short films for twenty-four years. After Alice he returned to making shorts for six years before he made his next feature, Faust, in 1994.
- Before branching out into filmmaking, Svankmajer’s primary training had been in building marionettes.
- Svankmajer sneaks a couple of references to classic horror/suspense films into Alice: a scene where Alice is menaced by a flying creature is reminiscent of Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963), and a scene where the White Rabbit takes an axe to a door and then sticks his head through the hole is a blackly funny citation to Kubrick‘s The Shining (1980).
INDELIBLE IMAGE: Although it’s difficult to top the bony “animals” that look like they were reassembled at random from a jumbled pile of a paleontologist’s relics, it’s the White Rabbit who makes the biggest impression, from the moment he comes to life and pulls his paws out from the display case floor where they had been nailed. His strangest habit is licking sawdust (his own guts) off the pocket watch he keeps stashed inside a wound-like gash in his torso.
WHAT MAKES IT WEIRD: “Alice in Wonderland” is a nonsense fantasy, a fairy tale of fractured reality; it makes a perfect template for a weird movie, but no adaptation has taken the story so deep into the frightening labyrinths of the subconscious as this uncanny animation. Carroll’s and Svankmajer’s opposite talents and sensibilities complement each other perfectly, like pure cane sugar mixed with white powder heroin.
Clip from Alice
COMMENTS: “Alice in Wonderland” has been adapted for the screen a dozen times, and the Continue reading 75. ALICE [NECO Z ALENKY] (1988)
SATURDAY SHORT: DR. FAUSEN’S CHILDREN (2009)
A son of Dr. Fausen’s narrates a small story about him and a few of his neon colored siblings. “Dr. Fausen’s Children” is much weirder than any short description can let on without giving too much away.
LIST CANDIDATE: TRASH HUMPERS (2009)
NOTE: Please go to Trash Humpers Certified Weird entry for an in-depth discussion of the film. Trash Humpers was one of the two winners of the second Reader’s Choice poll, and has been promoted to the List. Comments are closed on this version.
DIRECTED BY: Harmony Korine
FEATURING: Rachel Korine, Harmony Korine
PLOT: A narrativeless, shot on VHS chronicle of four rednecks in wrinkled geriatric masks
who wander around a nearly deserted suburbs drinking wine, demolishing abandoned television sets, torturing and murdering the bizarre outcasts they come across in their wanderings, and (of course) humping trash.
WHY IT MIGHT MAKE THE LIST: Any film in which four rednecks in latex masks that make them look like escapees from a nursing home for the criminally insane force a pair of Siamese twins connected at the head by what looks like a giant tube sock to eat pancakes doused in Palmolive obviously has weirdness in its corner. But among Trash Humpers many qualities, weirdness isn’t the pre-eminent one: the movie is also repetitive, ugly, pointless, unsavory, deliberately annoying, and tedious. In fact, the weirdness here is likely just another blunt weapon used to bludgeon the viewer; the film is intended as an anti-audience provocation rather than a movie. As one reviewer sagely put it, “Harmony Korine dares you to hate this movie…and I accept.”
COMMENTS: Mimicking the lo-fi aesthetics of VHS tape, complete with horizontal hold tracking errors and blocky-fonted “play” and “rew” legends appearing on the screen, is a great trick to give Trash Humpers an antiquarian, found footage feel. But the look isn’t the only anachronistic thing about the movie, which evokes (like a third or fourth generation dub) the punk spirits of earlier shock auteurs like Paul Morrisey (1960s), John Waters (1970s), and Nick Zedd (1980s). First rejecting conventional cinematography for the camcorder’s glare, Trash Humpers next dispenses with narrative in favor of disconnected episodes celebrating the beauty of vandalism and sadism. In between bouts of garbage copulation, the nameless humpers break TVs with sledgehammers and ride around a deserted, trash-strewn Nashville with baby dolls dragging behind their bicycles. In the course of their wanderings they meet a boy in a Sunday suit whom they teach to slip razor blades into apples, pancake-making fake Siamese twins, overweight prostitutes who serenade us with a Continue reading LIST CANDIDATE: TRASH HUMPERS (2009)