🔻
From the mid fifties to the beginning of the seventies Zeman created, for the Czech film industry, a series of masterworks of fantasy cinema. Journey to the Beginning of Time, Invention for Destruction, The Fabulous Baron Munchausen, A Jester’s Tale, The Stolen Airship and On the Comet all combine live action with animation in a unique way, conveying a visionary story book grandeur touched by the magic of a Georges Melies.
Apart from Zeman’s technical wizardry, sophisticated invention and adroit direction (Actors skillfully harmonising with stop motion animation long before green screens and CGI) there’s Zeman’s obsession with the art of interruption and small things going wrong. Or as film historian Georges Sadoul said, “...he has a great zest and a marvellous sense of baroque oddities and poetic gags.” Zeman’s poetic and zestful humour pops up again and again.
In The Jester’s Tale a court official displays a recently painted portrait of a princess to the real princess. His praise of the artist’s talent is constantly interrupted by a dog at court who cannot be silenced. In The Fabulous Baron Munchausen the baron finds it impossibly hard to open the door of the cabin of a beautiful woman who’s joined him on his adventures. She’s also trapped in a ship that’s been swallowed by a giant whale.
However the occasional mishap, mistake or accident comes to the hero’s rescue – back to The Jester’s Tale and the peasant farmer, disguised as an army officer, hiding in an enormous chandelier, who breaks one of its lamps. Yet it crashes to the ground at exactly the same moment as two soldiers enter the room and accidentally break a glass object: the timing of the breakages neatly averting discovery.
Zeman’s absurdities are never overlong digressions. They are beautifully integrated into the lively action of his fantasy plots. They may draw attention to imperfection and comic frustration. But Zeman loves to set-up contradictions. For his perfectly realised and technically faultless animation appears to enjoy itself by constantly exposing our very human frailties, blunders and silly mistakes. And you sense Zeman’s actors clicked in, like obedient line drawings, in such epic art-design, to share his anarchic and gentle disrespect.
Zeman worked freely and generally undisturbed because he was an animator. For the authorities probably thought that in this kind of film production (aimed at a children’s audience as much as an adult’s) there was less chance of him becoming a difficult agitator.
Yet Zeman’s wonderful 1958 Invention for Destruction (based on an 1896 novel by Verne) can be viewed as a thinly disguised warning against the post-war nuclear age. Professor Roch has invented a substance, involving “the secret of matter” for a weapon, which could destroy the entire world.
This invention is eventually discovered, in a secret volcano hideaway, and destroyed to create a large mushroom cloud. The Czech nation didn’t posses the bomb (bunkers were constructed but apparently war heads didn’t enter the country) however its communist overlord Russia certainly did. Verne’s prophecy of a military gun with an enormous bullet dominates the film and the atmosphere of Invention for Destruction is strikingly confrontational.
There’s a great deal of infectious fun to be had watching Zeman’s films. Zeman was one of cinema’s great animators and his catalogue of invention appears fresh and timeless. And they even have a small Karel Zeman museum for him in Prague.
- Alan Price
All the films I’ve mentioned can be found on Blu Ray and DVD on Second Run DVD (UK)
No comments:
Post a Comment