Byt (1968)

... aka: Flat, The

Directed by:

Jan Svankmajer

Ever have one of those days where something bad or annoying happens, and then something else bad or annoying happens immediately after the first bad or annoying thing and then you just have to stop everything, stand there for a few seconds and take a deep breath just because you know if a third bad or annoying happens in such quick succession it may send you over the edge? Now imagine yourself trapped in a room where nothing works right and everything contained therein seems specifically designed just to annoy you.

A door opens and a man (Ivan Kraus) rolls inside a small, dingy, one room flat. The door then sews itself shut. He crawls around on the floor following chalk arrows, which first lead up to a doorway with a tattered blanket hanging over it. After slipping inside for a bathroom break, he crawls back out and continues following the arrows to another door. When he tries to open it and leave, the handle breaks off. He finds a mirror on the wall, but it casts a backwards reflection so he can only see the back of his head. When he attempts to light a furnace, water gushes out. He next moves on to a pair of framed photos on the wall. One is crooked, the other is straight. When he adjusts the crooked one, the straight one becomes crooked. Trying to step on a chair to adjust the crooked upper painting, the chair shrinks to where it's out of reach. And then the chair decides to beat him up. How long could you keep your sanity in this place?

A light bulb busts a hole through the wall. Possible escape route? Nope, a gloved fist pops out to punch him in the face. Well, at least there's some food on the table! Only the bread has been hollowed out by a rat, the soup spoon is filled with holes, a beer decides to shrink to a micro shot glass, an egg refuses to crack and a pack of dogs miraculously appear long enough to eat all of the potatoes. The man gets his hand stuck in a hole in the wall and then goes through a table and face splats into the soup. He would wash up... except that in lieu of water, the spigot produces a large rock that breaks the wash basin. Best one could do in this situation is perhaps sleep, but even lying still backfires when the bed reduces itself to pulp. Some nails strip him of his pants before Czech filmmaker Juraj Herz swings by in a last minute cameo as a man passing through the room holding a chicken and an axe.

People try to deduct different meanings from all this (partially because of the enigmatic final scene, which features many names scribbled on a wall [see if anything jumps out at you from the shots below]), while some deduct no meaning at all and just see this as a playful piece of surrealism. Either way, this 13-minute comedy (?) short is not recommended if you already suffer from high anxiety. As per the director's usual, things are spiced up with bits of stop motion animation throughout. There's also a great score from Zdenek Liska.

This has been released on numerous collections over the years. It's included in Kimstim's "The Collected Shorts of Jan Svankmajer" released in 2005 and the British Film Institute's "Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films" released in 2007. It was also released as part of a VHS and DVD collection of the director's shorts released in Japan back in 2002.

★★★

Kostnice (1970)

... aka: Костница

... aka: Ossuary, The

Directed by:

Jan Svankmajer

In the late 1200s, an abbot was sent to The Holy Land and returned with some earth taken from the exact location where it's reputed that Jesus was crucified. The earth was then scattered at a burial site located next to a monastery located in Kutná Hora, Sedlec in what is now Czechia. Because of that notoriety, it became the desired final resting place for many. Seeing how both a major war and the Black Death were both right around the corner, that many really was many. We're talking tens and tens of thousands; enough to where the cemetery had to be greatly expanded to accommodate all of the corpses coming in. Over a century later, a large Gothic church was build in the center of the cemetery and a lot of skeletons that had to be exhumed in the process. The bones were initially just collected and stacked. In 1870, woodcarver and carpenter František Rint was given the task of doing something with these bones. Instead of re-burying them, he decided to construct elaborate statues out of them, which were then put on display in the basement chapel ossuary of the church. It is said that the bones of at least 40,000 people or as many as 70,000 people were used in these creations!

Though this sounds (and looks) like something right out of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, some see this as a beautiful, even calming, place to visit. As a result, the Sedlec Ossuary has become a top tourist destination in the Czech Republic. It attracts both thrill-seekers with morbid curiosity and the very devout and religious and both of these groups get an entirely different experience out of the place.

As we get a good look at the place, we hear the voice of a cranky and bizarrely money-centered female tour guide throughout as she gives a lecture of the place to young students, and learn a bit about the place's history. The guide claims that 70,000 skeletons were used and 30,000 people were buried there in just one year due to the plague and Hussite / Bohemian Wars. And we learn that Rint, his wife and his two children spent a whopping 10 years down there boring holes in bones and stringing them together to create their, as-she-calls-them "horrific art" sculptures... which sounds like a horror story all its own. I'd be interested in knowing  more about how those kids turned out!

The guide also repeatedly threatens the students and lets them know they will be fined 50 crown apiece for touching any of the bones. Apparently, some poorly-behaved schoolchildren took it upon themselves to write their names and other messages in ballpoint pen on the skulls when no one was looking. She also claims that college students had come there and stolen bones as souvenirs.

Since some things never change, just a few years ago the chapel had to institute a new rule that selfies and other photographs could no longer be taken there without permission. According to a 2019 article on Kafkadesk, "The Sedlec Ossuary has unsurprisingly become one of the most Instagrammable places in the Czech Republic, a fame with rather unsavory consequences: tourists removing bones from their display, touching them despite obvious signs forbidding them to, or even putting sunglasses or hats on skulls for their quick snapshots."

Naturally, the main draw of this 10-minute piece is the ossuary itself, which is a truly fascinating place with a fascinating history. The bone sculptures, including a giant chandelier and a coat of arms, really are impressive pieces of macabre, ornate art. The constructor was even kind enough to leave his own "signature" behind plus the date of construction... all spelled out in bones! Svankmajer, who's best-known for his later (usually very good) stop-motion films, could have just let the place do the talking for him but decides to liven things up with lots of jerky camera movements, pans, pivots, out of focus shots, zooms and flash editing. Though that may annoy viewers just wanting to take a long lingering look at the place, he does smartly use both medium and close-up shots so we can get both a good look at the pieces as a whole and closer inspection so we can see just how intricate the designs actually are.

There are several versions of the film out there; one with the tour guide voice-over (which is available subtitled in English), another featuring a man reciting a poem but with only music added once we enter the chapel of bones and yet another with just music and nothing else. This is available on a number of Svankmajer box sets, including "Jan Svankmajer: The Complete Short Films" from BFI and "Jan Svankmajer: The Ossuary and Other Tales" from Kimstim.

★★1/2

Gosti iz galaksije (1981)

... aka: Gäste aus der Galaxis (Guest from the Galaxy)

... aka: Monstrum z galaxie Arkana (A Monster from the Arkana Galaxy)

... aka: Visitor from Galaxy

... aka: Visitors from the Galaxy

... aka: Visitors from the Arkana Galaxy

Directed by:

Dušan Vukotić

Hotel desk clerk / budding science fiction writer Robert Novak (Žarko Potočnjak) is busy working on a novel tentatively titled "Monster from the Arkana Galaxy." Too busy, if you asked his frustrated hairdresser girlfriend Biba (Lucie Žulová), who's feeling neglected now that he's so focused on his writing and annoyed at the bizarre changes in her boyfriend, like his wearing a plastic astronaut helmet to get the creative sci-fi juices flowing. Robert's latest opus involves the inhabitants of the Planet Tugador, Tugadorians if you will, who live deep within a distant galaxy called Arkana. With their godlike powers and advanced technology, the aliens are able to easily traverse the universe and now have their sights set on exploring Earth. White-haired, laser-eyed Village of the Damned-style child aliens Targo and Ulu, along with their statuesque robot helper Andra, decide to take their ship out to snoop around our planet. And that's where Robert has left off thus far. He may have gotten a little further if he wasn't constantly interrupted by Biba, his photographer neighbor Toni (Ljubiša Samardžić) and Toni's overbearing mother (Věra Kalendová), whose latest life-shattering crisis involves Toni's dislike of her dog.

Late one night while he's recording parts of his book to add a new monster "toy" character to help with the book's commercial appeal, strange voices come over Robert's tape recorder. They announce themselves as Ulu and Andra, and they ask him to meet them on a nearby island. Robert borrows Toni's boat and heads on over. He then follows a flashing blue light and, low and behold, Andra (Ksenia Prohaska), Ulu (Jasminka Alic), the bratty Targo (Rene Bitorajac) and his toy (called "Mumu"), are all there, having somehow managed to materialize in the real world. When Mumu transforms into a big monster that looks like a mutant, patchwork elephant / anteater, Robert runs off, hops in the boat, takes off and immediately goes and seeks professional help.

During a consultation with a psychiatrist, Robert tells a bizarre story about when he was a baby and willed his widowed father to grow breasts and feed him when they ran out of milk. It seems Robert may possess the rare gift of "telurgy," a term in parapsychology referring to an individual whose will is so strong they can create something material out of nothing. Robert even manages to will a copy of his book into existence, only the pages are blank because the story is still being written as we speak. The aliens continue to communicate with him over his recorder. Robert can't tell if he's losing his mind. He asks Biba to accompany him to the island, where she soon becomes a believer herself when they run across the aliens, robot and their blue spherical spacecraft. They also get a demonstration of the alien's powers when they reverse time, remove the island caretaker's heart and temporarily shrink Biba to cube form.

Despite being Robert's creation, the emotionless aliens are quick to diminish him as lesser. He's merely a mammal; primitive, on the lower end of both the evolutionary scale and consciousness and one who wastes too much energy on emotion. Either way, he asks them to stay on the island for the time being. However, word quickly gets around town that aliens are there, causing both curiosity and a panic. A kid finds an alien finger and throws it into a meat grinder. Toni wants to get pictures of them to help his photography career. Townspeople scour the caves looking for them and strip off all their clothes to prove to them they aren't carrying weapons. After the aliens blow up a boat, they come to the mainland to live with Robert. Andra tries to prove her credentials as a domestic with her vacuum cleaner arm attachment and ability to generate food in her stomach and squirt coffee and cream from her fingertips. Just touching her creates feelings of ecstasy. Perhaps having them around won't be so bad after all. On second though...

Targo screws everything up by slipping Mumu into Biba's bag, which she then brings back to her apartment building. It transforms into a monster, kills both of her sisters (after squirting green slime all over them) and then makes its way downstairs where it crashes a wedding reception, decapitates several people (including tearing a head clean off with its tongue), bites off someone's hand with a fanged mouth that sprouts on its stomach (in a bit predating the famous defibrillator scene in Carpenter's THE THING), rips off a leg, crushes a head under its foot and does all kinds of other odd things (including mutating, growing horns and expelling toxic green gas) before setting the whole place on fire using its trunk as a flamethrower! The above somehow manages to be almost completely bloodless, is scored by an oblivious old blind man playing the accordion and is entirely played for laughs.

Bizarre, one-of-a-kind sci-fi / horror parody seems a bit unfocused at times and is all over the place with its tone but it's also imaginative, surreal, often very funny, oddly charming, extremely entertaining and filled with weird, colorful special effects of varying degrees of quality, some of which were done by Czech stop motion master Jan Svankmajer, who also designed the creature. The acting, locations and electronic score from Tomislav Simovic (which is now available on CD) are all very good and genre fans should find plenty to enjoy here.

Vukotic made dozens of short animated films from 1951 until the mid-70s but very few feature films. He was instrumental in helping to form the production company / animation studio Zagreb Film, where he worked for four decades, and won an Academy Award for Best Short Animated Film in 1961 for Surogat / "Ersatz"; becoming the first foreign animator to do so. He'd be nominated a second time for the same award for his 1964 animated short Igra / "The Game". Visitors came late in his career and would be one of his last projects.

While the cult potential for this title is huge, it has yet to get a cleaned up DVD or Blu-ray release. It's also never been officially released in America nor are there any with legit English subtitles (the version I found had fan-made subs). As far as I know, there were only a couple of VHS releases; in Germany (from C&T Videofilm) and Spain (from Polygram Video). It's way past time for someone out there to rescue this from obscurity.

★★★