The Cameraman's Revenge

So a couple of nights ago I spent an evening with Jan Svankmajer’s oeuvre… which I first discovered probably around 1995 or so (did I first read of him in Sight & Sound? Can’t remember) when SBS showed the Channel 4 documentary on him, The Cabinet of Jan Svankmajer (helpfully included on the BFI collection as an extra), and then I think they showed Alice afterwards or something. I’ve since seen Faust as well, but the short films have been unfamiliar territory, apart from Meat Love (saw at Mu-Meson Archives one night) and such excerpts of the shorts as appeared in the documentary (i.e. more or less all of Dimensions of Dialogue and bits of others; I always wanted to see his House of Usher after seeing the fragment of it in the doco). Beyond that I haven’t really made any actual effort to explore Svankmajer’s work; I only thought of him dimly as a sort of Czech surrealist and never exactly tried to hunt him down (I only even saw Faust cos I got sent a DVD of it by the local distributor). But I knew my library had the BFI collection of his short films, so when I found it in stock a couple of weeks ago I took it, and after watching the Paradjanov film the other night I decided that was the right time to finally watch the thing.

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The Czech New Wave ended here, according to some, though apparently Juraj Herz never considered himself part of it anyway. I’ve filed it under horror, which designation is a bit less problematic for this film than it is for The Cremator, although apparently Herz doesn’t like that designation either and the DVD booklet argues for it being called Gothic instead, which is fair enough too; the story’s original author, one Alexander Grin, is described as the Russian Poe and the whole thing has a very sort of 19th century Gothic flavour (though the actual period setting, judging by certain references, would appear to be the early 20th century). Two sisters are left orphans by their father’s death; Klara get’s the lion’s share of his estate while Viktoria is left with a smaller, crappier residence. Then a soldier Viki fancies has the temerity to fall in love with Klara instead. There’s only one solution to these insults: Klara has to die slowly by poison. Viktoria is, needless to say, a fairly horrible individual (Klara isn’t the only victim of her maliciousness), and this is a fairly horrible plan, but, true to form, it doesn’t go quite as expected. Neither did the film, for Herz at least; apparently the original story reveals Klara and Viktoria as two halves of one split personality, which idea Czech authorities frowned on, though it kind of survives in the film by having one actress play both roles (though it must be said this isn’t something that’s readily apparent at first). There’s a good helping of the grotesque here, in terms of the narrative, the visuals (Jaroslav Kucera whipping out plentiful wide-angle lens abuse and colour registration trickery) and, frankly, the hairstyles; I think I like The Cremator better on the whole, but this is still a neat bit of 70s Euro-Gothic.

If nothing else, Vlacil’s next feature had one advantage over Marketa Lazarova: it was over an hour shorter (100 minutes as opposed to 165). Booklet notes that the two were kind of shot together and Valley was actually finished first, though released second. We’re in 13th century Bohemia again, Vlacil seems to have written this film Corman-style to be able to reuse sets and costumes from the other film (though in the end he couldn’t use them), although this time concerns are somewhat different: man offers his son Ondrej to the Teutonic Knights as penance for trying to kill him, Ondrej grows to manhood, is inspired to flee the knights and return to his old castle, and is duly pursued by his friend Armin who is determined to drag his sorry soul back to the Order. Meanwhile Ondrej prepares to marry his stepmother, thus continuing the undercurrent of incest that also runs through Marketa (was it a common thing in medieval Bohemia?) while adding a vaguely sublimated homoerotic element in the relationship between the two men. On the whole I found I liked this better than the previous film (the comparative brevity was a factor, I must admit, along with the narrative being rather more easily discernible, and there’s marginally more warmth in its wide monochrome images), which is not to say that it doesn’t offer a similar sort of bleakness; finished and released before the actual Soviet invasion, it’s still easy to see the Teutonic Knights here as a surrogate for Soviet Communism, both were a foreign imposition, and Armin’s fanaticism (most clearly expressed in the astonishing encounter with the priest) is clearly meant to reflect badly on them. But Ondrej is no hero for fleeing their clutches, quite the reverse; he went in as something of an obnoxious brat and came out not much improved. There’s another parallel with Vlacil’s previous film for you; in neither film do any of the main characters come out looking particularly good.

As I said recently, I get some interesting contrasts from one film to the next as I plow through the vast expanse that is my unwatched films list, and this film is no exception… like our last film, we’re in the remote past of Eastern Europe (13th century Bohemia) and the narrative turns somewhat on a feud between families, but Marketa Lazarova is far less inviting, its freezing monochrome widescreen images in marked contrast to Paradjanov’s world full of colour. It comes recommended as the best Czech film ever made, at least according to Czech critics, or at least Czech critics who aren’t this lady. Needless to say, I’m hopelessly unqualified to judge the merits of either argument, though I am fascinated by Slobodova’s claim that the film  was originally four hours long. And the backstory of the film is intriguing, too; director Frantisek Vlacil had his cast actually live the medieval life for two years before filming began (cf. Kurosawa with Red Beard). I find myself uncertain of the end result, though I take some heart from other descriptions I’ve read online about the film being confusing on first watch, cos that’s kind of how it struck me. Frankly there were bits (particularly in the first hour) I’m not sure I would’ve got without pausing to read the DVD booklet’s plot summary. Would the long version have been clearer, or just even more of a slog? I see the film compared in various places to Bergman’s Virgin Spring or Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev, but it’s even less ingratiating than either of those not exactly giant popular hits. I can kind of appreciate the achievement, but while Vlacil’s film feels like a real picture of the past in the way Paradjanov’s does, it keeps itself at a far greater remove, and while it could be the sort of thing that will ultimately reward repeat viewings (if for no other reason than you’ll actually know what’s happening then), it doesn’t go out of its way to encourage them.

I’d like to just write “what the fuck?” here in regards to this film, but I feel I should make more of an effort than that… I tried looking up the Czech translation of the words “what the fuck”, which would’ve been appropriate here, but couldn’t find one, so too bad. At least I read a bit of the DVD booklet essay before watching and noted the reference to Valerie having her first period at the start of the film, which I was glad I did read or else the film might’ve made even less sense than it did otherwise. It put me in mind of Marienbad, if only in terms of how good it looks while being so hard to actually understand, though to be sure it does so in an opposite way: 1.33 aspect ratio rather than anamorphic, colour rather than monochrome, and full of pastoral warmth rather than the enclosed coldness of Resnais’ hotel… Also I don’t think Resnais evokes surrealism in the way Jaromil Jires does here; though Jires himself apparently wasn’t part of the Czech surrealist movement, the author of his source novel was. But I really don’t know what to say about this. Eastern European cinema is something that has, by and large, passed me by (Russian/Soviet cinema being a relative exception), so I’m not au fait with the Czech New Wave except by repute; I know this was a very late example (actually went into production a year after the Soviet tanks rolled in) but not much more than that. To be honest, I’m not even sure of the extent to which I did or didn’t like it (apart from the purely visual aspect), it’s that sort of film… “what the fuck” indeed. I can see this needing repeat viewings.

I have an account at ICheckMovies, for the one or two people who are likely to find it of interest, although I only mention it now because that’s the site where I first heard of this film. Looking at the comings and goings of the various IMDB genre lists, I was intrigued to see something from 1969 called Spalovac mrtvol appearing in the horror chart (where it currently sits at 28). Looked it up on IMDB, found it was this, went out and bought it at the first opportunity, finally got around to it tonight. Its status as “horror” might be questionable (there’s an oldish but interesting interview with director Juraj Herz here in which he addresses the genre question), and someone on the film’s IMDB page is whining in the message board section about it not being comedy either, but there’s still a bit of both at work in this film. It’s set around the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia at the end of the 1930s, where our “hero”, Karl Kopfrkingl (no, the “r” isn’t misplaced like it seems to be) works at a crematorium. He’s an odd little man, fond of a book about Tibet and Buddhism, feeling that his work helps liberate the soul from its earthly bonds to move on to wherever it goes next; from early one we may suspect there’s something not entirely right with him, and when he starts proving amenable to the requirements of his new German overseers we realise that “not entirely right” barely begins to describe him. I’ve said before that some films rely upon the strength of a single lead performance to work; this one goes a bit further by relying on the appearance of that lead actor. Somehow I think Karl could only be embodied by someone who could actually look like Rudolf Hrusinsky does here, that sort of mild, almost bland, vaguely aspirational middle class thing. It’s a terrific piece of casting, supported by Herz’s own black comic tendencies, and he’s the real horror of a reasonably normal person turning reasonably abnormal under the influence of an extreme idea, and the horror of what real people will do to each other under certain conditions makes this a lot more disturbing in the end than your conventional monster movie. And the fact that it is quite funny only makes it even more so.