Lunacy

Jan Švankmajer opens the film by addressing the camera and announcing that this is not a work of art, whereupon a slab of raw meat slithers past him. What follows alternates between a story set in an asylum and animated sequences in which those pieces of meat live lives of their own. The sources are two stories by Edgar Allan Poe and the thinking of the Marquis de Sade. The question at the centre is how a madhouse should be run. On one side a regime in which the patients are entirely free, on the other chains and violence. Švankmajer argues for neither, and demonstrates that both arrive at the same door. The meat animation is his signature: tongues, eyeballs and offal moving on their own across walls, inside clocks and over statues. The difficulty is plain. The revolting images are held deliberately long, the pace is heavy, and the argument is stated outright. Who it is for: lovers of Czech surrealism and stop motion. Who it is not for: anyone with a weak stomach.